The Mena Airport: Why Arkansas's Biggest Mystery Won't Die
by Mara Leveritt
THE MENA AIRPORT: Why Arkansas's biggest mystery won't die.
By Mara Leveritt, August 25, 1995
A recent spate of activity is bringing Mena's little mountain airport
near the Arkansas-Oklahoma border back into the limelight. This
has happened repeatedly since 1982, when Louisiana police
notified officials in Arkansas that one of the country's most wanted
drug runners was moving his headquarters to Mena.
First there was the investigation, the expectation of indictments--
and, to the amazement of many, the inaction. The plot thickened in
1986, when discovery of the Iran-Contra affair also revealed
shadowy connections between Oliver North's gun-running
operation to the Nicaraguan Contras and what appeared to be
government-protected drug activity taking place at Mena.
In the late '80s, a Vietnam veteran in Fayetteville, disillusioned at
what he saw as a betrayal by his government regarding Mena, began
collecting information on the case and calling for full disclosure. A
couple of national publications took interest, but even during Bill
Clinton's campaign for president, when the issue presumably could
have been used by either President George Bush or Clinton against
the other, those missiles were never launched.
Since Clinton's election, however, the name Mena has gained
national prominence--at least on late-night radio talk shows and
among a computer-linked army of conspiracy buffs. Republicans
looking under every rock in Arkansas for some dirt they can throw
at Clinton are digging hard into the files of Mena. But among
politicians, at least, the peculiar dance of approach and avoidance
that always characterized discussion of Mena still dominates the
floor.
A growing number of observers, however, now even including
editors at the conservative Wall Street Journal, have concluded that
national interests in this case supersede the partisan ones. "Mena
cries out for investigation," the Journal said. "If some chips fall on
the Republican side, so be it."
A couple of new developments are stirring the pot yet again. A
lawsuit filed against two former members of the Arkansas State
Police by former North Little Rock businessman Terry Reed, who
alleges his own close involvement in events at Mena, is scheduled
for federal court in Little Rock in September. Unconfirmed reports
also suggest Whitewater Prosecutor Kenneth Starr may be dabbling
on the fringes of the Mena controversy. And in an article published
this month in The American Spectator magazine, L.D. Brown, a
former member of Clinton's Arkansas State Police security detail,
claims that in 1984 he participated in two secret flights from Mena,
on which M-16 rifles were traded to Nicaraguan Contra rebels in
exchange for cocaine. Brown further claims that Clinton knew of
the activity.
That announcement spurred Fort Smith lawyer Asa Hutchinson,
chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party, to request a yet
another congressional inquiry into long-standing allegations of
money-laundering at Mena. Hutchinson was the the U.S. attorney
for the western district of Arkansas when investigators first
presented evidence supporting those allegations. In an argument
disputed by police investigators, Hutchinson claims he left office
before the evidence was well established. Since he harbors political
ambitions, he has an interest in clearing his name.
Arkansas Attorney General Winston Bryant, who defeated
Hutchinson in a campaign laced with debate about the former U.S.
attorney's supposed inaction, now argues that, "It's too late to
bother with Mena." Bryant's critics suggest he wants to buffer
Clinton, but he argues he only opposes what appears to be the
endless, political "targeting of Arkansas" for federal investigations.
In the political arena, Bryant isn't known as a friend of Clinton.
"If someone thinks we need to look at Mena," Bryant fumed, "I
think they first need to look at the U.S. Department of Justice and
all its agencies. The federal government was the one that, in my
opinion, had the ultimate responsibility at Mena and it failed to do
anything.
"We tried to find out what was going on there, and we never got a
thing out of the federal government. I spent three years trying to get
files from the Department of Justice, and all we ever got was a total
run-around."
In the months ahead, partisan politics will almost certainly drive
some of the accelerating interest in Mena. But that's a tricky
gambit, one that could backfire in any direction.
The more powerful force demanding government disclosure of what
went on at Mena arises from non-partisan sources. Law
enforcement officials who've seen the system fail, a growing body
of reporters who've researched the story and found it full of holes,
and ordinary citizens who think they have a right to know if their
government was helping to import cocaine--they are the forces who
are keeping Mena alive.
They've become hooked on this story of guns, drugs, and
international intrigue. And, so long as their questions remain
unanswered, their numbers will continue to grow. Here's why:
1. The smuggler was too colorful.
It's not every crook-turned-federal-informant who gets gunned
down by Colombian hit men, only to be resurrected in a made-for-
TV movie and portrayed by Dennis Hopper. Barry Seal was that
kind of guy.
A fat and swaggering pilot, he found a lucrative niche in the
emergent business of flying cocaine into the United States. He was
meticulous. He was crafty. And he apparently had connections.
In 1984, when federal agents were closing in with indictments, Seal
flew from his base in Mena, Arkansas to Washington, D.C., where
he met with two members of then-Vice President George Bush's
drug task force. After that meeting, Seal "rolled over," and became a
federal informant, under the supposed control of Drug Enforcement
Administration officials in Miami.
But there's more to Seal's story than that. From the moment he
turned, until his death in a hail of bullets in Baton Rouge, Seal
appears at the center of ongoing contacts with the Medellin drug
cartel, with the DEA, with the Central Intelligence Agency, and
with Oliver North's National Security Council at the White House.
It's enough for a TV movie.
2. The crimes were too big.
No one will ever know how much cocaine Seal and his pilots flew
to the United States. As an informant Seal testified that in the two
years before 1982, when he moved his operation to Arkansas, he
made approximately 60 trips to Central America and brought back
18,000 kilograms. It's believed his activity from 1982 to '84
continued at at least as strong a pace.
After 1984, when he became a DEA informant, Seal testified, he
smuggled 3,000 kilos into the U.S. What happened to that cocaine
is unknown. What is known, as a U.S. attorney later noted in court,
is that "Mr. Seal was a drug trafficker on a large basis--an
extremely large basis--for a very long period of time."
The cocaine Seal imported was sold for huge amounts of money,
and that money had to be laundered. Investigators in Arkansas were
able to trace some of it through illegal cash transactions at local
banks in Mena. But the vast majority of it still has not been traced.
Finally, if the mounting evidence that officially sanctioned gun-
running was taking place from Mena to Contra rebels is proven
true, that was also a crime. And if it were established, as some
Congressional testimony suggests, that White House officials were
willing to use profits from drugs brought into the United States to
buy arms to support the Contras, that--and the subsequent coverup-
-would be the biggest crimes of all.
3. Too much money was involved.
Seal once testified he grossed as much as $750,000 for one cocaine
smuggling trip. He testified before the President's Commission on
Organized Crime that his organization alone involved the
laundering of between $10 and $20 million.
It is known that Seal continued to import cocaine after he became a
DEA informant--for the last two of the four years he was in
Arkansas. But no one knows--or at least no one is saying--where
any of that money went. After Seal's murder, the federal government
tried to seize some of his assets for unpaid taxes. Here's what the
U.S. attorney in that case said: "The vast discrepancy between the
income [Seal] received and the income he reported obviously show
a great deal of unreported income as well as unspoken-for assets.
"Where did this money go? We found between $1.5 and $2 million
worth of assets. Where is the other tens of millions of dollars? We
don't know. Obviously, something has happened to that money."
4. The handling of the case was too bizarre.
Nothing about the investigation and attempts at prosecution of
illegal activity at Mena conforms to normal procedure. Midway
through his four-year stint in Arkansas, for example, Barry Seal
became a DEA informant. But the investigators working the case in
Arkansas--Russell Welch for the Arkansas State Police and
William Duncan for the IRS--were never notified of that. Nor has
anyone offered an explanation as to why, when informant-
smugglers are supposed to be closely monitored, Seal's assigned
DEA handler never stepped foot in this state.
The role of the FBI in the case is unclear, as, indeed, is the role of
the Arkansas State Police. Duncan, of the IRS, testified that prior
to his appearance before a committee of Congress investigating
Mena, he was instructed by superiors in the agency to lie and told
he needed "to get the big picture."
Another irregularity concerns the apparent reluctance of
Hutchinson's successor, U.S. Attorney Mike Fitzhugh, to let Welch
and Duncan present evidence of money-laundering to a seated
federal grand jury. They wondered about that for years.
But the Times has obtained a copy of a memo written in 1986 by an
FBI agent in Hot Springs, notifying the agent in charge of the Little
Rock office that Fitzhugh would be "withholding presentation"
about the investigation at Mena from the grand jury. The memo is
dated days before Seal's murder, and a month before he was to
come to Arkansas to appear before that same grand jury.
The agent in Hot Springs further reported that Fitzhugh "advised
that he will not utilize Seal as a government prosecution witness in
view of his lack of credibility in other mitigating circumstances."
While the FBI was apparently well informed about Fitzhugh's
decision, Welch and Duncan say that they were not. It is but one of
the inexplicable aspects of this case. Another is that in the months
before his death, Seal was being used heavily as a government
witness in cases both inside this country and out. What "mitigating
circumstances" dampened his credibility in Arkansas, making
Fitzhugh unwilling to use him, have yet to be explained.
5. Too much federal testimony implicates the CIA.
It's expected that when Terry Reed's civil lawsuit reaches federal
court, he will present evidence in support of his claim that he
worked with CIA operatives in Mena and Central America on
missions that he later learned involved the import of cocaine to the
U.S. Reed has made this claim in court before and the government
has failed to present evidence refuting it, claiming that to do so
would jeopardize national security. As a result, Reed won his
earlier case.
But even without Reed's current case, there is plenty of evidence
that Seal was working for both the DEA and the CIA, while he was
also in the employ of the Medellin Cartel. It was a mixture that got
him killed.
Ronald J. Caffrey, a former chief of the DEA's cocaine section, has
admitted that the DEA coordinated with the CIA to have
photographic equipment installed on Seal's C-123 cargo plane for
an undercover drug smuggling trip to Nicaragua. The plane had
been based at Mena.
Ernest Jacobsen, Seal's handler at the DEA, testified more
specifically that Seal's plane was flown to Homestead Air Force
Base in Florida, where the CIA installed a satellite navigation
system.
6. The connection between drug-running at Mena and Oliver
North's support for the Contras is too strong to be dismissed.
In 1988, the DEA's Caffrey told the House Judiciary Subcommittee
on Crime that he had been ordered by his superiors to brief North
about Seal's 1984 trip for the CIA to Nicaragua. Caffrey said he
took copies of the pictures taken on the Seal mission and discussed
plans for Seal to make another trip.
He testified that North asked if it would be possible to have some
type of publicity about the mission, because there was a vote on aid
to the Contras pending before Congress, and photos allegedly
showing Sandinista officials helping to unload cocaine from Seal's
plane would be beneficial. Caffery said he told North publicity was
out of the question because it would jeopardize Seal's life and ruin
the operation.
(Despite that warning, the photos purportedly taken from Seal's
plane subsequently did receive extensive publicity, as President
Ronald Reagan held one of them up on national television in a
move to dramatize his call for Contra funding.)
But the most startling testimony has come from Jacobsen, Seal's
DEA handler. In testimony in 1988, Jacobsen said that before Seal
was to make his second covert flight to Nicaragua, he was given
$1.5 million for the trip by Carlos Bustamante, an associate of
Medellin Cartel leader Jorge Ochoa.
According to Jacobsen, when North heard of the money, he
suggested that it be funneled to the Contras. The committee report
noted: "As DEA officials testified, Lt. Col. Oliver North suggested
to the DEA in June, 1985 that $1.5 million in drug money carried
aboard a plane piloted by DEA informant Barry Seal and generated
by a sting of the Medellin Cartel and Sandinista officials, be
provided to the Contras. While the suggestion was rejected by the
DEA, the fact that it was made highlights the potential appeal of
drug profits for persons engaged in covert activity."
7. Evidence of a coverup is too persuasive.
For almost three years, a federal grand jury in the Western District
of Arkansas considered questions about drug-running, money-
laundering, and illegal airplane modification--all of which
investigators believed were being conducted at the Mena airport.
But Fitzhugh reportedly focused only on the drug-running
allegations, the aspect of the case the jurors felt would be the most
difficult one to prove about anyone except Seal, and he, by then,
was dead.
According to statements from one of the jurors, Fitzhugh refused to
consider the money laundering or conspiracy charges, for both of
which the jurors believed evidence was substantial. "We asked him
about it," the juror said, "and it was like just blown off. We were
never given a straight answer."
Fitzhugh has denied having stymied the grand jury, but he has
never explained why, in the three years it met, Welch and Duncan,
the central investigators in the case, were never called to testify.
Since that time, several congressional committees have looked into
the case and extensive files on it were presented to the Iran-Contra
special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. But Walsh ignored the matter,
and other inquiries, frequently blocked by claims of "national
security," have failed to unravel the nature or extent of the
government's involvement with Seal. The total lack of prosecution
in what is acknowledged to be one of the biggest drug-smuggling
rackets in U.S. history makes Seal's 1984 claim to a newspaper
reporter sound prescient: "If they indict me, it means I go to court,"
he said. "It means that then I get to tell my side of the story. The
Justice Department is not going to tolerate this. It's never going to
happen."
8. The implications are too outrageous.
This month, Bryant, explaining why "it's too late to bother" with
Mena, said, "The statute of limitations has long since run out, most
of the important players are now deceased, and Mena occurred
during a Republican administration; the federal government was the
one that, in my opinion, had ultimate responsibility."
He's right about the statute of limitations. But, although Seal's
dead, most of the legendary drug-runner's associates--including
Oliver North and officials in the NSC, CIA, and several agencies of
the U.S. Treasury and Justice departments, as well as certain figures
in Arkansas--remain alive and well and have walked away
unscathed. That bothers people who believe that even at the highest
levels of government there should be some accountability.
Moreover, all this took place during a time when the federal
government was supposedly doing everything in its power to stem
the flow of drug running and money laundering in the U.S. If
evidence ever surfaced showing that government officials either
knowingly tolerated the import of cocaine, or worse, cooperated in
the smuggling to sponsor other illegal activities (then sought to
cover up its tracks), the consequences predictably would be dire.
9. Too many questions linger.
Instead of diminishing with time, the questions surrounding Mena
have increased. Here are a few of them:
What happened to the money Seal got while working as a DEA
informant? What happened to the cocaine he imported? Why did
Fitzhugh, in particular, depart so radically from custom and not
allow Welch or Duncan, the two investigators who knew more
about Mena than anyone else, to present their information to the
grand jury? Why didn't the DEA have Seal's handler in Arkansas,
where he could closely monitor the smuggler's activities, as
required by agency regulations? Why did the FBI not inform the
investigators that Fitzhugh would be "withholding" from the grand
jury the information they'd provided on Mena? Why was Seal an
acceptable government witness elsewhere, but not, apparently, in
Arkansas? Is L.D. Brown, who says Clinton knew about cocaine at
Mena, telling the truth? Why, when Arkansas State Police
investigator Russell Welch confronted DEA officials in
Washington, was he told, "Nothing ever happened at Mena"? Why
has the IRS never followed up with further investigation of what
U.S. attorneys themselves have acknowledged was a massive
money-laundering enterprise? And, since Clinton has said that
whatever occurred at Mena was a federal responsibility, why, now
that he's president, hasn't he ordered a complete disclosure by every
agency of the federal government that was involved with Barry
Seal?
10. Too many people have gotten curious.
There was a time when the peculiar activities at Mena might have
vanished, but that moment has long since passed.
The work Welch and Duncan did in their investigations has never
been called into question. Though the men and their families have
suffered for their involvement with the case, they continue to speak
out. They see what's happened as a travesty.
As a result, even before Clinton's election as president, public
interest in the bizarre story was beginning to spread. Now, news
media from around the world have made the trek to Mena, only to
encounter the same inexplicable saga, the same list of unanswered
questions.
So, far from being outdated, this is a story, like the story of cocaine
itself, that remains painfully current. It involves huge amounts of
money, strong suggestions of government involvement, and the
lives of thousands of people on the receiving end of Barry Seal's
distribution line. It also involves hope; hope that if a mess like this
can be cleaned up, however belatedly, this country's justice system
has a chance of redeeming itself.
That's why the inquiry into Mena has, in a sense, become a populist
crusade. Future government investigations may or may not answer
the nagging questions that remain. But as more and more Mena
buffs log onto the Internet, accessing and exchanging information,
and as new testimony continues to dribble out, some of it from
aging participants who no longer have careers to protect, at least
some answers will be discovered--some meaning to Mena will be
found.
Copyright c 1995 Arkansas Writers' Project, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission.
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