Victim No. 9. But Barry Seal's death was no accident. His story is so exciting that Hollywood made it into a movie (Double-Crossed), starring Dennis Hopper and Adrienne Barbeau.
Barry made about $50 million as a pilot and plane supplier in Clinton's incredibly elaborate and successful drug-running operation out of Mena, Arkansas.
Iran-Contra was conceived as a simple scheme to use the Ayatollah's money to send guns to the Contra freedom fighters. But from that humble, Ollie North beginning, it blossomed into the great Arkansas dream. Virtually every load of Chinese AK-47s (plus light machine guns, grenades, and other small ordnance) taken from Mena to Nicaragua was matched by a return load of dope and cash flown in from Colombia via Panama or the Cayman Islands on "black flights" that Customs officials and air traffic controllers were instructed to ignore.
According to an exhaustive, top-selling new book entitled Compromised, by Teffy Reed and John Cummings (which I found highly accurate), pilots were bringing back and air-dropping over $9 million a week in cash, which was properly laundered and then went into Arkansas industries owned by friends of Gov. Clinton. (Not into Clinton's pockets-he didn't usually do that kind of thing except to pay off campaign debts and favors.) And in case you were wondering why Bill Clinton needed his land scams when he had all the drug money available, the answer is, the drug operations came later. Incidentally, the money was laudered through such sterling banks as BCCI. Remember them? I discussed BCCI’s involvement extensively with its Panamanian president.
Five or six of the CIA subcontractor pilots running the gun-drug loop under Bary Seal have said that Nella (near Mena) was chosen as the base to train Contra Soldiers mainly because its terrain foliages were so similar to Nicaragua. Many local residents still recall camouflaged Latinos holding revolvers in the countryside -but they all agree it's not healthy to talk about it too much.
Iran-Contra was an impressive operation on both ends. I still remember standing on the deck of a flat-bottom supply boat used to run guns up to the Contras in Nicaragua. It was loaded to the gun-whales with Russian-made rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, etc., in Chinese-marked boxes. The captain and his partner, a German arms dealer, invited me to sample the merchandise, so I pried the lids off a couple of wooden cases, took out some AK-47s, and sprayed a few clips around the woods (Very nice guns, but I wasn't in the market.)
In case this begins to sound like a far-right half-wit notion, you should know that some liberal groups (opposed to CIA tricks) concur. For instance, The Wa11 Street Journal said on June 29:
There is even one public plea that Special Counsel Robert Fiske should investigate possible links between Mena and the savings-and-loan association involved in Whitewater. The plea was sounded by the Arkansas Committee, a left-leaning group of former University of Arkansas students who have carefully tracked the Mena affair for years.
I wish them luck. And good health. The Ark4, Attorney General, the IRS, and the state police been met for fifteen years with "a wall of obfuscation and obstruction" erected by the Clinton circle of power-which is everywhere in Arkansas. Acco , to Penthouse, which is not exactly noted for being a far right magazine:
He [Clinton] controlled virtually all the 2,000 handpicked appointees to an array of boards and commissions that effectively rule the state.... Anyone seeking to do business with the state and that included just about everybody running a business seemed to expect direct solicitations by Clinton's campaign finance people.
Polk County Prosecutor Charles Black, to his credit, once even sat down with Clinton himself and pleaded for a state investigation of Mena!
Bill said that "he would get a man on it and get back to me," Black recalls. That was in 1988. Black is still sitting by his phone. (I'm sure Bill got a kick out of that interview. I recall him grinning as he made some comment about "dumb Arkies" one afternoon at the brokerage I owned in Harrison, one of a dozen or so occasions when we spent time together.)
But at the risk of sounding as bad as Bill, I must remind you that, after all, this is Arkansas ... where:
* One governor before Clinton had every concrete and steel bridge in the state insured for fire (yes, fire). Guess who owned the insurance company.
* Another governor, being indicted for fraud, simply canned the judge and replaced him with the town drunk, who then dismissed the grand jury.
So just think of Bill as a traditional, Arkansas kind of politician.
But I digress. Barry Seal was eventually arrested by the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration. To get off the hook, he turned state's evidence and fingered several big drug dealers. He even managed to take clandestine photographs of major Colombian and Panamanian figures, one of which President Reagan showed proudly in a nationwide TV speech.
But in the end, the DEA betrayed the flamboyant Barry by allowing him to be sentenced to a halfway house, where a few days later he was a sitting duck for three Colombian avengers with Uzi and MAC-IO submachine guns with silencers. The ending wasn't pretty, but it made a hard-hitting movie.
Why did the DEA dump Barry? Perhaps because, as Clinton observed to Terry Reed, "Seal just got too damn big for his britches and that scum basically deserved to die, in my opinion..."
Im not saying Bill ran Iran-Contra. He didn't -not even the Arkansas half of it. But five men in the Mena operation (sorry, I can't reveal their names to you) have affirmed that he provided their cover as governor and rode herd" on them through the Intelligence Division of the state police. Other high officials helped. . Why? Because the Arkansas state bonds program (ADFA) received IO% of the net profits-plus the use of I00% of the gross in their banks as they laundered it. Quite a boost to the economy!
At least that was the deal cut with Clinton. But the Mena operations (code-named Centaur Rose and Jade Bridge by Reagan's CIA Director Wm. Casey) finally had to be yanked from Arkansas and moved to Mexico under the name Operation Screw Worm. Simple reason: Bill and friends just couldn't resist putting Arkansas' hand deeper into the till than they were supposed to.
In fact, eyewitness Reed details at length the tense meeting in which William P Barr-later President Bush's Attorney General-breaks the bad news to a very angry Clinton. (Sorry, I must condense the conversation greatly. You've got to read his book!)
On a March night in 1986, they met with Reed, Oliver North, and two other CIA men in a musty, poorly-lit World War II ammunition bunker at Camp Robinson outside Little Rock.
After several sharp exchanges and traded insults, Barr said, "The deal we made was to launder our money through your bond business. What we didn't plan on was you ... shrinking our laundry..... That's why we're pulling the operation out of Arkansas. It's become a liability for us. We don't need live liabilities."
"What do ya" mean, live liabilities?" Clinton demanded. "There"s no such thing as a dead liability. It's an oxymoron, get it? Oh, or didn't you Rhodes Scholars study things like that?" Barr snapped.
"What! Are you threatenin' us? Because if ya' are...
From that point on, Barr was able to smooth things out, and he concluded with the most eye-opening passage of the book: You and your state have been our greatest asset. The beauty of this, as you know, is that you're a Democrat, and with our ability to influence both parties, this country can get beyond partisan gridlock. Mr. Casey wanted me to pass on to you that unless you f- up and do something stupid, you're No. I on the short list for a shot at the job you've always wanted [meaning the Presidency]. That's pretty heady stuff, Bill. So why don't you help us keep a lid on this and we'll all be promoted together. You and guys like us are the fathers of the new government. Hell, we're the new covenant. An amazing statement, wasn't it? Especially for 1986.
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