WORMSCAN: MENA2 [PART 2]

Mena, Arkansas, base of CIA drug importation.

NOTES: I made a few corrections to spellings and grammar.

If you missed previous parts to this part of the WORMSCAN series, you can find it here.

WORMSCAN: MENA2 [PART 1]

Subject: Mena Airport, C-123s & More
From: Larry-Jennie
Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 20:06:40 -0700
Message-ID: <338A4FC0.14A3@interaccess.com>
Organization: InterAccess, Chicago's best Internet Service Provider
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.impeach.clinton,alt.president.clinton, alt.politics.clinton,alt.politics.bush,alt.politics.org.fbi,alt.journalism,alt.news-media.alt.politics.media,alt.politics.usa.republican,talk.politics.drugs

(Russell Welch is a retired Arkansas State Police investigator)

Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 17:26:50 -0500
From: truegrit (Russell Welch)
To: lar-jen@interaccess.com

Larry:

The Mena Airport is located about one mile from the southwestern city limits of Mena. It is still in a relatively densely populated area. A major highway (by local standards), Ark. State Hwy. 8, runs within about one or two hundred feet of the north edge of the runway. You can legally park your car and walk to the end of the strip. A major county road runs along the west side of the airport, giving access to the businesses on that side of the runway. The hangers are no more than 30 or 40 feet off the road. Another major county road runs along the south end of the strip, about 300 feet (maybe more) from the south edge of the strip. Again, you can legally park your car and walk out there is you want to.

These are major thorough fares, by local standards. They all have a lot of daily traffic. A short state maintained hwy runs along the east end of the runway, Ark State Hwy 980. This hwy runs maybe half the length of the strip. After that it turns into a dirt road and provides access to private land and residences. A local bootlegger used to live down that road. The area surrounding the airport is peppered with houses. In addition to that, immediately across the road from the airport, on the west side, there is a housing sub-division. Across the highway on the north side, there is a trailer park. I'll scan a map of the area and send it to you.

My house is located about a mile-and-a-half northwest of the airport. Al Hadaways house is about a mile due north of the airport. You can't land or take off, using the north approach, without going directly over Hadaway's house. You couldn't fire up the engines of the C-123 without hearing it from my house, and there's a hill between my house and the airport. From Hadaway's house, I would be surprised if you couldn't feel the walls shake a little bit.

During that time, when Hadaway wasn't working at being a sheriff, he was at the airport. He was a pilot and loved aviation. He eventually quit the sheriff's office, after being completely worn down (burned out) as a result of the Seal investigation. His response to the media, when he quit was, "How can I arrest people for relatively minor drug offenses when cocaine smugglers go untouched?"

Most of the laborers who worked at the Mena Airport were local citizens with families who took part in all of the social affairs of the community. I went to church with some of them. One of my fellow church members actually worked at Rich Mountain Aviation while Seal was there. A good man with a good family. Unfortunately, Freddie Hampton was able to monitor me at church and this man would get harassed and intimidated for so much as shaking hands with me during fellowship. I never put him and his family into jeopardy by soliciting information from him, but towards the end, he got tired of the intimidation and started volunteering information to me.

The local people have watched activity at the Mena Airport and don't approve of any illegal activity. Local politicians and certain businessmen have ranted for years that adverse publicity is hurting the airport and "local people are tired of it." That's wrong. Local people are tired of illegal activity at the airport; but, know that they need to keep their mouths shut. In Arkansas truth is declared by the people with the power. Those who try to oppose that, can get squashed. The safest and easiest thing for them to do, is to keep their mouths shut and enjoy their families.

That's why I had some consternation as I saw that my involvement in an investigation was becoming inevitable. I knew that I would be on my own and essentially living with the enemy. There was no place for me to go and be anonymous. Although, Billy Bottoms says that all of Seal's people were non-violent, it would have been stupid for me to think that, at the time. On top of all of this, being in a small town, there was a constant flow of information, mixed with a generous smattering of gossip.

People were constantly calling me to give me information on a wide range of subjects, including activity at the airport. It was the same way with Hadaway. When Seal flew the C-123 away, for the final time, I could hear the engines firing up over the air conditioner at my house. I still got two telephone calls from people telling that Seal was about to leave in the Fat Lady.

I went out to the airport and watched for a while as they worked on it at Rich Mountain Aviation. When it appeared that they would not be leaving any time soon, I went back home. A couple of hours later, I heard the engines fire up again. This time I got four telephone calls. I went back out to the airport and found the C-123 at the north end of the runway. I parked directly across from it on the east side of the runway, at Rose Upholstery. He tinkered with it for a while and then gave it some gas. Flames shot out behind the engines for about 20 feet. If anybody had been in the car with me, we would not have been able to talk because of the noise. A C-123 makes a lot of noise.

I know that Seal could see me because I was right across from him and he looked my way a couple of times. I watched to see if he would flip me off as he began his take-off. He didn't pay any attention to me. I guess he was busy flying the plane. As I was leaving the airport I stopped and talked to an acquaintance at the one of the hangers. He made some jokes about the Fat Lady and I went back home.

The point I'm trying to make is that, sure — the C-123 could have made some trips without Hadaway or me knowing about it; but, there were so many people at and around that airport that it was impossible for it to come and go without somebody knowing. Very few of the people that live next to the airport have anything to do with the businesses there. Some of them did not mind reporting suspicious activity on occasion. Jack Rose of Rose Upholstery volunteered his business to me for surveillance at night time. Everybody knew that Seal was a cocaine smuggler and at least some of the other businessmen didn't like the fact that Freddie Hampton had brought him to their airport. I can say that the C-123 left at least a couple of times. Maybe, it left three of four times; but, I don't think so.

The area around the strip at Nella is also relatively congested. A major county road runs along one end of the strip. While Seal was active at the Mena airport, there was a thin line of saplings grown up between the strip and the county road. The saplings are cleared off now. You can park your car on the side of the county road and walk a few feet onto the strip. Another road, that appears to be kept up by the county runs along the other end of the strip. A private drive, with public access runs along the north edge of the Nella strip.

Nonetheless, on at least one occasion two game wardens were rudely ordered away from one of these roads by men who identified themselves as federal agents. The game wardens were responding to a complaint of night hunters. But, that's another story; much of which hasn't been made public. I'm sure we can get into that later.

There are houses scattered out all over that area. This area of the Ouachita National Forest has been used for years for some Special Forces Training. Back in the 80's Fort Chaffee, at Fort Smith, about 85 miles north of Mena, was converted to what they call a "Joint Readiness Training Center." I found out from a newspaper clipping on the west coast, read to me by a federal investigator, that, included in the JRTC mission, was the training of South and Central American military forces. There was some reason for me to believe that they may have crossed over that line when they used the area to train El Salvadorian assassins.

Seal probably thought that the things he said and did at Rich Mountain Aviation were kept in confidence but that was not the case. As soon as Seal left, Freddie would tell somebody and before long it would spread over a wide area. After Seal started doing some legal stuff, I'm sure that Freddie couldn't wait to tell someone. As soon as Seal told Freddie Hampton or Joe Evans that he was bringing in a C-123 to do a sting with the DEA, the story was bound to spread, and Hadaway, without a doubt would have been one of the first to hear it.

There was another C-123. As far as I know, this other plane never came to Mena. It was camouflaged like the Fat Lady. It was being monitored by the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and a sheriff's office, two counties into Oklahoma from Mena. The OBN dealt with me on the subject because they thought it was the same plane that was parked at Mena. We were able to determine that it was not the same plane. We made that determination one day when the OBN called me and asked me to go to the Mena Airport and see if the Fat Lady was there because they had their camouflaged C-123 in the air at that time. I went to airport and observed the Fat Lady. Hence, two C-123's.

This information has not been freely given out, in the past, so that many of the charlatans have not been able to weave it into their story. It has been provided to an investigative unit out of DC. For the same reason that I can say that the Fat Lady rarely moved, I think I can say that this other C-123 never came to Mena. I've heard the suggestion that, maybe when the Fat Lady took off the other plane came and sat at the same place, so nobody would know that the Fat Lady was missing. Maybe that did happen, but it would have been so obvious, and based on the other kinds of information that I was getting from the airport at the same time, I cannot conceive of that occurring without me, Hadaway, and just about everybody else in the Mena area knowing about it. At the very least, it would have been foolish for anybody to try that and not expect to be caught at it.

The Mena airport is not out in the middle of nowhere. It's almost in the middle of Mena. It's been my experience, since 1987, that they don't try to be too clandestine with so called "covert activity," anyway. If they want to do something they'd just do it and lie about it. It's not easy to catch a dirty cop. If you catch him in the act of doing something, he's just going to say it was part of an ongoing investigation; and, the chances are you're going to have a hard time proving otherwise. You may have actually had a smoking gun, but it gets turned around on you, and there's not much you can do about it.

While I was still investigating, I had the opportunity to go to Southern Air Transport, in Miami. It was just a small olive green quonset hut, sandwiched in between some larger hangers. By small I mean "size small." If you're familiar with quonset huts, you know what I mean. They didn't even have their own hanger.

Larry, I hope this helps. It seems like there was another question that you asked. I'll check and get back with you. Below is part of an email that I sent to Hopsicker, before my patience ran out with him. I've got a great deal of my own documentation that I have never made available. It's possible that my documentation, along with my personal experience will help to clear up a lot of questions (and expose some charlatans). Unfortunately finding a good outlet has not been easy. Publishers are hesitant to deal with the subject. Short posts on the Internet seem to raise more questions than they answer; although, I'm more than glad to answer your questions. I had hoped that Hopsicker might provide an outlet; but, he has his own agenda. You have my permission to post all of this.

Best Wishes,

Russ

> From '86 until the Gulf War, there annual war games stages out of Mena, called "Coronet Centry." The army brought missile launchers, field radar, various weapons and supplies and had a war game for a week or two. They put all of this stuff up on people's property around Mena. The mayor (same one who tried to get the Cali Cartel to keep doing business here) gave speeches about what a boost the local economy was getting from the military.

There was some reason to believe that not all of the supplies were returned to supply. One BATF agent asked me to help him with an investigation of gun running at the Mena airport. He told me that he had an informant in Little Rock who had been tested on another case. The informant was the ex-wife of an Army Colonel. She wanted to snitch off her husband for his part in running guns out of the Mena Airport.

I wasn't anxious to turn up the heat on the frying pan that I was already in, but I said that I would help. He called me three of four times as he was preparing to start his investigation. The last time he called me, he said that he had talked to his boss, Bill Buford, who as far as I know still runs the Little Rock BATF office.

Bill Buford told him that he would authorize the investigation, but warned him that several "BATF agents had lost their jobs" as a result of the Mena Airport.

This is the only time that I have ever heard and I don't know anymore about it. The agent said that the warning was serious enough that he wasn't going to start his investigation. I've given this information to certain investigative bodies out of Washington DC. It's my understanding that they were never able to get any cooperation out the BATF.

At the risk of getting a rumor started let me say that I think the BATF agent I talked to was the same one killed at Waco. If it wasn't the same one, let the BATF fork up the right agent and tell what he knows. I raised my right hand for the DC investigators and said, "I swear to God Almighty and put me on polygraph." If they're not getting any cooperation from the BATF that's probably as far as it will go.

I tried to get them in touch with Bill Hobbs, a BATF agent that retired after the Waco siege. He said that Waco was the last straw for him. If he can remember, I feel like he will know something about the aborted investigation. Bill Hobbs is a good man. He lives in Tennessee.

I had information in the 80's that M-16's were available that came out of the Mena NG Armory. The source of the M-16's was member of the NG that worked at the armory. Later, he and a full time NG sergeant were arrest for the offense. They were also trying to sell LAWS missiles. The arrest took place in Dequeen, about 45 miles south of Mena. They had to take them to Fort Smith immediately to appear before a magistrate (Federal law) so they came through Mena. There were five marked police cars from Dequeen, with blues and sirens busting through the red lights in Mena. It looked like the Sugarland Express. There was no publicity and the offenders plead (pleaded?) guilty to minor charges.

There has been talk of a new east/west runway at the Mena Airport since about 1987. Originally, it was going to be built by the military. An army engineer unit was parachute in and build the thing. The work would be done for free and the army would get the training for building a combat zone airport. The early plans even had barracks on them. This fell through, apparently because of adverse publicity and curious questions that local business men and politicians attributed to me. All I could say was, "Hey, if it's legal why did they stop just because somebody asked what they were doing?" Later when the C-130's started coming in, a ground engineer from Australia told me that when they came here they intended to use the Mena Airport for some black ops, as well as, legitimate jobs.

After they got here, they found it to be such a great location that they didn't intend to do anything except black ops. They were going to fence in the entire airport, set up their own security, and not let anybody in without an ID badge pinned on. These intentions were actually placed in the local newspaper. The fence and security part of the deal got some local publicity. About 50 feet of the fence was actually put in at Rich Mountain Aviation. If you can remember, I showed that to you. Hampton stated in the local newspaper that the fence was being put in by the USG because of high level government contracts at the Mena Airport. Hampton said he was working on top secret stuff for the Strategic Defense Initiative (Starwars) out of Kwagalein, in the South Pacific. Gene Wheaton called the Pentagon. The Pentagon made an official statement that they did not put up a fence at the Mena Airport and there were no high level contracts at the Mena Airport. RMA had been given a small contract to do skin maintenance on some of their airplanes that were being used in the Marshall Islands. That stretch of fence is now a monument to Freddie Hampton's bullshit.

The ground engineer also stated that the project, which included a new 7000' east/west runway, was going to be financed with $10 million from a man in Washington who owned a professional ball club. When things drug on because of me and publicity, he had to stick the money somewhere else because of the IRS. What they were putting together here sounds a whole lot like a military base.

The north/south runway was repaved in 1983, I've got some surveillance photos of Seal's stuff while it was being paved. I think it's about 5,300 feet long. They have been trying to get a 7000' east/west runway since '86 or 87'. They wanted an ILS system for the new runway but the FAA kept turning them down because a part of the flight path goes through a mountain near my house. A month after I was taken off their problem list (retired) the FAA reconsidered and granted approval to the plans. Federal money was offered for the project which is under way right now.

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Subject: Starr Targets Arkansas Law Enforcement
From: lar-jen@interaccess.com (Larry-Jennie)
Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 21:58:05 -0600
Message-ID:
Organization: InterAccess,Chicagoland's Full Service Internet Provider
Newsgroups: alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater

not to be used for commercial purposes

Starr Investigation Targets Law-Enforcement Complicity
By Jamie Dettmer and Paul M. Rodriguez
INSIGHT magazine: May 29 1995

An ongoing money-laundering probe, led by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, is churning up details of possible state and law-enforcement ties to criminal misconduct in Arkansas.

In the late 1980s during the swirl of Iran-Contra allegations about narcotics trafficking and weapons shipments, senior officer in the Arkansas State Police began a methodical operation to destroy sensitive documents linking some of the state's most prominent political and business figures to illegal activities — spin-offs from Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North's cover arms for hostages deals.

Arkansas connection to Iran-Contra were, at the time, obscured nationally. Attention was riveted on Washington, Ronald Reagan and North's manic shredding of files detailing the "enterprise" that provided arms for the release of American hostages in the Middle East and guns for the Nicaraguan Contras. Arkansas seemed a long way from the action in the nation's capital.

Until Bill Clinton ran for president, an Arkansas dimension to Iran-Contra remained ignored by mainstream news organizations and federal officials. Now though, what in the 1980s has moved to center stage. It's not just shady land deals surfacing, but widespread wrongdoing by the state politico-business establishment that behaved as though it was above the law — and with the help of police officers, was allowed to be.

The conspiracy theorist, of course, have run riot and attempted to pin all the blame for misdeeds in Arkansas on Clinton. But what slowly is unfolding is a far more complicated story of negligence, opportunism and rank exploitation by a one-party political system that bent the rules and turned a blind eye to alleged criminal activity when it was carried out by some of its own.

Enter KWS. As the independent counsel pursues the money trail of Clinton and his wife, Hillary, in a land deal called Whitewater, the inner workings of Arkansas government and law enforcement are coming under the spotlight. What KWS is finding, according to a former senior federal official familiar with the probe, is a good-ole-boy network of "corruption and obstruction" in a state seemingly awash in narcotics money — some almost certainly of Iran-Contra origin and some from more home-grown enterprises.

INSIGHT now has learned that Starr's team of more than 125 FBI and IRS agents and U.S. attorneys are investigating what appears, on the surface, to be unrelated aspects of the Whitewater deal. His investigators are delving heavily into Arkansas narcotics and homicide cases, some of which have remained unsolved for years. And what is being uncovered, according to federal and state officials who agreed to be interviewed, is layer upon layer of complicity by state and local law-enforcement agencies and a maze of allegations that has investigators widening their inquiries at every turn.

One of the most startling discoveries so far is an extensive and regular pattern of document shredding in the late 1980s on the orders of senior state police officials. According to law-enforcement sources in Little Rock, the shredded documents were federal and state intelligence records and police investigators' files on prominent Arkansans. Some, such as businessman Dan Lasater, were significant contributors to Clinton's gubernatorial campaigns. Also shredded was material on the murky drug-running and arms-smuggling operation based at the Mena Intermountain Regional Airport (see INSIGHT, Jan. 30, 1995).

The shredding, which was conducted in a tiny office in the office in the state police headquarters, was furtive and known only by a handful of officers at the highest levels in the Arkansas State Police — that is, until Starr's investigator (missing) nessmen with close ties to Clinton personally. The destruction of documents was at its most intense in 1988 and 1989.

Col. Tommy Goodwin, former Arkansas State Police commander, says, "I am not aware of any documents that were shredded."

Former state troopers, who in the 1980s attempted to investigate prominent Arkansas allegedly involved in the cocaine parties and drug sales, are not surprised by the disclosures of the shredding. Julius "Doc" Delaughter claims he resigned from the state police in 1988 after his superiors blocked the mounting of certain inquiries. He recalls how documents concerning other cases, such as the Lasater investigation, would turn up missing. "A deposition I took from a friend of Lasater was stolen off my desk and was never seen again," says Delaughter.

The deposition Delaughter says he secured could have proved embarrassing for then-Gov. Clinton if it had been leaked. It dealt with a cocaine party allegedly organized by Lasater in Hot Springs, Ark., hotel suite. The party hastily ended with the arrival of Clinton, who was scheduled to meet with Lasater. Lasater subsequently was convicted of cocaine distribution and sentenced to prison.

In another case, a state police captain was apparently so concerned by the regular destruction of potentially embarrassing material that he maintained for safekeeping a copy of a lengthy memorandum revealing that a Mena-based drug-running suspect was allowed to consult investigators' telephone records with the knowledge of Goodwin, who retired last June. According to the memo, a copy of which INSIGHT has obtained, the suspect a former state narcotics officer, learned from his search of the phone logs that state trooper were cooperating with the FBI agents on a probe of Barry Seal, a notorious, confessed drug trafficker who claimed, before his assassination in 1986 at the hands of Colombian hit men, to have been part of North's Iran-Contra operations.

The 10-page memo provides a revealing look into the close-knit world of Arkansas law enforcement. Written on Jan. 9, 1987, by Lt. Doug Williams (now a captain), the memo, which was sent to his superior officer, Capt. Doug Stevens, related how the suspect requested help in learning the nature of the investigations being mounted at Mena airport and into himself and his associates.

The suspect complained to Williams that the "local sheriff's office had started watching the airport." He mentioned he had visited a senior state police officer, Maj. Richard Rail, "which he did often," and that they had talked about how investigators charged long-distance calls to state credit cards. According to the Williams memo: "He [the suspect] stated that he took most of the day at the capitol building checking these [telephone] records and that the gentleman that was helping him there told him he could not copy these records; however, he could sit down with the records and make hand notes from them and that Colonel Goodwin had been advised of his being there and periodically checked back to see if he was still there and each time the colonel checked back, the man would walk in and say Mr. Goodwin just called back to see if you were still here and how you were doing."

Rules governing public access to state police phone records and credit cards should have restrained the suspect. According to Wayne Jordan, a spokesman for the Arkansas State Police, records connected with active intelligence operations and ongoing probes are strictly off-limits. Only when cases are closed, according to Jordan, are records available for public inspection; then any inspection requires a Freedom of Information Act request and approval by the head of the Arkansas State Police.

The complex events surrounding Mena — the clandestine flights of guns and drugs in the dead of night; the peculiar stifling of local investigations as well as probes mounted by federal and even less to do with Clinton. But Starr's investigators seem to be convinced, based on their questions to witnesses and requests for documents, that the flow of drug profits and the alleged diversion of that money into businesses in Arkansas and even into Clinton's campaign finances warrant major investigation.

In his bid to trace donations to the then governor's election coffers, the independent counsel's FBI agents have reviewed thousands of pages of case files connected to suspected narcotics operations and money laundering by reputed criminals in Arkansas and surrounding jurisdictions. Starr's investigators also begun question the Mena pilots responsible for air-dropping sturdy duffel bags full of Central American cocaine and cash at pre-arranged sites in Arkansas.

"The Feds are primarily interested in money-laundering activities," says Joe Evans, one of the pilots interrogated recently. "The questioning had to do with where the money was coming from, where the money was going. They asked me from which banks in the U.S. or internationally the money originated. They asked me how frequent were the flights and how large were the shipments."

During the interview with Evans, Starr's investigators also were interested in a mysterious and as-yet-unsolved double homicide near Little Rock in 1987 that has been the subject of considerable local controversy. Again, it is money laundering that seems to be foremost in the minds of Starr's investigators as they review the cold-case files concerning the murders of teenagers Don Henry and Kevin Ives, who were found stabbed and bludgeoned on railroad tracks along the Pulaski-Saline county line on the outskirts of Little Rock.

INSIGHT has learned that the double homicide also is the subject of a separate FBI investigation and that a grand jury has been impaneled in Little Rock to take testimony in the case. The targets of that investigation, according to sources, are a handful of suspected drug dealers from northwest Arkansas, a Little Rock prosecutor and several former members of the sheriff's departments in Pulaski and Saline counties. Two of the alleged drug dealers under suspicion in the murders were mentioned regularly in Arkansas State Police intelligence files, copies of which INSIGHT has obtained, contain raw and unsubstantiated allegations about wrongdoing by a number of prominent businessmen in Arkansas.

There have been many theories put forth to explain the murders of Henry and Ives. A persistent one argues that the teenagers stumbled upon a Mena narcotics drop site shortly before drugs were due to be unloaded. This theory appears to have caught the attention of Starr's team. Mena pilots have been asked about a drop site code-named "A-12" by the smugglers. They also have been asked about "Flight 50" — all Mena flights were numbered — which coincided with the date and time of the boys' deaths.

Starr's investigators have interviewed several convicted drug offenders in Arkansas prisons who are believed to be connected to the homicides of Henry and Ives.

Current and former members of Congress and law-enforcement officers who have looked into the Mena drug and money-laundering operations long have suspected that there was — and continues to be — complicity by people at both the state and federal levels to keep a lid on the events in Arkansas during the 1980s and early 1990s. They believe that what began under the guise of national security involving Iran-Contra blossomed into an extensive, tangled conspiracy to hide the links between Mena and non-federal corruption throughout the region.

"Starr should be investigating the Arkansas police," says a former high ranking federal official who worked behind the scenes to put together pieces of the Mena puzzle. "What is coming to light now is that there was a broad-based conspiracy to hide the truth drug conspiracies and the latest turns in the Starr inquiry."

"I could never understand why no one went down this path before," says Bill Duncan, a former IRS agent and congressional investigator who for three years tried to secure indictments in connection with Mena drug smuggling.

In a confidential memorandum to House Judiciary subcommittee on crime dated Oct. 8, 1991, Duncan wrote: "On this date I received a telephone call from Paul Whitmore concerning a conversation which he had just overheard at the El Paso Intelligence Center. Whitmore related that, just minutes ago, he heard the Central Intelligence Agency EPIC Resident Agent tell the U.S. Customs EPIC Resident Agent that the CIA still has ongoing operations out of the Mena, Ark., Airport, but that 'some other guys' are still operating out of the airport also, and that one of the operations at the airport is laundering money." Whitmore was the IRS agent stationed at EPIC, formally called the El Paso Intelligence agencies.

Duncan's memo concluded: "The CIA agent then told the Customs Agent that if the laundering of cash was a pair of Customs Operations, he wasn't going to worry about it. According to Whitmore, they also discussed checking the registration of various aircraft which are currently at the Mena, Ark., Airport."

For Duncan, the memo is just one more piece of evidence pointing to "a bizarre mixture of drug smuggling, gun running and money laundering."

[Three photos accompany the article.

1. Photo of Goodwin.
2. Photo of a C-123 cargo plane at Mena.
3. Photos of Henry and Ives.

INSIGHT is a weekly news magazine published by Washington Times Corp

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Subject: MENA REDACTIONS: Rich Mountain & Fred Hampton
From: lar-jen@interaccess.com (Larry-Jennie)
Date: Sat, 24 May 1997 11:07:50 -0600
Message-ID:
Organization: InterAccess,Chicagoland's Full Service Internet Provider
Newsgroups: alt.politics.org.fbi,alt.conspiracy,alt.impeach.clinton, alt.president.clinton,alt.politics.clinton,alt.politics.bush, alt.current-events.arkansas.mena,alt.politics.corruption.mena, alt.politics.usa.republican

Note the deletions in this sworn deposition about Mena cocaine trafficking:

Excerpt from:

In December 1996, the Portland Free Press secured a copy of Richard Brenneke's 21 June 1991 sworn deposition before Congressman William Alexander, Jr., and Chad Farris, chief deputy attorney general of Arkansas. Mr. Alexander did the direct questioning and Bushman Court Reporting, Inc., did the recording.

Q. And when you landed at Mena, what would be the disposition of the cargo?

A. On one or two occasions the cargo was taken off by people who were not residents of the Mena area and put into other aircraft which departed from there. However, the most frequent activity was that the aircraft would be unloaded in front of [deleted]'s hangers and it would be stored in the back of the hanger....

Q. And go back in your mind to the first trip you took and describe to me the disposition of the cargo; that is, the cocaine, once it returned to Arkansas, once it was delivered to Arkansas? And I am especially I am particularly interested in the identification of persons other than [deleted]. You've talked about [deleted]. You've identified him. Can you identify other people who might have received this cocaine?

(He talks about Gotti and the New York Mob.)

***

Excerpt from:

"Truth on Mena, Seal shrouded in shady allegations Drug smuggling rumors just won't die"
By Michael Arbanas
THE ARKANSAS GAZETTE
December 22, 1990

A similar tale, though in a broader setting, is told by Richard Brenneke, a Portland, Ore., businessman who claims a history as a CIA contractor and whose name has come up several times during the Iran-Contra investigations.

Brenneke said in an August interview with Duncan, who is now pursuing the investigation as a private citizen, that he flew as many as six shipments into the Mena airport from Panama from 1983 to 1986 as part of a CIA-sponsored effort to supply the Contras. He laundered money for the operation, Brenneke said, and ferried Latin Americans, mostly Panamanian Defense Forces, to Mena for training in the Ouachita National Forest.

Brenneke said he got his instructions from CIA contacts and carried several groups of 10 to 40 Latin Americans for training, dropping them off in their civilian clothes at Rich Mountain. He said he had made three or four trips to the Nella airstrip.

He met Seal once at the airport, he said, but Seal was not part of the same operation as far as he could tell. He also claimed to have seen an associate of John Gotti, the reputed New York mobster, at the airport, saying he knew the man from earlier money-laundering operations.

Brenneke is not one of the Bush administration's favorite people, and officials have loudly attacked his credibility. He has, though, shown himself on occasion to know more about the international arms trade than the average real estate property manager. He first drew media attention in November 1986, when The New York Times reported that he had written a series of memos to the United States government in late 1985 and early 1986 asking to get in on a deal to sell arms to Iran. The story hit the newsstands just days after Attorney General Edwin Meese said on national television that only a few top administration figures and private consultants knew about the deal.

This year, Brenneke was acquitted of five counts of perjury. He was charged with lying in 1988 when he told a federal judge that he had participated in 1980 meetings in Paris in which Reagan campaign officials cut a deal with Iran to postpone the release of the 52 American hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran until after Reagan won his election challenging President Jimmy Carter. Paramilitary reports Reed's and Brenneke's accounts don't seem too far-fetched to Welch, who said state police and local sheriff's offices got regular reports of automatic weapons fire, low-flying planes and small groups of uniformed men crossing streams and roads in the National Forest. "There was talk of paramilitary activity in the forest between the Nella community and Lake Ouachita," Welch said. "We thought maybe it was somebody like the CSA (the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, a white supremacist paramilitary group that operated in Northern Arkansas during that era)."

***

From: "Bear Bottoms"
To: "The ciadrugs mailing list"
Cc: "cas list"
Subject: ciadrugs] Re: Black Eagle?
Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 17:41:00 -0500

I have a unredacted version. Implant Fred Hampton and Rich Mountain aviation in the redacted area.

***

What National Security roles or secrets were being protected when "Rich Mountain" and "Fred Hampton" were blacked out in the sworn deposition?

Note how the deposition was released only this past December, so the National Security redaction justification remained active.

Larry

$

TheCIAcocainesmugglingonbehalfoftheContras
throughMena,ArkansascorruptedthePresidencies
ofBillClinton,GeorgeBushandRonaldReagan.
Fordetails,see:
ftp://pencil.cs.missouri.edu/pub/mena/

$

------------------------------------------

Subject: The Heart of the Octopus
From: wmcguire@cybercom.net (Wayne McGuire)
Date: Wed, 28 May 1997 07:27:52 GMT
Message-ID: <33b2dc6c.138891473@news.harvardnet.com>
Organization: Kersur Technologies
Newsgroups: alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater

Randolph,

My ISP lately has been failing to receive a goodly number of important posts in this newsgroup.

I discovered your post below, which is excellent, on Alta Vista.

A brief comment: I think this information is getting exceedingly close to the heart of the Octopus, which involves a criminal conspiracy between the Mossad and a corrupted wing of the CIA.

The conspiracy perhaps began with the October Surprise, continued with Iran-Contra and Mena, and is alive and well in dominating pockets of the Clinton administration.

It is not a shock that Chinagate has the look and feel of Iran-Contra; the same political forces are probably at work in the current scandal.

I wouldn't be surprised to see the uncorrupted wing of the American national security and intelligence communities begin to take on this problem in a truly serious way in the near future.

My source on Amiram Nir's involvement in Mena is Terry Reed's "Compromised."

 --- BEGIN ---

Re: Foster & Mena & JQP Distorts
From Randolph Langley
Organization Florida State University
Date 26 May 1997 04:46:10 -0400
Newsgroups alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater
Message-ID

wmcguire@cybercom.net (Wayne McGuire) writes:

> jqp@globaldialog.com wrote:

> > Wayne McGuire wrote:

> >> jqp@globaldialog.com wrote:

> >> > Larry-Jennie wrote:

> >> >> In article <3388493F.7D2E@globaldialog.com> jqp@globaldialog.com writes:

> >> >> > Larry-Jennie wrote:

> >> >> >> In article <5m8lfe$76q@sjx-ixn6.ix.netcom.com> jmoore3@ix.netcom.com (John Moore ) writes: You're being stupid JQP. Tossing away evidence without justification other than personal whim is arrogant and stupid.

> >> >> Larry-Jennie wrote: JQP does that all the time. He claims no cocaine came into Mena via Barry Seal's organization.

> >> >> John Q. Public wrote: Trying to drag another thread off topic, Lar?

> >> >> No. I was pointing to another example how John Q. Public tries to control discussion through distortion and bullying. He has to smear since he can't argue the evidence and testimony. Also, there is a linkage between Vince Foster and Mena.

> >> > Trying to drag another thread off topic, Larry?

> >> > This one used to be about Foster and CW, until you showed up.

> >> I think you and Martin McPhillips are part of the same campaign that harassed Patrick Knowlton and entrapped Chuck Hayes. I think you are here to bury the truth, not to expose it. I think you in particular are especially nervous about Mena because Israel was involved in the operation and related operations.

> > Looky here! Wayne's wading in on Mena, and guess what? He says it was *the Jews*!

> No, I am saying the terrorism adviser for Menachem Begin, Amiram Nir, was involved in Mena. That means that the Israeli government was heavily involved in Mena, and probably in every other illegal operation run by the Reagan administration and CIA director Bill Casey.

Nir? What's your source on that? That would be a most interesting connection. Nir was a principal in the whole Iran-Contra mess; the book "By Way of Deception"[*] has a most interesting few pages [327-331] on this, which by the oddest chance I was reading today.

Speaking of books, the book "Dangerous Liaison"[**] does indeed place the Israelis front and center in Oliver North's drug and gun running schemes, although Nir is not specifically mentioned. Mike Harari is prominent, however. On pages 254 and 255 the Cockburns write:

[ed: Quoting Blandon] "Harari was part of a powerful network, a more complete network — the Israelis. The most important country to supply arms to Central America between 1980 and 1983, especially in Guatemala and El Salvador, was Israel. From 1983 to 1985, the most important network to supply arms to the contras was this [ed: Harari's] network." The Israeli arms conduit preceded the host of U.S. operatives who later flooded the region, airlifting arms until one of their planes was shot down over Nicaragua in October 1986, thus exposing the operation. But there was reluctance on Capitol Hill to go into precisely what Israel had contributed. With literally hundreds of tons of captured weapons from PLO stocks shipped at the request of Casey, with seasoned Israeli military trainers like Emil Sa'ada and Amatzia Shuali in the field, and with the Panamanian operation run by Mike Harari, the contribution was substantial.

There was, however, a rather delicate problem with the Harari arrangement: his reported involvement in the cocaine trade. According to Blandon, "Harari was part of the Noriega business. They moved the cocaine from Colombia to Panama." From there the former intelligence adviser explained, the product was transshipped to "airstrips in Costa Rica or Honduras and on to the United States. Since the beginning of the supply of arms to the contras, the same infrastructure that was used for arms was used for drugs. The same pilots, the same planes, the same airstrips, the same people." As the former Panamanian consul general saw it, the cartel used Noriega's involvement with the contras to gain access to the facilities of the cover war while "Noriega used the connections that Harari had in Israel and they put together a complete business."

When asked whether the CIA knew of the dark side of Harari's business dealings, Blandon stated that the agency had known of Noriega's involvement with the Colombian cartels since 1980 and that "since 1980, Israel has supplied arms in Central America... and the relationship between Israel and the United States in terms of these things is so close that I don't believe the United States didn't know about that." The United States certainly did know that some of the arms destined for the contras were purchased with drug money. That was made very clear in the diaries of Oliver North.

This goes on in the same vein, exploring interconnects between Israel and the CIA in the Iran-Contra affair. While Nir (apparently) did not survive this whole contretemps [B.W.O.D., pages 328-329], Harari retired to Israel and built "an impressive house in a posh enclave outside Tel Aviv." [D.L., page 259].

Oh well. Who says crime doesn't pay? Certainly not the Clintonites, or Mike Harari.

rdl

[*] "By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer" by Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy. ISBN is 0-312-05613-3.

[**] "Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship" by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn. ISBN is 0-06-016444-1.

 --- END -----
Wayne McGuire
http://www.cybercom.net/~wmcguire

------------------------------------------

Subject: Welch: "No feather in my cap"
From: lar-jen@interaccess.com (Larry-Jennie)
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 21:04:30 -0600
Message-ID:
Organization: InterAccess, Chicagoland's Full Service Internet Provider
Newsgroups: alt.politics.org.cia

Date: Mon, 09 Jun 1997 13:08:30 -0500
From: Russell Welch
To: ciadrugs@mars.galstar.com
Subject: ciadrugs] No feather in my cap

Let me say that I do not intend to be a lifelong member of this mailing list. Reliving my history in short episodes tends to be a little painful; however, some things seem to be clearer looking back on them than they were at the time they occurred. I find it alluring that a group of people are interested in a piece of American history of which I had some participation.

I believe that somewhere in the dialogue that Billy Bottoms and I have shared, the members of this group have gotten a glimpse of what Barry Seal was about. Bottoms and I don't agree on everything; but, we have learned from each other. One thing I learned from a career in law enforcement is that history is very fragile. If two people can't agree on what they both saw yesterday, what happens to "facts" after a year, or ten years, or a hundred years?

Every time I started an investigation I initiated a journal where I kept my "field notes." Most of the time my field notes were kept in a spiral notebook. This would protect the integrity of my field notes by making it impossible to remove a page without it being noticed. I always tried to make my entries immediately after the event. If, per chance, a couple of days went by before I made the entry, I would make a note that time had passed between the event and the entry. A part of my goal was to accept accountability for everything that I did, right or wrong. I doubt that I ever worked a case where I didn't make some kind of an error or misjudgment.

My court testimony was based on documents in my case file, including my field notes. Occasionally, I found that my memory of an event did not match my notes. My field notes could always take me back to what I was thinking when I wrote them. The notes were intended to be an objective record for both the suspect and the prosecuting attorney. I never assumed the role of a cop who just tried to put people in prison. I followed the evidence and made my findings available to defense attorneys as well as prosecuting attorneys.

My solution rate was very high but I never got a "feather in my cap." I never expected one. I was nominated for Trooper of the Year for my Rich Mountain Aviation investigation but I didn't get it. Instead they gave me an official commendation for catching a serial killer. I always let somebody else take the credit — sheriff, chief of police, my supervisor, etc. Life was easier if these people didn't think I was trying to steal their thunder.

Daniel Hopsicker chose to make a public statement that I am egotistical. That statement could not be further from the truth. If I was trying to feed my ego I would have been a lot more public.

I do want to make it clear that I do not have any patience with people who play with the truth for their own gain. I've seen facts from my case file twisted by charlatans. Several people have obtained documents from my case file and sold them to various news agencies or other interests that were willing to pay.

Over a year ago, investigators from Leach's banking committee wanted to share some documents with me and get my response. I was able to show them my markings on the documents. The documents had been taken from my case file. Who ever gave these documents to the banking committee just lost all of their integrity. Leach and Starr have both said they were having trouble investigation some allegations because so many of their sources were not credible.

Anyway, the reason I started this letter was to respond to a couple of statements by Billy Bottoms.

First, I had a very strong case put together against both Freddie Hampton and Joe Evans; but, the strongest case was actually on Joe Evans because he had more hands-on involvement with Seal and I could put him with Seal before he move to the Mena Airport. Joe Evans and his wife forged signatures on the fuel truck to establish their fictitious business, "H&L Explorations." I think Joe used the fictitious name, "Bill Elder." If you remember, Billy, this is also the fictitious name that Barry frequently used while in Mena. Reed didn't seem to have that information when he wrote Compromised.

I don't think Billy Bottoms and I are going to be able to agree concerning who was protected by Barry's plea agreement. The fact that it didn't end up on paper is a good indication to me that it wasn't a part of the final terms. I, also, feel certain that Barry would have mentioned it when Duncan and I interviewed him. Jacobson and Joura never mentioned it in their depositions, either.

I want to take exception with Billy's statement that officers in Arkansas were trying to get a feather in their cap. Maybe cap feathers are a noble reward in some places, but the most I could ever hope for was to just break even. Duncan and I were the only ones investigating in Arkansas. FBI agent Tom Ross showed up occasionally, but he wasn't investigating. I don't know what he was doing. I couldn't drop an investigation just because I wanted to go and do something else. I did not start the investigation of Rich Mountain Aviation because I was looking for glory. That case was assigned to me by Colonel Tommy Goodwin. It was what we called a "target file." These types of investigations could only be initiated by the Director of the State Police. The Director issued the case file number, which was designated with a "T." The Rich Mountain Aviation target file number was "T-57," meaning that this was the 57th target file assigned by the Director. Prior to that, T-18 had been a catch-all file for dope activity at the Mena Airport.

Barry Seal was killed on Feb. 19, 1986. For a while I wandered if there was something significant about the month of February. Emile Camp was killed on Feb. 20, 1985. Eric Arthur was killed on Feb. 17, 1984, when he "accidentally" walked into the prop of his own plane. Billy, you can't blame a cop for being just a little bit suspicious when he finds out that the same day Arthur walked into the prop, Barry lost $950,000 in gold Krugerands. Duncan and I actually speculated that February of 1987 would be your month. The investigation of Rich Mountain Aviation lingered on into 1988. I never ran out of leads but I got very tired and there were other cases to work. I had to go undercover on another smuggler at Mena. This one is still in prison. I had some demanding homicides that I had to tend to. I had another undercover case going between Dallas and Hot Springs. Things go on.

In 1987, however, some new players came to the airport that did not have anything to do with Seal. By then, Barry Seal was ancient history; but, Rich Mountain Aviation and the Mena Airport was going strong. What happened after that didn't bare any resemblance to Barry Seal's operation. After that you could go to the airport and hear people talking about the State Department, C-130's in Africa and Miami and Australia. Men dressed in El Salvadorian military uniforms were frequently seen at a local motel. Arabs in native dress were commonly seen at the airport, and so on. Some of these new people talked about their activity with Oliver North's deal at Southern Air Transport. It was after 1987 that I started having trouble with the Arkansas State Police for drug investigations that I was doing at the Mena Airport. It was in 1987 that the assistant director of the ASP allowed the business manager from Rich Mountain Aviation to look through my investigative files — files for which Rich Mountain Aviation was the target. This is when uniformed State Police officers were coming to the airport and visiting with known smugglers. This is when my supervisors began giving me direct orders to stop drug investigations at the airport. This is when drug evidence, that I had sent to the lab for trace testing, was returned to me, untested. Things continued to get worse. In 1991, I was poisoned. The envelopes that carried the poison were sent to me from State Police headquarters in Hope, Arkansas. I'll leave it at that.

Billy Bottoms is right. You win a few, you lose a few. That's no reason to quit my job with the state police. Barry Seal had nothing to do with my separation from the Arkansas State Police. Barry Seal was a piece of cake compared to what came after him.

Russell Welch

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