WORMSCAN: MENA2 [PART 4]
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.
Subject: Re: THE REAL WHITEWATER
From: lar-jen@interaccess.com (Larry-Jennie)
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 21:23:30 -0600
Message-ID:
Organization: InterAccess,Chicagoland's Full Service Internet Provider
Newsgroups: alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater
References:
In article cayenne@nyct.net (Martin McPhillips) writes:
> For those who have always bought the line that Whitewater was *just* a land deal that lost money, here's a little something from Partners in Power by Roger Morris.
Partners in Power
By Roger Morris
Pg. 393 — 399
But drugs were only one commodity in a bustling commerce. Especially after the spring of 1983, Seal's flights to Latin America to pick up cocaine commonly carried arms for the Contra rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Part of what was later exposed as the Iran-Contra affair, they were one channel of the CIA and the Reagan White House's efforts to evade congressional restrictions, including the Boland amendment, that went into full effect in the autumn of 1984. Though major, the Arkansas precincts of Iran-Contra remained unexplored in the circumscribed investigations by both Congress and the independent counsel.
Along with arms pouring into the Mena airport from US arsenals and the private market, nationally and internationally, weapons bound for the Contras also came from local Arkansas sources, including a Fayetteville gunsmith named William Holmes, who had been crafting weapons for the CIA since the mid-1950s and now produced for the agency a special order of 250 automatic pistols with silencers. Under oath he later told a federal court that he was taken to Mena twice to meet Barry Seal, who paid for some special orders in cash. Though Holmes dealt with other CIA agents, too, he regarded Seal as "the ramrod of the Mena gun deal." Not long after Seal's operation began, the terrain around Mena, similar to the landscapes in Nicaragua, became a CIA training ground for Contra guerrillas and pilots. Like the money laundering, the flow of weapons and the covert maneuvers supplied Mena with still more whispered stories, of crates of arms unloaded from unmarked black trucks, of Spanish-speaking pilots who flew practice runs in and out of the airport, of state game wardens in the backwoods who came upon contingents of foreigners in camouflage and armed with automatic weapons; of caches of weapons secreted in highway culverts and mysterious nighttime road and air traffic around neighboring Nella.
Though the CIA and other intelligence agencies routinely denied responsibility for Seal and Mena, security for the operation was generally careless; cover-up from Arkansas to Washington seemed taken for granted. There was a paper trail of federal aircraft registrations and outfittings. Some of Seal's fleet, which included a Lear jet, helicopters, and former US military transports, had been previously owned by Air America, Inc., widely reported to be a CIA proprietary company. Another firm linked to Air America outfitted Seal's planes with avionics. Between March and December 1982, according to law enforcement records, Seal fitted nine of his aircraft with the latest electronic equipment, paying the $750,000 bill in cash. Senior law enforcement officials happening onto his tracks in Arkansas were quickly waved off. "Joe [name deleted] works for Seal and cannot be touched because Seal works for the CIA," a customs official noted during an investigation into Arkansas drug trafficking in the early 1980s. "Look, we're told not to touch anything that has Barry Seal's name on it," another ranking federal agent told a colleague, "just to let it go."
At the same time, customs officers and others watched the Mena contraband expand far beyond the Contras to include the export of munitions to Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, and Brazil — a hugely lucrative black market in arms variously called the Southern Tier or Southern Arc. By any name, intelligence sources described it as a CIA operation, often under cover of bogus front companies, though occasionally with the knowledge of executives and workers in "legitimate" corporations providing spare parts. The smuggling was known to have made millions in criminal profits for CIA rogue operations, mainly from what one former air force intelligence officer called the "clockwork" transshipment of weapons and other contraband from "meticulously maintained" rural airports in Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, and Arizona. According to several official sources, Mena was not only the base for Seal's traffic in guns and drugs but also a hub in this clandestine network of government crime.
Like the Seal runs, Southern Tier flights came and went with utter immunity, protected or "fixed," as one law enforcement agent called them, by the collusion of US intelligence and other agencies under the guise of "national security." The most telling evidence in Seal's own thick files would be what was so starkly missing. In hundreds of documents revealing fastidious planning — Seal's videotapes even recorded him rehearsing every step in the pinpoint drop of loads of cocaine, down to the seconds required to roll the loads to the door of the plane — there was no evidence of concern for cross-border security or how the narcotics were brought into the country. Engaged in one of the major crimes of the century, neither he nor his accomplices showed the slightest worry about being caught. The shadow of official complicity and cover-up was unmistakable in Seal's papers. In 1996, a former Seal associate would testify to congressional investigators how the operation had been provided CIA "security" for flights in and out of the US, including a highly classified encoding device to evade air defense and surveillance measures.
Those who met Seal in Mena in the fall of 1983 found him at the zenith of his influence. He was already a businessman of note in Arkansas, with an address book listing some of the state's well-known names, and contacts in Little Rock's banks and brokerage houses, and what a fellow CIA operative called a "night depository" for bags of cash dropped from "green flights" onto the ranch of a politically and financially prominent Arkansas family. An associate, a pilot who came with Seal from Louisiana in 1982, would later testify about their first weeks in Arkansas, when they were introduced to pivotal figures in state government and business. "Barry Seal knew them all, and they knew him, the Clinton machine," he remembered. "There was no limit on cooperation by the good ole boys," a federal agent would say of Seal's Arkansas friends.
At the height of his Mena operation, Seal made daily deposits of $50,000 or more, using a Caribbean bank as well as financial institutions in Arkansas and Florida. He casually admitted to federal agents that he took in $75 million in the early 1980s, and under court questioning said he made at least $25 million in 1981 alone. A posthumous tax assessment by the IRS — which officially noted his "C.I.A.-D.E.A. employment" and duly exempted him from taxes on some of his government "income" for the years 1984-85 — would show Seal's estate owing $86 million in back taxes on his earnings in Mena in 1982 and 1983. Far from entertaining thoughts of paying taxes, Seal detailed in his private papers his own plans for the money, including setting up a Caribbean bank and dozens of companies, all using the name Royale — from a television network, casino, and pharmaceuticals firm to a Royale Arabian horse farm.
By 1984, the Seal operation began to unravel. While the Mena traffic flourished, he was charged by elements of the Drug Enforcement Agency and federal prosecutors — a group of agents and government lawyers not compromised in the Arkansas operation — for trafficking in Quaaludes. Suddenly facing a prosecution and prison sentence his intelligence patrons either could not or would not suppress, he scrambled to make his own deal. With typical aplomb ("Barry was always smarter than most government folks he dealt with," said an associate), he flew to Washington at one point to dicker with the staff of Vice President George Bush.
By the spring of 1984, Seal was DEA informant number SGI-84-0028, working as an $800,000-a-year double agent in an elaborate sting operation against the Medellin cartel in Colombia and individuals in the Nicaraguan regime who had been dipping into the drug trade themselves. The same elements of the US government involved in Mena were now eager, for political advantage, to expose the Sandinistas in drug dealing. That summer of 1984, CIA cameras hidden in his plane, Seal made the incriminating flights to Medellin and then Managua, only to have the case against the drug lords and his own life jeopardized when the Reagan administration gleefully leaked the evidence of Sandinista involvement, including the smuggler's own film, to the Washington Times. In a scribbled note, Barry Seal recorded with knowing cynicism the malignant juncture of politics and crime: "Government misconduct," he wrote, and then of himself, "Operate in a world nearly devoid of rules and record keeping."
In February 1985 Emile Camp, later identified as a member of a Louisiana organized crime family, one of Seal's expert pilots and the only witness to many of his more significant transactions with both drug lords and US intelligence agents, was killed — some thought murdered — when his elaborately equipped Mena-bound Seneca unaccountably ran out of gas on a routine approach and slammed into the Ouachita Mountains. The flight was carrying the original logs of one of Seal's other planes, a Vietnam-era C-123K Seal had christened the Fat Lady; these were missing when the wreckage was discovered. Meanwhile Seal himself was becoming a star witness for the US government against his old Colombian associates. Though still cocky, he was now becoming increasingly anxious about his own safety. As if personal publicity could offer a shield, he confessed a few crimes to local Arkansas investigators in a recorded interview and even agreed to an in-law's request that he cooperate in a documentary on his operations for a Louisiana television station. Nevertheless, he withheld the secrets of wider and higher official complicity in Arkansas. The Mena traffic remained relentless. "Every time Barry [sic] Seal flies a load of dope for the U.S. Govt.," one local law enforcement officer noted in a log on August 27, 1985, "he flies two for himself." The bargain seemed plain: "Seal was flying weapons to Central and South America," an agent noted, recording what "was believed" within the DEA. "In return he is allowed to smuggle what he wants back into the United States."
By the summer of 1985 Seal's usefulness to the government had expired, and a scapegoat for the illegal operation in Mena was imperative. That same year the CIA abandoned him, refusing even to acknowledge in camera to a federal judge his role in the Sandinista sting, much less his long and seamy clandestine service. In a tangled plea bargain on the old Quaalude charges, a bitterly defiant Seal, still holding onto his Mena secrets and still contemplating a profitable return to Arkansas, found himself on a court-ordered six months' sentence to a Salvation Army halfway house in Baton Rouge. It was there that assassins found him alone in his trademark white Cadillac on a wet February night in 1986. With remarkable dispatch and no further inquiry a group of Colombians, said to be working for Medellin, were arrested and sentenced to life. That same winter President Reagan went on nationwide television to denounce the Sandinistas as drug runners, using Seal's covert film to demonstrate his outrage. The Seal family buried Barry in Baton Rouge with a Snickers bar, his telephone pager, and a roll of quarters, under the ironic epitaph he had dictated for himself — "A rebel adventurer the likes of whom in previous days made America great."
***
Only hours before his gangland-style assassination, Seal had been making his habitual calls to Mena. After the killing, activities in the Ouachitas continued unabated, proving the operation went far beyond a lone smuggler. In October 1986 the Fat Lady was shot down over Nicaragua with a load of arms for the Contras. In the wreckage was the body of copilot Wallace "Buzz" Sawyer, a native of western Arkansas; detailed records on board linked Fat Lady to Seal and Area 51, a secret nuclear weapons facility and CIA base in Nevada. It would be the head-line-making confession of the Fat Lady's lone survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, that would hasten a partial public airing of the Iran-Contra affair. Though the Mena operation remained largely concealed in the ensuing expose, records showed that there had been several calls around the time of the Fat Lady's ill-fated mission from one of the CIA conspirators in Iran-Contra to Vice President Bush's office in Washington and to operatives in western Arkansas.
"After the Hasenfus plane was shot down, you couldn't find a soul around Mena," remembered William Holmes, who now found that the CIA refused to pay him, reneging also on one of the last gun orders. The hiatus at Intermountain Regional was brief. By early 1987 an Arkansas state police investigator noted "new activity at the [Mena] airport," the appearance of "an Australian business [a company that would be linked with the CIA] and C-130s." At the same moment two FBI agents warned the trooper, as he later testified under oath, that the CIA "had something going on at the Mena airport involving Southern Air Transport [another concern linked to the CIA]... and they didn't want us to screw it up."
Since the CIA is expressly prohibited by law from conducting any such operations within the US, the documented actions constituted not only criminal activity by the intelligence agency, but also suborned collusion in it by the FBI. In August 1987, eighteen months after Barry Seal's assassination, an FBI telex advised the Arkansas State Police that "a CIA or DEA operation is taking place at the Mena airport."
In the late 1980s, as intelligence sources eventually confirmed to the Wall Street Journal, a secret missile system was tested, CIA planes were repainted, and furtive military exercises were carried out in the Ouachitas. As late as the fall of 1991 an IRS investigative memorandum would record that "the CIA still has ongoing operations out of the Mena, AR airport... and that one of the operations at the airport is laundering money." When the story of those more recent activities leaked in 1995, the rival agencies behaved in time-honored Washington manner with the media, the CIA furtively explaining Mena as "a rogue DEA operation," the DEA and FBI offering "no comment."
Months before Seal's murder, two law enforcement officials based in western Arkansas — IRS agent Bill Duncan and state police detective Russell Welch — had begun to compile what a local county prosecutor called a "mammoth investigative file" on the Mena operation. Welch's material became part of an eventual thirty-five-volume, 3,000-page Arkansas State Police archive dealing with the crimes. Working with a US attorney from outside Arkansas, a specialist in the laundering or "churning" of drug proceeds, who prepared a meticulous presentation of the Mena case for a grand jury, including detailed witness lists, bookkeeping records from inside the operation, numerous other documents, and an impressive chain of evidence, Duncan drafted some thirty federal indictments on money laundering and other charges. "Those indictments were a real slam dunk if there ever was one," said someone who saw the extensive evidence.
Then, in a pattern federal and state law enforcement officers saw repeated around the nation under the all-purpose fraudulent claim of "national security," the cases were effectively suppressed. For all their evidence and firsthand investigation, Duncan and Welch were not even called to testify before appropriate grand juries, state or federal. At one point a juror from Mena had happened to see hometown boy Russell Welch, a former teacher, at the courthouse and "told the others that if they wanted to know something about the Mena airport," as one account described it, "they ought to ask that guy out there in the hall." But "to know something about the Mena airport" was not what Washington or Little Rock would want. Though the Reagan-appointed US attorneys for the region at the time, Asa Hutchinson and J. Michael Fitzhugh, repeatedly denied, as Fitzhugh put it, "any pressure in any investigation," Duncan and Welch watched the Mena inquiry systematically quashed and their own careers destroyed as the IRS and state police effectively disavowed their investigations and turned on them. "Somebody outside ordered it shut down," one would say, "and the walls went up." Welch recorded his fear and disillusion in his diary on November 17, 1987: "Should a cop cross over the line and dare to investigate the rich and powerful, he might well prepare himself to become the victim of his own government.... The cops are all afraid to tell what they know for fear that they will lose their jobs."
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Subject: Re: BILL LIKES TO KEEP 'EM DIRTY AROUND HIM
From: lar-jen@interaccess.com (Larry-Jennie)
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 06:18:45 -0600
Message-ID:
Organization: InterAccess,Chicagoland's Full Service Internet Provider
Newsgroups: alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater
References:
In article cayenne@nyct.net
(Martin McPhillips) writes:
> Getting Those Close To Him *Dirty* from "Love and Hate in Arkansas: L.D. Brown's Story," by Daniel Wattenberg in The American Spectator, May 1994
Here is more about what L.D. Brown had to say about the shenanigans of Clinton's Arkansas:
Excerpt from:
PARTNERS IN POWER
by Roger Morris
pg. 404-411
Early in 1984, a twenty-nine-year-old Arkansas trooper named Larry Douglass Brown was eagerly applying for work with the Central Intelligence Agency.
As he told the story with impressive substantiation from other accounts a decade afterward, Brown had been privy to some of the Clintons' most personal liaisons, their biting relationship with each other, their behind-the-doors bigotry toward "redneck" Arkansas, and other intimacies; he and a stoic Hillary had even talked earnestly about problems in their respective marriages. At one point in the early 1980s, Brown had come in contact with Vice President Bush during an official gathering. The rather conservative' young officer, as one friend described him, had been impressed by Bush. Afterward Clinton has twitted him about his Republican "hero," though the two remained close. Regarded as among the better state police officers, Brown received some of the most sophisticated training that national law enforcement agencies offer regional police officers, including advanced courses provided by the DEA and Customs in intelligence gathering, drug importation, and conspiracy cases. Because of Brown's extensive training, Clinton handpicked him to serve of a state committee studying the drug epidemic to help develop educational programs in Arkansas, and Brown wrote several of the panel's position papers later cited as evidence of the state government's fight against narcotics.
By Brown's repeated accounts, including hundreds of pages of testimony under oath and supporting documentation, the sum of the story was stark: The governor had clearly been aware of the crimes of Mena as early as 1984. He knew the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible, knew that there was major arms and drug running out of western Arkansas, believed the smuggling involved not only Barry Seal but also a cocaine dealer who was one of Clinton's most prominent backers, and seemed to know that approval of the Mena flights reached as high as Vice President Bush. Brown remembered how Bill Clinton had encouraged him to join in the operation — "Clinton got me into this, the governor did," he would testify — and how Clinton had then dismissed his repugnance at the evidence that Seal was trafficking cocaine under CIA auspices. The state policeman watched in "despair," his brother recalled, while the governor did nothing about the drug smuggling. Brown would still think a decade later that Bill Clinton "was surprised only in that I had found out about it."
Clinton had urged him to answer a newspaper ad for CIA employment that ran in the NEW YORK TIMES on April Fool's Day, 1984. "L.D., I've always told you you'd make a good spy," Clinton remarked to him when Brown showed him the paper and asked "if this is for real?" "Well, you know that's not his name," Clinton said of a personnel officer listed in the ad, "but you need to write him a letter." Brown did just that two days later. "Governor Clinton has been an inspiration for me to further my career in government service," he wrote, "and in particular to explore the possibilities of employment with your agency."
Clinton proceeded to show an avid interest in Brown's application. He urged Brown to study Russian for an intelligence career, and Brown characteristically took the advice to heart, practicing the foreign script in a copybook and artlessly, proudly informing the CIA of his "understanding the Cyrillic alphabet." He and Clinton talked, too, of the role of an operations officer, with Clinton explaining the CIA's diplomatic cover abroad and the recruitment of informers. "It was strange, you know. He was into the fiction aspect of it and intrigue," Brown remembered.
At one point Clinton told him he would personally call the CIA on his behalf. "He, obviously, from all our conversations, knew somebody," Brown recounted in a sworn deposition. "I don't know who he called, but he said he would. He said he did. I made a note one day that he made a phone call for me." But in a private conversation Brown would go even further with the story of the call. Clinton, he said, had not bothered to go through any officeholder's liaison or other formal CIA channel in Washington but had simply telephoned someone directly at the agency, someone whom he knew on a first-name basis and with whom he talked for some time. As usual, Brown was impressed with his boss's knowledge and contacts. Early in the process the governor had begun to greet him whenever they met with a grinning question they both understood to refer to Brown's relationship with the CIA. "You having any fun yet?" Clinton would ask.
By the end of the summer of 1984 — four months after taking and passing a CIA entrance examination — Brown had met with a CIA recruiter in Dallas, someone named Magruder, an "Ivy League looking guy" who spoke "admiringly of Clinton," and whom Brown would later recognize in photographs and identify to congressional investigators in 1996 as a onetime member of Vice President Bush's staff. This was the man who asked him if he would be interested in "paramilitary" or "narcotics" work as well as "security." Brown said he wanted to be considered for such assignment and, in the course of the interview, duly signed a secrecy agreement. Somebody, he was told, would be giving him a call.
On September 5 he received formal notification of his nomination for employment. Scarcely a month later the expected CIA call came to his unlisted number at home. As Brown testified, the caller "talked to me about everything I had been through in the meeting in Dallas, ... made me very aware that he knew everything there was to know." He asked Brown to meet him at Cajun's Wharf in Little Rock, a popular restaurant and bar off Cantrell Road in the Arkansas River bottoms just below the white heights. His name, he said, was Barry Seal.
At their meeting, the corpulent Seal was memorable for the athletic young state trooper. "Big guy. He had one of those shirts that comes down ... outside your pants, big-guy kind of thing." Seal was cryptic but again seemed clearly to know details Brown had provided on his CIA application. "He knew about the essay and everything I had done, so absolutely there was no question in my mind," Brown testified. Seal also spoke vaguely about working for the CIA: "He'd been flying for the agency, that's all I knew." In conversations over the next few weeks, Seal referred casually to Clinton as "the guv" and "acted like he knew the governor," Brown recalled. He invited Brown to join him in an "operation" planned to begin at Mena Intermountain Regional just before sunrise on Tuesday, October 23, 1984.
Arranging his shifts at the mansion to make time for the flight, Brown met Seal at the Mena airport in the predawn darkness and was surprised to find them boarding not a small private craft but a "huge military plane" painted a dark charcoal with only minimum tail markings, its engines roaring with a "thunderous noise," he remembered. "Scared the shit out of me just taking off."
Seal ordered him matter-of-factly to leave behind all personal identification, including his billfold, keys and jewelry. Along with Seal at the controls sat a copilot whose name Brown never learned, and in the back of the aircraft sat two men, "beaners" or "kickers" the trooper called them. Though he did not know it, Brown was aboard the FAT LADY, and his later account marked the flight as one of Mena's routine gun-and-drug runs.
After a refueling stop in New Orleans and the flight to Central America, the C-123K dived below radar, then climbed and dipped again for the "kickers" to roll out on casters large tarp-covered palettes, which were swiftly parachuted over what Brown could see out the open cargo door was a tropical, mountainous terrain. Later Sal told Brown the loads were M-16s for the Contras. On the return they landed in Honduras, where Seal and the "kickers" picked up four dark green canvas duffel bags with shoulder straps, which Brown did not see again.
Back at Mena Seal handed Brown a manila envelope with $2,500 in small bills, presumably as payment for his time — "used money just like you went out and spent," Brown recalled — and said he would call him again about another "operation." As the ambitious young trooper testified later, he was diffident about this apparent audition with his CIA employers, reluctant to ask questions, even about the cash. "This guy (Seal) obviously knew what he was doing and had the blessing and was working for the agency and knew everything about me, so I wasn't going to be too inquisitive."
At the mansion on Brown's next shift following the run to Central America, Clinton greeted him with the usual "You having any fun yet?" though now with a pat on the back. With a "big smile" Brown answered, "Yeah, but this is scary stuff," describing "a big airplane" which he thought "kind of crazy." But Bill Clinton seemed unsurprised and unquestioning, casual as always about what Brown told him about the CIA, Seal and Mena. "Oh, you can handle it," he said again. "Don't sweat it."
Brown was startled at the governor's obvious prior knowledge of the flight. "He knew before I said anything. He knew," Brown testified. Asked later under oath if he believed the Seal flight had been sanctioned by the governor, Brown would be unequivocal. "Well, he knew what I was doing. He was the one that furthered me along and shepherded me through this thing." Did he have any doubt that Clinton approved of the flight from Mena to Central America:? "No," he testified. Did he believe the Seal run "a sanctioned and approved mission on behalf of the United States?" "Absolutely. I mean, there is no doubt."
Not long afterward, in the later fall of 1984, Seal called the trooper as promised, again inquiring about Clinton: "he always asked me first thing, how is the guv?" They talked about the first flight and Seal, ruminating on his service for the CIA, confirmed that they had dropped a load of contraband M-16s for the Contras. "That's all he talked about was flying and (the) CIA and how much work he had done for them, and that's all he did. That's all we would talk about," Brown recalled. They met again, this time at a Chinese restaurant near the Capitol, and arranged for Brown to go on another trip in late December.
On Christmas Eve, 1984, once more with the governor's encouragement, Brown again flew with Seal to Central America on what he still understood to be some kind of orientation mission for his CIA employment. Seal picked up two duffel bags on the return through Honduras, and just as before, back at Mean he offered Brown $2,500 in small bills. Yet this time Seal also brought one of the duffels to Brown's Datsun hatchback in the Intermountain Regional parking lot and proceeded to take out of it what the former narcotics investigator instantly recognize as a kilo of cocaine, a "waxene-wrapped package," as he called it, "a brick."
Alarmed and incensed, brown quickly told Seal he "wanted no part of what was happening" and left, speeding back to Little Rock in mounting agitation, not least over the role of the state's chief executive. "I'm just going nuts in my mind with all the possibilities," he would say. "I'm thinking, well , this is, this is an official operation. Clinton got me into this, the governor did. It can't be as sinister as I think it is ... He knew about the airplane flights. He knew about it and initiated the conversation about it the first time I came back."
Returning to the guardhouse, Brown first called his "best friend," his brother Dwayne in Pine Bluff, who remembered his being "terribly upset" and later went to the mansion to see him when the Clintons were away. According to the two men, Brown told his brother part of what he had encountered, though without mentioning the CIA involvement. "Who's pushing this. Who is behind it?" his brother asked at one point. In reply, as each recalled clearly, Brown "nodded over towards the governor's mansion."
Brown decided to approach Clinton directly about what he has seen.
^^^
When they were together soon after the second flight, a smiling Clinton seemed about to ask the usual question. But Brown was angry. He asked Clinton if he knew Barry Seal was smuggling narcotics. "Do you know what they're bringing back on that airplane?" He said to Clinton in fury. "Wait, whoa, whoa, what's going on?" the governor responded, and Brown answered, "well, essentially they're bringing back coke." More than a decade later, Brown would testify to his dismay at Clinton's response "and it wasn't like it was a surprise to him. It wasn't like — he didn't try to say, what? ... He was surprised that I was mad because he thought we were going to have a cordial conversation, but he didn't try to deny it. He didn't try to deny it wasn't coming back, that I wasn't telling the truth or that he didn't know anything about it."
In waving off Brown's questions about Mena, Clinton had made another remark as well, added as what seemed both justification and warning. "And your hero Bush knows about it," he told Brown. "And your buddy Bush knows about it."
Brown was chilled. "I'm not going to have anything else to do with it ... I'm out of it," he told Clinton. "Stick a fork in me, I'm done," he added, an adolescent phrase from their shared Arkansas boyhood. The governor had tried to calm him: "Settle down. That's no problem." But Brown turned away, hurried to his car, and drove off, leaving behind his once-promising career. "I got out of there, and from then it was, you know, not good."
The trooper immediately called the CIA to withdraw his application, albeit discreetly. "Just changed my mind," he recalled telling them. But he saw no recourse, no appeal to some higher level of government in a crimes in which both the governor of the state and Washington were knowledgeable and thus complicit. "I mean if the governor knows about it ... and I work for the governor," he remembered thinking, "exactly who would I have gone to and told? I mean, the federal government knows that this guy is doing this ... I don't know what authority I would have gone to." More than a year later, as they were having drinks in Jonesboro, Brown would tell the commandant of the state police, Colonel Tommy Goodwin, but even then he acted out of a desire to confess his unwitting involvement rather than out of any expectation that Arkansas would move on the crimes. All the while, he was bothered by the role of his onetime hero at the mansion. "Number one," he would testify later of Bill Clinton, "he didn't deny it. I wanted him to tell me, OH, GOOD GOSH, THAT'S TERRIBLE. WE'VE GOT TO REPORT THIS. And I wanted him to deny knowing anything about it or explain it away to me ... THEY'VE GOT A BIG STING PLANNED, AND THEY'RE TRYING, YOU KNOW, TO MAKE A CASE ON SUCH AND SUCH, but no. It was no surprise to him. He was surprised, I think — this is what I think — that Seal showed it to me. That's what I think to this day."
But perhaps what most disturbed L.D. Brown was a direct reference by Clinton to a member of the governor's own inner circle. Clinton "throws up his hands" when Brown mentions the cocaine, as if a crucial, somehow rationalizing distinction should be made between the gunrunning and the drug trafficking.
"Oh, no," Clinton said, denying that the cocaine was related to the CIA Brown was hoping to join. "That's Lasater's deal."
For a free subscription to the CIA Drugs mailing list: email: ciadrugs-request@mars.galstar.com In the "Subject," write: SUBSCRIBE
$
The CIA cocaine smuggling on behalf of the Contras through Mena, Arkansas corrupted the Presidencies of Bill Clinton, George Bush and Ronald Reagan.
For details,see: ftp://pencil.cs.missouri.edu/pub/mena/
$
[end of message ... text also available at ]
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Date: Sun Jun 29, 1997 11:34 pm CST
From: ciadrugs
EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
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TO: ciadrugs
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Subject: ciadrugs] Public Enemy No. 1 (From Jean Duffey)
-------------Begin Forwarded Material From Jean Duffey------------------
Public Enemy No. 1
Update: June 29, 1997
The "train deaths"
http://www.idmedia.com/ttd.htm
------------------------------------------------
"Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and the corrupt."
— Graham Greene
AN ENEMY HAS BEEN CLEARLY DEFINED
Many visitors to our website have taken it upon themselves to contact several of the public officials involved with the train deaths case. One of those officials sometimes contacted is I.C. Smith, who is the head of the Arkansas FBI office. Some who have spoken with Smith were so appalled by what he said, they have called or e-mailed to tell us. To begin with, Smith purports that the FBI is "NOT CONVINCED THE BOYS WERE MURDERED."
Is this stupidity or what? From January of 1994 to well into 1995, the FBI had an agent assigned full-time to investigate the murders. The investigation was shut down, not because there was a sudden determination that the boys weren't murdered after all, but because it became impossible to ignore the Mena connection. Is Smith really expecting, or even wanting, us to believe that the FBI conducted an eighteen-month-long murder investigation before they determined there even was a murder? Rather than exposing the Mena drug-smuggling operation, the FBI wants us to believe that their incompetence amounts to idiocy.
Even if the boys' bodies were never exhumed, and second autopsies were never performed, and a team of seven forensic experts did not agree and report that the signs of murder were clear, questions surrounding the case cries COVER-UP, and accidents are not covered up.
If the boys had accidentally laid down on the tracks and gotten themselves run over by a train, why have local, state, and federal agencies put money and manpower into seven separate investigations spanning nearly a decade? What other accidental deaths have received that kind of attention? Why have these investigations been allowed to go forward just to be shut down suddenly when the inevitable connection to the Mena drug-smuggling operation is made?
How did Dan Harmon, now known to have been involved in the murders, just happen to be appointed by Judge John Cole to head the Saline County grand jury investigation of the murders? Why did Cole refuse to hear the complaints of the grand jurors that Harmon would not allow them to see the evidence and hear the witnesses they wanted? Why did at least seven witnesses turn up dead?
Why did U.S. Attorney Chuck Banks shut down a federal investigation after I took him information connecting the murders to a major drug operation involving public officials? Why did Banks clear Harmon when federal grand jurors were unanimously ready to indict him on drug-related charges? Why did Harmon's RICO indictment exclude his involvement in the murders even though the FBI have three eye witnesses placing Harmon at the scene? Why have I been able to locate a fourth eye-witness that the FBI says they can't find?
ENOUGH! We know why. It's because those who have the power to call the shots do not want the crimes of Mena exposed. So, it has become I.C. Smith's assignment to dispel any such notion that a crime was even committed. Lots of luck. Smith has got to be feeling like an imbecile for even making such a suggestion. That must be why he has other suggestions up his sleeve. Like, the boys were not all that wholesome, and the parents were not all that attentive.
I'm not making this up. I'm just repeating what sources have told me Smith said to them. And I can tell you, I am personally more offended by such slurs against Kevin and Don and their parents, than I am by Smith's asinine statement that they were not murdered. For argument's sake, let's say the boys had been very troubled teens and that their parents did not supervise them properly. What is Smith's point? Is he saying this somehow justifies their deaths?
Smith has been caught in numerous lies, he has attempted to generate bias against the parents of murdered children, and he has hinted that Kevin had a criminal record — if that was true, Smith would be breaking the law for disclosing a juvenile criminal record. Since it isn't true, Smith is telling a slanderous, bald-faced lie.
Why do our tax dollars have to pay the salary of the likes of I.C. Smith? Fax or mail this update to Smith and FBI Director Louis Freeh. We have the right to let them know how we feel about such behavior from a high-ranking, high-salaried public official.
Do not doubt that each of you who takes the time to express your concerns can make a difference.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead
Best wishes to you all,
Jean Duffey
If anyone can locate an e-mail address on Smith or Freeh, please share it with us.
I. C. Smith, Arkansas Special Agent in Charge
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Suite 200
Two Financial Centre
10825 Financial Centre Parkway
Little Rock, AR. 72211-3552
Phone: (501) 221-9100
Fax: (501) 228-8509
Louis J. Freeh, Director
Federal Bureau of Investigation
J. Edgar Hoover Building
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20535-0001
Telephone: (202) 324-3000
end---------------------------------------------------
Update: June 29, 1997
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Date: Mon Jun 30, 1997 11:44 am CST
From: ciadrugs
EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
MBX: ciadrugs@mars.galstar.com
TO: CTRL
EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
MBX: CTRL@listserv.aol.com
CC: ciadrugs
EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
MBX: ciadrugs@mars.galstar.com
BCC: * David Beiter / MCI ID: 635-1762
Subject: ciadrugs] CTRL-Mena, old as the hills?
an excerpt from:
Scarlet and the Beast — A History of the War Between English and French Freemasonry
John Daniel (C)1994
John Kregel, Inc.
P. O. box 131480
Tyler, Texas 75713
ISBN 0-9635079-0-7
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can be purchased from: Global insights
675 Fairview Dr. #246
Carson City, NV 89701
702-885-0700
800-729-4131(orders only)
[not me & and no way related except human; Roads End ;^)> ]
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As always Caveat Lector. Om
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Foreign newspapers are reporting on President Bill Clinton's political corruption, while our own Masonically controlled press remains silent. In February 1995, The Times of London, tied Bill Clinton's rise in politics to illegal drugs:
What is the basic truth of this Whitewater matter? To put it briefly: The state of Arkansas was corrupt the way Mexico is corrupt, long before Bill Clinton entered state politics, long before he was born.
The corruption goes back over a hundred years to the period after the Civil War [when 33rd degree Freemason Albert Pike ran the political machine in Arkansas]. In the 1970s, the corruption came to be financed by drug money, even before Clinton became governor. People got killed; we even know the names of some of the hit men.
By the early 1980s, drug importation through Arkansas, much of it through Mena airport. Reached billions of dollars.
The new narco-millionaires bought political protection by bribery and by financing political campaigns, including Clinton's. They made it their business to involve and implicate their political allies.
They killed dangerous witnesses. including schoolboys and probably including Vincent Foster; his body was moved, his suicide was faked.
As governor, Bill Clinton set up his own unaccounted $700 million ADFA operation, which made loans to his supporters and friends, many of whom subscribed to his political fund.
In the 1980s, Arkansas was awash with cocaine and money-laundering. It may have been impossible for Bill Clinton to keep his hands clean, but his great mistake was to think that he could go from being governor of Arkansas, a deeply corrupted state, to being U.S. president without the truth emerging CA Long Range Navigation (LORAN) radar. Flying at low level, they could evade US Customs and Defense radar detection systems.... When this was not feasible, a shadow aircraft, typically US Air Force with a scheduled night plan, was used to conceal the radar signature of a drug aircraft flying in close proximity.... Once over American soil, they would be intercepted by CIA aircraft and led over Inertial Landing Systems (ILS) radar. Positive identification was established with Identify Friend or Foe (IFF) transponders, that were installed on both trafficker and CIA aircraft. The CIA chase aircraft, having taken the helm, would lead the drug aircraft over a drop zone. The drug plane would then track on the ILS radar beam, typically associated with landing, and release his cargo to agents on the ground. We were those agents. Once we gathered up the cargo, we would transport it to a pre-designated area and fly it to Mena, Arkansas.(28)
With revenue generated from the illegal sale of these drugs, the CIA funded the Contras of Nicaragua in their fight against the communists. This operation flew under the banner of patriotism.
pp-157-159
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--notes--
26. Mike Royko, "Rupert Murdoch and the Arkansas narco-fiends," The Orlando Sentinel (21 February 1995) A-9; quoting William Rees-Mogg in The Times.
27. Kenneth C. Bucchi, C.LA.: Cocaine in America (New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1994) 137.
28. Bucchi 52.
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Aloha, He'Ping
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Peace Be, Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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Still WOW. Such levels of corruption definitely got us to today! Thank you!!