WORMSCAN: MENA2 [PART 5]
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.
Date: Wed Jul 02, 1997 3:09 am CST
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Subject: ciadrugs] We're Having An Effect
We're Having An Effect
"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
Update: July 2, 1997 The "train deaths"
http://www.idmedia.com/ttd.htm
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Until now, government officials have never had to deal with an informed public — the internet generation. Arkansas FBI Head Agent, I.C. Smith, is being put on the hot seat by readers of my latest update, "Public Enemy No. 1." Smith doesn't understand that, unlike talking to mainstream media, the internet medium will challenge his lies and half truths. If you missed it, you may read that update at http://www.idmedia.com/enemy-no-1.htm. The statements Smith made to internet comrade Chris Blau in a thirty-five minute telephone conversation yesterday are in response to that update. My comments follow Smith's statements.
* Smith says, there are only one or two witnesses placing Harmon on the tracks with the boys the night they were murdered, and one of them failed four or five polygraphs.
ONLY one or two witnesses! What does he mean, ONLY? Well, anyway, which is it — one or two? Neither, there are five witnesses that I know Smith knows about. Two of them are in prison. And guess who prosecuted them. Dan Harmon. Can you beat that? After U.S. Attorney Chucks Banks shut down the 1990 federal grand jury that was unanimously ready to indict Harmon, Harmon went after those two witnesses.
A third eye witness came forward to Linda Ives in 1993, was taken to the FBI, and passed a polygraph test. The FBI said the witness corroborated what they already knew, and a case file was opened. During that investigation, the agent in charge told Linda of a fourth witness; an ex-cop who participated in placing the bodies on the tracks. The fifth witness is one the FBI said they could not locate. I recently found out where he is, though, so how hard could it be?
Now, about the witness Smith says failed a polygraph four or five times. Well, which is it — four or five? Neither, it's two. Smith is talking about Sharline Wilson, one of the two witnesses Harmon prosecuted after he was cleared by Banks.
Sharline, a confessed cocaine dealer, dated Harmon several years in the 1980's. When Sharline lost custody of her son (by a previous marriage), she began to clean up her life. She gave testimony to the 1990 federal grand jury against Harmon, and later, she tells about driving Harmon to the tracks the night the boys were murdered. According to Sharline, Harmon left her with an eight-ball of cocaine which kept her high for several hours while she sat waiting in the car. Sharline says she knew the area was a drop zone for drugs but says she didn't know what had happened that night until she heard about the boys the next morning.
After Banks cleared Harmon in June, 1991 of "all wrong-doing," Harmon was not the only one still interested in Sharline. She was interrogated by several agencies, including the FBI, and says she often felt like she was being badgered and harassed. She volunteered to be polygraphed but became so upset during the pretest interview, the polygrapher said he couldn't even get a positive reading when she stated her name. Failed polygraph number one.
The next time she was polygraphed was after she had been arrested by Harmon's drug task force for what she says was "set up." She had been terrorized by Harmon and had been sitting in jail for months. The night before the test, she was transported to another facility where she spent the night in isolation. By then she was an emotional wreck, and claims she told them what they wanted to hear. She "confessed" to killing the boys herself. Failed polygraph number two.
It's amazing that Smith would use those bogus test results to discredit a witness against Dan Harmon.
* Smith says he is responsible for Dan Harmon's conviction and is not being given credit.
Fine, if he wants credit for Harmon's conviction, he's got some explaining to do. Two of his own agents, one in a taped telephone conversation, said the FBI has known about Harmon's illegal activities for years. Why did they wait to do anything about it until a small-town newspaper ran a story about Harmon's ex-wife being caught with cocaine packages from his district's evidence locker? The answer is in the question — it was reported in the newspaper. The feds (Smith, since he wants the credit) were forced to do something. They conducted an eighteen-month-long showy investigation which resulted in an eleven count indictment, but a conviction on only five counts. The government (Smith, since he wants the credit) should have asked for indictments for Harmon's criminal activity ten years back which is allowed under federal RICO law. This would have given the case the strength of a mountain of evidence my task force had against Harmon. No excuse or explanation has been given for cutting Harmon's indictment off at August of 1991, just a month after Banks held a press conference announcing there were no dirty public officials in Saline County.
* Smith says he doesn't doubt there was or is drug activity around Mena.
So, what is he doing about it?
* Smith says he is not sure the FBI has the jurisdiction to investigate the murders.
This is one of the most incredible statements Smith makes repeatedly. The FBI has jurisdiction over any drug-related/public official-related crime. If the FBI's jurisdiction was questionable, why was an agent assigned to work the case full-time for more than eighteen months? It wasn't lack of jurisdiction that stopped the investigation. It was the link to the Mena drug-smuggling operation that caused that shut-down as well as six previous investigations of the murders, and is likely the real reason Harmon's indictment didn't include his involvement in the murders. (Smith can have credit for that, too.)
The tragedy of Kevin and Don's murders is compounded by the government's cover-up to hide its involvement in the drug trade. The tragedy is further compounded because it is far from being an isolated incident. Another of many is the murder of Tommy Burkett . If you aren't familiar with Tommy's story, please visit his parents' website at http://www.clark.net/pub/tburkett/pacc/PACC.html. Their own struggle with the FBI to expose the truth has given them insight into an agency that most Americans still trust and value. Tom Burkett says: "The FBI is not in the business of truth; it is in the business of control."
I believe, however, that we can force change. We must arm citizens with truth and confront officials with knowledge. Our public officials can no longer be sheltered by corporate media. They are having to face us, the internet generation. We're on a roll, so we can't stop now. Go to "Congress E-Mail" at http://www.idmedia.com/congr-list.htm and send the Senators and Representatives of your choice (all of them would be better) a copy of "Public Enemy No. 1" and my responses to I.C. Smith in this update. John F. Williams, an internet comrade, provided us with Congress's E-mail list. He has already sent out "Public Enemy No. 1" with this message to our illustrious leaders: "For those of you who think that a conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory, wake up, before it is too late."
It is up to us to give them their wake-up call.
"Corruption flourishes in an atmosphere of tolerance that allows it to prevail."
— Capt. Frank Furillo
The best to you,
Jean Duffey
end-----------------------------------------------------
Update: July 2, 1997
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Date: Wed Jul 02, 1997 6:54 pm CST
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Subject: ciadrugs] The Mafia, CIA & Barry Seal
The Mafia, CIA & George Bush
By Pete Brewton
S.P.I. Books, 1992
Pg. 154-160
There was something more to Herman K. Beebe than just the drinking, the skirt chasing, the business wheeling and dealing, the La Costa hangout, the Teamsters, Carlos Marcello and the Mafia.
There were the helicopters for the CIA agent in Guatemala who was training Contras in Belize; there was Gilbert Dozier, the former Louisiana agriculture commissioner serving time for extortion and bribery, who was going to turn state's evidence against Beebe until President Reagan pardoned him at the request of CIA Director William Casey, there was Beebe's financing the establishment of Palmer National Bank in Washington, D.C., which was helping funnel money to the Contras three blocks from the White House; and there was E. Trine Starnes, Jr., one of the biggest borrowers at Beebe-controlled S&Ls and one of the biggest private donors to the Contras.
But first there was Barry Seal and the C-4 explosives in a Shreveport warehouse destined for anti-Castro Cubans in Mexico.
Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal — "El Gordo" — the fat man, also known as "Thunder Thighs," was from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Called the world's greatest pilot, he was at least the youngest ever to captain a Boeing 747, at the age of twenty-six. But several years later he turned to the Dark Side of the Force: He was caught dealing with Mafia associates and CIA operatives in one of the most bizarre and inexplicable criminal cases on record.
It went down this way:
On July 1, 1972, Seal was taking some sick leave from his job as a captain flying 707s and 747s out of New York to Europe for Trans World Airlines. As he walked out of his motel room near the New Orleans International Airport, he was arrested by federal agents and charged with violating the Mutual Security Act of 1954, which prohibited the exportation of weapons without the permission of the U.S. State Department.
Also involved in the plot and arrested that day were eight other individuals in Shreveport, Louisiana, New Orleans and Eagle Pass, Texas. A DC-4 that Seal had recently purchased in Miami was seized at the Shreveport Regional Airport. On board were 13,500 pounds of C-4 explosives, 7,000 feet of explosive primer cord, 2,600 electric blasting caps and 25 electrical detonators. The explosives, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Louisiana, were destined for Cuban exiles in Mexico, who were going to use them in an effort to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro.
Arrested in New Orleans along with Seal was a man from Brooklyn, New York, named Murray Morris Kessler. Kessler was the key middle man in the deal. He was the one who agreed to sell the explosives to the Cubans and then arranged for the transportation.
Kessler, who had six previous criminal convictions and was awaiting trial in New York on income-tax fraud when he was arrested, was well known to the Brooklyn Organized Crime Strike Force. He was a friend and business associate of Emmanuel "Mannie" Gambino, a member of the Gambino Mafia crime family and nephew of Carlo Gambino, the boss of the Gambino family.
Kessler and Mannie Gambino were partners in Neptune's Nuggets, a Long Island frozen stuffed-seafood packaging firm that had been criticized in Newsday articles for having a product that was extremely low in seafood and extremely high in bacteria. About a month before Kessler was arrested in the explosives scheme, Mannie Gambino dropped out of sight. Gambino, reported by Jonathan Kwitny in Vicious Circles to be a loan shark, had been murdered.
The man who brought Kessler into the scheme was just as interesting as the mob associate from Brooklyn. He was Richmond C. Harper, a millionaire banker and meat-packing plant owner from Eagle Pass, Texas, a small town on the Rio Grande between Laredo and Del Rio. After he was charged in the conspiracy, Harper told reporters, "I do know Murray Kessler. He is a friend of mine. And I have loaned him my airplane occasionally when he is down in this part of the world. I don't know what business he is in. To be truthful, I really don't."
In a statement Seal made after the trial, he said that the "request for arms and ammunition was brought across the border to a rancher/ banker by the name of Mr. Richmond Harper in Eagle Pass, Texas, who had very deep ties right into the White House." One of those people in Washington close to Harper was Myles J. Ambrose, the U.S. Customs Commissioner, who at that time was also in charge of the Federal Narcotics Bureau, the predecessor of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Ambrose would come to visit Harper and go hunting with him on his ranch in Mexico, according to a former Customs official under Ambrose: "We tried to warn him [Ambrose]. Tell him that this guy [Harper] is bad. He wouldn't listen." Ambrose's visits to Harper were also discovered in 1976 by the House banking subcommittee investigating the Texas rent-a-bank scandal.
Ambrose resigned his position in November 1972, apparently after learning that Harper was going to be indicted in the case. Harper was indicted the next month.
(One of Ambrose's running buddies was Jack Caulfield, a White House undercover spy and aide to John Ehrlichman, and one of the conceptual fathers of Richard Nixon's White House Plumbers, the leak-pluggers who turned to perpetrating dirty campaign tricks.)
In addition to the scheme to sell explosives to anti-Castro Cubans, Harper had also been observed by Customs agents flying arms and ammunition to Shreveport, and earlier to Alexandria, Louisiana. It may be just a coincidence, but Herman K. Beebe moved from Alexandria to Shreveport in 1971.
In a written statement after the trial, Seal said that "Flores [one of the defendants] contacted Richmond Harper, who contacted alleged Mafia connections in New York, who contacted a representative of theirs in Louisiana, who contacted me, Adler B. Seal, for the contract for the flying."
This statement is important because it shows Seal — for the first time that I am aware of — admitting to a connection to the Mafia. Was it Beebe's doing?
The possibility that it was increases with three additional pieces of information. One, the warehouse where the explosives were stored in Shreveport was owned by Beebe, according to a private investigator and a Customs official who is familiar with the case. Two, with the help of Beebe's partner, Ben Barnes, Harper obtained a $1.9 million loan from Surety Savings in Houston — where Beebe was doing business and brokering deposits. And three, one of the principals of a helicopter company that Beebe financed was a longtime, childhood friend of Seal's.
Seal, Harper, Kessler and the other defendants were not brought to trial until the summer of 1974. The trial seemed to be proceeding in a normal fashion until the fifth day, when Seal's attorney requested a mistrial and the judge granted it.
It seems that the government prosecutors couldn't produce two key witnesses against the defendants. One, Jaime Fernandez, was involved in the explosives scheme when the government began its investigation and later became a government informant, according to prosecutors. Jimmy Tallant, the lead prosecutor from the Organized Crime Strike Force, told the judge that Fernandez was a co-conspirator until he went to Mexican authorities with the scheme. Tallant stated that he went to Mexico to try to get Fernandez to come to Louisiana to testify, but Fernandez refused.
The second witness, Francisco "Paco" Flores, was a defendant, but federal agents couldn't find him. The judge declared a mistrial and the charges were later dismissed by an appeals court. End of story, or so it seemed.
However, after the trial, Seal wrote out a four-page statement, apparently because he felt he was being unjustly harassed by the Customs Service in his subsequent travels into and out of the United States. In this statement, Seal spins a fantastic story about how the whole scheme was a government sting operation set up to ingratiate our government with Fidel Castro so that he would sign an anti-hijacking agreement. In the proposed agreement Castro would let American planes hijacked to Cuba return without having to pay stiff fines.
The Customs Service undercover agent who carried out the sting was Cesario Diosdado, according to Seal, who "through records I have obtained from a private investigative agency in Denver, Colorado, has been proved to have been an ex-CIA agent who worked in the Bay of Pigs invasion and had been working both sides of the fence in the Miami/Cuban area."
Diosdado testified in the trial that his investigation began with Jaime Fernandez, but earlier stories indicated that Diosdado had either started the ball rolling or picked it up and ran with it, even traveling to New York to show Kessler some letters of credit with which to buy the explosives.
But much later, ten years after the trial, Seal changed his story about the purpose of the operation. In sworn testimony in a trial in Las Vegas in which he was a government witness, after he had turned informant, he testified that the explosives were for CIA-trained anti-Castro Cubans.
Several law enforcement officials familiar with the case said that regardless of whether the scheme was a Customs sting or a CIA operation for or against Castro, the CIA pulled the plug on it during the middle of the trial. The agency did so because some of the key participants and witnesses worked for the CIA and it didn't want to compromise their identities as CIA assets.
Russell Welch, an officer with the Arkansas State Police who has spent years investigating Barry Seal, said the case was dismissed because "Seal and others were protected, because the informant was protected, the CIA didn't want to burn him."
Richard Gregorie, a former assistant U.S. Attorney in Miami, who used Seal as a drug informant in 1984, told Rodney Bowers of the Arkansas Democrat that the case was dismissed because of "government misconduct."
"Although Gregorie said he had no knowledge of prior undercover work," Rodney Bowers reported in December 1989, "he told the Democrat in a recent interview that the 1972 incident gave an 'indication' that Seal might have been involved in a government operation at that time."
After the charges were dismissed, Seal, who had been fired by TWA, began to work full-time as a CIA asset and a drug smuggler. His activities between the explosives case and his murder on the parking lot of a halfway house in Baton Rouge in February 1986 — allegedly by associates of the Colombian Medellin drug cartel — have been well reported by journalists Kwitny, Bowers, John Cummings, John Camp and Jerry Bohnen, who revealed that:
After the explosives case was dismissed, Seal began working full-time for the CIA, traveling back and forth from the United States to Latin America. By 1977 he had turned to narcotics trafficking, and became one of the most proficient, if not THE most proficient, drug smuggler in this country. But in 1983 he was turned in by an informant in Florida, convicted and sentenced to a long jail term. Desperate, he tried to make a deal with the DEA to turn informant, but no one would listen to him until he spoke to George Bush's Vice Presidential Task Force on Drugs.
Seal told Bush's Task Force that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were involved in drug smuggling. Even though there was not one shred of evidence for it, and still isn't, this "revelation" thrilled the task force to bits, and Seal was basically forced onto the DEA as an informant.
One of his first tasks was to catch the Sandinistas in the act. So he took his C-123K cargo plane to the CIA, which installed a hidden camera in it. Seals flew the wired plane to Nicaragua and allegedly took some pictures — he said the camera malfunctioned and he had to operate it by hand — of a purported Sandinista official loading cocaine onto the plane. The CIA and Oliver North decided to blow Seal's cover and use the pictures as anti-Sandinista propaganda. The story appeared in the Moonie paper, the Washington Times, and President Reagan displayed the picture on national television in an attempt to get Congress to restore aid to the Contras.
Several journalists later blew the story out of the water as a setup, and there has been no evidence before or since then that the Colombian cartels have transshipped narcotics through Nicaragua. There has been, however, much evidence that some Contras and their supporters were trafficking in drugs.
Meanwhile, Seal had been busy training Contras at his new base of operations in Mena, Arkansas. At least seven pilots have told reporters of Seal's work with the Contras. The last one to go public, Terry Reed, said he was introduced to Seal by Oliver North. Reed said that North wanted him to turn over a light plane he owned to North's Enterprise and then report it as stolen and collect the insurance. Reed declined to do so, but the plane was later stolen, and Reed collected on his insurance. The plane turned up in Seal's Contra resupply operation and Reed was charged with fraud.
After Reed began talking about Seal, North and the Contras, and subpoenaed North for his trial, the government, after going after Reed with everything it had, dropped the case against him — but not before requiring the local prosecutor to get a security clearance and requiring Reed not to comment on the case for 30 days afterwards.
The federal government also went after Bill Duncan, an agent with the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division, who was investigating the flow of drug money through Barry Seal's operations. When Duncan was called to testify before the House Subcommittee on Crime regarding federal interference in Arkansas and Louisiana police investigations of Seal, he was ordered by one of his IRS superiors to perjure himself if he were asked questions about Seal's relationship to then-Attorney General Ed Meese and whether Meese had ordered evidence withheld from a federal grand jury investigating activities at Mena, Arkansas. Duncan resigned over the matter, after 17 years with the IRS. He then went to work for the House Subcommittee on Crime in an investigation of Seal's operation, but eventually got stymied there as well. He was arrested when he took a gun inside a House office building, even though he was authorized to carry a weapon. The House subcommittee cut his travel funds, and once again he resigned in frustration.
Another investigator probing into Seal's operations was Gene Wheaton, the former Pentagon criminal investigator who went to work for the Christic Institute after parting company with Oliver North and Richard Secord. Wheaton said he tracked Seal's C-123K cargo plane flying from Mena to William Blakemore's Iron Mountain Ranch in West Texas. (There is also an Iron Mountain in Arkansas near Seal's Contra training grounds.)
Blakemore said he had no knowledge of this.
Seal's C-123K, which he called the Fat Lady, would go down in history after its "Fat Man" was murdered. This was the C-123K that was shot down in October 1986 by the Sandinistas as it was making a resupply run to the Contras. The resulting crash blew the lid off the White House's secret support of the Contras, as the plane and its occupants were tracked to the CIA-connected Southern Air Transport in Miami and to Oliver North.
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Date: Wed Jul 02, 1997 11:15 pm CST
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Subject: ciadrugs] Russell Welch Interview, March 1996
Copyright 1996 The Washington Weekly (http://www.federal.com). All Rights Reserved.
Reproduced by special arrangement with Informatics Resource and the Washington Weekly.
[Image]
MENA: THE INVESTIGATION OF BARRY SEAL
Former Arkansas State Police Investigator Russell Welch
Interviewed by Marvin Lee, March 1996
LEE: When did you first hear about Mena airport or Rich Mountain Aviation?
WELCH: I took over as the criminal investigator in Mena in 1981. My duties were to maintain intelligence on Mena airport concerning smugglers, basically. There was one smuggler here by the name of Simon Frazier who, like Barry Seal, was busted in Florida and rolled over [turned informant] to stay out of prison, and was later either killed in an airplane crash, or the crash was used as a front for a witness relocation.
LEE: When did you first learn about Barry Seal and the CIA?
WELCH: The first time that I heard of him was, probably, in late 1983, when the Sheriff of Polk County, where Mena is located, had started an investigation and one of his deputies, Jimmie Jacobs, told me that Sheriff Al Hadaway was conducting an investigation of an alleged smuggler that had moved in here. The deputy sheriff said that his first name was Barry and they didn't know his last name. He came from Louisiana. The investigation was serious enough that the sheriff wasn't saying too much about it. According to the deputy sheriff, Hadaway was giving his information directly to a federal task force that was investigating Barry Seal in New Orleans. Their investigation was called operation "coin roll."
LEE: Was that the DEA?
WELCH: It was a Vice Presidential [George Bush] task force. According to the deputy, Sheriff Hadaway felt that it was over the head of the state police, it was out of our league. That's the reason he skipped us and went directly to the task force — which was, in retrospect, probably a good idea. It was out of our league. Although I believe to this day that if he had come through me, Barry Seal might still be alive. He'd be working on a pea farm at the prison in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, but still be alive.
LEE: What about the CIA?
WELCH: When Sheriff Hadaway wanted to seize Seal's C-123, the people from Rich Mountain Aviation contacted him and set up a meeting at their attorney's house, in Mena, where they showed him a video that had been made by John Camp called "Uncle Sam Wants You." It was a piece of crap. The only report that linked Seal to the CIA, that I'm aware of, concerned the trip on the C-123 to Nicaragua. Somebody from one of the first subcommittees told me, on the telephone that they had confirmed a CIA interest in that flight. Under the conditions at that time, they should have had an interest in it if they were doing their jobs. For the most part, it looked like Barry Seal was just trying to keep his cocaine smuggling butt out of jail. My investigation should have been fairly simple once I got a handle on things. But, little problems kept jumping up. The longer I investigated the bigger they got.
When leaders in my own department allowed one of the subjects of Bill Duncan's investigation, and an employee of Rich Mountain Aviation, to go into the basement of the capitol building in Little Rock and make notes from my investigative telephone records, those problems had grown into whoppers. Those records had the telephone numbers of witnesses and informants from, not just the Barry Seal investigation, but any other investigation that I might be working on. They put witnesses and informants, not to mention myself, in danger. I have no way of knowing how much damage that caused. I don't know what may have happened to certain people as a result of their action. When you finish a case people just go on and you assume that they're getting on with their lives, but you don't know. I understand that certain members of the state police are saying that they had a right to see those telephone records under the FOI Act. A year later FOIA requests for my files were still being turned down. How can they expose people to that kind of danger? Why would a person want to deal with the police over a telephone if they know that anybody could go look at the officer's telephone records. This same person tried to get into the telephone records at the sheriff's office in Mena. The sheriff and local circuit judge told him there was no way he was going to see those records. At least one person got a visit because telephone records were made available.
LEE: John Camp, that is the guy now working for CNN, right?
WELCH: The same. He actually did the video for Barry Seal and it was aired on Channel 2 in Baton Rouge. It was obvious that the video was choreographed by Barry Seal. To watch that video you'd have to say that John Camp was the only person in the world that didn't know that Barry Seal was a cocaine smuggler, because it was an hour-long tirade of Barry Seal being harassed by law enforcement officers when he was really working for the federal government as a paid informant. [When John Camp later joined CNN, he made a hit piece on Terry Reed and later he made a hit piece on Chuck Harder, a publishing partner of Reed.] I later found out that Seal already had two unrelated indictments in Florida. The only reason he did anything for the DEA was to stay out of prison. The Rich Mountain Aviation people showed that video to Sheriff Hadaway and tried to convince him that they had been working for the CIA all along. The sheriff didn't believe it and neither did anybody else.
When I started the case I hoped that I would find that Barry Seal was and had always been involved in DEA or CIA activity and I'd close the case out and get out of it. I would get on with other things, things that were less heavy to carry around on my shoulders.
That wasn't the case. I found a clear window of criminal activity where Barry Seal was definitely smuggling cocaine just for himself and his people. And there was no collusion or involvement with the DEA or CIA or any legitimate covert operation.
LEE: Did the CIA know about that?
WELCH: Barry testified in court, as did DEA agents, that they wanted him to continue acting like he had done before. Now that can be interpreted in different ways...
LEE: When did your own investigation start?
WELCH: In 1985. Emile Camp crashed between Mena and Nella. Emile Camp was one of Barry's pilots. Freddy Hampton [of Rich Mountain Aviation at Mena airport] asked me to come out to the airport and take a part in the investigation. He was, at that time, concerned because, in his own words, Emile Camp was an important witness in a trial that was going on in Florida at that time. There was some concern that Emile Camp's death wasn't an accident, that he had been sabotaged. He kept that attitude until about three days later when Barry Seal showed up and took control. Everybody's attitude changed. At first they told me that Camp was an extremely good pilot who had flown through these mountains numerous times, day and night. After Barry Seal arrived they said, "Well, Emile Camp wasn't a very good pilot anyway, he probably flew right into the side of the mountain." It was obvious that Barry Seal, among other things, had done damage control.
We looked for Emile Camp's crash for three days before Barry Seal showed up but couldn't find it. The business manager from Rich Mountain Aviation, Rudy Furr, told me that he had contacted the governor's office and Governor Clinton had promised to send some National Guard helicopters to help in the search. They never showed up, because of the weather, I think. Rudy Furr also said that the orbit of a satellite had been changed to help with the search. He said they were going to place the satellite over Mena to see if it could pick up an ELT.
About 15 minutes after Barry Seal showed up, he found the crash, just before dark. It reeked of him knowing where the crash was before he got there. The first words that I heard Barry Seal say were on a radio from his helicopter, as he was explaining how he found the crash so fast. He said, "I know my plane and I know how Emile flies," or something like that.
LEE: And then you tried to find out why it had crashed?
WELCH: There was nothing to make a determination. Like most airplane crashes it was eventually ruled a pilot error, and there wasn't anything left to determine whether it had been tampered with or not. During my investigation I did some checking with a number of people who knew Emile Camp and they all said he was just as good a pilot as you could find.
LEE: So, did you find any motive or did you have any suspicions?
WELCH: Well, at that time I wasn't sure what was going on. Freddy Hampton told me about this trial in Florida and Seal's trip to Nicaragua, allegedly to do a cocaine deal with some Sandinistas. I asked him who would benefit most from Camp's death, and he said well, Seal could benefit from Camp's death because that would give him more bargaining power because there were only three people that went on a C-123 trip to Nicaragua. I still don't know what that meant.
LEE: A year later Barry Seal died himself.
WELCH: Just before Barry died, he made a tape recording of himself, DEA agent Jacobson and another person in Panama. It was a three way telephone conversation. The tape recording was with Barry in his car when he was killed. He was returning from his office in downtown Baton Rouge with a couple of boxes and other items. And on the tape recording, among other things, there was this conversation with these three people. And Barry was a desperate man, you can tell by his voice. He is trying to help find Pablo Escobar, and the agent — you can tell by his voice — that there's nothing he can do with Barry anymore, he's done his thing and the agent is trying to get rid of him on the telephone. Barry is desperate, he is trying to keep his position and status [as a valuable DEA informant]. His trials were finished and he was about to be put on the streets. I think every cop goes through this some time in their career. The bad guy says, "I'll snitch off my friends if you keep me out of prison." The cop says, "Okay, you go first." When it's over the cop tries to keep his end of the bargain and then send the bad guy back home. You don't want to take 'em to raise. Sometimes snitches want to move in with you. Barry had been indicted in two different federal jurisdictions in Florida on drug charges. He was about to go to prison for a long time. Barry Seal snitched of some of his people, made some pretty good cases, and in return, he didn't have to go to prison. The convictions still stood but he was not in jail. Unfortunately for Seal, he still had some music to face in Louisiana, and those folks didn't like him very much. Anyway, on this tape recording, he is trying to give directions to the person in Panama, they are talking about streets, and Barry keeps telling him, "Don't use my name on the telephone," because all the telephones in Panama are tapped. The DEA agent comes in and says "Yeah, don't use Barry's name on the telephone!" And you can hear this fatalistic laugh of Barry in the background, like "I'm dead."
That was probably a month or two before Barry was killed [by drug cartel hit men].
[Excerpted and edited. Published in the March 25, 1996 issue of the Washington Weekly]
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Date: Thu Jul 10, 1997 7:26 pm CST
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Subject: ciadrugs] More Giroir, Huang, Lippo & Mena
by Anthony Kimery
In the late 1980s, federal and Arkansas state law enforcement officials became suspicious of a small and seemingly insignificant backwater Arkansas bank. A financial institution that had little comparison to the Citibanks of the world, but which was a profit-making cog in this state's most important banking empire. An empire owned by influential and powerful friends of the Governor, Bill Clinton, and his wife, Hillary.
The little bank popped up while the investigators were poking around inside the $3 to $6 billion drug trafficking and money laundering operation of the late Barry Seal. It was one of three banks the investigators had stumbled across in which some of Seal's profits appeared to be being laundered. The bank was the First National Bank of Mena, and criminal investigators had produced compelling evidence, which SOURCES has reviewed, to indicate it was being used to launder money derived from Seal's narcotics trafficking operations at Mena's Intermountain Regional Airport, an airstrip that's been linked to Reagan era covert intelligence activities and which was being used for "black" operations as late as the early 1990s.
But there was something else a little troubling about this particular bank, something that caused the investigators to tread cautiously. It not only was owned by long time Clinton financier (and one-time BCCI-front man), Jackson Stephens, but one of the principal stockholders in Stephens' banking consortium was the director of the board of The Rose Law Firm.
The Rose Law Firm claimed as partners the likes of Governor Clinton's wife and other powerful state politicos. This was important. As the investigations probed deeper, claims were unearthed to the effect that some of Seal's profits had flowed into Arkansas government businesses owned or operated by prominent state figures, and claims were unearthed that Clinton's gubernatorial administration, as well as federal authorities, acquiesced in Iran-Contra-related narcotics trafficking at Mena. As late as last year, FBI agents working for Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr reportedly investigated possible ties between Clinton gubernatorial campaign finances and drug money, and they interviewed several pilots about Colombian cocaine and cash drops in Mena and elsewhere in Arkansas.
For these reasons, the House Banking Committee has taken a keen interest in Seal's alleged drug money laundering at the First National Bank of Mena while it was owned by the Worthen Banking Corp., then Arkansas's largest bank holding company in which Stephens had a dominating interest. Stephens acquired his interest in Worthen Banking Corp. in a partnership with powerful conservative Indonesian banker Mochtar Riady in February 1984 when they bought controlling interest in First Arkansas Bankstock Corp., (FABCO). Go to: Background on FABCO's owners. A billionaire, Riady is one of the wealthiest men in Indonesia with ties to his country's dictator, General Suharto. The Riady family controls the Lippo Group, an unconsolidated conglomerate of far-flung businesses, including Lippobank Ltd., Bank of Central Asia, and the Hongkong Chinese Bank, all financial powerhouses in Asia.
At the same time Stephens was getting his hooks into FABCO, FABCO was acquiring four banks owned by C. Joseph Giroir, Jr., a former Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission attorney, and chairman of the board of The Rose Law Firm. At the Rose Law Firm, Giroir, there since 1968, was the boss of Gov. Clinton's wife as well as of since-convicted felon Web Hubbell. In March, 1984, shortly after Stephens' acquisition of FABCO and its purchase of Giroir's four banks, FABCO's board of directors formed an executive committee and appointed Giroir as its vice chairman.
The Rose Law Firm, and Giroir in particular, had long handled the legal affairs for Stephens' businesses, and was well versed in the black arts of high and creative financing (he was the only trained securities lawyer in the state). It was Giroir who helped change state laws allowing the Stephens banking empire to balloon. Indeed, while head of The Rose Law Firm, Giroir led a band of lobbyists in a successful effort to persuade the state legislature to change Arkansas' usury law, which made owning an Arkansas commercial bank very attractive. He also played a pivitol role in talking state lawmakers into changing the law restricting the formation of new bank holding companies through acquisition.
It was this change that allowed Stephens and Riady to make the deal for FABCO, and for Giroir to sell them the four banks he owned. Of course, it was Governor Clinton who signed the bills his wife's boss engineered, and her law firm profited from the legal fees that were generated for handling the FABCO-related transactions. Worthen also became a major repository for state tax receipts, which it promptly lost $52 million of when it bought government securities from a shady New Jersey brokerage business several of whose principals eventually went to jail for fraud. Worthen likely would have collapsed in the process had its major shareholders and the bank's insurance company not stepped in.
Oct. 5, 1986 in Nicaragua a C-123 airplane previously owned by Seal (one which had often been parked at Mena's airport) was shot down trying to drop supplies to the contras. This downing of a supply plane set the stage for the unraveling of the Iran-contra scandal. Within a week, Worthen entered into an agreement to sell the First National Bank of Mena. By this time the bank had grown to $64 million in assets, from $56 million when Worthen acquired it in 1984. (When the bank was originally bought in 1979 by FABCO in a deal that was reputedly in violation of the Bank Holding Company Act, it only had $28.5 million in assets). On Nov. 22, a month and a half after Seal's old C-123 was shot down and a week after Worthen announced it would have to restate its third-quarter earnings following a review of its loan portfolio, Worthen President William L. Cravens suffered a heart attack. He resigned in mid-January, 1987, and Worthen was eventually sold to a large regional bank holding company.
RELATED STORIES IN THIS ISSUE:
Failed Banks and Farhad Azima
Mena, Arkansas under the Magnifying Glass
John Hendrix and More activities in Mena
Robert Thompson and Azima and Others
L. Ray Adams and Azima and Others
[Image]
SOURCES eJournal copyright 1996, DSO, Inc., all rights reserved.
DSO — "BEYOND INTELLIGENCE — TRUTH"
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