This one of two articles from December 22, 1990 in the "Arkansas Gazette" recounts the story about drug smuggler, CIA operative and DEA informant Barry Seal -- and the cover up that ensued. Dennis Hopper was most appropriate to play a character such as Seal. "Everybody knew Barry worked for the government," Tolliver said in the deposition. "He was either doing a trip for the DEA or working for the CIA in their arms deal, or really what he was doing was using his cover under the federal umbrella to work trips himself, and so everybody knew that, too, and the feds knew that, too." "There have been times when I've wondered what I'm doing pursuing this," (former IRS investigator) Duncan said, "but I tell you, if this thing drops, what's to prevent it from happening again ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ here in Arkansas?" (or the White House) The cover up continues five years later, with one current Chief Executive who can thank Mena for putting him there. Larry ______________ "Truth on Mena, Seal shrouded in shady allegations Drug smuggling rumors just won't die" By Michael Arbanas THE ARKANSAS GAZETTE December 22, 1990 The questions about Barry Seal and the Mena airport refuse to go away. Seal now acknowledged as one of America's most successful smugglers during the cocaine heyday of the early 1980s died in a spray of gunfire in February 1986 in the parking lot of a Salvation Army halfway house in his native Baton Rouge, La. His Colombian assassins worked for the notorious Medellin cocaine cartel, which he helped finger for U.S. authorities. Before he was sentenced to serve time in the halfway house, Seal spent a lot time at the Mena Intermountain Regional Airport. The stories surrounding Seal and his activities at Mena already had grown to mythical proportions by the time he was gunned down. Since then, a series of government investigations and revelations from Seal's alleged accomplices have only enhanced the legend. No charges have ever been filed in the case, despite allegations of drug smuggling, gun running, money laundering and covert military operations, But the nagging questions surrounding Seal's activities became an issue in this year's race for state attorney general. Now, a television movie is being filmed about the flamboyant, heavy-set smuggler. Mena city and chamber of commerce officials would prefer to let Seal rest in peace and concentrate on the town's growth as a center for aircraft maintenance. But the stories and the questions keep coming. Several different accounts about alleged activities at Mena have come to light in the years since Seal's death. However, the stories don't all jibe, and many of their authors have faced their own legal problems. Depending on who is telling the story, the Mena Intermountain Regional Airport was either: Essentially a garage where Seal housed and serviced his aircraft. A hub for drug and gun smuggling between Central America and the U.S., part of a massive operation by former and current CIA agents. A training site for Contra rebels and pilots from Nicaragua, and for Panamanian ground forces. The focus of a massive government cover-up to hide these activities. All of the above. One thing is certain: Seal moved the base of operations for his fleet of airplanes from Louisiana to Mena sometime in 1982. He stored several planes and had them serviced at Rich Mountain Aviation, a repair firm located at the airport. Allegations that the maintenance involved illegal alterations including changing tail numbers, installing spare fuel tanks for longer flight range and adding cargo doors that could be opened only from the inside have not been substantiated to the point of drawing an indictment. Nor have allegations that Seal actually brought cocaine into Mena. Shortly before his slaying at age 43, Seal told investigators in Arkansas that he had never smuggled drugs into the airport. However, Russell Welch, one of two Arkansas State Police investigators who interviewed Seal, said Thursday that Seal was evasive and seemed to have forgotten many details. "If he hadn't mastered it before, he'd mastered double-talk by then," Welch said. Helicopters a giveaway Seal was no stranger to investigators. In fact, he was known to taunt Louisiana State Police investigators in Baton Rouge. After becoming one of the youngest pilots in the history of Trans-World Airlines at 26, he turned to smuggling in 1972. He was arrested on his first trip, a shipment of plastic explosives to anti-Castro Cubans in Mexico. The charges were dropped, and Seal switched to hauling marijuana and then cocaine. Welch said investigators who began looking into Seal's operation in the early 1980s found indications that he was smuggling cocaine into Mena basically the same way he smuggled it into Louisiana. One indication was the presence of helicopters at the airport. Seal's modus operandi when he was based in Louisiana was to drop the contraband by parachute into remote, swampy areas, where his operatives would pick it up by helicopter and take it for further distribution by automobile. The area around Mena is remote, if not swampy. "For a period of months, his helicopters were stationed at Mena," Welch said. A federal investigation into Seal's activities in Mena began in 1983. Welch said the investigation centered not on Seal, but on his alleged accomplices in Mena; it involved a variety of possible illegal activities, including conspiracy to smuggle and money laundering. Seal became an informant for the federal Drug Enforcement Agency in March 1984 after being convicted earlier that year in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., of smuggling methaqualone into the country. As an informant, Seal helped the DEA make several important cases. In the most celebrated case, he operated hidden cameras mounted by the CIA inside one of his cargo planes and captured photos of Medellin cartel leaders and Nicaraguan government officials loading drugs onto the plane on an airstrip in Nicaragua. That plane later ended up being used in the secret effort organized by Lt. Col. Oliver North to resupply the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. It was shot down Oct. 5, 1986, over Nicaragua, with Eugene Hasenfus the sole survivor. The plane's co-pilot, Buzz Sawyer of Magnolia, Ark., was killed in the crash. The plane's connection with Seal is viewed as corroborating evidence by those who claim that the Contra supply network was financed with drug-smuggling profits from the U.S. The state police file indicates that investigators in Arkansas and Louisiana suspected Seal was using his DEA cover to run his own smuggling missions on the side. Michael Tolliver, a convicted drug smuggler, said in a 1987 deposition from prison in Miami in a civil lawsuit that Seal introduced him to people involved in the guns-and-drugs trade with the Contras. "Everybody knew Barry worked for the government," Tolliver said in the deposition. "He was either doing a trip for the DEA or working for the CIA in their arms deal, or really what he was doing was using his cover under the federal umbrella to work trips himself, and so everybody knew that, too, and the feds knew that, too." Welch said the investigators in Arkansas were concentrating on the period before Seal became a federal informant so that nobody could say that the evidence they gathered against Seal's associates was covered by some sort of immunity. No indictments an issue The federal investigation in Arkansas continued long after Seal turned informant, and went on even a year after his death. However, no indictments were ever handed down by the federal grand jury. The lack of indictments became an issue in this year's race for attorney general. The Republican candidate was Asa Hutchinson, who presided over the investigation during his years as U.S. Attorney at Fort Smith from 1982 until October 1985. Democrat candidate Winston Bryant accused his opponent of failing to aggressively pursue the case. Hutchinson said the case was still developing when he left office for an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate. He filed a libel suit against Bryant over the campaign advertisements that contained the accusations. However, Bryant's claims were backed up by William Duncan, who began investigating the money- laundering allegations for the Internal Revenue Service in 1983. Duncan said both Hutchinson and his successor, J. Michael Fitzhugh, dragged their feet on the investigation, failing to subpoena critical witnesses. Duncan later quit the IRS, claiming that IRS attorneys had asked him to perjure himself before a congressional committee looking at the Mena situation. Duncan claims he had developed evidence of money laundering, including a sworn statement from a former secretary at Rich Mountain Aviation, who said her boss an alleged accomplice of Seal's who has never been charged with any crime instructed her to divide large amounts of cash into sums smaller than $10,000 and deposit them in various accounts. The IRS requires depositors to file forms explaining cash deposits greater than $10,000. In a recent interview, Duncan added to his charges, saying the U.S. Attorney's office treated Welch "very shabbily," sometimes excluding him from meetings with federal investigators, even though Welch was a crucial part of the investigation. "On some occasions, both Russell {Welch} and his supervisor would be left sitting out in the hall for sometimes hours," Duncan said. "A very unusual situation." Hutchinson and Fitzhugh both have denied that they stonewalled the investigation or received any instructions from the federal government to do so. More federal connections The connections between the federal government and Barry Seal went deeper than just the DEA, according to a one-time associate of the smuggler. Terry Reed, a former Little Rock businessman and pilot, recently said that in 1983 he met Barry through Oliver North, who organized the secret Contra resupply effort. Reed said Seal later recruited him to train Latin American pilots at a grass airstrip operated by Seal at Nella in rural Scott County. Reed's revelations about Seal emerged as a result of federal charges filed against Reed. The mail fraud charges stemmed from his own connections to North, whom he said he met in Thailand during the Vietnam War. Reed has maintained that North had asked him to "donate" his plane to the Contra effort in 1983 by allowing it to be stolen, pocket the insurance on it and then "forget" about it. Reed claimed he refused but that his plane was stolen anyway and he did claim insurance on it. The plane later turned up back in Reed's garage, and he was charged with fraud. Some, including federal prosecutors who charged Reed, dismissed Reed's tale as fabrication. But it was never put to a test. When Reed's trial was scheduled to start, prosecutors agreed to acquittal if, Reed said, he would remain quiet for at least 30 days. "They told me they didn't want me having a press conference," Reed said. Reed isn't the only person to emerge recently with details about Mena and how it fits into covert operations in the 1980s. Arms dealer's tale 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)." Meanwhile, Home Box Office is filming a movie based on Seal's life. It will star Dennis Hopper as Seal and feature Michael Carradine as a DEA agent. Mena Mayor Jerry Montgomery said Friday he wouldn't mind the film crew showing up at Mena and spending a few dollars in the community, but said Mena generally was ready to forget Seal. Montgomery said the aircraft repair and maintenance industry in the city was doing well, and the city was in the process of adding a second runway to the airport. Rumors surrounding Seal have slowed the industry's growth somewhat, he said. "Over here, essentially, as a whole, we consider it a dead issue because it is dead," Montgomery said. "Seal is dead. There's been lots of speculation and just pure rumors out there." The state police investigation is over, but Duncan, the former IRS agent, is pursuing the case privately, hoping to get back into a federal law enforcement position from which he can pursue it officially. U.S. Rep. Bill Alexander, D-Ark., has pledged to get to the bottom of the situation. Duncan hopes Alexander's efforts will lead to the establishment of some sort of grand jury investigation. "There have been times when I've wondered what I'm doing pursuing this," Duncan said, "but I tell you, if this thing drops, what's to prevent it from happening again here in Arkansas?" ___________________ Students of the October Surprise, such as Martin McPhillips and Wayne Mann, know that though the Justice Department could not prove that Brenneke was lying about his involvement in the October Surprise, the fact was the guy showed himself to be a liar by giving credit card receipts from Seattle for the days he was supposed to be in Paris with Bush and Casey. Nonetheless, in his trial he received corroborating testimony from law enforcement officials about Brenneke's knowledge of drug trafficking. "Texas Investigator Tell of Aid Provided by Brenneke" PORTLAND OREGONIAN May 3, 1990 Two investigators from a West Texas district attorney gave vivid descriptions of the international arms market in the early 1980s and said Richard J. Brenneke recently helped them in criminal investigations. Brenneke, a West Linn resident who claims he worked for the CIA, is on trial in federal court for lying to a Denver judge two years ago. Investigator Gary S. Howard said that Brenneke had provided him accurate information abut "narcotics and money" within the past three weeks. Investigator Ronald Ray Tucker described Brenneke's information as "extremely accurate" and said it involved "narcotics, organized crime and money-laundering." Neither man was asked for details of the operations involving Brenneke and neither volunteered any. ___ Howard claimed he had worked undercover for the CIA and Customs. He mentioned several arms deals unconnected to Brenneke like selling submachine guns to the Libyan Embassy in Washington. I wonder what that was all about. Larry