From: [S--Y--A] at [SUVM.SYR.EDU] (Sergio Rivera)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Subject: Airport scandal set to crash into White House
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 95 02:10:59 LCL

              FROM *THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH*, MARCH 26, 1995
 
             AIRPORT SCANDAL SET TO CRASH INTO WHITE HOUSE
 
   Bizarre saga of drugs, guns and lies in Arkansas steps up pressure
                                on Clinton
 
               by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Washington
 
 
UP TO now Bill Clinton has escaped scrutiny over the alleged drugs
smuggling and gun running channelled through Mena Airport in Arkansas
when he was the state's governor. But a federal lawsuit in Little Rock
is beginning to unearth information that is extremely embarrassing for
the White House.
 
Larry Patterson, an Arkansas State Trooper, testified under oath this
month that there were "large quantities of drugs being flown into the
Mena Airport, large quantities of money, large quantities of guns". The
subject was discussed repeatedly in Clinton's presence by State Troopers
working on his security detail, he alleged. Patterson said the Governor
"had very little comment to make; he was just listening to what was
being said".
 
Clinton has given conflicting answers when asked about the mysteries of
Mena. At a campaign stop in April 1992 he lost his temper and dismissed
the allegations as "fantasy". But last October, pale and uneasy at a
White House press conference, he said that it was "primarily a matter
for federal jurisdiction...we had nothing, zero, to do with it."
 
Extensive police documents describe Mena Airport, in the remote Ouachita
Mountains of western Arkansas, as having been the headquarters of a
high-volume cocaine operation in the 1980s. Sources at the Drug
Enforcement Administration say major trafficking was still going on
there as late as December 1994.
 
Patterson's testimony has not been released to the press, but *The
Sunday Telegraph* has been able to review a copy. It was one of three
depositions taken in a lawsuit that is likely to rock the White House in
coming months.
 
The plaintiffs in the suit are Terry and Janis Reed, who claim that they
were embroiled in a US covert operation to assist the Nicaraguan Contras
between 1983 and 1986. They say that the mission was based in Arkansas,
with the alleged active involvement of Governor Clinton.
 
The Reeds are suing Clinton's chief of security, Buddy Young, a former
Arkansas State Police Captain, alleging that he tried to frame them on
trumped up theft and fraud charges and inserted a false profile of them
in US criminal intelligence files listing them as "armed and dangerous"
- a pretext to shoot on sight. They believe they were targeted because
they had become a threat to Clinton's political career.
 
The Reeds were, in fact, acquitted of all wrongdoing in a federal court
in 1990. The judge said that Captain Young had "displayed a reckless
disregard for the truth".
 
The Reed saga is so bizarre that the American press has refused to take
it seriously. But in a book published last year, *Compromised: Clinton,
Bush, and the CIA*, Terry Reed alleged that he was recruited by Oliver
North to help train Contra pilots in aerial supply skills, and to put
his machine tool expertise to use developing a clandestine network for
the manufacture of untraceable weapons parts.
 
Reed also claimed to have been present in an ammunition storage bunker
outside Little Rock in 1986 when North and other Reagan Administration
envoys allegedly met Clinton to discuss the covert operation - and to
reprimand the Governor for members of his entourage skimming off money
earmarked for national security purposes.
 
Over the past year *The Sunday Telegraph* has been able to confirm most
of Reed's claims in interviews with pilots, Central American sources,
and senior officials from the US Defence Department, the CIA and the
Reagan-Bush White House.
 
The secret Contra scheme was devised in 1982 in order to circumvent an
anticipated ban by Congress on hostile actions by the Reagan
Administration against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. It skirted
countless laws prohibiting covert activities on US soil.
 
In order to maintain total "deniability" - and to avoid detection by the
US Congress and the press - the operation was subcontracted to Barry
Seal, a renowned drug trafficker from Louisiana. He established his
nerve centre at Mena Airport, where he maintained a fleet of modified
aircraft with hi-tech equipment provided by the US Air Force.
 
He continued smuggling, of course. That was his "cover". Large amounts
of cocaine were flown into the US while while the government looked the
other way. Indeed, the Louisiana State Police were convinced that he was
using his status of immunity to increase the volume of trafficking,
supplying cocaine to the organised crime machine in Little Rock and Hot
Springs - part of what is known as the Dixie Mafia.
 
The government still denies that Seal worked in US covert operations. It
will admit only that he was an informant for the DEA, agreeing to help
penetrate Colombia's Medellin Cartel after being convicted of drug
smuggling in 1984. Seal was assassinated by Colombian gunmen in 1986.
 
But *The Sunday Telegraph* has learned that Seal was working for the
Defence Intelligence Agency all along, answering to a top secret outfit
in Fort Meade, Maryland, known as the US Army Operations Group.
 
His recruitment was put into the Pentagon computer system through the
highly classified RODCA Channel, a "source management system" used to
prevent the exposure of secret assets. The last two numbers of his
10-digit "source code identifier" were 82, showing that he was recruited
as an outside operative in 1982.
 
None of this came out in the investigation by Lawrence Walsh, a special
prosecutor who spent six years and almost $40 million looking into the
Iran-Contra affair. That poses the question of whether members of
Walsh's staff with a Left-liberal political bias suppressed information
that would have exposed the involvement of Arkansas's Democratic
governor.
 
The Reeds said they spent three days in Washington in 1988 telling their
story to Senate investigators. But Walsh asserts that he was never given
a proper briefing on the Mena angle. "I'm glad you told me about this,"
he confessed, jokingly, to *The Sunday Telegraph*. "I keep learning new
things all the time."
 
There have been nine state and federal probes into Mena. None of them
went anywhere. In several case investigators say that they were thwarted
by high-level obstruction. Trooper Patterson casts some light on this
mystery. In his sworn deposition he claims to have been present when the
Arkansas State Police commander told Governor Clinton that he, the
commander, had been instructed to "stay out of Mena by two Democrat
Senators.
 
A second deposition suggests that measures are still being taken to
cover up the Mena scandal. Bill Duncan, who conducted a probe for the
Internal Revenue Service and the US Congress on drug trafficking and
money-laundering linked to Mena, has testified that his computer files
were broken into in January 1995 at his office within the Arkansas
Attorney-General's office.
 
His secret passcode was somehow cracked, allowing the intruder to tamper
with his files. He noted that the codes of his highly sensitive
7,000-page Mena archive - the most comprehensive set of documents in
existence - had been broken. He has not yet been able to assess the
level of damage.
 
The US press has made little of the "Colombianisation" of Arkansas by
the Dixie Mafia during the 1980s, and it has ignored the fact that two
of the biggest financial supporters of Clinton's political career in
Arkansas were under investigation for narcotics trafficking by the DEA
at the time they were making big contributions to his campaign.
 
But the Reed lawsuit is beginning to open up this whole can of worms.
Only three depositions have been taken so far. Another 107 witnesses are
on the list for questioning under oath between now and the end of the
broad "discovery" process in August. The trial date is set for September
27.
 
Among the witnesses are a number of State Troopers who have told the
Reeds' lawyers that they want to "go to confession", as well as Oliver
North and a whole cast of characters involved in the weird co-mingling
of covert operations and drug trafficking in Clinton's Arkansas.
 
The next round of depositions is due to be taken in April. The process
is moving inexorably forwards.