From: [lar jen] at [interaccess.com] (Larry + Jennie)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Subject: WALL STREET JOURNAL on CIA Cocaine 4/22/87
Date: Thu, 4 Jan 1996 20:56:40 -0600
Here is the JOURNAL's first report on the CIA-connected cocaine
trafficking through Mena, Arkansas.
"U.S. officials have rejected accusations of major drug
trafficking by the Contras. The handling of those accusations
now is being reviewed by two congressional committees and the
independent counsel for the Iran-Contra affair." Too bad one
of those congressional committees and the independent counsel
totally ignored the evidence given to them regarding CIA cocaine
trafficking. The chariman of the other congressional committee,
Sen. John Kerry, was plagued with charges of being a Communist
sympathizer.
"The imprisoned drug pilots say Mr. Seal was involved in
flights that brought weapons to Central American airfields
for the Contras and sometimes returned to the U.S. with
drugs. The pilots claim that their Contra weapons deliveries
were directed by the CIA. The people they say they worked
with are known to have been supervised or monitored by the
CIA and by Lt. Col. Oliver North, the National Security
Council staffer fired for his role in the program to sell
arms to Iran and fund the Contras. As is its practice, the
Central Intelligence Agency refuses to comment."
Who knows? Had the Select Committee on Iran-contra asked Ollie
North the questions that this report prompts, then the USA
probably would never have had a President William Jefferson Clinton.
Note that George Bush's office was made aware of Barry Seal's
drug trafficking expertise.
Larry
_____________
Headline:
"Dope Story:
Doubts Rise on Report
Reagan Cited in Tying
Sandinistas to Cocaine
---
Little Evidence Backs Tale,
Which Came From Pilot
Who Claimed CIA Link
---
Deal for a Lighter Sentence"
---
By Jonathan Kwitny
WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 22, 1987
In the early-morning darkness of June 26, 1984, Adler
Barriman Seal, a wealthy, convicted drug smuggler working as
a federal informant in hopes of leniency, landed his C-123
cargo plane at Homestead Air Force Base near Miami. On board
was 1,500 pounds of cocaine he said he had brought from
Nicaragua.
Within a few weeks, unnamed "administration officials,"
citing information provided by Mr. Seal, leaked to the press
stories saying that top Nicaraguan leaders, including a
brother of President Daniel Ortega, were trafficking in
cocaine with the help of Soviets and Cubans.
The Reagan administration has used the Seal story -- which
Nicaragua denies -- ever since in attempts to rouse
congressional and public support for aid to the Contra rebels
fighting to overthrow Mr. Ortega's Sandinista government. On
March 16 of last year, in an appeal for a Contra aid package,
President Reagan displayed on national television a photo
taken by a camera hidden in Mr. Seal's plane.
"I know that every American parent concerned about the
drug problem will be outraged to learn that top Nicaraguan
government officials are deeply involved in drug
trafficking," Mr. Reagan said. "This picture, secretly taken
at a military airfield outside Managua, shows Federico
Vaughan, a top aide to one of the nine commandants who rule
Nicaragua, loading an aircraft with illegal narcotics bound
for the United States."
But Mr. Seal's evidence of Nicaraguan drug trafficking
doesn't appear to be as sweeping as he or the Reagan
administration portrayed it.
The Drug Enforcement Administration says the cocaine on
Mr. Seal's C-123 is the only drug shipment by way of
Nicaragua that it knows of -- and Mr. Seal said he had
brought it there to begin with. The Nicaraguan "military
airfield" that officials said Mr. Seal flew from is in fact a
civilian field used chiefly for crop-dusting flights, the
State Department now concedes. That concession undermines the
basis for linking Defense Minister Humberto Ortega, President
Ortega's brother, to the operation.
In fact, the man who supervised Mr. Seal's work for the
government -- Richard Gregorie, chief assistant U.S. attorney
in Miami -- says he could find no information beyond Mr.
Seal's word tying any Nicaraguan official to the drug
shipment. As for Federico Vaughan, the man Mr. Reagan called
an aide to a Sandinista commandant, federal prosecutors and
drug officials now say they aren't sure who he is.
Asked about the matter, a White House spokesman says, "We
got the information from DEA and have received no indication
from them of any change in their original assessment."
Meanwhile, some DEA officials complain that the
administration's use of Mr. Seal's story against the
Sandinistas sabotaged a much bigger drug case, against
Colombians.
Now there are allegations that besides drugs, Mr. Seal may
have been involved with other sensitive cargo. Four drug
pilots in prison in Florida say they knew Mr. Seal as part of
a network that delivered weapons to airfields in Central
America for the American-backed Contras and then sometimes
flew back to the U.S. with cocaine. Over the years, Mr. Seal
told associates and testified in court that he sometimes did
work for Central Intelligence Agency operations. Though the
Justice Department was quick to follow up Mr. Seal's
Nicaraguan story with an indictment, it rejected allegations
from the pilots and others of drug dealing by Contras.
The Seal case is a complex double helix of politics and
law enforcement. Mr. Seal provided his story about Nicaragua
after contacting Vice President George Bush's anti-drug task
force and offering to be an informant. He gave the
administration the photographs and testimony it used to
accuse Nicaraguan leaders of drug trafficking. In return,
federal prosecutors helped him wriggle out of a long prison
term he faced on three drug convictions. He got six months'
probation.
Doubts about portions of his story first were raised last
year in the Village Voice and Columbia Journalism Review by
Joel Millman, who helped locate sources for this broader
investigation of the case.
It is clear Mr. Seal was a major drug runner. He had a
fleet of at least four planes, and he testified in federal
court that he earned more than $50 million smuggling dope. He
said he made $600,000 or $700,000 while working for the DEA
in the Nicaraguan case, which the government says it let him
keep to cover expenses.
The money did him little good. On Feb. 19, 1986, as Mr.
Seal was getting out of his white Cadillac at a Louisiana
shelter where his probation required him to spend nights, a
squad of hit men gunned him down.
When Mr. Seal first faced various drug charges several
years ago, he initially got nowhere in seeking a deal. He
twice went to Justice Department and DEA officials in Florida
seeking a milder sentence in exchange for doing undercover
work to catch big Colombian drug-cartel leaders, and he made
the same offer in another federal drug case in Louisiana. The
prosecutors all decided they preferred to have Mr. Seal in
jail.
So in March of 1984 he called Mr. Bush's drug task force,
got an appointment and flew his Learjet to Washington, he
explained later in testimony at drug trials of others in
federal court in Miami and Las Vegas. Two task-force staffers
say they met Mr. Seal on a Washington street and escorted him
to a meeting with Kenneth R. Kennedy, a veteran DEA agent.
The Justice Department says that he was accepted as an
informant to trap Colombian dealers and that everyone was
surprised to learn later of a Nicaraguan connection. But Mr.
Kennedy recalls Mr. Seal's saying at their first meeting that
"the officials of the Nicaraguan government are involved in
smuggling cocaine into the United States, specifically the
Sandinistas; that he would go through Nicaragua and get loads
and bring them back; that he had brought loads of cocaine
{through Nicaragua} in the past and he could continue to do
it."
Thomas Sclafani, who was just becoming Mr. Seal's lawyer
in Miami at the time, says that he is "absolutely" sure that
nailing Nicaraguans was "a key ingredient" in the deal Mr.
Seal offered the government.
Mr. Kennedy sent Mr. Seal to agents Robert Joura and
Ernest Jacobsen in the DEA's Miami office. They authorized
him to go to Colombia and Panama to arrange a drug shipment,
but they say it was a total surprise when he returned with
news that cocaine-cartel leaders were moving their operations
to Nicaragua because of law-enforcement pressure in Colombia.
Mr. Seal testified that the cocaine leaders explained to him,
"We are not communists. We don't particularly enjoy the same
philosophy politically that they do. But they serve our means
and we serve theirs."
Mr. Gregorie, the federal prosecutor in Miami, says the
politics of it made no difference to him, either. "Nobody
cared," he says. Nicaragua "was just another place they {the
cocaine cartel} did business."
As Mr. Seal related the story in his testimony, it was in
Panama in mid-May 1984 that the Colombians introduced Mr.
Vaughan to him as "some sort of a government official from
Nicaragua." He said Mr. Vaughan claimed to be a top aide to
Tomas Borge, the Sandinista interior minister and
security-police chief.
Mr. Seal testified that Mr. Vaughan took him and a
co-pilot to Nicaragua on an airliner, dodging customs at the
airport, and that they stayed at Mr. Vaughan's house
overnight. Then, he said, a Nicaraguan military driver gave
them a tour of an airfield and Mr. Vaughan pointed out
antiaircraft batteries they should avoid, before putting them
on a flight to Panama. As evidence of the trip, he offered
his boarding pass on an airliner to Managua and a receipt for
payment of the Managua airport tax; neither document appears
to bear any date or name identification.
On his first scheduled drug run after becoming an
informant, Mr. Seal testified, his plane skidded off a muddy
Colombian airstrip and crashed as he was taking off. He said
the accident forced the cocaine shipment onto a smaller plane
that needed to refuel to reach the U.S.; the refueling stop
was in Nicaragua, he said, and Mr. Vaughan met the flight. As
he related it, after taking off again, his plane was hit with
anti-aircraft fire and limped into the main Managua airport,
where he and his co-pilot were held by military officers.
Eventually, Mr. Seal testified, Mr. Vaughan's military
driver brought a truck to the Managua airport, transferred
the cocaine off the plane and drove it away. He said he was
jailed overnight, then picked up by Mr. Vaughan and given a
small plane to fly home to the U.S., leaving the cocaine in
Nicaragua. He said this plane was owned by Pablo Escobar, who
the DEA says is a major partner in Colombia's largest cocaine
syndicate.
On the night of June 24, 1984, Mr. Seal continued, he, a
co-pilot and a mechanic headed back to Managua to get the
coke, flying his newly acquired C-123 cargo craft. Hidden
within it was a secret camera, installed by the Central
Intelligence Agency at Rickenbacker Air Force Base in Ohio.
Although the camera didn't work right, he said, he managed to
squeeze off dozens of grainy, shadowy photographs.
Most of them show a few men in casual attire lounging
against a grassy background. Mr. Seal identified one as Mr.
Vaughan, one as Mr. Escobar, the Colombian drug kingpin, and
a third as another Colombian drug dealer. Several pictures
show men, whom U.S. officials called soldiers, carrying
canvas bags.
After this trip the DEA sent Mr. Seal back down to
Nicaragua with $1 million, and he said he arranged with Mr.
Vaughan for another cocaine shipment. But in mid-July of
1984, DEA agent Joura remembers getting a call from his
agency in Washington saying that a story based on Mr. Seal's
C-123 trip would shortly appear in the Washington Times.
Chances of using Mr. Seal to catch members of the
Colombian drug cartel vanished. "At that time, there was a
Contra funding bill that was up for approval, and I guess
that precipitated the leak of the photographs," says Mr.
Joura. "It ruined the case. We hoped to go a lot further with
it."
Mr. Joura did have time to tell Mr. Seal to round up some
Florida distributors and another pilot for a meeting so they
could be arrested. (It was at the 1985 Miami trial of these
men that Mr. Seal, as a government witness, related his
Nicaraguan story. He repeated it at another federal drug
trial that year, in Las Vegas.)
The Washington Times story, which touched off many other
press accounts, quoted "U.S. sources" as saying that "a
number of highly placed Nicaraguan government officials
actively participated in the drug smuggling operation,"
naming Interior Minister Borge and Defense Minister Humberto
Ortega. U.S. officials have said that the defense minister
could be implicated because the drug shipment used a military
airfield, Los Brasiles.
But the State Department now confirms reports from
Nicaragua that Los Brasiles is a civilian airfield used
mainly for agricultural flights. It is also listed as a
civilian field in a Defense Department Flight Information
Publication.
The Justice Department said in 1984 that
cocaine-processing labs had been established in Nicaragua and
that the drug was being shipped in "multi-ton" amounts.
Within a month after the story of the flight broke in the
press, Mr. Vaughan was indicted.
The department says it knows that Mr. Seal's C-123 went to
Nicaragua because a device aboard the plane enabled
satellites to track it. But Mr. Gregorie, the federal
prosecutor in Miami, and the DEA's Mr. Joura concede that
their only evidence of who Mr. Vaughan is comes from Mr. Seal
and a tape of a call to a man Mr. Seal identified as him. The
Nicaraguan government says that a Federico Vaughan worked in
1982 and 1983 as the deputy manager of an export-import
company run by the Sandinista government but had left before
the Seal flight and was never an aide to a commandant.
Mr. Vaughan hasn't been put on trial. Though the U.S. has
an extradition treaty with Nicaragua, the federal prosecutors
never tried to extradite Mr. Vaughan. Mr. Gregorie says the
State Department told him it would be futile.
While the account of Sandinista drug involvement brought
swift Justice Department action, U.S. officials have rejected
accusations of major drug trafficking by the Contras. The
handling of those accusations now is being reviewed by two
congressional committees and the independent counsel for the
Iran-Contra affair.
"There have been allegations that the laws have not been
evenly and appropriately carried out, so we're looking into
that," says Hayden Gregory, an investigator for a House
Judiciary Committee subcommittee.
The imprisoned drug pilots say Mr. Seal was involved in
flights that brought weapons to Central American airfields
for the Contras and sometimes returned to the U.S. with
drugs. The pilots claim that their Contra weapons deliveries
were directed by the CIA. The people they say they worked
with are known to have been supervised or monitored by the
CIA and by Lt. Col. Oliver North, the National Security
Council staffer fired for his role in the program to sell
arms to Iran and fund the Contras. As is its practice, the
Central Intelligence Agency refuses to comment.
Mr. Seal once was a pilot with Trans World Airlines, but
he lost the job in 1972 after being charged with smuggling
explosives to Mexico. The explosives, he later testified in
federal court in Las Vegas, were for CIA-trained personnel
trying to overthrow Cuba's Fidel Castro. An appeals court
threw out the indictment.
Fred Hampton, whose Mena, Ark., firm does a global
business repairing aircraft, says Mr. Seal used to talk in
1982 and 1983 about working for the CIA. He says Mr. Seal was
secretive about it but discussed aerial reconnaissance of
Nicaraguan air bases when the subject came up.
Jack Terrell, a former Contra mercenary who now opposes
U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, says that "we knew he {Mr.
Seal} was flying for the Contras" at Aguacote, a Honduran
supply base. And a jailed drug pilot named Gary Betzner says
he once ran into Mr. Seal at Illopango air base in El
Salvador, where much of the Contra weaponry was transshipped.
Another imprisoned drug pilot, Michael Tolliver, says he
was recruited into the Contra supply network by Mr. Seal,
whom he had known since they were both airplane enthusiasts in
Louisiana. He says Mr. Seal called him in the spring of 1985
and said, "I've got some interesting flying for you to do."
Says Mr. Tolliver: "I figured it was government because
everybody knew he was working for the government."
Following Mr. Seal's drug convictions, his undercover
efforts served him well with sentencing judges. In federal
court in Fort Lauderdale, Judge Norman C. Roettger reduced a
10-year drug sentence to six months' probation after DEA
agents spoke to him. The judge specifically praised Mr.
Seal's cooperation in the Nicaraguan case. Then, under a deal
worked out with the Justice Department, Mr. Seal also got
probation for another Florida drug conviction and for drug
charges in Louisiana.
But the judge in the Louisiana case, upset at the leniency
of the Justice Department terms, required Mr. Seal to spend
nights during his probation at a Salvation Army shelter in
Baton Rouge. The requirement made him easy for his enemies to
find, and one day early last year some of them did. Three
Colombian men have been charged with killing him.
Of the two others Mr. Seal said went to Nicaragua on the
C-123, one, co-pilot Emile Camp, died in a crash of his
one-man plane. The other, mechanic Peter Everson, who has
never been charged or asked to testify, won't discuss Mr.
Seal's story except to say he would corroborate it if called.
He lives in a fortress-like building in Louisiana.
One final footnote: Mr. Seal's C-123, after a change in
ownership, crashed in Nicaragua last October while on a
Contra supply run. The Nicaraguans captured an American cargo
handler who survived. His name was Eugene Hasenfus, and his
capture began the unraveling of secret U.S. efforts to supply
the Contras.
________
Too bad the rest of the American media ignored this, and much more
evidence, that operatives connected to the Central Intelligence
Agency were, and are, deeply involved with the global narcotics
trade.
L