Read The Clintons' War on Women Online
Authors: Roger Stone,Robert Morrow
Here again, it bears repeating: the Clintons associate with some extremely shady characters. The Mena drug-trafficking operations caused many people to profit from a shameful business. If this interview is accurate and the operations truly garnered ten million dollars a week, then those involved got away with an appalling crime. The link between the Clintons and this operation seems more and more suspicious upon closer inspection.
There
were many Clinton men who linked the governor to the drugs. One man who tried to figure out the connections between Mena and Governor Clinton was former Arkansas Attorney General Winston Bryant.
“There was, in my opinion, more than enough evidence to prosecute a number of people for crimes regarding the Barry Seal case at Mena,” said Bryant.
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Bryant never got the chance to prosecute or properly investigate the connections of various high-ranking officials. In his bid for attorney general in 1990, Bryant attempted to raise Mena as an issue. He was subsequently confronted and warned by Clinton Aide Betsey Wright, who told Bryant “to stay away” from the matter.
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“The Mena investigations were never supposed to see the light of day,” said William Duncan, former investigator with the Medicaid Fraud Division of Bryant’s office, “Investigations were interfered with and covered up, and the justice system was subverted.”
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A memo from Duncan in March 1992 noted that he was ordered “to remove all files concerning the Mena investigation from the attorney general’s office.”
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The money profited from the drug trade running out of Arkansas was embroiled in Iran-Contra, the high-ranking political scandal in the 1980s in which senior Reagan administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo. The arms sales, it was hoped, would secure the release of several U.S. hostages and the money would also be used to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. The real scandal of Iran-Contra was not merely the Reagan administration’s arms trade for hostages or the illegal arming of Nicaraguan Contras despite the congressional prohibition of the Boland Amendment. The real scandal of Iran-Contra was that the administration was running drugs to support its illegal war against the Marxist government of Nicaragua. The blame for funneling the funds to the Contras was placed on Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who sacrificed his career and, for a short time, his freedom. Barry Seal sacrificed his life. Those on high stayed insulated from
major damage. Vice President Bush was behind the operation and the center for the drug operations operated under the watch of Governor Clinton.
“All of the drug money, and all of the trafficking of drugs sent all over the nation, came out of little Mena, Arkansas, right under the nose of little Governor Billy Clinton,” said Larry Nichols.
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Authors Sally Denton and Roger Morris wrote a fabulous essay called the “Crimes of Mena,” which was set to run in the
Washington Post
in 1995. The
Washington Post
editor, like the Bushes a Skull and Bones alumnus of Yale University, spiked the story. Denton and Morris were forced to publish the article in
Penthouse
in July 1995.
Denton and Morris pointed out that the CIA drug running at Mena had been documented to the hilt and that it implicated both Republicans and Democrats at the highest levels. The readily available article included an extensive discussion of Seal and his drug running activities and his immunity from the powers that be:
Barry Seal—gunrunner, drug trafficker, and covert C.I.A. operative extraordinaire—is hardly a familiar name in American politics. But nine years after he was murdered in a hail of bullets by Medellin cartel hit men outside a Salvation Army shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he has come back to haunt the reputations of three American presidents.
Seal’s legacy includes more than 2,000 newly discovered documents that now verify and quantify much of what previously had been only suspicion, conjecture, and legend. The documents confirm that from 1981 to his brutal death in 1986, Barry Seal carried on one of the most lucrative, extensive, and brazen operations in the history of the international drug trade, and that he did it with the evident complicity, if not collusion, of elements of the United States government, apparently with the acquiescence of Ronald Reagan’s administration, impunity from any subsequent exposure by George Bush’s administration, and under the usually acute political nose of then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.
CIA
operative Chip Tatum kept some careful records of his actions during Iran-Contra. One of his most revealing records was an inflight conversation on a helicopter flight to Palmerola Air Base in Honduras on March 16, 1985, between former Arkansas police captain Buddy Young and Mike Hariri of Mossad, which indicated that Seal tragically thought he had an “insurance policy” that would somehow protect him from both prosecution and physical harm. But the insurance policy was canceled in a hail of bullets on February 19, 1986, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three Colombians in 1987 were convicted of the murder of Seal: Miguel Velez, Luis Carlos Quintero-Cruz, and Bernardo Antonio Vasquez. They told their lawyers that they thought they were working for Oliver North. Larry Nichols says the CIA killed Seal and those captured for his murder were the same ones he was working with in the Contra resupply efforts.
Here’s our theory: The big lie is that the Medellin Cartel murdered Seal; instead, it was the bipartisan American CIA Drug Cartel that murdered him. The American CIA Cartel was running the Medellin Cartel. Seal had turned from an asset into a liability. Author Daniel Hopsicker, who wrote a biography on Seal, concluded that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council indeed used the Colombian hit team to murder Seal (though this was never officially proven).
Hopsicker interviewed Seal’s well-known, highly respected Miami lawyer Richard Sharpstein. Sharpstein said that another Seal lawyer, Lewis Unglesby, was with Barry when the IRS came to seize his property for unpaid taxes on his drug dealings. Seal flat out told them that both he and they (the IRS agents) were working for the same people.
Sharpstein had strong opinions about Seal’s murder.
“Unglesby was with Seal when he retired to a back room.” Sharpstein stated. “He watched as Seal placed a call to Vice President Bush. He heard Seal tell Bush, ‘If you don’t get these IRS assholes off my back I’m going to blow the whistle on the Contra scheme.’”
Sharpstein
spoke solemnly, aware of the gravity of his words. “’That’s why he’s dead,’ is what Unglesby said.”
One week after the phone conversation between Seal and Bush, Barry was sentenced to a halfway house. Two weeks later he was dead.
“Barry Seal, you mean that agent that went bad?” Gordon Novel had casually inquired, when we’d posed the question of his associations with Seal.
An agent that “goes bad,” as we understand intelligence industry trade jargon, is one who contemplates talking.
“Seal was gunned down, supposedly by those Colombians,” says Sharpstein. “But they were fed information by the assholes in our government who wanted him dead.”
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Red Hall, who worked with Seal, told Hopsicker that the killers of Barry Seal were known to have worked for Oliver North.
“Chip Tatum, another covert operative who had known Seal and shared confidences with him,” Hopsicker said, “listened with amusement the first time we breathlessly relayed what we’d discovered: that Oliver North is guilty in the assassination of Barry Seal … ‘No shit, Sherlock,’ he replied, laughing. ‘It ain’t exactly the secret of the century, I can tell you,’ claimed Hopsicker.”
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On April 19, 1986, two months after the Seal murder, Reed and his wife went out to a popular Mexican restaurant in Little Rock.
By coincidence Governor Clinton was there “partying.” As Reed finished his dinner, Bob Nash approached Reed and said that the governor wanted talk with him in a security van parked outside. Reed entered the van with Clinton’s head of security, Buddy Young, watching the outside. Terry Reed described the scene in his book
Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA
:
“Bobby [Bob Nash] says you’ve got a problem about going to Mexico because of the deal with Barry Seal,” the glassy-eyed governor began. By this time the smell of marijuana was unmistakable.
Clinton
paused for a moment as if trying to sort out his thoughts. ‘“I can see your concern. I understand Seal was a friend of yours. His death does appear suspicious. And Bobby says you got a feeling somebody here in Arkansas may have had a motive to kill him. But nobody here had anything to do with that. Seal just got too damn big for his britches and that scum basically deserved to die, in my opinion …”
With that, Clinton got up from his chair and went to the back of the van, returning with a half-smoked joint. He reseated himself. He took a long, deep drag. After holding it in until his cheeks bulged, he then exhaled slowly and deliberately.
He extended his arm and offered the joint to Reed. Terry shook his head and gestured, no thanks.
“Go on, I’m commander in chief here; you won’t get busted,”’ the governor said with a straight face while exhaling….
[Reed said] “‘No, thanks. I just want to get all of this straight. You’re saying that Seal’s death, from what you know, is just as the papers say, he was killed by some Colombians because of his connections to the Medellin Cartel?”
“’Yeah. And I think you’re makin’ a big mistake by passing up the opportunity to go to Mexico for Cathey [Oliver North]. It sounds attractive to me. I wish I could go in your place. Terry, these guys are counting on you and they’re leaning on me to get you to go. I’m not standing in your way. I just want to tell you if you wanna go to Mexico, you’d be leaving here with my blessing. There’s no hard feelings about anything that has happened here. I wanted you to hear that coming from me.”’
Clinton took another deep drag [on his joint], held it and exhaled. In a raspy voice, with smoke still coming out of his mouth, Clinton added, “Sure you don’t want some of this? This is good shit. We sure do grow lotsa good things besides watermelons here in Arkansas.
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“So what’s your decision, you gonna go or aren’t ya? I gotta tell Cathey [Oliver North] somethin’ ASAP to get him off my ass. It’s ridiculous, but he’s holdin’ me responsible for your vacillation.”
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Reed told Bill Clinton that he was going to Mexico. The next month Felix Rodriguez was contacted by L. D. Brown, who prodded him to go to Mexico to murder Terry Reed.
In 1986, after the murder of Seal, L. D. Brown was again tasked by the CIA—this time with assassination.
“Rodriguez had a sense of urgency in his voice,” Brown said. “He told me they had found the guy flying the second seat of the C-123 I had flown on, the plane Seal used to fly the coke into Mena. The man was to be in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on June 21 and I was to be there to take care of him.”
In a bipartisan effort, Bush’s man Rodriguez was sending Clinton’s favorite state trooper down to Mexico to silence someone involved in Seal’s drug flights. Rodriguez sent Brown a manual for a 7.62 rifle that Brown was supposed to pick up from a soldier at a restaurant in Puerto Vallarta. Then Brown was to assemble the rifle and find his target, who was staying at a local resort.
Before Brown left on his Mexico murder mission, he checked in with Clinton and told him he was going to “take care” of the problem there.
“That’s good, L. D.,” said Clinton, in compliance with the CIA-directed hit.
Supplied with a fake Arkansas driver’s license, Brown went to Mexico under the alias Michael Johnson. He assembled his rifle and mentally prepared himself for the hit, which he assumed had been the co-pilot on Seal’s plane. Seal himself had been murdered earlier in the year on February 19, 1986, in Baton Rouge.
Brown got to the Hotel Playa Conchas Chinas in Puerto Vallarta where his target was staying. Brown made contact with a hotel clerk who pointed out his murder target: a dark-haired man, who bore
none of the characteristics of the drug runner from two years prior.
“Horror ran down my spine,” said Brown. “I had never seen the man before in my life. I left the hotel with the straw bag in tow … I dumped the bag and gun in a ditch by the road back into town…. We left Puerto Vallarta that afternoon as I thought I would never see that man again. I was wrong. Ten years later I would be giving a deposition in a civil case he would bring in Little Rock, Arkansas. His name was Terry Reed.”
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It was clear the powers that be were trying to clean up the mess of Mena.
In the summer of 1993, Clinton campaign Security Director Jerry Parks feared for his life. He would carry a pistol to check the mailbox. He would take strange routes back home to make sure he was not being followed. He was a restless sleeper at night.
Evans-Pritchard said that when he went to Arkansas to investigate the Clintons he found Jerry’s son, Gary Parks, then aged twenty-three, in a state of terror. Gary Parks was “half-underground, sleeping on the floor in different houses, afraid that he too could be the target of attack.” Evans-Pritchard said that the situation he discovered in Arkansas, the intimidation factor, was just like what he had found in El Salvador and Guatemala when he was covering the Central American wars of the 1980s. It should be noted that when Evans-Pritchard went to Arkansas to investigate Bill Clinton, he himself came under direct, overt, and intimidating surveillance, including a “large, corpulent, bearded, redneck wearing dark glasses” that made a point of intimidation staring at one of the witnesses who Evans-Pritchard was interviewing in an otherwise empty restaurant.
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Parks told Evans-Pritchard that his father who had done a lot of work for the Clintons, also was spying on Bill’s infidelities. Mrs. Parks, the mother of Gary, said that Vince Foster (Hillary Clinton’s law partner and lover) and Hillary had ordered the surveillance of Bill. Gary Parks said Jerry Parks was “Working on his [Bill’s] infidelities.
It had been going on for years. He had enough to impeach Bill Clinton on the spot.” Gary said that since 1988, when he was age seventeen, he had gone with his father Jerry on four or five spying missions on Clinton.
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After Clinton declined a run for president in 1988, his relationship with Hillary took yet another dive and they were seriously contemplating divorce.