Wall Street News Article: The Drug Trade At MENA in ARKANSAS under Clinton

[sandycoosworth]

http://www.csun.edu/CommunicationStudies/ben/news/cia/mena/970129.wsj.html

Mysterious Mena: CIA Discloses, Leach Disposes
By MICAH  MORRISON
WALL STREET JOURAL  January 29, 1997

The word on Capitol Hill is that Rep. Jim Leach will soon
wrap up his inquiry into the spooky goings-on at remote
Mena in western Arkansas. For more than a decade, state
and federal probes of supposedly government-related drug
smuggling, gun running and money laundering at Mena

Intermountain Regional Airport have hit a stone wall. But Mr.
Leach already can claim some success: He kept the
pressure on the Central Intelligence Agency until it
completed a still-classified internal probe of the
allegations; in a declassifed summary released in
November, the CIA for the first time admitted that it had a
presence in Arkansas.

The agency was not "associated with money laundering,
narcotics trafficking, arms smuggling, or other illegal
activities" at Mena, the report  concludes. But the CIA did
engage in "authorized and lawful activities" at the airfield: a
classified "joint-training operation with another federal
agency" and contracting for "routine aviation-related
services."

At the center of the web of speculation spun around Mena
are a few undisputed facts: One of the most successful drug
informants in U.S. history, smuggler Barry Seal, based his
air operation at Mena. At the height of his career he was
importing as much as 1,000 pounds of cocaine per month,
and had a personal fortune estimated at more than $50
million. After becoming an informant for the Drug
Enforcement Administration, he worked at least once with
the CIA, in a Sandinista drug sting. He was gunned down by
Colombian hit men in Baton Rogue, La., in 1986; eight
months later, one of his planes--with an Arkansas pilot at
the wheel and Eugene Hasenfus in the cargo bay--was shot
down over Nicaragua with a load of Contra supplies.


What had then-Gov. Bill Clinton known about CIA activities at
Mena? Asked at an October 1994 press conference,
President Clinton said, "They didn't tell me anything about
it." Events at Mena, Mr. Clinton continued, "were primarily a
matter for federal jurisdiction. The state really had next to
nothing to do with it. The local prosecutor did conduct an
investigation based on what was in the jurisdiction of state
law. The rest of it was under the jurisdiction of the United
States Attorneys who were appointed successively by
previous administrations. We had nothing--zero--to do with
it."

Mr. Clinton was right about federal jurisdiction, but wrong
about Arkansas involvement. As reported on this page, local
attempts to investigate Mena were tanked twice by the Mr.
Clinton's administration in Little Rock, which refused to
allocate funds. And in July 1995, a former member of Gov.
Clinton's security staff, Arkansas State Trooper L.D. Brown,
suddenly stepped forward claiming he had worked with the
CIA and Seal running guns to the Contras--and cocaine back
to the U.S. Mr. Brown says that when he informed the
governor about the drug flights, Mr. Clinton replied, "that's
Lasater's deal"--a reference to Little Rock bond daddy Dan
Lasater, a Clinton crony later convicted on an apparently
unrelated cocaine distribution charge.

The CIA report does not directly address the Lasater
allegation. It says trooper Brown applied to the agency but
was not offered employment and was not "otherwise
associated with CIA." Barry Seal was associated with CIA,
but only for "a two-day period" while his plane was being
outfitted for the DEA's Sandinista sting. The CIA also says it
found no evidence of tampering in earlier money-laundering
prosecutions, as several Arkansas investigators have
charged.

And what does the CIA say about Mr. Clinotn's knowledge of
CIA activities at Mena? It gives its boss wiggle room that
parses nicely with his statement that " they  didn't tell me
anything." In response to Mr. Leach's question about
whether information was conveyed to Arkansas officials in
the 1980s, the report states that "interface with local
officials was handled by the other federal agency" involved
in the joint Mena exercise, side-stepping the issue of what
Mr. Clinton knew.

The Clinton White House has gone to great lengths to
discredit the Mena story. It figures in the notorious White
House conspiracy report and was denounced by former
Whitewater damage-control counsel Mark Fabiani as "the
darkest backwater of right-wing conspiracy theories."
Beltway pundits tend to dismiss Mena as an excess of the
Clinton critics. But in Arkansas the campaign is more
vicious. With a passive press having long ago abandoned
the field, Mena investigators such as former Arkansas State
Police investigator Russell Welch and former IRS agent Bill
Duncan were stripped of their careers after refusing to back
away from the case. Mr. Leach's CIA report provides some
vindication for the two Arkansans.

Mr. Leach's full report is not likely to resolve all the
questions surrounding  Mena, but it might provide important
details about that "other agency" and related mysteries. In
Arkansas, meanwhile, the Little Rock FBI office is following
leads in a sensitive drug-corruption probe involving
the Linda Ives "train deaths" case and allegations of
Mena-related drug drops. The big drug-corruption question
is what network encompassed the Barry Seal operation. The
answer could come by following the money on some
of the smaller questions, such as whether those CIA
contracts for "aviation-related services" went to one of
Seal's front companies at Mena. But in forcing an admission
from the U.S. intelligence community, Mr. Leach already has
performed an important service: He's demolished the notion
that nothing happened at Mena.

Mr. Morrison is a Journal editorial page writer.