At present, although there is no reason to believe any of the allegations, we are declining to comment publicly, pending exhaustive searches of DO files, as tasked by ICA. Counterrevolutionaries, known as Contras, were battling the Sandinistas. "According to some reports, the [Mena] airport, from 1981 to 1985, was a major transit point for the entrance of cocaine and heroin into the United States," Sherwood wrote. "Despite the availability of evidence sufficient for an indictment on money laundering charges, and over the strong protests of state and federal law enforcement officials, the cases were dropped," according to the report. Lets hope that Cruises high-powered version of Seal prompts an equally high-powered demand for disclosure of all government records on him, especially after his move to Mena.. "Prior to his death, Seal admitted to smuggling large quantities of cocaine from South America (Columbia) to United States and testified before Senate investigative committee," according to the FBI memo, which referred to a telephone call between agents in Little Rock and Miami. Like in the movie, the American Made true story reveals that Barry made a living as a commercial airline pilot for several years. Barry also had a daughter and a son not shown in the movie, Lisa and Alder, with his first wife Barbara Bottoms. Owing to a case that Brown was then working on that could have implicated Tucker, Brown believes the demotion was illegal. One mission involved a C-123K cargo plane that was outfitted at the Mena airport. Starring Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright, Copyright 2023 HistoryvsHollywood.com, CTF Media, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. According to investigative records compiled by the Arkansas State Police and other agencies, the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport served as a second home for Barry Seal, a. Reprints and media inquiries: [emailprotected]. In another deposition in the Reed case, Russell Welch, an Arkansas state police investigator who has looked extensively at Mena, says that Young asked him in 1992 if Clintons name had ever come up in connection with Mena. Then, he says, they regained altitude, by then they descended again, and thats when these two crazy bastards got these palettes and roll them out on casters. Parachutes opened from the palettes. The pilot of the plane was Barry Seal, a legendary drug trafficker. He had previously been married to Barbara Bottoms (m. 1963-1971) and Lynn Ross (m. 1971-1972). It does seem, however, that Clinton was far less cautious. Barry met Debbie while he was on his way to a hearing after he was caught in 1972 trying to smuggle military explosives out of the country. After a barrage of requests from different people and media outlets under the federal Freedom of Information Act, on Wednesday the FBI released more than 1,000 pages of its file on Seal: vault.fbi.gov/recently-added. Suddenly, though, the Arkansas State Police were uncooperative. Asa Hutchinson was U.S. attorney for Arkansas' Western District in the early 1980s. In the 1980s the smallairportin Arkansas known as Mena became part of the largest covert operation in history. But there were still questions regarding the Mena airport and people who worked there, according to the FBI memo. The goal was to expose the involvement of the Nicaraguan Sandinista regime as a major supplier of cocaine from Colombia.". Her character in the American Made movie is much more aware and suspicious of her husband's activities, stating that she flat out doesn't trust him, which is the opposite of Seal's real-life wife. In her suit, Lisa, who is not depicted in the movie, also claimed that there were factual inaccuracies in the script, including the fact that Barry had five children, not three, and that the movie falsely suggests he was an alcoholic and a reckless pilot. Seal was a DEA informant/operative who was deeply involved in Iran-Contra and Gov. CIA and DEA activities flowed out of Mena in the Clinton years. In 1986, Colombian hitmen caught up with Seal in Baton Rouge, shooting him to death in his white Cadillac. Barry Seal was one of the most renowned American dealers that smuggled weapons and drugs in the USA Barry Seal became an aviator at only 16 years old, and as soon as he received his pilot licence, he started smuggling weapons He had strong relations with the Madelln Cartel, i.e. Seal is purported to have flown guns to South America from Mena and drugs back into the United States, according to the memo. A 1983 document in the recently released trove referred to a telephone conversation between the FBI and Polk County Sheriff A.L. Three Colombians eventually were arrested and convicted of the murder. "Allegations later surfaced that many of the gun shipments sent to Nicaragua as part of the Iran-Contra Affair were sent from the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport. The book was killed at the last minute. He also says he told Seal he wanted no part of what was happening; then he left. Hagan said he didn't know how many pages of material on Seal have yet to be made public by the FBI. In the least, his exploits with the CIA and agent Monty Schafer in the movie are largely fictional and based on speculation. It was originally an Air Force transport plane Seal dubbed it the Fat Lady. He later claimed to have made as much as $50 million running 1,000 pounds of cocaine a month from Colombia. The pilot of the plane was Barry Seal, a legendary drug trafficker. One mission involved a C-123K cargo plane that was outfitted at the Mena airport. According to Del Hahn's book Smuggler's End, Barry Seal was not chummy with the cartel bosses. Hadaway said an informant told him a "narcotic smuggling operation" was headquartered out of the Mena airport and that a man named Barry from Baton Rouge was in charge of it. "The information indicates that Seal was an informant for DEA at the time but also working as an operative of the CIA. At the time Seals flights took place, Lasater was contributing to Clintons political campaigns. That film finds Seal (portrayed by Michael Par) being assassinated in a motorcycle drive-by shooting while he is driving and Robert Mazur (Cranston) is his passenger. Frigon, who says she administers Seal's estate, contends the estate did not consent. Bush's anti-drug task force in hopes of convincing them of his value as an informant. For a portion of this time, the alleged ringleader of the drug smuggling, Seal, appeared to have been working with the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Agency. Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal (July 16, 1939 - February 19, 1986) murdered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Well take it from here. Then, he started the engines, and Brown remembers, ThisI mean just thunderous noise. -Daily Mail Online, The movie proposes that Barry Seal's first foray into smuggling drugs happened in 1980 after he was kidnapped while refueling his plane in Colombia. Images like the one earlier on this page show Medelln Cartel boss Pablo Escobar with Sandinista government officials and soldiers, who were loading cocaine onto Seal's plane, nicknamed the Fat Lady. It turns out Barry flew the plane all the way back to the United States. Brown, a narcotics cop, got upset. Trooper Bobby Walker has told me that sometime in the mid-1980s he was at Mena with Clinton. Because no one "He would tell me all these wild stories about the missions he had flown. var sc_project=5585388; In 1981, Seal set up shop at Mena. The accident didn't happen during filming. Barry arrived that evening at approximately 6 p.m. and backed his white Cadillac into a parking space. According to a 1988 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, Seal's associates at the Mena airport were also being investigated. Mena is the small town in Arkansas where Barry Seal, who was born in Baton Rouge, conducted operations. Gov. As author Del Hahn states in his book about Barry Seal's life, Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal, there is no evidence to support claims that Barry Seal worked for the CIA. Dwayne Brown says he knew his brother had made some unexplained trips out of the country. Its now referred to as theIran-Contrascandal. Still unknown at the time, the cartel would go on to make hundreds of millions from the explosion of cocaine use in the U.S. Barry Seal, who became known as "El Gordo" (The Fat Man), ended up being an integral part of that success. Seal's Drug Enforcement Administration file also supports this, noting that he was smuggling marijuana as early as 1976, then adding cocaine to his resume in 1978. After Brown told Sealand Clintonthat he would no longer take part in the drug flights, Seal contacted Brown again. Young has since been made head of the Federal Emergency Management Administration in Denton, Texas. Judicial Watch On Issue: The Battle for Election Integrity, Judicial Watch On Issue: Leading the Battle Against Illegal Immigration, Al Qaeda Plans Plane Attacks Using New Techniques and Tactics as Air Marshals Keep Getting Sent to Mexican Border, Biden staying at St. Croix villa of wealthy donors who got state dinner invite, Tom Fitton's Judicial Watch Weekly Update. Yes. I never saw drugs, that's for sure." Associated Press text, photo, graphic, audio and/or video material shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium. When asked who his source was, Jacoby implied that it was "an aide in the White House" and that Oliver North had the most motivation to release the information. Creating Epstein: Bill Barr Leslie Wexner & the CIA, Bonnie's Clyde: The True Story of Jeffrey Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell, Revisiting Mena, Bill Clinton, the CIA & Barry Seal. "I fly airplanes. "According to some reports, the [Mena] airport, from 1981 to 1985, was a major transit point for the entrance of cocaine and heroin into the United States," Sherwood wrote. MENA NOIR: Aircraft pilot Barry Seal, a Baton Rouge native who smuggled drugs into the U.S. for the Medellin Cartel during the 1980s, used this airport in Me. In its review of the 2017 movie "American Made" -- about Seal -- the New York Times called it the Conspiratorial Industrial Complex. Then it was refueled while Sale and the kickers got off. Bill Clintons favorite bodyguard, but also a close friend. As part of the application process, Brown had written an essay: Marxist Influence in Central America. Judicial Watch, Inc. is a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, which promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law. "At the time Seal started cooperating with DEA Miami, he had an established base at Rich Mountain Aviation and had frequent contact with subjects," according to the document. The book was to be called, The Mena File: Barry Seals Ties to Drug Lords and U.S. Officials. Leveritt knew the story well and had researched it earlier, writing about Seals murder and other related events. FBI agents in Miami wanted to know what Seal might have told people at Rich Mountain Aviation regarding his smuggling activities, according to the document. She is a brunette, not a blond like Sarah Wright's character in the movie. In the years that followed his split from Clinton, Brown investigated white-collar crime for the Arkansas State Police. . Under the disguise of an aircraft refurbishing center, Mena was an arms and drug smuggling ring working for President Ronald ReagansContrawar against theSandinistas. "The estimated value of the narcotics smuggled through the facility is $3 [billion] to $5 billion. In his research for the book, the only confirmed connection Hahn could make between the CIA and Barry Seal was in 1984, after Seal had started working as an informant for the DEA. Officials at the Arkansas Studies Institute suggested their concerns were legal and financial, associated with vetting the book, but Leveritt wasnt buying it. A month before that, the Southwest personnel representative for the CIA, Ken Cargile, in a letter to Brown, wrote that I am pleased to nominate you for employment with the Central Intelligence Agency. Another entry in Browns daybook indicates that he had met with another CIA representative only a few days before that. Clinton had been asking him a similar question for months, ever since, with Clintons encouragement, he had applied for a job with the CIA. The name of another person under investigation was redacted. -TIME. -Daily Mail Online. The story took on a new life when Bill Clinton ran for president. Basically, Seal would fly over the guns and smuggle back drugs on his return trip. Barry Seal was an American-born Trans World Airlines pilot who . The second is the article they reference. The irony is that he might have remained reluctant, but then the White House itself intervened. "The original information dates back to the activities of a pilot, Barry Seal (now deceased), who is purported to have flown guns to South America from Mena and drugs back into the United States," according to the memo. Regardless, Jacoby's article led to the abandonment of the final piece of Barry Seal's undercover operation. In February 1986, Seal was killed in a hail of machine-gun fire outside a Baton Rouge Salvation Army halfway house. They could locate no files on Seal. Two years later, he would be shot dead in Louisiana. Bill Clinton's Mena, Arkansas drug smuggling and money laundering operation through the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA).. Seal was a Green Beret in the Vietnam war and later a pilot for TWA. Dwayne Brown says his brother seemed terribly upset, and that he immediately drove over to the Governors Mansion to meet him. This document may not be reprinted without the express written permission of Northwest Arkansas Newspapers LLC. Strange events unfolded at Mena, a small city in remote western Arkansas, in the 1980s. He was not only Gov. Yet she pressed on with her writing and finished the book. Like Clinton, Brown passed through a radical stage when he attended the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. They referred him to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). As stated in the previous question, there is no strong evidence to confirm that Barry Seal was working with the CIA prior to becoming an informant after his arrest in 1983. In the film, his abductors take him to a secret airstrip in the Colombian jungle where three businessmen, including Pablo Escobar, make him an offer he can't pass up. Phone Number . "He thought we had more time. When he returned to Little Rock, he called his brother Dwayne. See Rafael L Mena's age, phone number, house address, email address, social media accounts, public records, and check for criminal records on Spokeo. Exclusive: Tom Cruise's portrayal of drug-smuggler-turned-government-informant Barry Seal is a fast-paced visit back to the Reagan era's shadowy world of the CIA, cocaine and secret wars . Later Seal confirmed Browns suspicions: the palettes contained M-16s for the Contras. The arrests never happened since Seal's cover was blown. Then Brown says, Seal and the kickers returned, carrying four duffel bags. "We're talking about one of the largest drug smugglers in America, and these agents loved him." ", Copyright 2023, Northwest Arkansas Newspapers LLC. However, the U.S. needed a way to covertly get the funds and weapons to the rebels. Seal, he says, laughed, and told Brown that all he had wanted him to do was sit back for the ride. Then he gave Brown an envelope with $2,500 in cash not marked money, not banded money, just twenties, fifties, mostly twenties, used money, like you just went out and spent.. var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); "The aircraft flew with various cameras used to obtain photographic evidence of the Sandinistas in the act of smuggling narcotics," Sherwood wrote. For their efforts, their careers were crushed. When I got back from that first trip he knew I had been out doing something, Brown insists. The assassination happened on February 19, 1986 in the parking lot in front of the Salvation Army building on Airline Highway (U.S. 61) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In other words: nothing to see here, move on. On Watch: The #COVID19 Crisis on our Southern Border the Media ISN'T Coveri On Watch: Marxism & the Current Insurrection in America. })(); In the meantime, we are receiving media queries on Mena, most recently from Michael Isikoff of Newsweek n 18 July. He concluded by saying that Mena was a federal, not a state, matter. The DEA had been onto him for a long time. An entry in Browns daybook indicates that the flight with Seal took place on October 23, 1984. Concurrently, they had to make sure not to raise the suspicions of the ruthless Colombian drug lords. There were no local dignitaries present, Bender says, and Clinton did not seem to be taking part in any official function. The CIA stonewalled the release of information now sought by Judicial Watch on the Mena Airport controversy, said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. Advertisement. forgave the taxes on hundreds of millions in known drug and gun profits over the ensuing two-year period when Seal was officially admitted to be employed by the government. In the film, his abductors take him to a secret airstrip in the Colombian jungle where three businessmen, including Pablo Escobar, make him an offer he can't pass up. "Tom did all his own flying in the movie," says Liman. And for thirty years, every attempt to get to the bottom of events at Menafederal, state, judicial, journalistichas failed. Hadaway. Pablo Escobar and the Ochoas were going to be arrested at a celebration of Seal's successful cocaine transport. He also says he was mindful of the secrecy agreement he had signed with the CIA. The other troopers called him Clintons Fair-haired boy. That didnt happen. individuals, "I initiated a grand jury investigation in relation to money laundering through the Mena airport in 1985," Hutchinson said Friday. 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