Who's afraid of Barry Seal?

The 'true lie' behind Tom Cruise's new film on the notorious drug-trafficker-turned-federal-informant who operated out of Arkansas.


The poster for the movie "American Made," to be released Friday, Sept. 29, shows a grinning, cocky Tom Cruise as the drug smuggler Barry Seal, hauling a duffle bag bursting with cash. "It's not a felony if you're doing it for the good guys," the poster teases. The film's trailer has Seal casually boasting about his simultaneous work for "the CIA, the <g class="gr_ gr_354 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Punctuation only-ins replaceWithoutSep" id="354" data-gr-id="354">DEA</g> and Pablo Escobar."
One critic was led to ask: "So, was Seal a triple agent?" Perhaps. The producers say this swaggering story, based mostly in Arkansas, is all "based on a true lie."
"American Made" is Hollywood's second film about Seal, the trafficker-turned-government-informant who is fast becoming America's most intriguing outlaw. HBO released the first, "Doublecrossed," starring Dennis Hopper as Seal, in 1991, five years after Seal's controversial murder.
When Cruise's film was announced, its title was going to be "Mena," after the town in Arkansas where a local company hid Seal's aircraft and modified them for drug drops. I was a reporter focusing on drugs in the 1980s, but I learned of Seal's three-year presence at Mena only after the night in 1986 when Colombian assassins gunned him down in Baton Rouge, La.
I became one of many reporters who tried to untangle Seal's story and, though that task ultimately proved impossible, I did learn a lot about him. But now, the bits and pieces collected about Seal have provided enough material — enough "true lies" — for Hollywood to weave into films that enlarge his legend
But his actual story is littered with dead ends — secrets that are still being carefully kept — especially in Arkansas. And here, I'm sorry to say, some police records that were open to the public 20 years ago are apparently no longer available.
I wouldn't know this if it weren't for Cruise's film. When it was announced with a planned release in 2016, Rod Lorenzen, the manager of Butler Center Books, a division of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, asked me to write a history of Seal's time in Arkansas to correspond with the movie's release. I was honored. The Butler Center is part of the highly respected Arkansas Studies Institute, a creation of the Central Arkansas Library System and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
I'm a huge admirer of the ASI and consider its staff my friends. Yet I declined. I told Lorenzen that the book he proposed would be too hard to write; that there were still too many people in power — in both political parties — who did not want Seal's full story told.
But Lorenzen persisted. I began to waver, recalling the words of some Arkansans who'd known Barry Seal.
"I can arrest an old hillbilly out here with a pound of marijuana and a local judge and jury would send him to the penitentiary," a former sheriff at Mena in 1988 had said, "but a guy like Seal flies in and out with hundreds of pounds of cocaine and he stays free."
The prosecuting attorney there had avowed: "I believe that the activities of Mr. Seal came to be so valuable to the Reagan White House and so sensitive that no information concerning Seal's activities could be released to the public. The ultimate result was that not only Seal but all of his confederates and all of those who worked with or assisted him in illicit drug traffic were protected by the government."
And this, by the Internal Revenue Service agent who'd found evidence of money laundering at Mena: "There was a cover-up."
Nothing had changed with regard to Seal since those men spoke those words, except that the savage war on drugs had ground on, while Seal — whatever he was — remained a hidden but important part of its history. Finally, I told Lorenzen I would write the book; I would document as much as I could of Seal's secretive Arkansas years.
We agreed that the book would be called "The Mena File: Barry Seal's Ties to Drug Lords and U.S. Officials." Lorenzen commissioned a cover while I began my research by contacting the Arkansas State Police. I knew the agency had an extensive file on Seal because I'd read it decades earlier, shortly after Seal's murder. In fact, I still had a letter from the former director advising me, in case I'd planned to make copies, that the file held some 3,000 pages.
But now, three decades after Seal's murder, State Police spokesman Bill Sadler reported that he could locate no files on Seal. None. Arkansas's Freedom of Information Act requires the release of public records, but Sadler said that, in Seal's case, the agency was unable to do that. I protested, and after weeks of back-and-forth, Sadler reported that a file on Seal had been discovered. He eventually provided a packet of 409 pages. He said this was all the agency could release after duplicates and documents that are exempt from public disclosure were removed.
Even allowing for duplicates and legal exemptions, I would find the reduction of publicly available records, from 3,000 pages 20 years ago to just over 400 now, disturbing. My concern increases when the case is one of national interest that's also replete with political connections. As Sadler suggested, the state police in the past may have made too much available. On the other hand, if the grip on information about Seal has been tightened, the reason for this extra control might be traced to his earliest days in Arkansas.
By late 1982, when Seal moved his aircraft to Mena from his home base in Baton Rouge, federal agents had already identified him as "a major international narcotics trafficker." Police watching Mena's airport notified federal authorities that a fat man from Louisiana had begun frequenting an aircraft modification company there called Rich Mountain Aviation.
That same year, President Ronald Reagan appointed Asa Hutchinson, already a tough, anti-drug crusader, as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Arkansas. Wanting to keep tabs on Seal, Hutchinson ordered William Duncan, an investigator for the IRS, to watch for signs of money laundering around Mena resulting from Seal's presence.
Another investigator, Russell Welch of the State Police, was assigned to look for evidence of cocaine arriving there. Duncan and Welch both told me that being assigned to Seal ended up ruining their careers.
Welch said he began to suspect that something was amiss one night in December 1983, when he and several other law enforcement officers had staked out the airport, watching for Seal. He said they'd seen the smuggler and his co-pilot land and taxi to a hangar at Rich Mountain Aviation, where workers installed an illegal, extra fuel tank in the plane.
Welch said that Seal had taken off into the wintry night, fast and without lights. But what he remembered most was how surprised he, the FBI agents and the Arkansas Game and Fish officer who'd joined them had been that, although officers for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had met them at a motel in Mena, none had gone with them to the stakeout.
Seal had no criminal convictions at the time, but he did have a puzzling record. Ten years earlier, federal agents in Louisiana had caught him attempting to take off from an airport in Shreveport with a planeload of plastic explosives bound for Cuban ex-patriots in Mexico. <g class="gr_ gr_374 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Grammar multiReplace" id="374" data-gr-id="374">Seal</g> was charged with being part of a plot to overthrow Fidel Castro. But prosecutors abruptly dropped the case at the start of his trial. That event, relatively early in Seal's career, would later prompt speculation — unquestioned in Cruise's film — that he performed contract work for the Central Intelligence Agency. From later court records, we know that in April 1981, before Seal moved to Mena, DEA agents in Florida had caught him in a drug sting. We know that while his case there was pending, Seal agreed to become an informant for the DEA — but that the circumstances of that deal were also strange. In the summer of 1984, facing possible life in prison if convicted, he'd flown his Lear jet to Washington, D.C., where, in a meeting with top DEA officials, he'd established the terms that would allow him to remain free.
Duncan and Welch were not informed of Seal's change of status as they pursued their respective investigations. Throughout 1984, they had no idea that Seal was supposedly working for an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. So far as they could tell, he was a drug-runner continuing to run drugs, while the DEA remained, as both officers put it, "conspicuously absent" from Mena. The Arkansas lawmen, along with their peers in Louisiana, could scarcely have imagined all that Seal was up to that year.
From a variety of surviving court records, we know that DEA officials in Florida cooked up a plan for him to help them round up the leaders of Colombia's Medellín cartel in one dramatic sting. Suffice it to say that the plan turned into a catastrophic failure — one that exposed Seal's status as an informant to his former associates in the cartel.
With Seal's usefulness in that regard ended, he was put to another use. This time it was a political one — on behalf of Reagan's White House. Reagan wanted evidence that officials of Nicaragua's Sandinista government, which he opposed, were shipping cocaine into the U.S. After allowing CIA technicians to install hidden cameras in his C-123, Seal flew to Nicaragua and returned with photographs that he said showed Sandinista leaders helping load cocaine onto the plane.
But again, Seal was compromised. Someone who knew of the flight leaked word of it to a Washington newspaper. Seal's status as an informant was confirmed, placing his life at still greater risk.
After that, the justice department found yet another use for Seal, as U.S. attorneys began calling him to testify about his experiences with major drug dealers whom they were prosecuting. From Seal's testimony at some of those traffickers' trials, we know that he claimed to have grossed $750,000 per flight while he was smuggling for the cartel; that he continued to fly in drugs after becoming an informant; that he had smuggled about 6,000 pounds of cocaine into the U.S. during that period; and that for one of those flights alone the DEA had allowed him to keep the $575,000 he'd been paid.
But it's clear that by late 1984, Seal was getting worried. A man who had lived by secrets suddenly made the unthinkable move of agreeing to be interviewed by a reporter. Seal flew Louisiana TV reporter Jack Camp to Mena, where he allowed Camp to film him inside the C-123 as he talked about his work for the <g class="gr_ gr_367 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Punctuation only-del replaceWithoutSep" id="367" data-gr-id="367">DEA,</g> while pointing out the places where the CIA technicians had hidden their cameras.
It was only after Camp's interview aired on Baton Rouge television in late 1984 that law enforcement in Louisiana — and, quickly enough, Arkansas — accidentally learned of Seal's dual roles. But even now his status remained unclear, and federal officials weren't trying to help. <g class="gr_ gr_363 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Grammar multiReplace" id="363" data-gr-id="363">Seal</g> was still flying, apparently free, in both states, while ground crews, including workers at Rich Mountain Aviation, continued to work with him. Duncan and Welch focused their own investigations on the period before Seal became an informant.
In mid-1985, Duncan told Hutchinson that he had sworn statements from employees at Rich Mountain Aviation and Mena bankers about illegal cash deposits being made into area banks. With what he called this "direct evidence of money laundering," Duncan asked Hutchinson to subpoena 20 witnesses, all of whom, he said, <g class="gr_ gr_386 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Grammar multiReplace" id="386" data-gr-id="386">were</g> ready to testify before a federal grand jury. But Duncan said that Hutchinson balked and, in contrast to his conduct in other cases where Duncan had requested subpoenas, in this <g class="gr_ gr_387 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Punctuation only-ins replaceWithoutSep" id="387" data-gr-id="387">case</g> the U.S. attorney subpoenaed only three. Later, when Duncan was asked under oath in a deposition whether he believed there was a cover-up, he replied, "It was covered up."
In August 1985, shortly after Duncan's request for subpoenas, U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese flew to Fort Smith to meet with Hutchinson. DEA Administrator John C. Lawn was with him. While the nation's two drug officials were in town, they held a press conference with Hutchinson to announce a series of raids dubbed "Operation Delta-9," which they said <g class="gr_ gr_353 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Grammar multiReplace" id="353" data-gr-id="353">were</g> meant to eradicate home-grown marijuana. Although Fort Smith sits just 70 miles north of Mena, nobody mentioned Seal. No one even mentioned cocaine.
By then, though local investigators still did not know it, Seal had become a darling of the Department of Justice. In October 1985, the President's Commission on Organized Crime invited him to be the featured speaker at a symposium in the capital attended by several top U.S. law enforcement officers. The following month Hutchinson announced <g class="gr_ gr_346 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Punctuation only-del replaceWithoutSep" id="346" data-gr-id="346">that,</g> having decided to run for Congress, he would be resigning as U.S. attorney.
At first, it looked like Hutchinson's successor, J. Michael Fitzhugh, was ready to act on the cases related to Seal. In December 1985, Fitzhugh announced that he had subpoenaed Seal to testify at a grand jury session to be held in Hot Springs. In preparation, he sent Duncan to Baton Rouge to interview Seal, and the State Police sent Welch.
When I interviewed the investigators for my book, they told me that Seal seemed weary. He and his attorney fretted that Seal's deals from Florida would not protect him in Arkansas. But, after some dickering, Seal agreed to be sworn in. "I don't want to waste these men's time," he told his attorney, Lewis Unglesby. "They have come a long way in bad weather and it's Christmas."
In the recorded interview that followed, Seal acknowledged some, if not all, of his business with Rich Mountain Aviation. He told Duncan and Welch that he had warned the company's owner that he stood "a good chance of going to jail" for the illegal modifications Rich Mountain Aviation had performed on his planes and that the owner had "better get himself a lawyer and be ready to look at pleading guilty."
But five days before the grand jury was set to convene, Fitzhugh suddenly canceled Seal's appearance, due to what he termed Seal's "lack of credibility." Duncan and Welch were incredulous. By now they knew that Seal had been invited to the Washington symposium largely because of the respect he'd won from U.S. attorneys for his testimony at high-profile trials. Duncan and Welch could not understand — and Fitzhugh never explained — why, at the last minute, he'd suddenly deemed Seal's "credibility" insufficient in Arkansas.
<g class="gr_ gr_339 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Grammar multiReplace" id="339" data-gr-id="339">Seal</g> may not have intended to show up, anyway. The pressures on him had intensified since he'd agreed to testify against Jorge Ochoa, a cartel leader who was soon to be extradited to the U.S. To prevent that from happening, the cartel had placed a half-million-dollar contract on Seal's head.
And it worked. On Feb. 19, 1986, a group of Colombian gunmen murdered Seal in the parking lot of a halfway house in Baton Rouge, where a federal judge had ordered Seal to spend nights while on court-imposed probation.
Barely four weeks later, Reagan appeared on national television to explain his opposition to Nicaragua's Sandinista government. As part of that explanation, the president held up one of Seal's photographs from inside the C-123. The image was grainy but Reagan said that it showed officials of Nicaragua's Communist government loading cocaine onto a plane that was headed to the United States.
Reagan never mentioned Seal, and the photo's authenticity was soon challenged. Nevertheless, that televised moment captured the whirlwind into which Seal flew after his move to Arkansas: the intersection of drugs, Central American politics, the DEA, the CIA and the U.S. president.
We might never have known about any of that except for what happened on Oct. 5, 1986, less than eight months after Seal's murder. The C-123 cargo plane he'd kept at the airport at Mena was once again flying over Central America when a Nicaraguan soldier shot it down. Papers found with the downed aircraft linked it to members of Reagan's White House staff and with that, the political upheaval known as the Iran-Contra scandal burst into world news. Questions about the plane led to questions about Seal, and, inevitably, some of the fallout reached Hutchinson. The former U.S. attorney had lost his initial race for Congress, and by 1996, when he was running again, many Arkansans were trying to sort out his connection to Seal.
When someone at a campaign appearance asked the candidate if there'd been a cover-up at Mena, Hutchinson replied: "All I can tell you is I started the investigation. I pursued the investigation, and I was called to run for office. And after <g class="gr_ gr_345 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Punctuation only-ins replaceWithoutSep" id="345" data-gr-id="345">that</g> I was out of the loop." Hutchinson won his 1996 congressional race and two subsequent elections. He resigned from Congress in 2001 to accept an appointment by President George W. Bush as head of the DEA.
After a subsequent appointment at the Department of Homeland Security, Hutchinson returned to Arkansas, where he became the state's governor in 2015.
Soon after taking office, Hutchinson installed veteran DEA agent Bill Bryant as head of the State Police. I came along a few months later, asking to see the agency's file on Seal. When I learned how much less was available than reportedly had been in the past, I wrote to Hutchinson, hoping to ask about the difference, but he did not respond.
Bill Clinton, who was governor throughout Seal's time at Mena, has also had little to say about the smuggler's presence. While governor, Clinton was drawn uncomfortably close to questions relating to cocaine after police arrested his half-brother, Roger Clinton, on charges of distributing cocaine, and Roger Clinton reported that he'd gotten the drug from his boss, Dan Lasater, a Little Rock bond trader and financial supporter of Clinton.
<g class="gr_ gr_359 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Grammar multiReplace" id="359" data-gr-id="359">Seal</g> was dead by late <g class="gr_ gr_360 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Punctuation only-del replaceWithoutSep" id="360" data-gr-id="360">1986,</g> when Lasater was indicted, but the FBI's investigation of Lasater produced at least one intriguing connection between the two. Billy Earle Jr. had been in the co-pilot's seat on that night in December 1983 when Seal flew into Mena to have an extra fuel tank installed. The following year, when Earle was arrested in Louisiana, Welch went there to interview him.
Earle told Welch that immediately after "the new plumbing" was installed, Seal planned to fly "to a place in southern Colombia, bordering Peru, and pick up 200 kilos of cocaine." He said the trip was for an "operation to be staged out of Carver Ranch in Belize." But, Earle said, that plan had fallen through.
In the fall of 1986, when FBI agents were investigating Dan Lasater, they questioned his personal pilot. That man reported that he had flown Lasater and his business partner, Patsy Thomasson, "to Belize to look at a horse farm that was for sale by a Roy Carver." He said that flight had taken place on Feb. 8, 1984, within weeks of the aborted trip Seal had reportedly planned to the same location. Lasater and Roger Clinton both pleaded guilty to drug charges and served time in prison. After Bill Clinton's election as president, he placed Thomasson in charge of the White House Office of Administration.
Though accusations abound, no link has ever been established between Clinton and Seal. Still, on the few occasions when the smuggler's name has come up, Clinton has sounded as "out of the loop" as Hutchinson.
At one point, while Clinton was governor, the local prosecuting attorney for Mena had attempted to act where U.S. attorneys Hutchinson and Fitzhugh had not. Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Charles E. Black wanted to impanel a state grand jury to consider evidence that people at Rich Mountain Aviation had abetted Seal's drug-trafficking operation. Realizing that such a case would cost more than his district could afford, Black had asked the governor's office for a grant of $25,000. But Black said he never received a response.
Bill Alexander, one of Arkansas's long-term Democratic congressmen, supported Black's idea. Alexander told me that he wrote to Clinton personally, repeating Black's request and explaining that questions about Seal needed to be "resolved and laid to rest." But he, too, said that he did not recall receiving a response.
Yet, later on, when a reporter asked Clinton what he had known about Seal, the governor had a somewhat different recollection. He said that, although he had authorized payment of $25,000 to fund the grand jury Black had requested, "Nothing ever came of that."
On the subject of Seal, the usually astute governor had come across as unusually uninformed. A citizens' group called the Arkansas Committee suspected that state and federal authorities had agreed to protect Seal in Arkansas. Disturbed by Clinton's apparent disinterest, members of the group at one point unfurled a 10-foot-long banner at the state Capitol that asked: WHY IS CLINTON PROTECTING BUSH? In 1992, when Clinton and George H.W. Bush opposed each other for president, neither candidate mentioned Seal.
After Clinton's election as president, when White House correspondent Sarah McClendon asked him what he knew about Mena, he remained adamant but vague as he mischaracterized Black's investigation. "It was primarily a matter for federal jurisdiction," he said. "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, and everybody who's ever looked into it knows that."
Almost a decade after Seal's death, U.S. Rep. James A. Leach (R-Iowa) took an interest in what one of the people he questioned, CIA Director John Deutch, later described as "allegations of money laundering and other activities" in Mena. As chairman of the House Banking Committee, Leach was well positioned to investigate such claims. He told reporters: "We have more than sufficient documentation that improprieties occurred at Mena. This isn't a made-up issue. There are grounds to pursue it very seriously."
In a letter to the DEA, Leach asked the agency to provide all documents relating to "possible ties between activities at Mena Airport and the use of a private airstrip at a similarly remote location near Taos, New Mexico, at a ski resort called Angel Fire" — a resort owned by Lasater. Leach wrote: "Published reports indicate that DEA conducted at least two separate investigations of alleged money laundering and drug trafficking in or around Angel Fire, the first in approximately 1984, and the second in 1988-1989." He said the second investigation was triggered by allegations from former Angel Fire employees "that the resort was the focal point for 'a <g class="gr_ gr_383 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Grammar multiReplace" id="383" data-gr-id="383">large</g> controlled substance smuggling operation and large-scale money laundering activity.' "
Leach added: "The alleged activity at Angel Fire was roughly contemporaneous with the money laundering and narcotics trafficking alleged to have taken place in or around Mena Airport during the period 1982-1986." Leach sent congressional investigators to Arkansas. And he asked the U.S. Customs Service what it knew about "the disposition of potentially ill-gotten gains by Seal or his associates," especially with regard to "a piece of property in Belize known variously as the Cotter, Cutter or Carver Ranch," because, "Barry Seal allegedly used this property in his narcotics trafficking operations and attempted to buy it in 1983."
Little more was heard of Leach's investigation for the next three years. Finally, in 1999, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal inquired about its status. Leach's spokesman responded that investigators were "putting the finishing touches" on their report.
But that was the last the public heard. The House Banking Committee's investigation into what Leach called the "improprieties" relating to Mena has never been released.
And my book, "The Mena File?" It was not published, either. I'd completed the manuscript, with hundreds of supporting notes, by this time last year. Lorenzen, who had prepared the index, was pleased. The book was listed in the University of Arkansas Press catalog and for presale on sites such as Amazon.com.
It was time for an attorney to read the manuscript to make sure it contained nothing libelous. This vetting process is standard for books of contemporary nonfiction, especially those involving crimes. Having been through the process with publishers of my other books, I understood the need and was ready. I was also unconcerned, in part because I'd been careful, but also because the most serious allegations — those concerning Rich Mountain Aviation — had already been vetted years ago for a section about Seal in my book, "The Boys on the Tracks."
But I was in for a shock. Lorenzen told me that his boss, David Stricklin, the ASI's director, had suddenly expressed some "concerns" about the book. Lorenzen further reported that, while these concerns were legal in nature, Stricklin had said the ASI could not afford to have the manuscript vetted.
Neither the decision nor Lorenzen's explanation that "we're just a shoestring press" made sense. From the start, the book was intended to be a solid work of Arkansas history buoyed by a major Hollywood film. What's more, Random House had already contracted to buy its audio rights and paid <g class="gr_ gr_316 gr-alert gr_spell gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim ContextualSpelling ins-del" id="316" data-gr-id="316">an</g> advance.
From a business point of view, the ASI's position defied logic. I asked Lorenzen if the newly arisen concerns might be political rather than financial, but was told nothing more. Lorenzen proposed rescinding our contract. Seeing no reasonable way forward, I agreed. As I'd written the book without an advance, the deal's undoing was simple.
OFFICIAL TRAILER:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEBIJRAkujM
By now I've had a year to reflect on my experiences in writing about Seal, as well as those of Duncan, Welch, Black, Alexander, members of the Arkansas Committee, and others who've tried to shed light on his time in Arkansas. None of us much succeeded.
So I'm glad that at least Hollywood has found Seal's "true lies" worth exploring. Too many secrets have been kept for too long; too much important history has been hidden, lost or destroyed. Let's hope that Cruise's 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.
Mara Leveritt is <g class="gr_ gr_312 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Grammar only-ins doubleReplace replaceWithoutSep" id="312" data-gr-id="312">author</g> of "The Boys on the Tracks," "Devil's Knot" and "Dark Spell."
https://m.arktimes.com/arkansas/whos-afraid-of-barry-seal/Content?oid=9950116

That might be the longest post ever!

Never heard of any of it. Will see the movie though.

Word on the street says Bill Clinton had a hand in that whole thing.

indeed he did, "governor" Clinton at the time I believe

That's probably why it has been 'hushed-up' for so long Tudo....The Clinton connection.

I saw that this film with Tom Cruise is opening in my local movie house soon and I'm going to see it.

Good movie is "The Palermo Connection" with James Belushi. about a fellow running for mayor of NYC who goes to Palermo with his wife and subsequently set up........anyway, way way way ahead of it's time in telling WHY it's all illegal and all the money that is taken from all of us, in all the countries and how their economies......anyway, just try and find it in any medium other than VHS


IN fact I'm not aware of any movie since that has illuminated that terrain so to speak. Hmmm


I got one


p.s. Oh but it CAN be found in Italian lol

I've read a variety of -recent- articles about this (don't know if that was you or not) and recall some of it from years back.

Laos and Air America, Afghani dope in the early 80s (during the Mujahedeen's tiffs with the Soviets), the current waist-deep supply of Afghani Black tar, even up here in Alaska, and the cocaine that was very available in relatively pure state in the early 80s, all point to the 'cash-and-carry' benefits of black market drugs for those who need to fund operations or move weapons.

And in every case, which ever Administration is/was in charge, the response was nearly always the same; "A handful of rogue agents/personnel/military members," yadda yadda, yadda.

I recall the capture of the CIA's 'Dirty Tricks' book, the press and public being booted from Committee hearings when Ollie North was asked specifically about 'shadow governments' in our Country, etc.

Between what our government has done or lied about in half the world or more, when any official states I/we should be ashamed for growing a plant, I laugh out loud at the absurdity. They work for or employ murderers, propagandists, and professional liars, rubbing shoulders with reprehensible 2nd and 3rd world despots, who promise them strategic access and/or corporate benefits, but -I-/we should be ashamed for good gardening, of which the end results causes people to laugh, sleep, or eat a bit too much.

It's a MAD, MAD world!!

Great post Tudo.....only thing is it needs tidying up a bit, put into proper paragraphs to break it up to look more easily readable.

Gypsy Nirvana said:

Great post Tudo.....only thing is it needs tidying up a bit, put into proper paragraphs to break it up to look more easily readable.

Click to expand...

I agree. I started double spacing between paragraphs.

Lito and Ache were devastated when I told them I was quitting and asked if I knew of anyone who would fly? They had all been exceptionally nice to me and it was only fair I should help them. I called Barry and he flew down to Miami and we met in the Omni Hotel. I offered to buy the planes and pay him two-thousand dollars per kilo to fly for me.

Barry agreed to the deal but didn’t want to fly without a copilot. I argued that he could load another 100 kilos without a copilot. However, he insisted. He had a friend named Emil Camp who was in prison in Honduras and for $20,000 he could have him released in a couple of days.

He also wanted a Panther to fly the loads. These were Piper Navajos, converted from the firewall forward with new 450 horse power motors and four blade props with Q-tip ends to cut down on noise. One equipped with radar, storm scope and a new gyro navigation system cost between $350,000 and $400,000. I ended up buying seven of these haulers for both Barry and Jerry who also flew for me on the same deal.
Barry flew to Honduras and returned a few days later with Emil, who wasn’t near the pilot Barry was. I suspect they had become good friends while in prison and Barry wanted to help him. Most men prefer to have a partner or co-pilot, I don’t. Whenever he becomes scared his fear radiates and contaminates me.


My favorite landing strip was a small airport way out in the pines of Southern Louisiana where I paid the owner ten thousand dollars per landing. My other choice was on interstate 10 anywhere in Louisiana or Texas where it was closed for construction. Barry didn't even want to hear of my places. He would only land at Mena, Arkansas where Governor William Jefferson Clinton ruled with wife Hillary. Barry said he was covered one hundred percent, right to the very top; that is was impossible for him to be arrested. I balked at his bravado and wondered how you could guarantee one hundred percent? Even with bribes, which were the norm at this level of operation, you could never guarantee one hundred percent. I was soon to learn that when Barry said he was having, "lunch with the Gov," he wasn't joking.


The landing fee there was $50,000. I can guess it was spread around through the Sherriff, on up the chain. I never bothered asking, I knew how things worked. It was no secret Bill and Hillary Clinton were up to their necks in mischief in the state of Arkansas. In any case, I had to cough up the money every time Barry landed at Mena and he must have done that at least thirty times on my watch. I found out much later he was doing far more than that. While I languished in prison, Barry kept flying and began operations in a much larger aircraft that was registered to the DEA and CIA. At times he was carrying over one and a half tons of cocaine in a single trip on a C-126 military transport aircraft dubbed, 'The Fat Lady'. Barry was right in the center of one of the greatest political scandals of the last century - Iran/Contra. Illegal arms shipments flew out of Mena, Arkansas and landed in Honduras where the arms were then transported to anti-Communist forces in Nicaragua. Then, the same plane landed in Nicaragua at a military airbase, loaded cocaine, then flew right back into Mena, Arkansas. Tons and tons of cocaine and money.

No one said, "Just say no." No one in the White House anyway. Nor Mena, Arkansas. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the name 'Barry Seal' and 'Mena' would soar to such notoriety in the years to come.
But for now, early in his career with the Medellin Cartel, Barry went to work for me and flew just as fast as I paid him. This doubled my risk as I was paying out cash for the cartel before I was paid. Nevertheless, I had to pay him before he would fly. Barry bitched and moaned about this and that. In one box containing a million dollars I placed a package of Stay Free Mini-Pads with a big pink bow. He thought it was so funny that he made a place on his mantel piece for it.


Barry was a likeable fellow. We met one night at the Omni Hotel. Marrie, Miriam and baby Rhett were there and we all went to dinner at the Festival Restaurant in Coral Gables. When we returned all the rooms were sold out, so Barry spent the night with us. There were two double beds in the room and Barry stripped down to his striped shorts and T-shirt and made himself at home. During the night Rhett wanted a bottle. Barry laid him on his big belly and gave him the bottle, smacking and carrying on saying, “It’s sooo good, ain’t it Rhett?”

Before Barry was fully up and running and I was fully retired, I would have to work with him for a while, flying the southern Colombian end while Barry flew the northern end of operations into Mena. I'd arranged to meet 'halfway' at the Carver ranch in Belize and transfer the quarter ton of coke on the clay airstrip.
This weekly trip began with me flying my Aero Commander turbo prop out of Montego Bay, Jamaica, and meeting a Cessna 180 over the Colombian jungle, just above the El Banco radio tower. I would descend from 30,000ft and slow down to 150mph at tree top level and follow the little 180 right into the jungle airstrip.


Quickly loaded, I would have my windshield wiped, a coffee, then be right out of there.
At a climb rate of 5,000 ft. per minute I was soon up at 30,000 ft. and able to reach Barry via radio, 2,000 miles away, 12,000 ft. over Louisiana. Barry flew in his favorite 'Panther' converted Piper Navajo and we would speak in code to time our arrival at the Carver ranch. "One hundred out," would crackle sharply over the radio. "Seventy five out, descending," I'd reply. We'd land within minutes of each other and pull up outside the home of Mr. Cotter. We'd greet each other and I'd help refuel and transport the load into Barry's Panther.


At times when I landed the clay strip was wet and not being used to prop pitch and the idiosyncrasies of the Aero Commander, I'd end up sideways down the run way with Barry laughing at me sloshing this way and that in the mud.
With the load transferred, I would fly back to Montego Bay then on to Miami, while Barry would fly to Mena, Arkansas, and on into infamy.

https://www.facebook.com/SmugglerBook/posts/1683017541732392

On April 8, 1984 Seal flew to Medillin, Columbia, with Felix
Bates, ostensibly setting up a sting. The courts are not yet
aware that Barry may "roll over" to gain consideration for
his sentencing. In fact, Barry has not yet appeared in Judge
Gonzales' court to face his other indictment. That won't occur
until May, 14, 1984. On April 22, 1984 Seal flew to Panama,
still working on the sting. Still, neither court is aware of what
Barry is doing. On May 14, 1984, Seal enters guilty plea before
Judge Gonzales. On May 22, 1984 Seal flew to Panama. On
May 23, 1984, Seal returned from Panama, to Opa-locka Airfield,
where there is no Customs check. He is late for a court appearance
before Judge Roettger, on this same date. On May 24, 1984,
Seal is sentenced by Judge Roettger for the Feb. 17, 1984 conviction.
Seal receives two consecutive 5 year sentences for conspiracy and
using
a telephone to commit a crime. Seal is put in jail. On May 25, 1984,
Agent Jacobson and Assistant US Attorney Kellner go before
Judge Roettger and tell him that Seal has been cooperating on a major
drug sting and if the sentence is carried out, they will have to
terminate an important drug investigation. They put the judge in
a difficult position. Judge Roettger is unhappy with the way
they have handled this and tells them so; however, in the interest
of curtailing cocaine traffic into this country, the judge amends
his sentence, Seal enters into the second of three plea agreements,
and is released. Judge Roettger's plea agreement is the second
for Seal, even though it was the first court appearance.
There was plenty of time to discuss the roll-over with
the judge before sentencing had been carried out. Although
I have my own opinions, I have never been offered an explanation
for this timing. It's almost like Seal's release was extorted
from the judge. No matter how good a snitch might appear,
when you get access to them because they've been arrested
and want to try to stay out of jail, you still have to deal with
the court once their arrest has been litigated. Seal would have
done himself a lot better, if he had rolled over before going
to trial. I assume that he was hoping to be acquitted and then
continue with cocaine smuggling.
Nobody else in Seal's organization is mentioned in the plea
agreements.

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MENA/welch.html

This all came out a long time ago in a book called,
"Whiteout, the CIA, drugs and the press"

"The political rise of the Clintons has been monetarily fueled by a man linked to one of the biggest banking scandals in the nation’s history. Arkansas financier and political king-maker Jackson Stephens, with his son Warren, helped raise more than $100,000 for Clinton. More important, Stephens’ Worthen National Bank extended Bill Clinton a $2 million line of credit in January 1992, when the campaign was reeling under multiple allegations of adultery.

It was Jackson Stephens who brokered the arrival of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)–the bank later identified as an institution of preference for global criminals and drug peddlers–into this country in 1977. He steered the bank’s founder, Hassan Abedi, toward Jimmy Carter’s budget director, Bert Lance, whose bank an Abedi front man took over. Stephens then helped clear the ground, according to SEC documents, for Abedi’s secret takeover of First American Bankshares. In the wake of BCCI’s downfall, these institutions are gravely weakened; other U.S. banks secretly taken over by BCCI–including CenTrust, the biggest S&L in Florida, and Independence Bank of Encino–collapsed, leaving taxpayers holding the multi-billion dollar bag.

Just as the BCCI trail heads back toward Arkansas and a prime cash register for the Clintons, so too does another long-running and explosive scandal within the state, involving money-laundering, drug-running and support for right-wing insurgents backed by the the CIA.
By the mid-1980s, Arkansas was a crucial link in the contra war against Nicaragua being masterminded from Washington. One scheme for maintaining a cover-up for Oliver North’s network was, it appears, played out in the Governor’s mansion occupied by Bill Clinton."

https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/11/clintons-contras-and-cocaine/

^^^^ The recent article(s) I read had to do with one of the primary journalists who reported on this, and followed up, relating how his professional life/career was systematically destroyed by folks from various Gov offices, involving antics that included intimidating his sources into either not speaking with him, recanting their earlier reports, or otherwise sabotaging his ability to follow up.

This was from a -recent- (follow-up) story sent by a friend over-seas, who stays up on U.S. news, as he's an expatriate.

I love this kind of stuff. It's really interesting to hear of the Arkansas/Clinton connection, that's not something I'd heard much on previously.

I also recently watched this movie, wasn't particularly informative and quite Hollywood, but still enjoyable. Wasn't pro-government though so that's a plus.

Another great documentary regarding the CIAs involvement with the Contras and smuggling is 'Freeway: Crack in the System' about Rick Ross, his involvement with Nicaragua, and subsequent setup by the government. It focus a lot on Rick and his associates, but also touches on the journalist who uncovered the whole ordeal and the campaign to discredit him, which essentially lead to his suicide.

There's also another great book written by an English guy, about the history of the illegal cocaine trade, that contains a lot of info I haven't found elsewhere. I'm completely blanking on the title, but will dig through my library and post it if I can find it.

I have a feeling in the near future, we're going to be hearing very similar stories coming out of the middle east and the US's 'war on terror'. In a way it's a little disheartening, but also very important for people to know.

.....................

Brother Nature said:

I have a feeling in the near future, we're going to be hearing very similar stories coming out of the middle east and the US's 'war on terror'. In a way it's a little disheartening, but also very important for people to know.

Click to expand...

A family member is involved in opioid treatment. Even a number of the arctic villages are flooded with various opioids, to include Afghani black tar heroin.

The Khyber Pass is wired so tightly by NSA and CIA satellite, as well as others, that I strongly suspect if a cockroach farts up there, someone in Langley or Yuma hears it over a head-set, or sees the act on a screen.

No one's taking vacations to Kabal.. No one that I can think of, anyway. NGOs, State Dept., and Military are the primary traffic in or out by air.

When I raised the comparison of Air America in Laos, and Nicaragua's/El Salvador's/Honduras' weapons in, dope out, in a newspaper comment section a number of years ago, I was called a troglodyte by one overly-patriotic numb-nut.

The very next morning, to my vindication, a report appeared on the news about 55 or 56 military personnel being investigated for drug trafficking, linked to Afghanistan.

But I'll wager my genitals on those investigated, or even perhaps indicted, having nothing to do with the main flow. Mercenaries and others in far off places have seemingly enjoyed Uncle Sam's participation in quid pro quo weapons-and-dope traffic for a long time. When they need a sacrificial lamb, they seem to come up with free-lancers, sometimes enlisted, who had nothing or little to do with the greater volume. Nixon referred to them as "A few rogue agents," if I recall correctly. The Reagan Administration/GHWB had similar discounting adjectives when the 'Dirty Tricks Book' was captured.

If it weren't directly fueling death and destruction, generated by folks claiming to represent me, in places we simply don't belong, I'd have little problem with the entrepreneurial aspect of the business; 'live and let live.' But the hypocrisy, shallowness, and coldness of these MoFos tells me they ought to rot in Hell.

Im not going to go see it, it looks like Cruise turned it into a comedy but it is far from that in real life. By the way the Colombian that worked for Griselda that blew his brains out in Baton Rouge just died in prison in Angola of natural causes.
I know Roger Reaves, and I write to him in Australia where hopefully they will free him. and Barry started flying for Roger.
The real story of Barry places him in indirect involvement with players from the Kennedy assassination by the way.
I was hoping that they would put the truth out about Bill Clinton accepting cash and product bribes for using the Mena airport but of course they whitewashed the whole thing. Bush, Clinton, Poindexter, North, Reagan... I imagine they were never brought up in the whole sordid affair that once again proves that the cocaine epidemic was helped along by the same people that proclaimed to be wanting to stop it. Makes me want to puke.

After Barry was murdered his wife and family moved to Santa Cruz to get away from it all.
They rented a small house next to a close friend that sold Cannabis, the Original Haze.
The family was shattered and destitute and scared they were next. I do not know what happened to them after I left the USA soon afterward.

Legalize all drugs, take the profits away, teach the ignorant that hard drugs are poison shit.
If you like any hard drug you better stay away from it, if you do not like them stay away from them all.
-SamS

A recent article from the book referenced by Water, above..

A recent article from the book referenced by Water, above..

Credit, and links included.

The articled below is, in part, an elaboration of portions of the book referenced above by Water.

It is testament to isolated incidents not being isolated incidents, and my personal belief that, typically, "Zebras don't change their stripes."

This more recent article is entitled,

'Armies, Addicts, and Spooks; the CIA in Vietnam and Loas'


Lucien Conein himself was of Corsican origin, and as part of his intelligence work had maintained ties to Corsican gangsters in Southeast Asia and in Marseilles. His role in the White House drug war team appears to have been not so much one of advancing an effective interdiction of drug supplies as in protecting CIA assets who were tied to the drug trade. For example, one of the CIA’s first recommendations – an instinctive reflex, really – was a “campaign of assassination” against global drug lords. The CIA argued that there were only a handful of heroin kingpins and that it would be easy to eliminate all of them. A White House policy memo from 1971 records this piece of Agency advice: “With 150 key assassinations the entire heroin-refining industry can be thrown into chaos.”



September 29, 2017
by Jeffrey St. Clair - Alexander Cockburn

At 7:30 a.m., on March 16, 1968, Task Force Barker descended on the small hamlet of My Lai in the Quang Nai province of South Vietnam. Two squads cordoned off the village and one, led by Lieutenant William Calley, moved in and, accompanied by US Army Intelligence officers, began to slaughter all the inhabitants. Over the next eight hours US soldiers methodically killed 504 men, women and children.

As the late Ron Ridenhour, who first exposed the massacre, said years later to one of the present authors, “Above My Lai were helicopters filled with the entire command staff of the brigade, division and task force. All three tiers in the chain of command were literally flying overhead while it was going on. It takes a long time to kill 600 people. It’s a dirty job, you might say. These guys were flying overhead from 7:30 in the morning, when the unit first landed and began to move into those hamlets. They were there at least two hours, at 500 feet, 1000 feet and 1500 feet.”

The cover-up of this operation began almost from the start. The problem wasn’t the massacre itself: polls right after the event showed 65 percent of Americans approved of the US action. The cover-up was instead to disguise the fact that My Lai was part of the CIA killing program called Operation Phoenix. As Douglas Valentine writes in his brilliant book, The Phoenix Program,

the My Lai massacre was a result of Phoenix, the ‘jerry-built’ counter-terror program that provided an outlet for the repressed fears and anger of the psyched-up men of Task Force Barker. Under the aegis of neutralizing the infrastructure, old men, women and children became the enemy. Phoenix made it as easy to shoot a Vietnamese child as it was to shoot a sparrow in a tree. The ammunition was faulty intelligence provided by secret agents harboring grudges – in violation of the agreement that Census Grievance intelligence would not be provided to the police. The trigger was the blacklist.
​

The My Lai operation was principally developed by two men, the CIA’s Paul Ramsdell and a Colonel Khien, the Quang Nai province chief. Operating under cover of the US Agency for International Development, Ramsdell headed the Phoenix program in Quang Nai province, where it was his task to prepare lists of suspected NLF (called by the Americans “Viet Cong”) leaders, organizers and sympathizers. Ramsdell would then pass these lists on to the US Army units that were carrying out the killings. In the case of My Lai, Ramsdell told Task Force Barker’s intelligence officer, Captain Koutac, that “anyone in that area was considered a VC sympathizer because they couldn’t survive in that area unless they were sympathizers.”
Ramsdell had acquired this estimate from Col. Khien, who had his own agenda. For one thing, his family had been hit hard by the Tet offensive launched by the NLF earlier in the year. In addition, the NLF had seriously disrupted his business enterprises. Khien was notorious for being one of South Vietnam’s most corrupt chieftains, an officer who had his hand in everything from payroll fraud to prostitution. But Khien apparently made his really big money from heroin sales to US soldiers.

For the CIA, the need to cover its involvement in the My Lai massacre became acute in August 1970, when Sergeant David Mitchell, a member of Task Force Barker, was put on trial for killing dozens of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. Mitchell claimed that the My Lai operation had been conducted under the supervision of the CIA. The Agency’s lawyer, John Greaney, successfully prevented Mitchell’s lawyers from lodging subpoenas against any Agency personnel. But despite such maneuvers, high CIA and army brass were worried that the truth might trickle out, and so General William Peers of US Army Intelligence was given the task – so to speak – of straightening out the furniture.

Peers was a former CIA man whose ties to Agency operations in Southeast Asia dated back to World War II, when he supervised the OSS’s Detachment 101, the Burma campaign that often operated under the cover of Shan opium trafficking. Peers had also served as CIA station chief in Taiwan in the early 1950s, when the Agency was backing the exiled KMT supremo, Chiang Kai-shek and his henchman Li Mi, Peers had helped design the pacification strategy for South Vietnam and was a good friend of Evan Parker, the CIA officer who headed ICEX (Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation), the command structure that oversaw Phoenix and other covert killing operations. It’s not surprising, then, that the Peers investigation found no CIA fingerprints on the massacre and instead placed the blame on the crazed actions of the enlisted men and junior officers of Task Force Barker.

In the immediate aftermath of My Lai the polls may have shown 65 percent approval by Americans, but it’s doubtful whether such momentary enthusiasm would have survived the brute facts of what Operation Phoenix involved. As Bart Osborn, a US Army Intelligence officer collecting names of suspects in the Phoenix Program testified before Congress in 1972,

I never knew in the course of all of these operations any detainee to live through his interrogation. They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died and the majority were either tortured to death or things like thrown out of helicopters.
​

One of the more outlandish efforts to protect the true instigators of My Lai came during the 1970 congressional hearings run by Senator Thomas Dodd (father of the present US senator from Connecticut). Dodd was trying to pin the blame for My Lai on drug use by US soldiers. He had seized on this idea after seeing a CBS news item showing a US soldier smoking marijuana in the jungle after a fire-fight. The senator forthwith convened hearings of his subcommittee on juvenile deliquency, and his staff contacted Ron Ridenhour, the man who had first brought the massacre to light prior to Seymour Hersh’s journalistic exposé. Ridenhour had long made it his quest to show that My Lai was planned from the top, so he agreed to testify on the condition that he would not have to deal with any foolishness about blaming the murder of over 500 people on dope.

But no sooner had Ridenhour presented himself in the hearing chamber than Dodd began to issue pronouncements about the properties of marijuana so outlandish that Harry Anslinger himself would have approved. Ridenhour got nowhere, denounced the proceedings and expostulated outside the hearing room that “Dodd is stacking the evidence. Nobody mentioned drugs at My Lai after it happened and they would have been looking for any excuse. Many, many Americans are looking for any reason other than a command decision.”

Although Dodd had simply wanted to blame My Lai on drugs and move on, the press now began to take an interest in the whole question of drug use in Vietnam by US forces. The attention prompted a congressional delegation to travel to Vietnam headed by Rep. Robert Steele, a Connecticut Republican, and Rep. Morgan Murphy, a Democrat from Illinois. They spent a month in Vietnam talking to soldiers and medics and returned with a startling conclusion. “The soldier going to Vietnam,” Steele said, “runs a far greater risk of becoming a heroin addict than a combat casualty.” They estimated that as many as 40,000 soldiers in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. A follow-up investigation by the New York Times reckoned that the count might be even higher – perhaps as many as 80,000.

The Pentagon naturally preferred a lower figure, putting the total number of heroin addicts at between 100 and 200. But by this time President Nixon had begun to mistrust the flow of numbers out of the Defense Department and dispatched his White House domestic policy council chief, Egil Krogh Jr., to Vietnam for another look. Krogh didn’t spend time with the generals, but headed out into the field where he watched soldiers openly light up joints and Thai sticks and brag about the purity of the grades of heroin they were taking. Krogh came back with the news that as many as 20 percent of the US troops were heroin users. The figure made a big impression on Richard Nixon, who readily appreciated that although Americans might be prepared to see their sons die on the front lines battling communism, they would be far less enthusiastic at the news that hundreds of thousands of these same sons would be returning home as heroin addicts.

Partially in response to these findings Nixon recruited the CIA into his drug war. The man the Agency chose to put forward as coordinator with the White House was Lucien Conein, a veteran of the CIA’s station in Saigon, where he had been involved in the coup in 1963 that saw South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem, assassinated along with his brother Ngo Dhin Nhu. (The Diems were regarded by President Kennedy and his advisers as insufficiently robust in pursuing the war. What the CIA proposed, local South Vietnamese generals disposed, and the Diems died in a hail of machine-gun bullets.) At the time of his death Nhu was one of the largest heroin brokers in South Vietnam. His supplier was a Corsican living in Laos named Bonaventure Francisi.

Lucien Conein himself was of Corsican origin, and as part of his intelligence work had maintained ties to Corsican gangsters in Southeast Asia and in Marseilles. His role in the White House drug war team appears to have been not so much one of advancing an effective interdiction of drug supplies as in protecting CIA assets who were tied to the drug trade. For example, one of the CIA’s first recommendations – an instinctive reflex, really – was a “campaign of assassination” against global drug lords. The CIA argued that there were only a handful of heroin kingpins and that it would be easy to eliminate all of them. A White House policy memo from 1971 records this piece of Agency advice: “With 150 key assassinations the entire heroin-refining industry can be thrown into chaos.” On that list were relatively small-time players and those without any links to the CIA-backed KMT forces that controlled the crucial supply lines out of the Shan States. This discretion was nothing new, since there had been an agreement between Anslinger’s Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (the forerunner of the DEA) and the CIA not to run any of Anslinger’s agents in Southeast Asia, lest it discommode the CIA’s complex living arrangements in the region.

Another tactic advanced by Conein was to contaminate US cocaine supplies with methedrine, the theory being that users would react violently when dosing themselves with this potion and turn violently on their suppliers. There’s no evidence that either of these schemes – assassination or methedrine adulteration – was ever put into play. But the Agency was able to convince the Nixon administration that its eradication effort should be directed at Turkey rather than Southeast Asia, said effort culminating in an attempt at export substitution, with opium growers in Anatolia being helped to set up a factory to produce bicycles.

The CIA was well aware that Turkey provided only between 3 and 5 percent of the world’s supplies of raw opium at that time. In fact, the Agency had prepared an internal survey that estimated that 60 percent of the opium on the world market was coming from Southeast Asia and noted the precise whereabouts of the four largest heroin labs in the region, in villages in Laos, Burma and Thailand. This report was leaked to the New York Times, whose reporter relayed the main conclusions, without realizing that these villages were all next to CIA stations with the labs being run by people on the CIA’s payroll.

In April 1971, the CIA’s ties to the opium kings of Southeast Asia nearly sparked a major international confrontation. Crown Prince Sopsaisana had been appointed Laotian ambassador to France. On arrival in Paris, the prince angrily announced that some of his copious luggage was missing. He berated French airport officials, who meekly promised they would restore his property. In fact the prince’s bags had been intercepted by French customs after a tip that Sopsaisana was carrying high-grade heroin; indeed, his luggage contained 60 kilos of heroin, worth $13.5 million, then the largest drug seizure in French history. The prince had planned to ship his drug cargo on to New York. The CIA station in Paris convinced the French to cover up the affair, although the prince was not given back his dope. It hardly mattered. Sopsaisana returned two weeks later to Vientiane to nearly inexhaustible supplies of the drug.

Why the CIA interest in protecting the largest trafficker nabbed on the French soil? The opium used to manufacture the prince’s drugs had been grown in the highlands of Laos. It was purchased by a Hmong general, Vang Pao, who commanded the CIA’s secret air base in Laos, where it was processed into high-grade Number 4 heroin in labs just down the block from CIA quarters. The heroin was then flown to Vientiane on Vang Pao’s private airline, which consisted of two C-47s given to him by the CIA.
Vang Pao was the leader of a CIA-sponsored 30,000-man force of Hmong, which by 1971 consisted mostly of teenagers, fighting the Pathet Lao Communist forces. The Hmong had a reputation for fierceness, in part due to a century of conflict with the Chinese, who had, back in the nineteenth century, driven them into Laos after taking over their opium fields in Hunan. As one Hmong put it to Christopher Robbins, author of Air America, “They say we are a people who like to fight, a cruel people, enemy of everybody, always changing our region and being happy nowhere. If you want to know the truth about our people, ask the bear who is hurt why he defends himself, ask the dog who is kicked why he barks, ask the deer who is chased why he changes mountains.” The Hmong practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, with two crops – rice and opium, the first for sustenance and the latter for medicinal and trading purposes.

Vang Pao was born in 1932 in a Laotian hamlet called Nong Het. At the age of thirteen he served as an interpreter for the French forces then fighting the Japanese. Two years later he was battling Viet Minh incursions into Laos in the First Indochina War. He underwent officer training at the French military academy near Saigon, becoming the highest-ranking Hmong in the Royal Laotian Air Force. In 1954 Vang Pao led a group of 850 Hmong soldiers on a fruitless mission to relieve the beleaguered French during their debacle at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam.

The Hmong were first marshaled into a surrogate army by a French colonel called Roger Trinquier, who confronted a crisis in the French budget for local covert operations and intelligence in a fashion that covered more than one objective. “The money from the opium,” he wrote later, “financed the maquis [that is, the Hmong mercenaries] in Laos. It was flown to Cp. St. Jacques [a French military base sixty miles south of Saigon] in Vietnam in a DC-3 and sold.” The money was put into an account and used to feed and arm the guerrillas. Trinquier cynically added than the trade “was strictly controlled even though it was outlawed.” Overseeing the marketing in Saigon was the local French director of the Deuxiéme Bureau, Colonel Antoine Savani. A Corsican with ties to the Marseilles drug syndicates, Savani organized the Bin Xuyen River gang on the lower Mekong to run the heroin labs, manage the opium dens and sell the surplus to the Corsican drug syndicate. This enterprise, called Operation X, ran from 1946 through 1954.

Ho Chi Minh made opposition to the opium trade a key feature of his campaign to run the French out of Vietnam. The Viet Minh leader said, quite accurately, that the French were pushing opium on the people of Vietnam as a means of social control. A drugged people, Ho said, is less likely to rise up and throw off the oppressor.

During World War II, OSS officers working to oust the Japanese from Southeast Asia developed a cordial relationship with Ho Chi Minh, finding that the Viet Minh leader spoke fluent English and was well versed in American history. Ho quoted from memory lengthy passages from the Declaration of Independence, and chided the intelligence agents, noting that Vietnamese nationalists had been asking American presidents since Lincoln for help in booting out the French colonialists. As with Mao’s forces in China, the OSS operatives in Vietnam realized that Ho’s well-trained troops were a vital ally, more capable and less corrupt than Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army and the pro-French forces in Indochina. When Ho was stricken with malaria, the OSS sent one of its agents, Paul Helliwell, who would later head up the CIA’s Overseas Supply Company, to treat the ailing Communist. Similar to Joe Stilwell’s view of Mao, many military and OSS men recommended that the US should back Ho after the eviction of the Japanese.

After arriving in Vietnam in 1945, US Army General Phillip Gallagher asked the OSS to compile a detailed background on Ho. An OSS operative named Le Xuan, who would later work for the CIA during the Vietnam War, acquired a dossier on Ho from a disaffected Vietnamese nationalist: Le Xuan paid the man off with a bag of opium. The dossier disclosed to US intelligence agencies that Ho had had extended stays in the Soviet Union, a revelation that doomed any future aid from the Americans for his cause. Le Xuan would later turn on the CIA, showing up in Paris in 1968 to reveal his services to the Agency and denounce its murderous policies in Vietnam.
In 1953, Trinquier’s Operation X opium network was discovered by Colonel Edwin Lansdale, at the time the CIA’s military adviser in Southeast Asia. Lansdale later claimed that he protested about this French role in opium trafficking, but was admonished to hold his tongue because, in his words, exposure of “the operation would prove a major embarrassment to a friendly government.” In fact, the CIA’s director, Allen Dulles, was mightily impressed by Trinquier’s operation and, looking ahead to the time when the US would take over from the French in the region, began funneling money, guns and CIA advisers to Trinquier’s Hmong army.

The post–Dien Bien Phu accords, signed in Geneva in 1954, decreed that Laos was to be neutral, off-limits to all foreign military forces. This had the effect of opening Laos to the CIA, which did not consider itself a military force. The CIA became the unchallenged principal in all US actions inside Laos. Once in this position of dominance the CIA brooked no interference from the Pentagon. This point was driven home by the military attaché to Laos, Colonel Paul Pettigrew, who advised his replacement in Vientiane in 1961, “For God’s sake, don’t buck the CIA or you’ll find yourself floating face down on that Mekong River.”

From the moment the Geneva Accords were signed, the US government was determined to undermine them and do everything in its power to prevent the installation of Ho Chi Minh as president of all Vietnam, even though elections would have clearly showed he was the choice of most Vietnamese, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously admitted. Eisenhower and his advisers decreed that Laos’s neutral status should be subverted. On the ground this meant that the neutralist government of Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, which had amicable relations with the Pathet Lao, should be subverted by the CIA, whose preferred client was General Nosavan Phoumi. The Agency fixed elections in 1960 in an attempt to legitimize his rule. Also in 1960 the CIA began a more sustained effort to build up Vang Pao and his army, furnishing him with rifles, mortars, rockets and grenades.

After John Kennedy’s victory in 1960, Eisenhower advised him that the next big battleground in Southeast Asia would not be Vietnam but Laos. His counsel found its mark, even though Kennedy initially snooted Laos as “a country not worthy of engaging the attention of great powers.” In public Kennedy pronounced the country’s name as L-AY-o-s, thinking that Americans would not rally to the cause of a place pronounced “louse.” In 1960 there were but a thousand men in Vang Pao’s army. By 1961 “L’Armée Clandestine” had grown to 9,000. By the time of Kennedy’s assassination in late 1963, Vang Pao was at the head of some 30,000 troops. This army and its air force were entirely funded by the United States to the tune of $300 million, administered and overseen by the CIA.

Vang Pao’s original CIA case officer was William Young, the Baptist missionary-become-CIA-officer we met in the preceding chapter. Young never had any problem with the opium trafficking of the Hmong tribes. After Young was transferred out of the area in 1962, the CIA asked the Frenchman Trinquier to return as military adviser to the Hmong. Trinquier had just completed his tour of duty in the French Congo and consented to perform that function for a few months before the arrival of one of the most notorious characters in this saga, an American named Anthony Posephny, always known as Tony Poe.

Poe was a CIA officer, a former US Marine who had been wounded at Iwo Jima. By the early 1950s he was working for the Agency in Asia, starting with the training of Tibetan Khamba tribesmen in Colorado (thus breaching the law against CIA activities inside the US), prior to leading them back to retrieve the Dalai Lama. In 1958 Poe showed up in Indonesia in an early effort to topple Sukarno. In 1960 he was training KMT forces for raids into China; his right hand was by now mangled after ill-advised contact with a car’s fanbelt. In 1963 Poe became Vang Pao’s case officer and forthwith instituted new incentives to fire up the Hmong’s dedication to freedom’s cause, announcing that he would pay a cash bounty for every pair of Pathet Lao ears delivered to him. He kept a plastic bag on his front porch where the ears were deposited and strung his collection along the verandah. To convince skeptical CIA superiors, in this case Ted Shackley in Vientiane, that his body counts were accurate, Poe once stapled a pair of ears to a report and sent it to HQ.

This souvenir of early methods of computing the slaughter of native Americans was not as foolproof as Poe imagined. He himself later described going up country and finding a small boy with no ears, then was told that the boy’s father had sliced them off “to get money from the Americans.” Poe shifted his incentive to the entire heads of Pathet Lao, claiming that he preserved them in formaldehyde in his bedroom.

This man, described by an associate as an “amiable psychopath,” was running Phoenix-type operations into Lao villages near the Vietnam border. The teams were officially termed “home defense units,” though Poe more frankly described them as “hunter-killer teams.” Poe later claimed that he was booted out of Long Tieng because he had objected to CIA tolerance of Vang Pao’s drug trading, but his description suggests more an envy for the French style of direct supervision of the opium trade. In a filmed TV interview at his home in Northern Thailand Poe said in 1987,

You don’t let ’em run loose without a chain on ’em. They’re like any kind of animals, or a baby. You have to control ’em. Vang Pao was the only guy with a pair of shoes when I met him. Why does he need Mercedes and hotels and homes when he never had them before? Why are you going to give him them? He was making millions. He had his own avenue for selling heroin. He put his money in US bank accounts and Swiss banks, and we all knew it. We tried to monitor it. We controlled all the pilots. We were giving him free rides into Thailand. They were flying it [that is, the opium cargoes] into Danang, where it was picked up by the number two man to Thieu [at the time South Vietnam’s president]. It was all a contractual relationship, just like bankers and businessmen. A wonderful relationship. Just a Mafia. A big organized Mafia.
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By the time Poe left this area of Laos in 1965, the situation was just as he described it twenty years later. The CIA’s client army was collecting and shipping the opium on CIA planes, which by now were flying under the American flag.

“Yes, I’ve seen the sticky bricks come on board, and no one challenged it,” Neal Hanson, an Air America pilot, said in a filmed interview in the late 1980s. “It was as if it was their personal property. We were a freebie airline. Whoever was put on our plane we flew. Primarily it was the smaller aircraft that would visit outlying villages and bring it [the opium] back to Long Tieng. If they put something on the airplane and told you not to look at it, you didn’t look at it.”

The Air America operation played a key role in expanding the opium market. CIA and US Agency for International Development funds went to the construction of more than 150 short, so-called LIMA landing strips in the mountains near the opium fields, thus opening these remote spots to the export trade – and also ensuring that such exports went to Vang Pao. The head of AID in that area at the time, Ron Rickenbach, said later, “I was on the air strips. My people were in charge of supplying the aircraft. I was in the areas where the opium was grown. I personally witnessed it being placed on Air America planes. We didn’t create the opium product. But our presence accelerated it dramatically.” In 1959 Laos was producing about 150 tons. By 1971 production had risen to 300 tons. Another boost to opium production, much of which was ultimately destined for the veins of Americans then fighting in Vietnam, was enabled by the USAID’s supplying rice to the Hmong, thus allowing them to stop growing this staple and use the land to cultivate opium poppies.

Vang Pao controlled the opium trade in the Plain of Jars region of Laos. By buying up the one salable crop the general could garner the allegiance of the hill tribes as well as stuff his own bank account. He would pay $60 a kilo, $10 over the prevailing rate, and would purchase a village’s crop if, in return, the village would supply recruits for his army. As a village leader described it, “Meo [that is, Hmong] officers with three or four stripes came from Long Tieng to buy their opium. They came in American helicopters, perhaps two or three men at one time. The helicopter leaves them here for a few days and they walk to the villages, then come back here and radio Long Tieng to send another helicopter for them and take the opium back.”

John Everingham, an Australian war photographer, was at that time based in Laos and visited the Hmong village of Long Pot; he recalled in the late 1980s that

I was given the guest bed in a district village leader’s house. I ended up sharing it with a military guy, who I later discovered was a leader in Vang Pao’s army. I was wakened by a great confusion of people and noise at the bottom of the bed, where there was a packet of black sticky stuff on bamboo leaves. And the village leader was weighing it out and paying quite a considerable amount of money. This went on several mornings. I found out it was raw opium. They all wore American uniforms. The opium went to Long Tieng by helicopters, Air America helicopters on contract to the CIA. I know as a fact that shortly after Vang Pao’s army was formed, the military officers gained control of the opium trade. It not only helped make them a lot of money. It also helped the villagers who needed their opium carried out, a difficult task in wartime. The officers were obviously paying a very good price because the villagers were very anxious to sell it to them.
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In the early 1960s the trading chain from Long Tieng was as follows: the opium would be shipped into Vietnam on Laos Commercial Air, an airline run jointly by Ngo Dinh Nhu and the Corsican Bonaventure Francisi. Nhu, brother of South Vietnam’s President Diem, had presided over a huge expansion in Saigon’s opium parlors in order to fund his own security operation. But after the Diem brothers’ assassination, Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky, the man selected by the CIA as South Vietnam’s new leader, began bringing the opium in from Long Tieng on Vietnamese air force planes. (Ky had previously been head of South Vietnam’s air force.) A CIA man, Sam Mustard, testified to this arrangement in congressional hearings in 1968.
At the Laotian end, General Phoumi had placed Ouane Rattikone in charge of overall opium operations, and his dealings resulted in about a ton of opium a month being landed in Saigon. For his services, however, Rattikone was getting only about $200 a month from the parsimonious Phoumi. With the backing of the CIA, Rattikone rebelled and launched a coup in 1965 against Phoumi, driving his former boss into exile in Thailand. Rattikone now wanted to drop the contract with the Corsican’s Air Laos, which, despite Marshall Ky’s switch, was still doing business. Rattikone’s plan was to use the Royal Lao Air Force, entirely funded by the CIA. He referred to the opium shipments on the national air force as “requisitions militaires.” But CIA air commander Jack Drummond objected to what he deemed a logistically inefficient use of the Royal Lao Air Force’s T-28s and instead decreed that the CIA would furnish a C-47 for the dope runs “if they’d leave the T-28s alone.”

That’s precisely what happened. Two years later, in 1967, the CIA and USAID purchased two C-47s for Vang Pao, who opened up his own air transport company, which he called Xieng Khouang Air, known by one and all as Air Opium.

At the time the CIA decided to give Vang Pao his own airline, the CIA station chief in Vientiane was Ted Shackley, a man who had gotten his start in the CIA’s Paperclip project, recruiting Nazi scientists. Before he came to Laos Shackley had headed the Agency’s Miami station, where he orchestrated the repeated terror raids and assassination bids against Cuba and consorted with the local Cuban émigrés, themselves deeply involved in the drug trade. Shackley was an ardent exponent of the idea of purchasing the loyalty of CIA clients by a policy of economic assistance, calling this “the third option.” Tolerance – indeed active support – of the opium trade was therefore a proper military and diplomatic strategy. He also had a reputation for preferring to work with a team of long-term associates whom he would deploy in appropriate posts.

Thus one can follow, through the decades, the Shackley team from Miami, to Laos, to Vietnam (where he later became CIA station chief in Saigon) to his private business operations in Central America. When Shackley was in Vientiane, his associate, Thomas Clines, was handling business at Long Tieng. Another CIA man, Edwin Wilson, was delivering espionage equipment to Shackley in Laos. Richard Secord was supervising CIA operations, thus participating in a bombing program depositing more high explosive on peasants and guerrillas in the Plain of Jars than did the US on Germany and Japan during the whole of World War II. Shackley, Clines, Secord and Air America cargo kicker Eugene Hasenfus show up later in our story, in Central America, once again amid the CIA’s active complicity in the drug trade.

By the time Shackley moved to Saigon in 1968, the war had turned against Vang Pao. The Pathet Lao now had the upper hand. Over the next three years the story of the Hmong was one of forced marches and military defeats, and as the ground war went badly the CIA took to bombing campaigns that killed yet more Hmong. As Edgar “Pop” Buell, a missionary working in the hills, wrote in a memo to the CIA in 1968, “A short time ago we rounded up 300 fresh recruits [from the Hmong], 30 percent were 14 years old. Another 30 percent were 15 or 16. The remaining 40 percent were 45 or over. Where were the ages between? I’ll tell you – they’re all dead.”

By the end of the war in Laos a third of the entire population of the country had become refugees. In their forced marches the Hmong experienced 30 percent casualty rates, with young children often having to put their exhausted parents, prostrated along the trail, out of their misery. By 1971 the CIA was practicing a scorched-earth policy in Hmong territory against the incoming Pathet Lao. The land was drenched with herbicides, which killed the opium crop and also poisoned the Hmong. Later, when Hmong refugees in Thai refugee camps reported this “yellow rain,” CIA-patronized journalists spread the story that this was a Communist essay in biological warfare. The Wall Street Journal editorial page ran an extensive propaganda campaign on the issue in the early Reagan years. Vang Pao ended up in Missoula, Montana. General Ouane Rattikone went into exile in Thailand.

This CIA-transported opium engendered an addiction rate among US servicemen in Vietnam of up to 30 percent, with the soldiers spending some $80 million a year in Vietnam on heroin. In the early 1970s some of this same heroin was being smuggled back to the US in the body bags of dead servicemen, and when DEA agent Michael Levine attempted to bust the operation, he was warned off by his superiors because it might have led to exposure of the supply line from Long Tieng.

In 1971 a second-year grad student at Yale named Alfred McCoy met the poet Allen Ginsberg at a demonstration for Bobby Seale in New Haven. Ginsberg found out that McCoy had studied up on the drug trade and also knew several Southeast Asian languages as well as the political history of the region. He encouraged McCoy to research allegations about CIA involvement in the drug trade. McCoy finished his term papers and traveled to Southeast Asia in the summer of 1971, where he embarked on a courageous and far-reaching investigation that yielded brilliant results. He interviewed troops and officers in Saigon, and there also met John Everingham, the photographer who had witnessed the opium dealings in Laos. Everingham took him back into Laos to that same village. McCoy interviewed Hmong, both villagers and chiefs. He tracked down General Ouane Rattikone in Thailand. He interviewed Pop Buell and the CIA agent William Young.

Back in the United States by the spring of 1972, McCoy had finished the first draft of what was to be the path-breaking The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. In June of that year he was invited to testify before the US Senate by Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin. Following that testimony, he was called by his publisher Harper & Row, demanding that he come to New York and meet with the company’s president, Winthrop Knowlton. Knowlton told McCoy that Cord Meyer, a top-ranking CIA officer, had paid a visit to the owner of Harper & Row, Cass Canfield, and had told Canfield that McCoy’s book posed a national security threat. Meyer demanded that Harper & Row cancel the contract. Canfield refused, but did agree to let the CIA review McCoy’s book before publication.

While McCoy was deliberating what to do, the CIA’s approach to Canfield leaked out to Seymour Hersh, then working at the New York Times. Hersh promptly published the story. As McCoy wrote in the preface to a new edition of his book published in 1990, “Humiliated in the public arena, the CIA turned to covert harassment. Over the coming months, my federal education grant was investigated. My phones were tapped. My income tax was audited and my sources were intimidated.” Some of his interpreters were threatened with assassination.

The book was duly published by Harper & Row in 1972. Amid Congressional disquiet, the CIA told the Joint Committee on Intelligence that it was pressing forward with an internal review by the CIA’s Inspector General. The Agency sent twelve investigators into the field, where they spent two brief weeks in interviews. The report has never been released in its entirety, but this is its conclusion:

No evidence that the Agency or any senior officer of the Agency has ever sanctioned, or supported drug trafficking, as a matter of policy. Also we found not the slightest suspicion, much less evidence, that any Agency officer, staff or contact, has ever been involved with the drug business. With respect to Air America, we found that it has always forbidden, as a matter of policy, the transportation of contraband goods. We believe that its Security Inspection Service which is used by the cooperating air transport company as well, is now serving as an added deterrent to drug traffickers.
The one area of our activities in South East Asia that gives us some concern has to do with the agents and local officials with whom we are in contact and who have been or may still be involved in one way or another in the drug business. We are not referring here to those agents who are run as penetrations of the narcotics industry for collection of intelligence on the industry but, rather, to those with whom we are in touch in our other operations. What to do about these people is particularly troublesome in view of its implications for some of our operations, particularly in Laos. Yet their good will, if not mutual cooperation, considerably facilitates the military activities of the Agency-supported irregulars.
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The report admitted that “the war has clearly been our over-riding priority in Southeast Asia and all other issues have taken second place in the scheme of things.” The report also suggested that there was no financial incentive for the pilots in Air America to be involved in smuggling, since they were “making good money.”

Reviews of McCoy’s book were hostile, suggesting that his hundreds of pages of well-sourced interviews and reporting amounted to conspiratorial rumor-mongering by a radical opponent of the war. McCoy’s charges were dismissed out of hand in the Church hearings of 1975, which concluded that allegations of drug smuggling by CIA assets and proprietaries “lacked substance.”

As McCoy himself summed it up in 1990, in words which no doubt strike a chord in the heart of Gary Webb, “Although I had scored in the first engagement with a media blitz, the CIA won the longer bureaucratic battle. By silencing my sources and publicly announcing its abhorrence of drugs, the Agency convinced Congress that it had been innocent of any complicity in the Southeast Asian opium trade.”

This article is adapted from Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press.