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"The Mena Coverup"

by Micah Morrison; Wall Street Journal p.A18 10/18/94

     MENA, Ark. What do Bill Clinton and Oliver North have
in common, along with the Arkansas State Police and the
Central Intelligence Agency? All probably wish they had
never heard of Mena.
     President Clinton was asked at his Oct. 7 press
conference about Mena, a small town and airport in the wilds
of Western Arkansas. Sarah McClendon, a longtime Washington
curmudgeon renowned for her off-the-wall questions, wove a
query around the charge that a base in Mena was  "set up by
Oliver North and the CIA" in the 1980s and used to "bring in
planeload after planeload of cocaine" for sale in the U.S.,
with the profits then used to buy weapons for the Contras.
Was he told as Arkansas governor? she asked.
     "No, " the president replied, "they didn't tell me
anything about it." The alleged events "were primarily a
matter for federal jurisdiction. The state really had next
to nothing to do with it. The local prosecutor did conduct
an investigation based on what was in the jurisdiction of
state law. The rest of it was under the jurisdiction of the
United States Attorneys who were appointed successively by
previous administrations. We had nothing- zero-to do with
it. "
Unanswered Questions
     It was Clinton's lengthiest remark on the murky affair
since it surfaced nearly a decade ago, in the middle of his
long tenure as governor of Arkansas. And while the president
may be correct to suggest that Mena is an even bigger
problem for previous Republican administrations, he was
wrong on just about every other count. The state of Arkansas
had plenty to do with Mena, and  Clinton left many
unanswered questions behind when he moved to
Washington.Anyone who that Mena is not serious should speak
to William Duncan a former Internal Revenue Service
investigator who, together with Arkansas State Police
Investigator Russell Welch, fought a bitter lO-year battle
to bring the matter to light. They pinned their hopes on
nine separate state and federal probes. All failed."The Mena
investigations were never supposed to see the light of day,
" says Mr. Duncan, now an investigator with the Medicaid
Fraud Division of the office of Arkansas Attorney General
Winston Bryant. "Investigations were interfered with and
covered up, and the justice system was subverted."
     The mysteries of Mena, detailed on this page on June
29, center on the activities of a
drug-smuggler-turned-informant named Adler Berriman "Barry"
Seal. Mr. Seal began operating at Mena Intermountain
Regional Airport in 1981. At the height of his career,
according to Mr. Welch, Mr. Seal was importing as much as
1,000 pounds of cocaine a month.

"The Mena Coverup" part 2

   By 1984, Mr. Seal was an informant for the Drug
Enforcement Agency and flew at least one sting operation to
Nicaragua for the CIA, a mission known to have drawn the
attention of Mr. North. By 1986, Mr. Seal was dead, gunned
down by Colombian hitmen in Baton Rouge, La. Eight months
after Mr. Seal's murder, his cargo plane, which had been
based at Mena, was shot down over Nicaragua with Eugene
Hasenfus and a load of Contra supplies aboard.
     According to Mr. Duncan and others, Mr. Clinton's
allies in state government worked to suppress Mena
investigations. In 1990, for example, when Mr. Bryant made
Mena an issue in the race for attorney general, Clinton aide
Betsey Wright warned the candidate "to stay away " from the
issue, according to a CBS Evening News investigative report.
Ms. Wright denies the report. Yet once in office, and after
a few feints in the direction of an investigation, Mr.
Bryant stopped looking into Mena.
     Documents obtained by the Journal show that as Gov.
Clinton's quest for the presidency gathered steam in 1992,
his Arkansas allies took increasing interest in Mena. Marie
Miller, then director of the Medicaid Fraud Division, wrote
in an April 1992 memo to her files that she told Mr. Duncan
of the attorney general's "wish to sever any ties to the
Mena matter -because of the implication that the AG might be
investigating the governor's connection. " The memo says the
instructions were pursuant to a conversation with Mr.
Bryant's chief deputy, Royce Griffin. In an interview, Mr.
Duncan said Mr. Griffin put him under "intense pressure "
regarding Mena.
     Another memo, from Mr. Duncan to several high-ranking
members of the attorney general's staff in March 1992, notes
that Mr. Duncan was instructed "to remove all files
concerning the Mena investigation from the attorney
general's office. " At the time, several Arkansas newspapers
were known to be preparing Freedom of Information Act
requests aimed at Mr. Clinton's administration.
     A spokesman for Mr. Bryant, Lawrence Graves, said
yesterday that he was not aware of the missing files or of
pressure exerted on Mr. Duncan. In Arkansas, Mr. Graves
said, the attorney general "does not have authority" to
pursue criminal cases.
     From February to May 1992, Mr. Duncan was involved in a
series of meetings aimed at deciding how to use a $25,000
federal grant obtained by then-Rep. Bill Alexander for the
Mena investigation. In a November 1991 letter to Arkansas
State Police Commander Tommy Goodwin, Mr. Alexander urged
that, at the current "critical stage " in the Mena
investigation, the money be used to briefly assign Mr.
Duncan to the Arkansas State Police to pursue the case full
time with State Police Investigator Welch and to prepare "a
steady
flow of information" for Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence
Walsh, who had received some Mena files from Mr. Bryant.

"The Mena Coverup" Part 3

     According to Mr. Duncan's notes on the meetings, Mr.
Clinton's aides closely tracked the negotiations over what
to do with the money. Mr. Duncan says a May 7, 1992, meeting
with Col. Goodwin was interrupted by a phone call from the
governor, though he does not know what was discussed. The
grant, however, was never  used. Col. Goodwin told CBS that
the money was returned "because we didn't
have anything to spend it on. "
     In 1988, local authorities suffered a similar setback
after Charles Black, a Mena area prosecutor, approached Gov.
Clinton
with a request for funds for a Mena investigation. "He said
he would get on it and would get a man back to me," Mr.
Black
told CBS. "I never heard back."
     In 1990, Mr. Duncan informed Col. Goodwin about Clinton
supporter Dan Lasater, who had been convicted of drug
charges. "I told Tommy Goodwin that I'd received allegations
of a Lasater connection to Mena," Mr. Duncan said.
     The charge, that Barry Seal had used Mr. Lasater's bond
business to launder drug money, was raised by a man named
Terry Reed. Mr. Reed and journalist John Cummings recently
published a book "Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA "
-charging that Mr. Clinton, Mr. North and others engaged in
a massive conspiracy  to smuggle cocaine, export weapons and
launder money. While much
of the book rests on slim evidence and already published
sources, the Lasater-Seal connection is new. (Thomas Mars,
Mr. Lasater's attorney, said yesterday that his client "has
never had a connection " with Mr. Seal.) But when Mr. Duncan
tried to
check out the allegations, his probe went nowhere, stalled
from lack of funds and bureaucratic hostility.
     Not all of the hostility came from the state level.
When Messrs. Duncan and Welch built a money-laundering case
in 1985 against Mr. Seal's associates, the US Attorneys in
the case "directly interfered with the process," Mr. Duncan
said. "Subpoenas were not issued, witnesses were
discredited, interviews with witnesses were interrupted, and
the wrong charges were brought before the grand jury."
     One grand jury was so outraged by the prosecutors'
actions that she broke the grand-jury secrecy covenant. Not
only had the case been blatantly mishandled, she later told
a congressional investigator, but many jurors felt "there
was some type of government intervention," according to a
transcript of the statement obtained by the Journal.
"Something is being covered up."
     In l987, Mr. Duncan was asked to testify before a House
subcommittee on crime. Two days before his before his
testimony, he says, IRS attorneys working with the Us
Attorney for Western Arkansas reinterpreted Rule 6(e), the
grand-jury secrecy law, forcing the exclusion of much of Mr.
Duncan's planned testimony and evidence.

"The Mena Coverup" Part 4

Mr. Duncan also charges that a senior IRS attorney tried to
force him to commit perjury by directing him to say he had
no knowledge of a claim by Mr. Seal that a large bribe had
been paid to Attorney General Edwin Meese. Mr. Duncan says
he didn't make much of the drug dealer's claim, but he did
know about it; he refused to lie to Congress.
Career in Ruins
     Mr. Duncan, distressed by the IRS's handling of Mena,
resigned in 1989. Meanwhile, the affair was sputtering
through four federal forums, including a General Accounting
Office probe derailed by the National Security Council. At
one particularly low point, Mr. Duncan, then briefly a Mena
investigator for a House sub-committee, was arrested on
Capitol Hill on a bogus weapons charge that was held over
his head for nine months, then dismissed. His prized career
in law enforcement in ruins, he found his way back to
Arkansas and began to pick up the pieces.
     Mr. Duncan does not consider President Clinton a
political enemy. Indeed, he feels close to the president- a
fellow Arkansan who shares the same birthday- and thinks
Mena may turn out to be far more troublesome for GOP figures
such as Mr. North than any Arkansas players.
     These days, Mr. Duncan struggles to keep hope alive.
"I'm just a simple Arkansan who takes patriotism very
seriously," he says. "We are losing confidence in our
system. But I still believe that somewhere, somehow, there
is some committee or institution that can issue subpoenas,
get on the money trail, find out what happened and restore a
bit of faith in the system."

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