barry seal mena house address
It would later be serviced and financed by Southern Air Transport, a CIA front company, and it was eventually shot down over Nicaragua in a doomed supply effort to the Contras that left an American, Eugene Hasenfus, a prisoner of the Sandinistas and the CIA link to the Contras revealed. The extent of Barry Seal's involvement with the CIA in the 1980s has provided fuel for speculation and conspiracy theories. Too many secrets have been kept for too long, she wrote, too much important history has been hidden, lost or destroyed. In total, he had illegally imported $3 to $5 billion worth of drugs and an estimated 56 tons of cocaine into the U.S., making over 100 flights. "In other words, the charges of drug smuggling and money laundering were not enough to warrant the release of information about the use of the airport in the Iran-Contra Affair," wrote Sherwood for the Arkansas encyclopedia. Seal said that he started by doing things like flying guns for the CIA to revolution fighters in Cuba in the late 1950s and flying operations for U.S. Army Special Forces in Laos just prior to the Vietnam War. As part of his reduced sentence, the judge had ordered Barry to spend his nights, from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., at a Salvation Army halfway house for six months. He later claimed to have made as much as $50 million running 1,000 pounds of cocaine a month from Colombia. "There are also allegations that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency used the airport as a base of operations to help train pilots and troops for the intervention in the Nicaraguan uprising by the Contras during the 1980s," according to the encyclopedia entry, which was written by Robert Sherwood of Georgia Military College. ABC was also told that brown had failed a psychological test. Tom Cruise got his pilot's license in 1994. Images like the one earlier on this page show Medelln Cartel boss Pablo Escobar with Sandinista government officials and soldiers, who were loading cocaine onto Seal's plane, nicknamed the Fat Lady. At the time Seals flights took place, Lasater was contributing to Clintons political campaigns. The man who made Baton Rouge headlines in the mid-1980s for the machine-gun killing of drug informant Adler "Barry" Seal died in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola on Aug. 25, Louisiana. When I got back from that first trip he knew I had been out doing something, Brown insists. Contributions are received from But I was in for a shock, Leveritt writes. She was an experienced writer and had prepared for the legal review. Then, Brown says, Seal reached again into the duffel bag and pulled out a kilogram of cocaine. An "extensive joint investigation" by the FBI, Arkansas State Police and IRS revealed that Barry Seal used the Mena airport for "smuggling activity" from late 1980 until March 1984, according to an internal FBI document released last week. View Alex Mena results in Phoenix, AZ including current phone number, address, relatives, background check report, and property record with Whitepages. Seemingly panicked, the White House mistakenly presumed that Brown was talking to ABC News about his involvement with Mena when he was actually discussing Whitewater. Soon after, JB is killed by a car bomb. Leveritt had in-depth knowledge of the travails of investigators Duncan and Welch, and state and federal officials, in attempting to get to the truth about Mena. "Little Rock [FBI] is attempting to establish that [redacted] modified, maintained and stored Seal's aircraft with the knowledge that he was involved in cocaine smuggling activities prior to Seal's plea bargaining agreement on March 24, 1984," according to the memo. The CIAs inspector general investigated and released a terse statement saying no evidence has been found that the CIA was associated with money laundering, narcotics trafficking, arms smuggling or other illegal activities at or around Mena. There was, however, a classified two-week exercise and some contracting for routine aviation-related services.. The arrests never happened since Seal's cover was blown. The narcotics runner, Barry Seal, allegedly paid off then-Governor Clintons protg, L. D. Brown, and one Dan Lasater, a Clinton contributor. A Seal associate cut a runway deep in the woods. He decided to talk about Mena. Also, view a news story about Barry Seal's death. })(); The CIA stonewalled the release of information now sought by Judicial Watch on the Mena Airport controversy, said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. Brown has identified him as Dan Magruder, and says that he spoke admiringly of Clinton. No convincing explanation was offered for this act of censorship. I dont want to be getting any more reports from Brown is the statement by Tucker that Colonel Tommy Goodwin, the recently retired head of the Arkansas state police, quoted in explaining the demotion to me in an interview. Current Address: HERA E Avalon Dr, Phoenix, AZ. Judicial Watch Victories: Courts Declare California Quota Laws Unconstituti BEST OF: Top Anti-Corruption Victories in 2022. Because no one We had nothing zeroto do with it, and everybody whos ever looked into it knows that.. Documents and a surviving crew member tied the shipment to the CIA and the White House, dragging a Seal connection into the Iran-Contra affair. Photograph: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP . No. A C-123K cargo plane, like this one, was out tted at the Mena airport and ew with various cameras to obtain photographic evi- dence of the Sandinistas in the act of smuggling narcotics, according to an entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas(Arkansas Democrat-Gazette file photo). Reprints and media inquiries: [emailprotected]. He gathered information on Medellin cartel kingpins and participated in at least two drug runs to Nicaragua, where the Reagan administration was ramping up operations against the Sandinista government. Over a quarter of a century ago, George H.W. The first is a CIA internal memo on an article written about Mena in 1995. In the years that followed his split from Clinton, Brown investigated white-collar crime for the Arkansas State Police. File: Attachment Size; "He stopped in there and, just like that, he asked me out," says Debbie. Then Brown says, Seal and the kickers returned, carrying four duffel bags. The Judicial Watch lawsuit seeks the report of a November 1996 CIA investigation into drug running, money laundering and intelligence gathering at Mena. Basically, Seal would fly over the guns and smuggle back drugs on his return trip. In the American Made movie, Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) crash lands a plane in a suburban neighborhood in an effort to escape the DEA who ordered him to land. You can trust him, but the network apparently yielded to White House pressure. After Brown told Sealand Clintonthat he would no longer take part in the drug flights, Seal contacted Brown again. An "extensive joint investigation" by the FBI, Arkansas State Police and IRS revealed that Barry Seal used the Mena airport for "smuggling activity" from late 1980 until March 1984, according to . "We're talking about one of the largest drug smugglers in America, and these agents loved him." Not all of Barry Seal's heirs were happy with the making of the movie. Leveritt has written convincing book-length studies of the Memphis Three case and the deaths of teenagers Don Henry and Kevin Ives, the Arkansas boys on the tracks. In Whos Afraid of Barry Seal?, in the Arkansas Times, Leveritt wrote that secrets are still being carefully kept, especially in Arkansas. In advance of the recent Tom Cruise movie about Seal, American Made, an official associated with the Arkansas Studies Institute, an affiliate of the University of Arkansas and the Central Arkansas Libraryboth state institutionsconvinced Leveritt to write a book about Mena, as a tie-in to the movie. Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal grew up in south Baton Rouge in the 1950s. And for thirty years, every attempt to get to the bottom of events at Menafederal, state, judicial, journalistichas failed. According to investigative records compiled by the Arkansas State Police and other agencies, the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport served as a second home for Barry Seal, a. He was murdered on February 19, 1986, by contract killers hired by the cartel. Please read our Terms of Use or contact us. Two duffel bags were put on board the plane at Tegucigalpa. In the film, his abductors take him to a secret airstrip in the Colombian jungle where three businessmen, including Pablo Escobar, make him an offer he can't pass up. In February 1986, Seal was killed in a hail of machine-gun fire outside a Baton Rouge Salvation Army halfway house after allegedly crossing Pablo Escobar and the Medellin drug cartel. Exclusive: Tom Cruise's portrayal of drug-smuggler-turned-government-informant Barry Seal is a fast-paced visit back to the Reagan era's shadowy world of the CIA, cocaine and secret wars . After a barrage of requests from different people and media outlets under the federal Freedom of Information Act, on Wednesday the FBI released more than 1,000 pages of its file on Seal: vault.fbi.gov/recently-added. Seal flipped, becoming a valuable government informant. He had already been flying planes for nearly half his life, earning his student pilot's license at age 15 and pilot's license at 16. It's certainly possible and it's what the movie proposes. Suddenly, though, the Arkansas State Police were uncooperative. While at a small airport in rural Mena, Arkansas, the notorious smuggler Barry Seal was given protection by Governor Bill Clinton to continue his drug-smuggling, gun-running, money laundering operation but now as a DEA informant and a CIA contract pilot, also set up by Bush. "The information indicates that Seal was an informant for DEA at the time but also working as an operative of the CIA. var sc_partition=60; Connor Hagan, a spokesman for the FBI in Little Rock, said the release of so much information into the FBI's public "vault" doesn't mean that the documents haven't previously been made public. An entry in Browns daybook indicates that the flight with Seal took place on October 23, 1984. Brown recalls that on the morning of this particular flight, Seal had told him to drive to Mena Intermountain Regional Airport, a remote air strip near the Oklahoma border. The scene was actually inspired by something that happened while director Doug Liman and Tom Cruise were training for the movie. "I've heard that stated by a lot of people.". If he had in fact been working for the CIA at the time, his connections didn't get him off the hook. Some facts, however, are indisputable. -Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal. But of the charges levelled at Brown by the White House, the most unintentionally revealing was that Brown had flunked a CIA examination in the mid-1980s. An indignant Brown began toying with the idea of exposing the corruption of Arkansas politics. commission charbonneau liste de noms. No investigation was blocked. It was originally an Air Force transport plane Seal dubbed it the Fat Lady. Arkansas State Trooper L.D. With the publication of The American Spectator article, we expect more. In 1994, Brown told Daniel Wattenberg of The American Spectator that Jim Guy Tucker, then the Arkansas governor had asked him and trooper Larry Patterson for compromising information on Clintons private life in 1990, when Tucker was contemplating a race for governor. The mysteries of Mena revolve around a drug-smuggling pilot named Barry Seal. That aspect of who he was has never been disputed. The CIA does not talk about these things, and so Browns exact relationship with the agency may never be known. Like Clinton, Brown passed through a radical stage when he attended the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He says that Clinton arrived in a Beech aircraft, and was still there when he left for the day. Inside the plane, according to Brown, were another pilot and two beaners common laborers who looked like Central American Indians. Seal became a federal informant in March 1984. 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barry seal mena house address