5.1 KiB
| title | aliases | created | updated | category | tags | summary | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arkansas |
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2026-05-17 | 2026-10-05 | U.S. State |
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U.S. state where Barry Seal based aircraft at Mena from late 1982; federal, state and CIA records on the Mena airport run from a 1983 IRS inquiry to the 1996 CIA Inspector General report. |
Arkansas appears in this record because of the airport at Mena, Arkansas, where the smuggler Barry Seal kept his aircraft from late 1982 until 1984 and where investigators from the Internal Revenue Service and the Arkansas State Police worked from 1983. The Central Intelligence Agency's own file copies, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee report and Arkansas press accounts are summarized on that page.
Officials and investigations
Asa Hutchinson, appointed United States attorney for the Western District of Arkansas in 1982, assigned the IRS investigator William Duncan to Seal, and his successor J. Michael Fitzhugh canceled Seal's grand jury appearance in December 1985 for "lack of credibility." A 1986 Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum from Hot Springs, obtained by the Arkansas Times, said Fitzhugh would be "withholding presentation" of the Mena investigation to the grand jury. Hutchinson later served as administrator of the DEA and governor of Arkansas.12 Attorney General Winston Bryant said in 1995 that he spent three years trying to get Mena files from the U.S. Department of Justice and "all we ever got was a total run-around."2
The Kerry subcommittee's 1988 report stated that grand jury probes of Seal's Mena associates were dropped over the protests of state and federal law enforcement officials, with the apparent reason that prosecution might reveal national security information.3 Charles E. Black, deputy prosecuting attorney at Mena, asked Governor Bill Clinton's office for $25,000 to impanel a state grand jury and said he received no reply; Clinton later said he had authorized the payment and "nothing ever came of that."1
Little Rock
The Little Rock bond dealer Danny Ray Lasater and Clinton's half-brother Roger Clinton pleaded guilty to drug charges. The Arkansas Times reported that the FBI's 1986 investigation of Lasater found that his pilot flew him and Patsy Thomasson to Belize on February 8, 1984, to look at a horse farm for sale by Roy Carver, a ranch Billy Earle Jr. told investigator Russell Welch Seal had planned to fly to for a cocaine operation weeks before; it noted that no link between Clinton and Seal has ever been established.1
The aircraft
The C-123K "Fat Lady" that Seal kept at Mena is the aircraft the CIA Inspector General's file calls N4410F, and a DEA spokesman said in 1986 that it was the plane shot down over Nicaragua with Eugene Hasenfus aboard. Gary Webb wrote in Dark Alliance that Seal sold the plane back to the company he got it from and that in early 1986 it wound up with Southern Air Transport; the CIA Inspector General found no record that Southern Air owned or leased a C-123K, and a CIA memorandum of October 10, 1986 said the plane was sold as military surplus in 1983 to an undetermined purchaser.456 Webb also wrote that a 1983 U.S. Customs report said Seal's farm near Baton Rouge, Louisiana was allegedly a drop site for cocaine and marijuana flown in aboard a DC-4 that later flew supplies to the Contras through a company operated by the brother of Adolfo Calero, Mario Calero; Webb is the sole source for that passage.7
Footnotes
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Mara Leveritt, "Who's afraid of Barry Seal?" Arkansas Times, September 28, 2017. https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/2017/09/28/whos-afraid-of-barry-seal ↩︎
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Mara Leveritt, "Mena rides again," Arkansas Times, August 25, 1995. https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/1995/08/25/mena-rides-again ↩︎
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U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy (Committee Print, December 1988), "Barry Seal and the Cartel," pp. 121-122. https://archive.org/details/Kerry-Report-Drugs-Contras ↩︎
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CIA Inspector General, memorandum for the record, "C-123K - Review of Additional Records," December 24, 1996 (CIA Reading Room 0001289850). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-0001289850 ↩︎
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Richard Halloran, "Plane Downed in Nicaragua Was in a U.S. Drug 'Sting,'" The New York Times, October 10, 1986 (CIA Reading Room, CIA-RDP90-00965R000402690007-7). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-00965r000402690007-7 ↩︎
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CIA Office of Congressional Affairs, memorandum for the record, OCA 86-3575, October 10, 1986, paragraph 14. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-00788192 ↩︎
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Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998, chapters 7 and 15. Sole source for the Seal sale-back, Customs report and DC-4 passages. ↩︎