By C. S. Mahoney

Up until the moment when three medellin cartel gunmen blew the life from his body in front of a dingy Baton Rouge Salvation Army outlet, Adler Berriman, better known as Berry Seal ran the largest drug smuggling operation in the continental United States. From his headquarters at the Intermountain Regional Airport in Mena Arkansas, Seal oversaw the importation of tens of thousands of pounds of cocaine and the export of tremendous amounts of U.S. military hardware. He was able to accomplish this with the overt and covert complicity of at least four major U. S. government agencies and despite being investigated at least nine times between 1981 and 1986 by everything from a grand jury to an official congressional inquiry. The case of Berry Seal stands as a cautionary tale of Intelligence Community ‘s covert operational capability run amok.

It’s true roots lie not in the Oachita mountains, some 160 miles from Little Rock where he broke state and federal laws for so long and with such impunity, rather they lie in the dank steaming jungles of North Vietnam. For to tell the story of Berry Seal is to tell the story of Air America. When Ted Shackley arrived in Laos, Vang Pao was at war with two rival druglords for control of the Southeast Asian opium trade. Shackley had just been transferred to Laos from Miami where he had run JMWAVE, a Spanish language radio station broadcasting nonstop propaganda into Havana. He had also run Operation 40,which was a program dedicated to training and equipping assassins for the express purpose of killing the upper echelons of the Cuban revolutionary government. It was thought that if this could be accomplished that the communist regime in Cuba would collapse under it’s own weight. At some point this operation evolved into the infamous Operation Mongoose, which was tasked with training and equipping Cuban exiles for the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion. Even after the Bay of Pigs debacle Shackley stayed on in Miami to conduct a covert war against Cuba.

In 1965 the covert war on Cuba was folded up and Shackley’s team was moved en masse to Laos. Shackley took three of his Operation 40 assassins to Laos with him, Felix Rodriguez, Jose Pasada and Chi Chi Quintero.Shackley was in Laos a matter of days before intermediaries set up a meeting between he and Vang Pao. Vang Pao wanted total control of the opium trade and Shackley wanted a military intelligence foothold in the Southeast Asian opium trade. The two struck a bargain. The United States Air Force would bomb the compounds of both of his rivals out of existence in exchange for certain favors once he was in control of the opium traffic. The Air Force carried out it’s end of the bargain. The young major who coordinated the bombing attacks on Vang Pao’s rivals was Richard Secord.

When Vang Pao did become undisputed lord of the Southeast Asian opium trade, he regularly began donating a share of his profits to the training and equipping of Laotian tribesman for incursions against North Vietnamese supply lines and to carry out assassinations against suspected communist sympathizers. The director of training for the tribesman was Shackley’s second in command, Tom Clines. Major General John Singlaub ran the assassinations arm of the enterprise. Richard Secord coordinated the flights that ferried arms, personnel, and heroin to various points throughout Europe and Asia. One of the pilots who made these flights was a Special Forces lieutenant named Adler Berrimen, later known as Berry Seal. In 1968 Mafia Don Santos Trafficante visited Vang Pao in a Saigon hotel. There are at least three different military intelligence reports that mention this meeting so it is highly unlikely that it escaped Shackley’s notice. More likely, it occurred with his direct complicity. Subsequent to the meeting Trafficante became the leading importer of China White heroin in the western world. Vang Pao’s profits soared, and as they did so did his contributions to the training and equipping of the Laotian tribesman. What had been a relatively small scale operation suddenly blossomed into the Phoenix Project. The Phoenix Project was an epic intelligence debacle that resulted in the assassinations of nearly 35,000 noncombatants throughout Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. The Phoenix Project acquired it’s own airforce, paid for with profits from Vang Pao’s heroin trade and piloted by U.S. intelligence personnel such as Adler Berrimen.

In 1972, with the coming fall of Saigon, Air America, as the group had come to be known (complete with the cynical motto "We Fly Right") was officially disbanded. But during their four years of existence, they had established an important precedent. They had used an existing criminal infrastructure to finance intelligence community operations that they never would have received funding for had they gone through standard appropriations channels, thus subverting the will of Congress and the American people.

Even after Ted Shackley was brought back to the United States to run the western hemisphere operations of the CIA, his agents were still extorting millions of dollars from Vang Pao and transferring it to a bank in Australia called the Nugun Hand Bank. They also began to pilfer tons of military equipment from depots around Asia and transfer it to a secret base in Thailand. One of the men who flew the military hardware into Thailand and made the odd smuggling run for Vang Pao was Adler Berrimen a.k.a. Berry Seal.

In 1975 George Bush became director of the CIA and Ted Shackley received yet another promotion, this time to Deputy Director of Intelligence in charge of world wide covert operations. This was a major step towards the directorship of the CIA, which Shackley would have received had Ford won the election. But Carter won and Admiral Stansfield Turner became director of the CIA. Under Carter’s direction, Admiral Turner began to dismantle large parts of the CIA’s covert operations apparatus. Since the accounts in the Nugen Hand bank and the military hardware stashed in Thailand had never officially existed, they were never touched. However the remnants of Air America feared that this would not be the case for much longer so they found employment with the Shah of Iran until Turner’s purge had run it’s course.

The Shah was a longtime friend of the United Sates, so it was not difficult to get the operation approved. Elements of the Air America apparatus began training and equipping the Shah’s dreaded secret police SAVAAK for a prolonged assassination program against the Shah’s many political enemies, both in and out of Iran. This must have made the Shah sleep better at night because he paid the mercenaries off in copious amounts of petrodollers.

The operation was overseen by Edwin Wilson and Frank Turpel. The fear and hatred that the ensuing assassination program brought about was instrumental in Iran falling to the Islamic militants. This was the first time that the Air America network had been used for purposes totally outside of the CIA’s supervision and so Shackley and Tom Clines had to deal with something that neither of them expected, resistance from inside the intelligence community.

While many had winked at Shackley’s ingenuity in financing the Phoenix Project with Vang Pao’s heroin profits, the prospect of using that selfsame apparatus for an operation that was at best only nominally in the national interest and was very profitable to those involved. So Shackley and Clines bowed to the pressure from their collegues and withdrew the elements of Air America from Iran.

Mere weeks later Shackley, Richard Secord, and Eric Von Marbod formed a company called EATSCO, the Egyptian American transport and Service Company. Because Eric Von Marbod had been assistant Secretary of Defense, the company received the contracts to ship all of the arms shipments into Egypt. The routes into Egypt had been opened due to the Camp David peace accords. These shipments were partially coordinated by Adler Berriman.

The Air America apparatus banked hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several years until they came under the unwelcome scrutiny of U.S. Attorney Larry Barcella. Barcella discovered that Edwin Wilson had been selling explosives to Col. Qaddaffi in direct defiance of the U.S. arms embargo. Barcella indicted Edwin Wilson and Frank Turpel and began an investigation of Shackley, Clines, Secord and Von Marbod. This investigation lasted less than a week before it was quashed, but Deputy Director of Intelligence Frank Carlucci did ask that Shackley and Clines resign from the CIA, they did.

Air America was mothballed for a period of slightly more than two months while Edwin Wilson, then under multiple federal indictments, traveled to Nicaragua to negotiate a deal with then dictator, Anastasio Somoza. After obtaining a contract to supply Somoza with U.S. military hardware and private sector advisors in open contempt of U.S. policy, the apparatus was reactivated. Even after Somoza was forced to flee to the Bahamas, Air America continued to supply arms and advisors to the vestiges of his supporters in Nicaragua, now called the Contras. The man who acted as liaison to the Contras was one of Ted Shackley’s old Operation 40 operatives, professional assassin Chi Chi Quintero.

Quintero took orders from the Contras and relayed them to Adler Berrimen who set up the shipping routes. Shackley’s next coup was to negotiate a deal with the Iranians whereby the hostages were kept on ice until the election was over. This enabled Reagan strategists to portray the Carter administration as weak and vacillating. Perhaps not an I naccurate depiction. The American public did not seem to think it coincidental that the hostages were released on the day of Reagan’s inauguration. All of this time and all of these operations were leading the Air America apparatus incrementally toward Mena.

There has long been an outlaw quality about Mena. During the nineteenth century, it was a refuge for smugglers and bandits. In the 1920’s it was a hotbed of political discontent. During the depression, it offered shelter to anarchists and like minded extremist elements. The rolling terrain and densely packed pine and hardwood forests give the surrounding territory a secretive feel. As though you could wander over the next hill and come upon a parked UFO or a cocaine shipment in progress.

Berry Seal started bringing planes into Mena in 1979, but the operation never really got into full swing until late 1980. There never seemed to be any deviation from the cycle that ran until his death in 1986. Armaments were loaded at Mena. They were then flown to a private airfield in Costa Rica located on a gigantic ranch belonging to a millionaire named John Hull.

The construction of this airfield had been supervised by Chi Chi Quintero. From there, the planes were refueled and sent on or sometimes the cargo was off loaded for overland shipment to boats waiting in Costa Rican waters. But wherever the planes finally did offload their cargo, there was an arguably more lethal cargo waiting to be picked up, kilos of it.

The planes would then turn back towards the United States to deliver their cargo to various drop points throughout the South. One video tape left among the voluminous financial records, journals, bank drafts and classified federal documents, Seal left after his death shows a cargo plane dropping several sturdy looking duffel bags by parachute, Seal retrieving them and stuffing them into a helicopter that had come in behind the cargo plane. He then smiles into the camera and says "That was the first daylight cocaine drop in the history of the state of Louisiana.

If the videotape is any indication, Seal’s operations were pulled off with a military precision that was to be expected of a former Special Forces pilot. The pattern of financing a black op, that could not be financed through normal intelligence community appropriations channels with the profits from drug sales to American citizens was being continued by the same group of men who had done it in Vietnam a decade previously. The Mena operation’s only real divergence from the guns for drugs for guns pattern was some occasional intelligence gathering duties.

Sometime in 1982, CIA technicians came to Mena and installed cameras in the wings of Seal’s C-123K transport plane. Seal used these cameras to take the famous pictures of the Sandanistas loading drugs aboard a flight in Nicaragua. These pictures were later used by the Reagan administration to justify covert aid to the Contras. These same pictures were used by the Bush administration as one of the links in the evidentiary chain tying Manuel Noriega to a massive drug smuggling campaign.

The C-123K cargo plane that Seal used, later became an important link in another chain. The chain connecting the operations at Mena to the original Air America apparatus. Seal’s C-123K cargo plane, which he dubbed "Fat Lady", had been part of the original Air America fleet in Laos. After the fall of Saigon "Fat Lady" had stayed on at the secret base in Thailand, occasionally turning up working for CIA friendly companies but mostly doing heroin runs for Vang Pao’s organization.

Seal’s plane and two others like her were used in this way until the operation in Iran, when they were transferred to Iran and countries just outside of Iran, to facilitate the training of the Shah’s secret police. At the conclusion of that operation they turned up in Mena. The smugglers at Intermountain Regional Airport seem to have enjoyed reasonably cordial relations with the local community. The one horrific exception to this was the deaths of two local teenagers, found bludgeoned and stabbed, then laid across tracks to be struck by the morning freight train. Authorities stepped all over themselves to rule the deaths an "accident", saying, "the boys had been smoking marijuana and fell asleep on the tracks" Only after the coroners report showed that the boys had been killed prior to being layed on the tracks were the deaths pronounced murders. Some of Seal’s records indicate that the area in which the boys had been camping was one of his drop zones and that there had been a flight on the night they were killed.

Since Seal modeled his operations so closely on Airborne resupply procedures, it is only logical that he would have set out security teams to patrol the perimeter of his drop zone. Don Henry and Kevin Ives may have run afoul of just such a patrol and been killed because of it. Whatever the case, a large number of people who were either investigating or implicated in the death’s of the two teenagers have either been killed or have committed suicide. This has all the hallmarks of black operations damage control. Seal’s relations with the banks were especially good. Secretaries have testified that there were days that they were given stacks of cash and directed to secure cashiers checks and money orders, just below the ten-thousand dollar limit that triggers an automatic IRS cash transaction report. The Union Bank of Mena seems to have been a particular favorite of Seal’s. Not only did he maintain several accounts there, but some of the bank’s officers were also administrators of the Intermountain Regional Airport. One of these officers, Jackson Stevens, was an early Clinton campaign contributor.

The Union Bank of Mena is currently under investigation by the house banking committee.

Another name that crops up time and again in relation to Seal’s financial activities is Don Lassater. Lassater ran a Little Rock bond house that was investigated for laundering cocaine profits. He was also involved in a cocaine distribution trial as a codefendant with Roger Clinton, the President’s brother. Lasater was sentenced to a short prison stay in this case.

The President has been accused of varying degrees of collusion in the Mena case. The single most glaring piece of evidence that he did indeed know about the activities at Intermountain Regional Airport is the Congressional testimony of a former Arkansas state trooper named Larry Patterson who said that he and other officers repeatedly discussed in Clinton’s presence large amounts of guns, money and drugs going in and out of Mena".

Another Arkansas State Trooper L.D. Brown has said in a magazine interview that while a member of the Governor’s security detail, he applied to the CIA with Clinton’s verbal and written endorsements. Shortly after doing so, he was contacted by Berry Seal and found himself making smuggling runs into Central America. Clinton made his first public statement on Mena at a press conference in 1991 in which he said " there are apparently linkages to the federal government", he also said, "there are all kinds of questions as to whether Seal had any links to the CIA and whether that banked into the Iran-Contra deal". Not much of a statement to make upon finding out that one of the largest smuggling operations in the history of the United States was going on in your state.

Of Clinton’s reticence to discuss the Mena case, Bill Plante and Micheal Singer of CBS news have written "That a Republican administration was apparently sponsoring a contra aid program in his state and protecting a smuggling ring that flew tons of cocaine through Arkansas was indisputable". One thing is certain, that is that Bill Clinton, on most occasions, has an unusually keen faculty for sniffing out political advantage. It stretches the boundaries of plausibility that he would have missed the possible political bonuses inherent in the Mena situation, that is unless he unless he had a good reason for missing them.

Official sanction of the activities at Mena by no means begins and ends with Bill Clinton. As early as 1986 the Attorney General of Louisiana wrote to then Attorney General Edwin Meese that Seal had "smuggled between three and five billion dollars worth of cocaine into the United States. In 1991 Arkansas State Attorney General Bryant wrote to independent council in the Iran-Contra investigation as to "why no one was prosecuted in Arkansas despite a mountain of evidence that Seal used Mena as his principle staging area during the years between 1982 and 1985".

Both Internal Revenue Service Agent Bill Duncan and Arkansas State Police Investigator Russel Welch have accused U.S. Attorney J. Micheal Fitzhugh of not pressing evidence that they presented him with. Welch was later poisoned with military grade anthrax, something that is very difficult to come by unless you can lay hands on biological warfare stores.

The final nail in the coffin of the Mena operation came, not with the murder of Barry Seal in Feb. of 1986, rather it came with crash of the "Fat Lady" which was shot down over Nicaragua loaded with supplies for the Contras. Arkansas pilot Buzz Sawyer was killed in the crash and mercenary pilot Eugene Hasenfus was taken prisoner. The Sandanistas were smart enough to make sure that the footage of Hasenfus being led from the wreckage was splashed all over CNN. After that, according to one arms dealer who had come to town to get paid, "You couldn’t find anybody in Mena".

The newest incarnation of Air America has turned up in the Wackenhut corporation. Specializing in security related products, the Wackenhut corporation’s board of directors and senior administration ranks read like a who’s who of retired spooks and spymasters. The Wackenhut corporation was also active in developing chemical and biological weapons for the contras at a secret facility on an Indian reservation in Southern California. Shortly after the operation at Mena was closed down, the Wackenhut corporation came out with a new business venture, Wackenhut Correctional. The idea of privatized prisons is a relatively new one in the United States and was still facing some legislative hurdles. Wackenhut hired lobbying firm Grey and Company to aid in getting over these hurdles. It wasn’t long before all the impediments to Wackenhut running prisons in the United States had been removed. With the contracts to run some American prisons in hand, some of the Wackenhut sales staff left for South America. It is worth noting that all of the locations where Wackenhut Correctional obtained large contracts to run South and Central American prisons, were areas that Berry Seal had formerly run drugs or guns to. The leap from smuggling drugs to running prisons makes perfect sense in the face of the intelligence community mindset.

Appearances to the contrary, the bulk of all intelligence community activity involves the analysis and collation of data. Their job is to take absolutely gigantic amounts of information, shape it, and analyze it, and try to garner a coherent picture of the future from it. Since all of the people in the senior ranks of the Air America apparatus were high level intelligence officers, they probably had a good idea of what the net effect of pumping billions of dollars worth of drugs on to the streets of this country was. They also knew that the war on drugs as started by the Reagan administration was unwinnable. Not that this country was incapable of interrupting a large percentage of the flow of drugs through our borders and of drying up another large percentage at the source, but that the United States does not want to win the war on drugs. If we were to do so, nearly a dozen South and Central American countries would default on their loans to Chase Manhattan and the World Bank, plus a huge amount of money currently circulating on the streets of the U.S. would be taken off.