The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories

Re: The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories

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CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE DAN LASATER DRUG TRAFFICKING ORGANIZATION

PATTY-ANNE SMITH was sixteen years old when she fell under the ruinous influence of Dan Lasater, friend and patron of the Clinton brothers. She was a cheerful, gregarious girl, a cheerleader at the North Little Rock "Ole Main" High School. Her nicknames were Muffin and Precious. She was still a child, but not for long.

"I was a virgin until two months after I met Dan Lasater. He plied me with cocaine and gifts for sexual favors and I finally gave in and slept with him," she said in a police statement at the offices of the U.S. Attorney in Little Rock.} At the time Lasater was 40, more than twice her age. Under his tutelage she soon became addicted to hard drugs. She would help herself to the limitless store of cocaine in the kitchen wall-safe at Lasater's apartment at I2B Quapaw Towers. "I could get an eight-ball whenever I wanted it. I carried a vial of it around at school." [2]

Lasater arranged for a corrupt doctor to give her "a pelvic examination and prescribe birth control pills." Once on contraceptives, she was made available to Lasater's business colleagues, including Arkansas State Senator George Locke. [3] In the end Patty-Anne fled Arkansas after it was explained to her that he planned to use her "as a semi-prostitute to 'entertain.'''

Patty-Anne was not the only victim. Michelle Cochran, then 19, had much the same experience. "He used drugs and money eventually to seduce me. As a result of the relationship I became addicted to cocaine," she told the State Police. [4] So did Gina Hartsell. Lasater flew her to Las Vegas in one of his private jets, enticed her with cocaine, and seduced her that night at the Bob Hope Suite of the Riviera Hotel. Before long she was so addicted that she "would sometimes get up and snort cocaine in order to start my day." [5]

But it was Patty-Anne Smith who suffered the most traumatic loss of innocence. The feds tracked her down in 1986 as a witness in a joint state-federal probe of the Lasater cocaine ring. When they found her she was a "basket case," in the words of one investigator, working as a "drugged-out party girl" at the Tahoe Beach and Ski Club in California. [6]

As I read through her statement in the narcotics files of the Arkansas State Police eight years later, I wondered what had become of her. By all accounts she had simply vanished, and for good reason. She had been threatened by Lasater's enforcer. "Chuck Berry told me that I was one of Dan Lasater's most trusted people and knew a lot about cocaine and his personal life," she told the Arkansas State Police. "If I ever betrayed his personal trust and hurt Lasater in any way I would not 'see daylight' to tell about it anymore." [7]

She was not easy to find. First I had to track down her mother, who then passed messages back and forth thinking that I was one of her daughter's numerous suitors. Apparently, she approved of my Oxford accent, which generally seemed to go down well in Arkansas. I eventually met up with Patty-Anne in Florida. She was still beautiful, making a living as best she could on the margins of the jet set. Blessed with the beautiful lithe body of a fashion model, she had green eyes, long blonde hair, and a slight rasp in her voice.

How did it all start? I asked her as we sat on the terrace of an Art Deco cafe, looking out over the Atlantic.

"I was working at Busters, as a seating hostess. It was a Friday night. He came in with a large entourage and wanted a table. The place was packed, but I somehow managed get them seated and he gave me a hefty tip. I'd never seen a $100 bill before .... A few hours later he called me up, wanted me to come over to a party. He said the chauffeur was waiting for me outside with a limo. I thought it was kind of neat." [8]

"I was the youngest of all the girls. We were like hens in the roost, with the rooster," she explained. "We girls got along in a bitchy kind of way because we didn't want to be expelled from the roost .... He bought us all."

"I'll never be the same sweet Patty I was, I'll never trust people again. It's made me the cynical bitch I am now." Her mother knew that something awful had happened, but Patty-Anne was too ashamed to confess her story. The shame lingers. "How can I marry now, or have children? I have too much explaining to do."

She had moved fifteen times, tormented by her nightmares, too frightened to venture near Little Rock. "I knew a lot more than I should have known. I was there in the apartment at 12B when Dan did his business dealings. I'd be corning and going with champagne, and I'd hear the conversations," she said. That was how she learned that Lasater was mixed up with the Contra supply operation in Nicaragua. "I didn't think anything of it at the time. Then all that stuff broke in the news years later, and I thought 'wow.'''

The Clinton brothers were part of the scene. "I met Bill Clinton several times, he'd know my name and I thought he was a wonderful person, but I can tell you that he was never acting like a governor when I saw him." She claims to have witnessed him taking cocaine on two or three occasions, although only one of them stands out in her memory. It was late at night, around one in the morning, in a room off the kitchen in Lasater's residence. The only people present were Patty-Anne, Lasater, and Bill Clinton. "He was doing a line. It was just there on the table."

Given the circumstances, that allegation is, obviously, impossible to verify, but Patty-Anne's general testimony was used in 1986 by federal authorities to help convict Dan Lasater of "social distribution of cocaine."

What is possible to verify is that Bill Clinton and Dan Lasater are rewriting history when they now claim they hardly knew each other. [9] The reality was spelled out in the sworn deposition of Corporal Barry Spivey, a State Trooper who served on Governor Clinton's security detail from 1979 to 1984. Spivey is not one of the troopers who came out publicly against Clinton. He gave this interview because he was compelled under subpoena.

Spivey: "I can recall flying on Dan Lasater's Lear jet. It was nice. It impressed me, I recall .... I flew from Little Rock to Lexington, to the Kentucky Derby, the Governor and I and Dan .... There was other times that Governor Clinton took flights with Dan personally or in Dan's plane. But that was the only time I was with him."

Q: "Do you remember Dan Lasater coming to the Mansion?"

Spivey: "Well, he dropped in. Just kind of off-the-cuff, drop-in things .... Day and night, weekends, all day. He just came when he wanted to. I wouldn't log Dan in because I knew that he and Bill were friends .... Dan was never shown in through the front door. Dan went in through the kitchen .... You just didn't go through Miss Liza's kitchen unless you were part of the kitchen circle."

Q: "How many times would you say you took Governor Clinton down to Dan Lasater's?"

Spivey: "Six, eight, ten times. A lot of times he'd say stop and he'd jump out and run in and I'd circle the block and he'd jump back in. Sometimes I might park and sit there for an hour .... I know he went a lot more times than when I was with him, when the other guys were driving .... He went by there a lot." [10]

* * *

Dan Lasater is a talented entrepreneur. Born poor in rural Arkansas, he started a chain of hamburger restaurants called Scotty's at the age of 19 and succeeded in undercutting McDonald's by selling burgers at 12 cents instead of 15 cents -- and making up the profits with a higher price for french fries, a formula that apparently made him a millionaire by his mid-twenties. [11] By the time he was 30 he was the owner of the Ponderosa steakhouse chain in Ohio and Indiana, with annual sales of more than $300 million. Cashing in his equity for around $15 million, [12] he turned to horse racing and soon became the most successful breeder and racer of thoroughbreds in the world. With stables of 80 horses in Florida and Kentucky, he was the leading money winner three years in succession -- 1974, 1975, and 1976 -- netting a total of $10 million in prizes, and winning the Eclipse Award of the racing industry. But according to a police statement by one of his employees, Lasater's success with the horses was achieved by "putting in the boot"-fixing the races. [13]

It was at the Oaklawn Race Track in Hot Springs that Lasater first befriended Virginia Kelley, the mother of Governor Clinton, and began to close his vice around the First Family of Arkansas. Collecting governors was one of his business specialties. In early 1983 he bailed out Governor John Y. Brown of Kentucky with $300,000 cash in a paper sack at the Lexington airport. At the time Brown was desperately trying to stay one step ahead of the IRS. He had withdrawn $1 million out of a Florida bank without a "cash transient" report. [14] "I just took care of John Y.'s money problems," Lasater told his colleague Michael Drake. [15]

Lasater also tried to befriend Governor Tony Anaya of New Mexico, offering him a consulting job at the end of his term. Anaya never took up the offer, but he did use taxpayer funds to construct an 8,900-foot runway at the Angel Fire Ski Resort owned by Dan Lasater.

The governor was viewed by his opponents as naive but honest. However, the Attorney General's Office in Santa Fe was later to investigate Lasater for suspected "narcotics trafficking via aircraft with possible Organized Crime ties" operating out of Angel Fire. [16] At the time of the alleged drug trafficking, Angel Fire was managed by Patsy Thomasson, later to become Director of the Office of Administration at the White House. "I put Patsy in as the assistant chairman, and she pretty well ran that project for me," said Lasater. [17]

But the show trophy of his collection was undoubtedly Governor Clinton, who seemed to require more favors than most. When Clinton needed a safe house for his delinquent half-brother Roger, it was Lasater who spirited him out of Arkansas and gave him a sinecure job as a "stable hand" in Ocala, Florida. And when Roger fell behind in payments to his Medellin contact -- a stash of cocaine had been stolen from his convertible, which his mother had just given him -- it was Lasater who paid the debt, or perhaps a better word is ransom. [18] The Colombians, apparently, were hinting that there could be violent reprisals against the Governor himself. [19]

Always restless, Lasater moved into the bond business in 1980. A brief business partnership with Senator George Locke was dissolved, because of enveloping SEC violations, before Lasater embarked on his own as Lasater & Company. One former broker told me that he never witnessed enough authentic business to justify the existence of Lasater's office at 312 Louisiana Street. He suspected that Lasater was "shuffling money." [20] By the mid-1980s Little Rock was a hub of petty racketeering and fly-by-night securities trading. The target: small, deregulated thrifts that had been neglected by the big firms on Wall Street. "You have no idea how crazy it was here in the mid-eighties," said Ron Davis, a former Lasater broker. "At one point there were 54 investment houses in Little Rock. There were 4,000 brokers working in this city. In 1987 we did more institutional sales than any other city in the world, and that includes New York, London, and Tokyo. You had used car dealers signing up making a $1 million a year in commissions." [21]

For investigators attuned to the methods of organized crime, the Lasater empire looked suspiciously like a laundromat for tens of millions of dollars of drug profits. Nor was this an idle hunch. In 1977 Lasater had lost a Lear jet in Santa Marta, Colombia, after it was confiscated by the Colombian authorities on suspicion of narcotics trafficking. The aircraft was insured at Lloyds of London, so he was not too bothered by the event, but the FBI took note. [22] The jet had been leased to a Las Vegas outfit called Jet Avia, which was under investigation for Mafia ties. It had been flown to Colombia to evacuate a badly burned pilot who had crashed a DC-6 loaded with marijuana in the jungle. [23] Among the passengers on the jet was Jamiel "Jimmy" Chagra, viewed as one of the most dangerous mob bosses in the United States. In 1982 he was prosecuted for conspiring to murder Judge John H. Woods, the first U.S. federal judge to be assassinated this century. He was acquitted on that charge, but was ultimately convicted on charges of cocaine smuggling.

Lasater was a player in the cocaine trafficking network of the Dixie Mafia as early as the mid-1970s. Intelligence reports show that the DEA had opened a file on Lasater in 1983 and had assigned him a tracking number of 141475. [24] Lasater was tipped off at once. A source called him in 1983 to inform him that he was listed in the computer as the subject of a DEA probe. [25]

In February 1984 Lasater, accompanied by Patsy Thomasson, flew to Belize in his private jet to negotiate the purchase of a 24,000- acre ranch. [26] The deal fell through because of a dispute with the "governor of Belize who was hard to deal with." One member of the Lasater party boorishly proposed "that the governor should be wasted." [27] This caused some heartburn for the U.S. Ambassador who was present during these interesting negotiations. Also present was a lawyer from Washington, D.C., named Ed Cummings, who had flown down with Lasater. [28]

Ostensibly, Lasater was looking for a horse farm. But the property, known as the Carver Ranch, was in fact a refueling stop for smugglers coming up from Colombia. Located near the border with the Yucatan, it has cropped up in a number of investigations. One of them was the "Mena" probe of Arkansas State Trooper Russell Welch, which focused on the smuggling empire of Barry Seal. This is what Welch wrote in his notebook during a debriefing of one of Seal's pilots: "With orders from Seal he would fly to a place in Southern Colombia, bordering Peru, and pickup 200 kilos of cocaine. This operation was to be staged from 'Carver Ranch' ... operated by Chester Cotter. Seal met Cotter through Roger Reeves. [Roger Reeves was the intermediary who introduced Barry Seal to the Medellin Cartel.] Seal used this ranch frequently." [29] So, apparently, this ranch was no horse farm. It was part of the Medellin trafficking empire.

It was certainly well known among the drug pilots. Basil Abbott, a convicted smuggler, told me that he used it frequently when he operated from Belize in the early 1980s. He remembers Cotter, the manager, as a man with legendary sway over the local "peons." He would have the fuel supplies ready at the landing strip. The usual route to the United States, explained Abbott, was through a blind spot in the mountains of Mexico, near Monterrey, crossing the border five miles east of the McAllen control tower. "There were about seven or eight of us doing it, and none of us ever got caught," he said. On one occasion in early 1982 he flew a Cessna 210 full of cocaine into Marianna, in the rice delta of eastern Arkansas. The aircraft was met by an Arkansas State Trooper in a marked police car. "Arkansas was a very good place to load and unload," he said. [30]

Lasater had his own agents in the State Police. One of them was a narcotics investigator named Mike Mahone, whom he had befriended at the Oaklawn Race Track in the box of Virginia Kelley -- Governor Clinton's mother. [31] Lasater spotted easy prey. The subsequent courtship offers a revealing insight into his methods of corrupting law enforcement. First he invited Mahone to spend the July 4th weekend, 1985, in one of his condominiums at the Angel Fire Ski Resort. [32] Having broken the ice, the bribery began. It was disguised, of course. What Lasater did was to instruct one of his subordinates to buy a run-down property belonging to Mahone. The price was inflated, netting the State Trooper a windfall profit. [33] Lasater also paid off $7,500 of a delinquent loan that Mahone had taken out in his sister's name.

In return for these little favors, Mahone was generous with police intelligence. In the early summer of 1986 he met with Lasater and Senator Locke at a hotel in Chicago to brief them on the status of the investigation into their drug activities. [34] He warned them to be careful of their telephones and told them that the two State Troopers on the case -- Doc Delaughter and Larry Gleghorn -- had a "hard on" for Lasater. The two officers could be found at "Spanky's" restaurant, he added, as if tempting Lasater to take drastic action.

Trooper Mahone advised Lasater to freshen up his image by donating money to the Gyst House for Drug Abuse. So, with a nice sense of the absurd, Lasater launched a philanthropic Blitzkrieg that included funding for the Florence Crittenden Home for Unwed Mothers. This caused huge amusement at Lasater & Company, where the running joke was guessing which of the unwed mothers Lasater had sent there in the first place. [35] (Years later, Lasater was profiled by CNN's investigative reporter John Camp as a humble born-again Christian, trying to redeem his soul by helping in a soup kitchen.)

It was chilling for Doc Delaughter to discover that he was being betrayed by criminal elements within his own police department. But nothing about this case was normal, least of all the two status reports he gave to Colonel Tommy Goodwin, the commander of the State Police. They were strictly verbal, conducted on the telephone, and both times the calls were patched through to the personal offices of Governor Clinton.

"I don't know if Bill Clinton was listening on the line," said Delaughter. "I wasn't in the room. But he had no business being in the loop." [36]

Delaughter believed that he had sufficient evidence to pursue a full-fledged investigation of Lasater for drug trafficking. At the very least there were grounds for probing his transportation of cocaine on private jets. But Delaughter was squeezed out of the investigation, prevented from attending the critical interviews of Lasater, Senator George Locke, and Roger Clinton. In the end, U.S. Attorney George Proctor offered Lasater a plea agreement that charged Lasater with a conspiracy to distribute cocaine for "recreational use." It was a slap on the wrists. Lasater was paroled after one year, most of it spent at a halfway house in Little Rock. The prosecutor was later appointed to be head of the Justice Department's Office of International Affairs by President Clinton.

At the sentencing U.S. Federal Judge Thomas Eisele said: "There are a lot of people who would like to believe that your financial success was derived, because it was so spectacular, from nothing less than being in the drug business. But I have to rely on the evidence, and there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that you were making money in the drug business," he intoned before falling into tabloid cliche: "I think we are dealing with essentially an American tragedy, a case where the American dream turned into the American nightmare."

Others in law enforcement were less inclined to regard Lasater as a victim. According to The Albuquerque Journal, the FBI and U.S. Customs in New Mexico opened a fresh probe in 1988 under the auspices of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, naming Dan Lasater as the chief target. But it fell apart in early 1989 due to jurisdictional bickering between the FBI and Customs on one side, and the DEA on the other. [37]

Governor Clinton gave Lasater a state pardon in 1990, purportedly so that he could regain his hunting license. The pardon was of dubious validity, because Lasater had been sentenced by a U.S. federal court, not a state court. But it sent a signal to the Arkansas authorities that Lasater should be allowed to resume his financial and broking activities without hindrance.

Lasater retreated to a 7,400-acre heavily guarded estate in the Cockspur Mountains of Saline County. (Complaints by neighbors about low-flying aircraft had been passed on to the DEA, according to Captain Gene Donham of the Saline County Sheriffs Department.) But Lasater's influence lives on through the tenacious Patsy Thomasson, his adjutant and partner in adventures at the Carver Ranch. Her rise to prominence in Washington is remarkable, given that she worked so closely with Lasater -- a convicted drug distributor -- continuously from June 1983 until July 1992. "I was his eyes and ears. Whatever needed to be done I did," she explained. [38]

The Albuquerque Journal reported that Thomasson was still listed as the registered agent of Lasater's Phoenix Mortgage Company after she went to work at the White House. She was executive vice president of Lasater & Company, and president of Angel Fire Corporation and the Phoenix Group Incorporated. She was the signing officer for Agency del Sol, Portfolio Services Incorporated, Emerald Isle condominium development, and Starfire Resorts Incorporated.

When Lasater was sent to prison, she was given "durable power of attorney" to manage his business empire. This included everything from signing checks, to selling off his properties, and filing lawsuits in his name.

A self-styled "yellow-dog Democrat" with short black hair and a brusque no-nonsense manner, she had once served on the staff of Arkansas Congressman Wilbur Mills. At Lasater's, she was viewed as the link to the Democratic Party by the firm's employees. "We'd all have to make contributions to the Clinton campaign funds, anywhere from $500 on up, scaled on earnings," said one bond salesman, describing the obligatory tithing system at the firm. "Patsy was the one who handled the money." [39]

Feared and disliked by many members of the firm, she was clearly a favorite with Bill Clinton. He installed her as executive secretary of the Arkansas Democratic Party to help build the foundations for his presidential bid. After the 1992 elections, she was catapulted into one of the most powerful positions in Washington -- Director of the White House Office of Administration, in charge of personnel, computers, security, and drug testing -- where she continued to make her presence felt in the successive scandals that have beset the Clinton presidency.

She participated in a six-hour meeting on May 15, 1994, with the FBI that eventually led to the investigation and firing of the Travel Office staff. And it was, of course, Patsy Thomasson who was found sitting in Vincent Foster's office on the night of his death, rifling through his drawers. All this without benefit of a White House security clearance. For reasons that have never been explained, the Secret Service refused to give Patsy Thomasson a White House security clearance until March 5, 1994. [40]

* * *

Nobody was more astonished by the vaulting ascent of Patsy Thomasson than Dennis Patrick, a truck driver in Florida. He was listening to the Rush Limbaugh radio show just before Christmas 1993 when suddenly her name cropped up in the midday commentary. "Rush made some comments about Patsy Thomasson removing some documents from Vince Foster's office," he said. "Then he started talking about Dan Lasater, and I thought 'My God."' [41]

The names brought back a flood of confused memories. Dennis went rummaging through boxes of documents at home and unearthed a wad of trading receipts from a brokerage account in his name at Lasater & Company. He had looked at them years before but the documents were hard to interpret, and anyway his life had been in such a shambles that he had somehow missed their full significance. This time he looked closer.

The trading tickets showed that "his" account had been buying bonds worth tens of millions of dollars in late 1985 and early 1986. In a single trade on July 31, 1985, Patrick & Associates bought a block of Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation bonds for $6,763,373. On September 18 it bought a block for $9,492,216. It was constantly buying and selling Treasury Bills in blocks of$1 million or $2 million at a time, and GNMA pools for $5 million. [42]

Dennis took the slips to a friend from church, a stockbroker, who told him that these trades were not options trades -- where a small sum of money can control large amounts of stock. These were actual buys and sells, face-value transactions by a man who could write a check for $ 10 million. Lasater & Company had been running huge sums of money through a "straw" account in his name.

Dennis was living in hiding with his wife and two young children in Coral Gables, Florida, when I first went to see him in early 1994. A gentle man with a tense, quivering voice and tired eyes, he seemed older than 42, but then he had a good excuse for premature aging. If a Hollywood screenwriter concocted his story, it would fail the test of plausibility.

He had once been a rising star in the Appalachian coal town of Williamsburg, Kentucky. He came from a respected local family. His father had been Sheriff of Whitley County. His mother had been Circuit Court Clerk, and he stepped in to succeed her after her death. The youngest Circuit Court Clerk in the country, aged 24, he did a good job. "He had integrity," said Marlyn Arnold, chief deputy clerk. "He saw that everything was run right. It seemed like everybody loved him."

"I was asked to run for state office by the Kentucky State Republican Committee," recalled Dennis, shaking his head with melancholy regret. "My goal was to be governor. I thought that one day I might really lead the state of Kentucky."

But if Dennis had a failing, it was a willingness to go along to get along. In the summer of 1985 he was contacted by an old college friend, Steve Love, who was making a fortune trading bonds at Lasater & Company in Little Rock. Love drove up in his Lamborghini, flush and exuberant, and began to lure Dennis into Lasater's flashy, vulgar world. In July 1985 he invited Dennis to stay at one of Lasater's luxurious beachfront condominiums in Destin, on the Gulf of Mexico. Out fishing, Dennis caught a Wahu, which Lasater & Company mounted at exorbitant expense and shipped back to Kentucky.

"When I look back now I realize that I was just a clay pigeon. I was being set up from the beginning," said Dennis. "We were out on a fishing boat and Steve turned and said 'I've got the inside on this. I can make you a great deal of money, Dennis, and it won't cost you anything.''' It wasn't something that Dennis wanted to get mixed up in. His income as Circuit Court Clerk was less than $25,000. His total assets were only $60,000, including the value of his house. He was in no position to play with the big boys on the bond market. "I should have just said no, but they were being so generous I felt obligated. I told Steve to send me something so I could read up and see what I was getting into. He changed the subject."

A few days later Steve Love called up and said: "I've just earned you $20,000, but I need you to come down to Little Rock and open an account." Dennis was ecstatic. He jumped into his pickup truck and raced to Arkansas. "My God, I would have ridden rollerblades to Little Rock for $20,000 dollars." At the Capitol Hotel he was treated like royalty and given the best suite. He was escorted to the First American Bank and $21,932 was deposited in his newly opened account. [43] The money went through Dennis's fingers like water. "I spent the lot," he said, sheepishly. "My fear was that they were going to ask for it back."

Years later Dennis was interrogated about this by FBI agents working for the Whitewater investigation. Why did he take the money? "Hell," he replied. "Hillary Clinton took a hundred thousand dollars without asking any questions, didn't she? And she's supposed to be one of the best lawyers in America." This caused considerable mirth at the Office of the Independent Counsel. Indeed, the FBI agents interviewing him had to leave the room until they could control their laughter.

After a grueling cross-examination, FBI Agent Mike Smith told Dennis that he was "a vital witness in the overall investigation of Whitewater." But Dennis was never contacted again. Dennis's trip to Little Rock was a whirl of high-life extravagance, ending at a nightclub where Roger Clinton was playing in the band. "Good to have you aboard," said Lasater, patting Dennis on the back and promising him that the firm would make him a rich man. Lasater's senior vice president, Billy McCord, told Dennis that $20,000 was nothing. Dennis was going to make that much every week.

"I was already thinking of buying farms up in Kentucky," confessed Dennis. He was hooked. When the firm offered to send a Lear jet to London, Kentucky, to fly him to Angel Fire for an elk hunt, he accepted eagerly. He asked whether he could invite his girlfriend Karen (later his wife), who was in the little town of Paducah. The aircraft was put completely at his disposal. So he called Karen from the air phone, and the Lear jet collected her off the tarmac.

During the flight Steve Love repeatedly tried to get Dennis to sign a set of papers that would formalize his relationship as a client of Lasater & Company, and Dennis kept trying to put it off. "I began to get a queasy feeling in my stomach, even then. I don't know why," said Dennis.

Then the music stopped, as abruptly as it had begun. After the trip to Angel Fire, Dennis never heard another word from Lasater & Company.

His life began to fall apart a few weeks later. In October 1985 the ATF contacted Dennis and told him that an armed criminal by the name of Patrick Henry Talley, who had recently been granted early parole from a federal penitentiary in Oklahoma, had been apprehended in Alabama. "They told me that Talley had been 'dispatched to murder' me." Apparently Tally had been arrested after a fight in a bar. Among Talley's possessions police discovered a picture of Dennis, a hand-drawn map of his house, a picture of his Blazer jeep and its license tags, as well as $30,000 in cash and an Uzi submachine gun with a silencer. Talley was driving a motorbike with no serial numbers on it -- a classic "drop bike." Though Talley confessed to the ATF that his intent was to murder Dennis Patrick, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Alabama declined to investigate the apparent contract hit and allowed Talley to plead guilty to a minor firearms violation. [44]

When Dennis met with an ATF officer, he found himself accused of high level involvement in narcotics smuggling. "You'd better start talking because those bastards are going to kill you, and we're going to hang you out to dry," warned the officer. [45]

If that was shocking, what happened next was bizarre. Sex ads with his name and address were published in magazines. "White, Bi, male seeks satisfaction, Anytime, Anywhere, with Anyone. Nothing too kinky for me to enjoy," was one that appeared in Modern Publications. Rolls of film with pornographic pictures were dropped off at the photo shop. Dennis's name and address were on the cover envelopes. "I wouldn't pick up the pictures, but it didn't make any difference, it started spreading like wildfire," he said. The mystery of who placed the sex ads and pictures was eventually solved -- as we shall see -- but not before even more harmful rumors spread.

A woman he had chosen to work in his office as a deputy clerk came to him, highly distraught, to say that she could not take the job. The minister of the First Baptist Church, Dennis's own church, had told her to stay away from him, because he was "heavily into drugs."

"That just busted my chops," said Dennis. "For a while people stick with you, but when it keeps coming they pull away, and you're all alone .... It reached a point where people would walk out of the barber shop when I came in .... And I still didn't know why it was happening."

"It was all out war. I was getting sued left, right, and center, fictitious lawsuits, draining me of every penny I had." Then his house was firebombed. On October 15, 1985, a gas grenade canister was hurled through the window, setting the curtains and walls on fire. Dennis was not there. After the ATF warned him about the attempted contract hit on his life he had been sleeping in barns, or in his jeep, always watching his back.

Terrified, he now began to take exceptional precautions. He bought a bullet-proof vest, and turned his house into an electrified fortress with live wires activated at night. Inside he had seven guns carefully placed in different spots. One was a shotgun mounted in the kitchen with a triggering mechanism attached by string to the kitchen door. He even linked a copper wire from his Chevy Blazer to an electric cable under the ground so that anybody trying to plant a detonating device in his car would be blown up in the process.

"There are a lot of animal instincts in a human being that you don't know about until something like this happens," he said. Perhaps it was animal instinct that led him back to his house on Friday, December 13, 1985. He was standing by the kitchen window getting a drink of water when an old Bonneville with Tennessee tags drove up. "I knew at once that this was it .... A man got out with a package and started walking up toward the door. The next thing I know he'd hurled a bomb at the window, but it hit the corner and exploded outside. It was a military CS gas grenade that he'd covered with candle wax and shotgun pellets."

What happened next was something straight out of a Charles Bronson movie -- with this difference, it is attested to in sworn depositions before the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Tennessee.

The would-be assassin sprinted back to his car with Dennis, barefoot, running after him in the snow. His assailant raced off the wrong way up a blind alley, giving Dennis enough time to jump into his Blazer and go careening down 1-75 in hot pursuit. As they wove through the mountains at 100 mph, dodging in and out of heavy trucks, the assailant fired a .38 Smith & Wesson out his window. Dennis rammed the assailant's truck, but the impact sent Dennis's own Blazer spinning out of control, finally bouncing back on the tarmac.

When the assassin pulled off the freeway, Dennis fired a Belgian Browning 270 deer rifle with an eight power scope at the assassin's car. "I shot his tire out, and then just started to dismantle the car shot by shot .... I blew out the windscreen, the gas tank .... I was going to make sure that this one never got away."

The Jellicoe Police arrived, followed in quick succession by the Tennessee State Police and the ATF. The assassin was arrested. He was a Texan named Danny Starr Burson. In a deposition given a year later he admitted that he had been contracted for "$20,000 plus expenses" to kill Dennis Patrick and his wife with a KG-9 machine gun. [46] He described how he bought a "drop car" under a false name, how he found a spot in some foliage where he sat at night, wearing camouflage, his face painted, and watched Dennis's house with a set of night binoculars.

"Was it your instructions at the time to kill Mr. Patrick and his wife, or to only put him under surveillance?"

"No, it was to kill 'em."

"Why didn't you do it?"

"Couldn't find him."

He admitted that he had put Dennis on a pornographic mailing list. It was one of the tricks in a harassment manual he had picked up at a gunshow. He referred in opaque terms to the organization that contracted him as a multi-million dollar outfit with military ties. As a case of conspiracy to murder that crossed state lines, the federal authorities had jurisdiction, but the ATF left it to the local authorities. Burson pleaded guilty to "wanton endangerment" and "criminal mischief." He was sentenced to five years, but was immediately released on probation. Omitted from the deposition was a crucial piece of testimony. In an examination under oath shortly after the attack he had said:

"This guy called me named Steve and I met him in Little Rock, at a McDonald's near downtown and he told me he wanted to harass this guy Patrick."

"Steve who? Do you know?"

"No, sir." [47]

There was one last plot to murder Dennis Patrick. A group in Texas -- penetrated by an ATF informant wearing a body microphone -- planned to blow up his Chevy Blazer, and if that failed to kill him, to attack his house with an "M-72 anti-tank weapon" (sic). Thanks to the informant, the group was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and sent to prison. But the ATF investigator in charge of the case, John Simms, could not fathom why anybody would go to such lengths to eliminate a Circuit Court Clerk of modest means in Williamsburg, Kentucky. "Somebody, somewhere, was really determined to kill this guy," he said. "But I never was able to get to the bottom of it." [48]

"I think John Simms felt sorry for me," said Dennis. "He came to my house one day and sat down in the kitchen. My wife was there, six months pregnant, and he looked up and said 'Dennis, I don't know what I can do for you .... This thing is too big.'"

The local newspapers attributed the attacks to a dispute between Dennis and his business partners in a wildcat drilling venture in Kentucky. One of the conspirators from Texas, James Josey, was involved with civil litigation against Dennis over some marginal oil and gas leases.

"If you added up the whole company I was involved in it wasn't worth $25,000," said Dennis. James Josey later phoned Dennis from prison to confess that the conspiracy was much bigger than he imagined. "There are a whole lot of people who want you dead," he said, in a taped exchange. "There are a lot of things I can't disclose right now .... We're in very thin shoes." Josey intimated that he had been exploited by a powerful organization and used as a patsy. The murder attempts, he said, had nothing to do with the oil leases. [49]

Dennis had been warned long before by a disenchanted broker at Lasater & Company called Linda Nesheim that people with ties to the firm were trying to kill him. "Linda kept talking about Patsy Thomasson," recalled Dennis. "She told me that Patsy was the one in charge, that she was the one who could put an end to my whole nightmare." [50]

But at the time it didn't make much sense to him. "I couldn't figure out why Lasater would do this to me. I didn't know back then that he'd run $100 million, or $150 million, or whatever it was, through my account."

Eight years later, Dennis managed to speak to Nesheim again, if only for a few minutes. This time she was more circumspect. "They're bigger than we are, they're larger than you can imagine. I know you have a son, and I know you love him. I have a daughter, and I love her too," said Nesheim. "Just leave this alone, Dennis." [51]

Dennis limped through to the end of his term as Circuit Court Clerk, then left town with his pregnant wife, Karen, and his infant child, Robert.

"We drove, and drove, and drove, always going South, to get as far as possible from Kentucky," he said. "We ended up here In Florida, living in a motel with roaches. Here I was with a college degree, working a dump truck ... but that's all I was fit for. I couldn't think, I couldn't focus, I was a burned out husk of a man .... I still am."

His friends did not know whether he was dead or alive. "How could I face them when I'd been stripped of my whole life, my name, my integrity, everything I had?" Too proud to return to Williamsburg in disgrace, he preferred to build a new identity as a working man in Coral Gables, Florida. And that is how he was living when two British reporters, Chris Wood from The Economist and I from The Sunday Telegraph, invaded his refuge in the spring of 1994.

It was only after we started writing about Dennis that the worst details came to light. The Economist was leaked a confidential document dated March 15, 1989, entitled "REPORT FLINTLOCK SCORPIO 000289." It profiled Dennis Patrick as "an associate of the Lamida Family of Long Island, New York .... Subject allegedly has been under suspicion of trafficking in cocaine with the Lamida Family. He has hidden all assets ... under the drug cartel in Florida." [52]

The report called for an urgent investigation. "Need two operatives to proceed immediately for additional information to Cape Coral and Williamsburg, Kentucky." In a supplementary page it stated that "subject is known to carry a 9 mm UZI in his vehicle while traveling. He must be considered armed and dangerous at all times."

The documents included a printout of telephone calls from Dennis's house made between August and September 1988. According to the printout six calls were made to a place called Lehigh Acres, "a swamp with small landing and drop zones." There was a trading receipt from Lasater & Company for a Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation bond sale worth $9,492,216 and an asset statement, dated December 13, 1985, that was drawn up by a Memphis accountant named Ron Moore. It listed the net worth of Patrick & Associates (the associate had been Dennis's first wife) as $12,339,850.

The FLINTLOCK SCORPIO document portrays Dennis as a wealthy drug smuggler capable of trading $9,492,216 in bonds in a single block. The question is, who was behind FLINTLOCK SCORPIO? Who had a motive to give a dump truck driver the false identity of a man with this kind of money? The report carries no government identification or letterhead. Its style and lettering look like an amateurish rendition of an FBI document. But similar charges were appearing elsewhere. Dennis was informed that his name appeared on Florida police computers as an associate of Colombian cartels. [53] Moreover, in 1989 an FBI agent in Louisville went to Williamsburg, Kentucky, to inform the Police Department that Dennis Patrick was involved in a Florida drug cartel. [54] Whoever was behind this effort had deep reach into U.S. law enforcement.

For Dennis's erstwhile "broker," Steve Love, life has had its up and downs, too. When I tracked him down in a small town in Pennsylvania, he was a different man. The Lamborghinis were gone. He, too, had been living half-underground for years, frightened that the past would catch up with him. "I find it extremely painful to think of what happened at that time," he said. "I was just a scapegoat. I was used by Lasater, and flushed away, my whole life destroyed .... I finished up sleeping on park benches." [55]

He professed remorse. "Dennis never did anything wrong, and I'm deeply sorry that I got him mixed up in it. The fellow was like a brother to me."

Love swore that he was not responsible for the monster trades of $9 million at a time in the account of Patrick & Associates. His "broker number" was on the transaction slips, he admitted, but the orders had been given by the higher-ups who ran Lasater & Company. "There was an awful lot of money going through that business, that's all I can say, and most of us didn't really know what was going on," he said.

Did Lasater & Company order his murder? I asked outright.

"They certainly didn't want anybody to blow the whistle," he replied.

* * *

In 1989 the Arkansas Committee, a group of left-wing students at the University of Arkansas, started investigating the alleged nexus of drug-running, money-laundering, and covert activities linked to Mena Airport. The Arkansas Committee's lead advocate, Mark Swaney, came to suspect that Lasater and others were laundering funds through the Arkansas Development and Finance Administration (ADFA), a state-controlled investment bank created by Governor Clinton in 1985 to provide "low interest finance for economic development." [56]

There was no need for Clinton to create ADFA. The state already had the Arkansas Housing Development Agency and the Arkansas Industrial Development Corporation (later made famous by a clerk named Paula Corbin Jones). But these two bodies had semi-independent boards. ADFA gave Clinton a patronage machine that answered to the Governor alone. It was a versatile instrument. As James Ring Adams reported in The American Spectator, it was designed with the help of a Boston consultant named Belden Daniels and allowed Clinton to tap into the huge reserves of the Arkansas Teachers Retirement System. At the same time, Clinton steered bond business to Lasater, and low interest industrial loans to the others in the Arkansas group -- Seth Ward, for instance, the father-in- law of Webster Hubbell -- frequently without due diligence and over the objections of the agency staff. [57] "They were giving money away like candy to the insiders," said Mark Swaney. [58]

Believing that ADFA's records would reveal the story of a national security operation run amok in his home state, Swaney tried to pry open the books. His FOIA requests were stonewalled. He fought a protracted lawsuit that eventually compelled ADFA to let him review some of the archive. It was not exactly full disclosure, but what he found was enough to confirm his suspicion that the agency was engaged in practices that were far outside the scope of a state development agency.

Funds had been flowing offshore. ADFA had done at least $250 million worth of business with the Fuji Bank ofjapan. In December 1988, for instance, ADFA raised $50 million for the purpose of building and buying houses for the needy of Arkansas, but instead, ADFA wired the $50 million to the Fuji Bank, Grand Cayman Branch, account number 63119808. [59] It was a nice piece of arbitrage profiteering. ADFA raised the money at 7 percent interest with tax exempt status, and loaned the money to Fuji at an interest rate of 9.37 percent, generating a profit of about $1 million on a ten-month investment. Whether the money -- all of it, plus interest -- came back from Grand Cayman is anybody's guess. ADFA has not provided the wiring documents. When the bonds were remarketed in October 1989 the principal had fallen to $47,915,000. [60]

In 1987 ADFA borrowed $5.04 million from Japan's Sanwa Bank to buy stock in a Barbados company called Coral Reinsurance. [61] With 84 of the 1,000 shares issued, ADFA was in fact the biggest single shareholder. The activities of Coral Reinsurance triggered an investigation by the Delaware Insurance Department in 1992, which cause panic at ADFA. [62] Among the documents obtained by Mark Swaney were a series of memos by Bob Nash, who had taken over as director of ADFA (he is now White House chief of personnel). "Why are they asking about this??!!" scribbled Nash. "Why no other states, only private people? Who was the mover and shaker on this? ... CALL ME."

Swaney believes that ADFA was created by Clinton as an instrument for Dan Lasater. What we know is that Lasater wrote at least eight letters to Bill Clinton recommending people for the board of ADFA. Most of them were appointed. The letter and telephone traffic between Lasater and the Governor's Mansion suggest that ADFA was essentially answering to his instructions. [63]

In 1984 and 1985 there was an explosion of housing bond issues. They spiked to $300 million a year, way above their usual level of between $50 and $100 million. It is exceedingly hard to find an actual bricks-and-mortar house built with all this money. As an experiment, I tried auditing ADFA's $175 million housing issue from July 1985, but the money is impossible to trace. [64] "It just disappears on you, it goes into night and fog," said Mark Swaney.

The finance director, Bill Wilson, admitted to me that ADFA "had trouble getting enough house buyers." [65] If that was the case, why raise the money in the first place? It was a confession that the purpose of the bond issue was to generate commissions -- or soak up money. Wilson was soft-spoken and charming when I paid a visit, but one of his aides destroyed the effect by switching on a tape-recorder as soon as we started chatting about the exploits of Dan Lasater. [66]

Lasater & Company was deeply involved in the demise of thrifts in Illinois. One of them, First American Savings and Loan of Oak Brook, Illinois, fired back with a lawsuit against the firm in October 1985, alleging that Lasater had transferred "unprofitable investments from his personal account to the account of the Plaintiff" after trading was closed. [67] The suit was taken over by the government's Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation in April 1986, after First American was seized by regulators. It hired the Rose Law Firm to handle the case. The attorneys were Hillary Clinton and Vincent Foster. They settled for a modest $200,000 in a sealed agreement that drew a veil over the reasons for the collapse of the S&L. The Chicago Tribune ran a blistering series on Hillary Clinton's role. It accused her of a "glaring conflict of interest" for negotiating "a secret, out-of-court settlement" that ended a suit "against a family friend and an influential benefactor of her husband."

Patsy Thomasson handled the case for Lasater, who was by then in prison. She was more than just an executive vice-president. She was also a "financial and operations principal" of the brokerage firm, with direct liability for criminal misuse of client accounts. According to the Arkansas Securities Commission, she held the key 24,27, and 53 series brokerage licenses (as well as a Masters in Economics from the University of Missouri), making her one of the most highly qualified broking principals in the country. "She's as smart as a whip with these licenses, a very rare find," said a spokesman for the National Association of Securities Dealers. "But she was sitting in front of a howitzer. If any of the brokers had got in trouble, she would have been responsible."

She must have been fully cognizant of the transactions in the account of Patrick & Associates, if not involved herself. Her role was certainly something that seemed to interest the Republicans in the early summer of 1994. After Dennis Patrick went public with his amazing story, he was summoned to Washington and ushered from one office to another on Capitol Hill. Senator D'Amato (R-N.Y.), for one, was in high dudgeon. "This man should be sworn in, he should be deposed. We should have a right and the people should have a right to hear his testimony, and to judge," he thundered on the floor of the Senate. "There are substantial documents to show tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars being funneled through this fellow's account, a person who has absolutely no wealth, and the question is how? And the question is why?"

But it was all bluster. "D'Amato's office never called me. When he got into the majority he didn't do anything about it," said Dennis. A year and a half later Dan Lasater was called to testify before the Whitewater Committee. He was not asked a single question about the trading in the Patrick account. (D'Amato told The Wall Street Journal that it was outside the scope of his investigation.) "I think all these investigations of Clinton are red herrings, just trying to divert attention from what really went on," said Dennis in disgust.

"One day I want to go back to the mountains and woods of Kentucky and go squirrel hunting again like I once did. I want my kids to come back with me to a town where nobody questions my integrity," he said one evening, sitting in the garden of my house in Washington.

"When I think what these people have done to me, the living nightmare they've put me through, I don't think death could have been worse. I would never have believed that what happened to me could happen to anybody in the United States of America. I've never been a militant, but you look at the Red, White, and Blue, and you think of the renegades running everything, and it makes you wonder whether we'll have to fight to get our country back."
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Re: The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories

Postby admin » Sun Jul 03, 2016 2:29 am

CHAPTER TWENTY: BARRY SEAL, AIR CONTRA, AND MENA AIRPORT

IT IS AN UNDISTINGUISHED place, tucked away in the remote Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas. The architecture is plain, and the food even plainer. But the town of Mena boasts a regional airport with a cluster of first-class retrofitting stations for small and medium-sized aircraft. This is how it became the site of one of the most enduring conspiracy theories of the late twentieth century.

The Mena scandal has been running for ten years now, kept alive by an accretion of new evidence. There is nothing complicated about it. The core allegation is that the airport was used to transport weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras in the early phase of U.S. intervention in Central America.

In late 1983 and early 1984 this may have been perfectly legal, but it crossed into the grey zone once Congress passed the second Boland Amendment restricting the Contra support activities of the CIA and the Defense Department. It is no secret, of course, that the Reagan administration was carrying out a covert operation against Nicaragua in defiance of the will of Congress. But Mena went beyond anything that was revealed by the various noisy investigations into the Iran-Contra affair.

What makes it so fascinating today is evidence that the CIA's base of operations was in Arkansas, and that Governor Bill Clinton was actively involved. The idea that an outwardly liberal and progressive Democrat like Bill Clinton was secretly assisting Oliver North's crusade against the Revolucion Sandinista is so shocking that the American press has dismissed it out of hand. But it is precisely because Mena turns the world upside down that it matters so much. If true, it validates an inchoate suspicion felt by many Americans that things are not what they seem. It suggests that the political rhetoric of the two parties in Washington is mere window dressing, while the real decisions are made in secret collusion without democratic accountability. To examine Mena is to examine the institutional condition of the United States. As for the president, it exposes him as a remarkable counterfeit, willing to betray his liberal principles for self-advancement.

It was the political Left that first became exercised about Mena. They were alerted when a Fairchild C-123 military transport was shot down in Nicaragua on October 5, 1986. The plane had been used earlier by cocaine smuggler Berriman Adler Seal, who based his fleet of aircraft at Mena. Arkansas Congressman Bill Alexander, the Democratic Deputy Whip in the House, made it his lonely crusade in the late 1980s to find out whether drug smuggling had somehow become intertwined with rogue operations by the CIA at Mena. The left-wing press, The Nation and The Village Voice, doggedly pursued the story, led by an Irish radical named Alexander Cockburn. He passed the baton to two liberal authors, Roger Morris, author of the Clinton biography Partners in Power, and Sally Denton. They wrote a long expose called the "Crimes of Mena" for the "Outlook" section of The Washington Post in 1994, only to see it spiked at the last moment. [1]

Until now, no one has provided documentary evidence that Barry Seal's Mena-based air fleet was part of the "Air Contra" supply operation, or that Seal was actually running guns to Nicaragua under the cover of drug smuggling. With due acknowledgment to my colleagues on the Left, I beg to offer the elusive proof.

* * *

For Deborah Seal it has been a strange experience to see her late husband transformed into a figure of colossal dimensions, a man who single-handedly defeated Sandinismo in Nicaragua while supplying most of America's cocaine needs in his spare time. [2]

Deborah was a ravishing country girl working the cash register at a little restaurant outside Baton Rouge when she met Barry Seal in 1972. She was twenty. He was a great laughing bear of a man, a 747 pilot who knew the world and offered to take her flying. By then, he was already in trouble. In 1972 he had been caught trying to smuggle plastic explosives to Cuba in a DC-3, and had lost his job with TWA. The smuggling charges against him were eventually thrown out by the judge on technical grounds, an outcome that led congressional investigators to suspect that he was involved in "national security" activities even then. [3] He tried his hand at a variety of small businesses, but by 1977 was smuggling again.

He cut quite a figure in the narco-culture of the Deep South, always back-slapping in his jocular way, always armed with a sack of $50 in quarters to use at public telephones. [4] "I really didn't know what was happening at first," said Debbie Seal. "He'd be traveling, you know, and I was at home with the babies. We had a nice house, but nothing special."

Then it started becoming obvious. He was charged with cocaine trafficking in Honduras. It took him nine months to get out of prison. "Barry had bribed the government to get out, but then there was an election in the middle of it, and he had to payoff a whole new set of officials," she said. In the meantime, he made himself comfortable. "He built himself an air-conditioned house inside the prison with a movie screen and a projector, and the jailer sent these couriers out to fetch his meals from the best restaurants." Debbie would fly down every weekend from New Orleans. The staff would treat her like royalty, throwing her a birthday party, making little gifts. "They liked Barry. He raised the standard of living of everybody in that prison."

At times Barry would make cryptic comments about his work for "the Company" without telling her outright whether he had ever worked for the CIA. He would spin yams about the Bay of Pigs, and talk of his time in Special Forces, yet his discharge papers list him as an E-z Private with parachute training in the Louisiana National Guard. "I always had the sense that he was working for the government," his widow says, "but I don't have anything on paper to prove it ... and I don't suppose I ever will."

In June 1984 Barry flew his family -- on his private Lear jet -- to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Debbie took the children swimming every day while Barry inspected aircraft and schmoozed with the military. He was hobnobbing with some general, which impressed her at the time. She does not remember much about visits to the base, except for seeing a big military cargo plane with a ramp at the back that Barry seemed to be interested in. [5]

By late 1981 Barry Seal had made direct contact with the Colombian cocaine cartels. Over the next three years his fleet of aircraft would become the dominant smuggling conduit for the Medellin Cartel, which reportedly controlled 75 percent of all the cocaine exported from Colombia. The Colombians learned to respect him. They were losing loads of cocaine at a fearful rate as the Reagan administration cranked up its war on drugs in the Caribbean. Seal knew how to get through the defenses. He had never lost a single shipment for the Cartel. [6]

He needed a sophisticated base of operations, far enough inland to evade the stringent patrolling of the coastal states. He chose Mena. "We had gotten so high-tech at that time. Rather than use barnyard mechanics, hiding in the back of hangars ... [we needed] a professional shop. That whole airfield is one of the most professional aviation retrofit places in the country, and that's why we went up there," explained Billy Bottoms, a pilot in the organization. [7]

Seal took over a ragged outfit called Rich Mountain Aviation and turned it into a command center with two hangars large enough to hide his aircraft. His fleet had secret fuel "bladders" installed in the floor of the aircraft to extend their flight range. The work was done so professionally that inspectors from the DEA and U.S. Customs invariably failed to detect it. Trap doors were fitted so that he could drop duffel bags of cocaine in mid-flight before landing empty. The police never knew where to look because he did not decide where to make the drop until the last moment, using his state-of-the art gear to give immediate "Loran" coordinates to his helicopter crews. [8]

"I made it a rule to keep my smuggling aircraft out of sight at all times and fly through U.S. airspace only at night," Seal later explained to the President's commission on organized crime. [9] He liked to keep two models of each aircraft. [10] It was a trick that would fool almost everybody who tried to investigate him. He had identical orange-striped Chieftain Navahos with Panther conversions, N7409L and N62856; two Piper Senecas, N80482 and N80492; [11] and most significantly two identical Fairchild C-123 twin engine military transports, restricted aircraft that are officially designated "weapons of war." Sometimes he would fly planes in formation -- one aircraft following in the radar shadow of the other -- before having them separate for landing. His equipment was the envy of the DEA. "All of his aircraft were equipped with the most expensive cryptic radio communications we have ever seen," said DEA Agent Ernest Jacobsen. [12]

The business was run like a covert operation, each component insulated from the other. The contractors at Rich Mountain Aviation did not fraternize with the pilots, and Barry Seal's other business -- money laundering -- was done in faraway places: mostly in the Cayman Islands, Panama, and Honduras. [13] Seal's pilots operated under anonymous code numbers. Billy Earle, Jr., for instance, was assigned number 49. His father, Billy Earle, Sr., was number 33. [14] It ensured secrecy. Only Seal himself knew how all the pieces fit together, which is why journalists have found it so difficult to reconstruct.

"I don't believe there's any paramilitary group better equipped than my former associates," Seal told the President's commission. "The narcotics cartel I associated with was as professional as any Fortune 500 company." [15] Revealing some of his tricks -- but not the best ones -- to an open-jawed gathering of Pentagon top brass and federal officials, he explained that he "used pocket-sized digital encryption devices to send coded telephone messages; I also fitted my smuggling aircraft with Loran-C radar altimeters, beacon interrogating digital radar, communication scramblers ... " and on it went. He said that he had made "about one hundred smuggling flights without ever being intercepted by U.S. interdiction authorities. His average load was 300 kilograms, with a top smuggling rate of$5,000 a kilo. On one flight alone he earned a transport fee of $1.5 million. Using wholesale prices, he must have smuggled anywhere from $3 billion to $5 billion worth of drugs into the United States. [16]

Putatively, Barry Seal became a "snitch" for the DEA after he was caught in "Operation Screamer," conspiring to smuggle quaaludes into Florida. Facing the likelihood of a long prison sentence -- the federal judge in Florida called him a "heinous criminal" -- he made overtures to the Florida office of the DEA. When that failed he went over their heads to Washington. He was helped out by his lawyer, the ubiquitous Richard Ben-Veniste, who later happened to be the chief counsel for the Democrats in the Senate Whitewater investigation. "I did my part by launching him into the arms of Vice President Bush, who embraced him as an undercover operative," Ben-Veniste later told The Wall Street Journal.

The DEA jumped to attention. Instructions came down to the Miami office from DEA headquarters in April 1984 to "work him." Agent Ernest Jacobsen volunteered to take the assignment. He was known for his skill at cracking the hard nuts. "I knew if we could work a deal out, Barry Seal would be one of the best informants DEA ever had," he said. "I mean, every major trafficker in the world was talking to this guy." [17]

Seal immediately offered to help break the Medellin Cartel. He was working on a shipment of 3,000 kilos of cocaine. If he could pull off a sting, it could be the biggest cocaine seizure in history. But it was not easy work. Seal flew to Colombia to meet with the mercurial Carlos Lehder. Lehder had a machine-gun-waving tantrum at the airstrip and forced Seal to take off with too much cargo on a muddy strip. The "Lode Star" Howard 350 crashed. Mr. Lehder's Indian peons salvaged the merchandise. The Lode Star was burned and buried.

Seal survived. The Colombians found him a smaller Cessna Titan 404. It was not equipped to reach the U.S. without stopping, so Lehder told Seal to refuel at a 6,000-foot military landing strip used by the Cartel in Nicaragua, a country that was then governed by the Sandinista Front. Seal did as he was told, arriving on June 3, 1984' But nobody told him there was a flight curfew after 6:00 PM in Nicaragua. His left engine was shot out by Sandinista anti-aircraft fire. The plane made it to the Sandino International Airport in Managua, where Seal suffered his second crash landing in less than a week. He was promptly escorted to a Nicaraguan prison. The Cartel got him out the next morning. For the next three days he found himself a guest of the Colombians at the former mansion of Anastasio Somoza, the fallen dictator. They seemed to have the run of the place. It was there that he managed to snap pictures of the most wanted drug trafficker in the world: Pablo Escobar. "This guy had guts," said Seal's DEA handler. "This guy had more guts than you could know. He took pictures of everything, something I wouldn't have done." [18]

There was consternation in Washington when the pictures arrived. Pablo Escobar in Managua? Hobnobbing with the Sandinistas in Somoza's mansion? If it could be established that the Sandinista security forces were colluding with the Medellin Cartel, it would be a propaganda coup of the first order. Needless to say, it would also be a stick in the eye for the Democrats in Congress, who were mounting a campaign to cut off aid to the Contra rebels.

Meanwhile, Barry Seal still had to fetch Carlos Lehder's ill-fated load of cocaine. Seal told the DEA that he needed a big military transport aircraft. The Cartel were asking him to ferry 18,000-pound loads of coca paste once a week from Peru to three processing labs in Nicaragua, and from there to a 40,000-acre ranch in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. I find this story impossible to believe. There is no reason to process coca paste in Nicaragua. It is far too bulky to transport long distances. The processing phase is carried out in the upper Amazon, close to coca fields in the Ceja de Selva foothills of the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes.

I visited that area with an American colleague in the mid-I980s and reached a cocaine processing settlement along the Rio Apurimac, where we were detained at gunpoint and interrogated. I was able to allay suspicions that we worked for the U.S. DEA by showing a British passport. Before letting us go they laughingly noted that there was nothing to stop them having us drowned in the Apurimac. Two gringos less in the world, who would give a damn? All in jest, mind you. We were loaded onto a motorized canoe loaded with coca. The smugglers nonchalantly picked up a unit of the Peruvian anti-drug police on the way and gave them a ride down to the next settlement. The troops actually sat on the coca sacks. I did not get the impression that the Cartel was suffering serious constraints in Amazonian Peru.

Be that as it may, Barry Seal supposedly convinced the DEA that he needed a Fairchild C-I 23K ex-military transport to maintain his relationship with the Medellin Cartel. He immediately found one for sale in a magazine called Trader Plane -- as we shall see, this was a "cover story." The plane had already been activated by the Defense Department a year earlier. According to the DEA this C-123K, nicknamed the "Fat Lady," was sent off to Rickenbacker Air Force Base in Ohio [19] where a Pentagon team of 20 to 30 men worked round the clock for a week putting in new "vertical fins," long range tanks, and such like. Then the CIA took over. It fitted cameras covering the cargo ramp at the back of the aircraft. The CIA also installed a satellite tracking device. [20]

Seal and two crew flew directly from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida to the Cartel landing strip in Nicaragua. Pablo Escobar was waiting. A team of men identified as members of the Sandinista Interior Ministry were on hand to load the cocaine and fill the 20,000 gallon fuel tank, a bucket at a time, with Soviet aviation fuel. [21] But the CIA's cameras were not working properly. The remote control triggering device strapped on Seal's leg failed, so he had to reach up and start the cameras manually. "The cameras were a joke," said Ernest Jacobsen. "You can hear the motor that is supposed to be silent zinging inside the airplane .... Here you've got the Sandinistas with machine guns all around you and you've got a camera going off." It was a close run thing, but Seal managed to cover the noise by switching on some generators. He returned safely on June 25, 1984, with pictures that purported to show that the Medellin Cartel had a protected base of operations in Nicaragua. [22]

The White House was ecstatic. Lt. Col. Oliver North called a meeting at his office in the Old Executive Building. There was a congressional vote on Contra aid coming up. North wanted to go public with the DEA's information. [23] But the DEA was horrified, saying that to go public now would be to risk the biggest sting in the history of U.S. drug enforcement.

Word of Seal's spectacular sting leaked to The Washington Times. Showing great restraint, the newspaper agreed to delay publication for two weeks. Seal set off on the second leg of his kamikaze mission after having loaded the "Fat Lady" with a Cartel "wish list" of Trix breakfast cereal, water skis, bicycles, outboard motors, VCRs, pantyhose, and other goodies that were hard to come by in the arid supermarkets of Nicaragua Libre. He also had $1.5 million in cash to deliver to the Cartel from their American buyers. The DEA told Seal to deliver the money as he normally would. Oliver North, however, suggested that the cash be slipped to the Contras instead, an indication that he was quite willing to use drug profits to fund the Contra movement. [24]

While Seal was en route to Managua, General Paul Gorman, Commander of U.S. forces in Latin America, told an excited crowd at the San Salvador Chamber of Commerce that he "now had firm proof that the Sandinistas were actively and recently involved in drug trafficking, and the world would soon be given proof." [25] It was a good thing the Colombians weren't reading El Diaria de Hoy in San Salvador the next day. By the time the Colombians found out, Seal had escaped. The DEA sting was cut short, but it was already enough to indict Pablo Escobar, Carlos Lehder, and Jorge Ochoa, the leadership roster of the "untouchable" Medellin Cartel.

This then is the "authorized" version of Seal's exploits for the U.S. government. In reality it is only half the story. Crucial details have been distorted or fabricated to disguise the second operation that Seal was conducting in utmost secrecy for the White House. What I have discovered is that Seal had a second C-123K. The serial number was 54-674. (The serial number of its sister ship, the "Fat Lady," was 54-679, tail number N4410F.) The second plane first appears in the records of Rich Mountain Aviation on December 26, 1983, long before Seal was contracted to work for the DEA. The first entry is a work order by mechanic Cecil Rice for a propeller. The C-123 was undergoing constant work. In March 1984 Rich Mountain Aviation billed Barry Seal $35,000 for work on the aircraft. In July 1984 the bill was $138,067 for total labor, parts, and gas.

Altogether this C- 1Z3 appears 15 times in the service log books of Cecil Rice after December 1983. The second plane flew only at night, and was kept hidden inside a hangar that was strictly off limits to normal employees of the company.

For two years it flew without being registered, a phantom ship with no legal tail number. According to the microfiche records at the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association in Oklahoma City, it first appeared in July 1986 when Corporate Air Service put in a request for a tail number. This was the company that provided the air crews for the Contra resupply operation of Oliver North and General Richard Secord, known as "the Enterprise." It was managed by William Cooper, who was later killed when the "Fat Lady" was shot down by the Sandinistas. [26] Registering the aircraft was a careless slip. The motive, clearly, was to provide the aircraft with proper documentation-and a tail number-so that it could be sold as the Enterprise wound down in late 1986. [27]

The phantom C-123K, nicknamed "No Problema," is now owned by Joe Cadiz, a former operative in Barry Seal's Air Contra. He bought it in 1989 as a souvenir from the Cold War. His name was still etched on the tail, just as he had left it when he was working in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, providing forward maintenance for the Enterprise. The plane was supposed to be destroyed after the "Fat Lady" was shot down on October 5, 1986, and an American crewman, Eugene Hasenfus was captured. "Once Hasenfus started talking, Oliver North gave the order to get rid of all the airplanes," said Cadiz. "We didn't want to get caught with our pants down. The planes were flown to an airstrip in Honduras, where they were burned up in a ditch. They just bulldozed earth over the top." [28]

But in the mad scramble to leave Tegucigalpa the right engine of "No Problema" caught fire, so it was abandoned at the airport. For several years it sat there on a ramp in the custody of the Honduran Air Force, until Cadiz finally got it back again.

He had a special affection for C- 123Ks. He had been a maintenance chief for the Fairchild transports in Vietnam, which was why he was drawn into the Air Contra operation. In the fall of 1983 a CIA contractor called Harry Doan asked him to do some maintenance work on a C-123K that he had bought that August. It was the other C-123, the "Fat Lady" (serial 54-679). The paper trail shows that the "Fat Lady" was brought out of storage by the director of the aerospace museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Colonel Richard L. Uppstrom USAF. He sold it to a Roy L. Stafford to June 17, 1983, [29] who promptly resold it to Harry Doan, of Doan Helicopter on August 18, 1983. [30]

The "Fat Lady" was clearly being activated a year before the DEA sting in Nicaragua. Cadiz recalls that Seal came to view the plane in November 1983, although he says the chronology is hazy a decade later. In January 1984, just after the New Year holiday, Cadiz was invited to a dinner with Seal at Harry Doan's house. "Seal wanted to know everything about the aircraft: how much it would carry, how far it would go .... He said it was a clandestine operation and that he was working for the "State Department," but I figured that was just code for the CIA. I'd already heard things on the grapevine. Harry filled me in on the details afterwards."

Over the early months of 1984, Seal came down to test the "Fat Lady" and learn how to fly it. He was pressing Joe Cadiz to join the operation. "He wanted me to 'go down South' as crew chief for the aircraft. I kind of knew what it was about. At first I told him 'No.''' But in mid-1984 Cadiz finally agreed to help, once he was assured that it was a legitimate covert operation. The money was good. He was paid up to $3,000 a week for stints down in Honduras in 1985 teaching the "locals" how to maintain C-123s. By then he had begun to maintain the second aircraft "No Problema," which Seal had been servicing before at Rich Mountain Aviation in Mena.

Cadiz did not like to ask too many questions about the activities of Air Contra. His job was to keep the C-123s in the air. He did not need to know anything else. But along the way he learned that Seal was shipping crates of M-16 rifles from Mena. Cadiz said they were composite weapons drawn from Defense Department stocks with special parts manufactured by a firm called Brodix in Mena. "Harry Doan showed me a couple of these M-16s he had at his house. They had no serial numbers on them, you know, so they couldn't be traced."

It was Cadiz's belief that Seal was "coerced" into bringing cocaine back into the United States in order to generate profits for the Contra operation. "I really think that the government was behind the dope, I really do. They hung Seal out to dry. It wasn't fair what they did to that man."

Seal's two C-123s looked identical from the outside, both painted in black, green, and tan camouflage. Inside they had different radio systems and instrument panels. "No Problema" was the more sophisticated of the two. After the Nicaraguan sting operation, the "Fat Lady" was parked in full view at Mena airport. It did not raise eyebrows because it was now recognized as part of a legitimate DEA operation. The plane stayed there until June 1985, and was rarely flown again. Indeed it was slowly picked to pieces to provide spare parts for "No Problema," which was kept hidden in one of Seal's hangars.

With hindsight, it is clear what Seal was doing. He was using a real DEA operation as a front to obscure an even more sensitive assignment shipping weapons. The cover was masterful. It has caused confusion ever since, sending journalists and investigators on a false trail.

It is frequently asserted that Seal could not have been working for the Contra operation because he was strictly monitored by the DEA in 1984 and 1985. After the Medellin bust Seal worked on two major stings for the DEA, a considerable feat. "Here he is on the front page of The New York Times and all over, and President Reagan has him on TV .... It's amazing that the guy could actually buy an aspirin ... after that," quipped his handler. [31]

The DEA insists that it had Seal under tight control. To do otherwise would be an admission of negligence since Seal was on bond restrictions. But when pressed in questioning by the House Subcommittee on Crime, Ernest Jacobsen acknowledged that Seal made "a lot of trips" and control was broken for days at a time. [32]

"Were you able to be in touch with Barry when he was off on trips .... Did he call in, for example?"

"No, for the simple reason that all the phones down there are tapped .... Even when he talked on the phone to me from Louisiana, he would talk in code and talk on pay phones .... I think it was probably from being in the dope business as long as he was. But he wouldn't call us. If he did, he would just call and say, 'I'm here, I'll be a couple more days,' and that would be it."

Asked if Seal could have been moonlighting, Jacobsen replied. "I don't think there's much time that I didn't know where Barry Seal was. I'm sure on weekends he could have done what he wanted to .... "

Jacobsen concedes that his supervision of Seal was far more relaxed after the Medellin sting. "It was more sporadic, you know. We would talk to him every day, but you know, he was in Louisiana and we were in Miami."

Off the record, the DEA was much more candid. Take this entry from the handwritten diary of Russell Welch, the Arkansas State Trooper trying to investigate the crimes of Mena. "On June 4, 1985, agent Steve Lowrey (DEA) informed me in strictest confidence that it was believed, within his department, that Barry Seal was flying weapons to central and south America in violation of U.S. foreign policy .... In return he is allowed to smuggle what he wanted back into the United States."

Clearly, the DEA knew that Seal was not under control. It is also an open question whether Seal's DEA handler, Ernest Jacobsen, was in fact a CIA asset, as suspected by investigators for the Mena probe of the House Banking Committee. [33]

Seal did not live long enough to become a liability to the CIA. A federal judge in Louisiana sentenced him to a halfway house in Baton Rouge on earlier drug charges, even though the Medellin Cartel had put a $1 million contract on his head. [34] He was a sitting duck.

"We were at a Waffle House. That's when I saw them standing there, neat-looking, with Spanish complexions, dressed as salesmen," said Debbie Seal. "They had the trunk up, and Barry was looking at them. They exchanged glances but he didn't show any signs of fear."

The next day, February 19, 1986, two Colombian gunmen opened fire with a Mac-Io machine gun as Seal parked his car in front of the Salvation Army Center where he was confined. They were part of a six man team of Colombians. Three of them were caught, three got away.

After Seal's murder, the IRS seized everything from Debbie Seal. They froze her checking account, and sold the house from under her feet. She fled to Boston with three young children. But the IRS pursued her. She owed $29 million in back taxes from the estate of Barry Seal, they said. She had no money. All she had was a modest annuity from a life insurance policy. The IRS tried to take that away, too. After eight years, an appeals court finally ruled in her favor, accepting that she was an innocent spouse. To this day she believes that the CIA abandoned her family, leaving her to fend off the IRS as best she could rather than admit that Barry was one of theirs.

But life moves on. When the children were old enough, she embarked on a career in nursing. A good, honest profession. Remarriage was out of the question. "I didn't date for eight years; there was no room in my heart for another man," she said. Besides, after Barry Seal the rest were all too boring.

Her husband had already written his own epitaph for inscription on his tombstone. "A rebel adventurer the likes of whom in previous days made America great."
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Re: The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories

Postby admin » Sun Jul 03, 2016 2:30 am

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: THE MENA TWINS

IN NOVEMBER 1996 the CIA released a terse statement admitting that the agency had conducted "a joint training operation with another federal agency at Mena Intermountain Airport." It acknowledged for the first time that the CIA had used Mena for "routine aviation related services."

The short release was thin gruel, as one would expect from a declassified summary of a report from the Inspector General's office of the CIA. It absolved the agency of any wrongdoing. No evidence had come to light of CIA involvement in "money laundering, narcotics trafficking, arms smuggling, or other illegal activities at or around Mena."

The summary contained one demonstrable evasion. It stated that while the CIA had provided "technical support" in fitting the cameras to the "Fat Lady" for the trip to Nicaragua, that was the full extent of the agency's involvement in the Seal operation. In fact, the CIA had also fitted satellite equipment.

We know, at a minimum, that the CIA had more devices than cameras attached to the plane. In closed door congressional testimony given by Seal's DEA handler, Ernest Jacobsen, the following exchange took place:

"We put a SATNAV on it," said Seal's DEA handler, Ernest Jacobsen in closed door congressional testimony that is still classified. [1]

"What does that mean?" asked Associate Counsel Paul McNulty.

"Satellite tracking device."

"Did DEA put a SATNAV on it?"

"CIA."

"Are you certain of that?"

"Yes."

The CIA report also acknowledged that Governor Clinton's "fair-haired boy," Arkansas State Trooper L. D. Brown, was under review for recruitment in 1984. This was a major vindication for R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., the editor of The American Spectator, who described the astonishing misadventures of L. D. Brown in his biography Boy Clinton. The tale of L. D. Brown is so central to any understanding of Bill Clinton -- and the Faustian pact the young governor was willing to make to advance his ambitions -- that I would like to flesh out the details by quoting directly from 190 pages of sworn testimony that Brown gave under subpoena. [2]

I first met Larry Douglass Brown at a dinner given by Tyrrell at the Cosmos club in Washington. Something of a sophisticate, wearing a light grey Ralph Lauren suit, he was quite at home in the upper echelons of capital society. Later, we adjourned to the Jockey Club, one of President Clinton's haunts. L. D. considered the Armagnac quite satisfactory, if I remember, and talked about Russian literature. He has always been an intellectual. Now studying for a doctorate in political science at the University of Leicester in England, he was once a radical activist working on an off-campus magazine at the University of Arkansas called the "Grapevine," though Brown later, to Clinton's amusement, became an admirer of President George Bush.

He was, obviously, a different caste from the hot dog and ball game types who gravitated toward the Arkansas State Police. For Governor Clinton he was a soulmate, a refreshing break from the stultifying philistinism of Arkansas state politics. When Brown was assigned to the security detail at the Governor's Mansion between 1982 and 1985 he and Clinton became close friends. So close, he now admits sheepishly, that he propositioned more than a hundred women for the governor, and enjoyed the "residuals" himself. "I was no saint."

He was close to Hillary, too. She passed him her copy of The New York Times, quite a recherchi newspaper in Little Rock in the early 1980s. His fiancee and future wife, Becky McCoy, was Chelsea Clinton's babysitter. It was a tight little group. At times Hillary would talk about Vince Foster, confiding the ups and downs of that tangled affair. They were in love, Brown says, but it was an affair of the mind more than anything else. Foster was devoted. He would do anything for her. And she took advantage of that. There was no one else on earth that she would trust like Vince Foster. [3]

Brown's specialty at the State Police was undercover narcotics. He had been trained at the DEA school in Miami, learning about air smuggling, conspiracy, and such like. He was already angling for a better job at one of the elite federal agencies. So he took note when he saw an ad for employment at the CIA in The New York Times on April Fool's Day 1984. "I was reading it when Bill walked in .... I showed him this ad and, you know, he read spy novels and things of that nature and he said, 'L. D. I've always told you you'd make a good spy. You need to fire off a letter to them' .... I sat down either that day or very soon thereafter and actually wrote a letter to this guy." [4]

"I started receiving correspondence from the agency .... They wrote to me from the Southwest office in Dallas." He was told to take a test at the University of Arkansas. "It's an eight hour test, no books. You do a psychological part, you do a language thing ... the whole nine yards." Clinton gave him advice. "He told me I would probably have to write an essay .... I wrote an essay on Beirut.... That was May 5th, 1984."

"Did you receive any other communication from the CIA?" he was asked.

"I did. They would send me a letter to call them collect."

Brown was very careful in his diary. He wrote in Cyrillic script, often using Spanish words. He would refer to the CIA as "the Company." "I got this from Bill Clinton. He was a big John LeCarre guy .... So I would put 'May 25th, call Company.'''

Clinton was very encouraging. "I would tell him what it was I got in the mail and show him, and we would talk back and forth about each step that I would go through .... I had to write another essay, so I went back to Governor Clinton. We talked, I don't know if we were in the car or at the Mansion; usually we'd talk more in the car .... At that time there was a big discussion on funding for Central American rebels and I didn't know much about it. He knew everything about it .... We decided that I would write a paper on Marxism in Central America .... The domino theory and all that."

"You say we decided?"

"Governor Clinton and I .... I typed up what I thought was a pretty decent essay .... He started mashing in on it and changing and putting insertions, and telling me to expound on this." Brown kept the original, covered with Clinton's annotations. He also kept all of the letters that he exchanged with the CIA.

As the process moved along, Clinton made a call to Langley. "He said he was going to make a phone call for me .... I don't know who he called within the Agency .... He told me he had made the call. Now, I didn't press it or pry, but I appreciated it."

On August 30, 1984, Brown went to the Hilton Hotel in Dallas for his first interview. A man called Dan Magruder was waiting for him. After watching the Iran-Contra hearings, Brown identified "Dan Magruder" as Donald Gregg, the National Security Adviser of Vice President George Bush from 1982 to 1989. Gregg was a career veteran of the CIA. His last posting for the Agency was at the White House, where he was directly involved in shaping American policy toward Nicaragua as head of the Intelligence Directorate of the National Security Counsel. [5] He left the CIA in 1982 to join Vice President Bush's staff, where he continued to help coordinate Contra policy behind the scenes.

"I went up and met the guy .... He told me that he had just gotten back from South Korea, that he was an Asia specialist .... He told me he was an operations officer which is what I wanted to do from talking to Governor Clinton about what the Agency actually did."

"What did Governor Clinton tell you about the Agency?"

"First thing, you don't call them 'agents.' They have an 'operations officer' .... You'd be stationed around the world. Ostensibly you'd be working for the State Department, or whatever." [6]

The meeting went well. Brown was told to expect a call. Instead, on September 5, he received a formal nomination letter from the CIA. "Your application papers for employment with the Central Intelligence Agency have been forwarded to our Headquarters in Washington D.C. ... If you receive a tentative job offer, you may expect a lengthy period of processing before a firm offer will be made."

A month later, the expected call came through at Brown's unlisted home telephone. The caller identified himself as Barry Seal. "He knew everything there was to know about me: the application, the test, the interview, that I had been to Dallas."

They arranged to meet at the Cajun's Wharf in Little Rock. "He knew me on sight. I didn't know him, so he greeted me .... Big guy." They talked about the Governor. "How's the Gov? Called him 'the Gov' .... He knew about the essay and everything I had done."

Seal explained that he "had been flying for the Agency .... He asked me if I wanted to go on a trip. Of course, I worked a crazy shift back then .... He told me we wouldn't be gone overnight." Brown reported to Clinton. "I told him I met this guy and he wasn't at all what I expected. Kind of devil-may-care. His response was: 'You can handle it, don't sweat it; you'll have fun.'"

Brown met Seal several times, either at the Cajun's Wharf or at a Chinese restaurant near the Capitol -- Fu Lin's, owned by Charlie Trie who was later implicated in the 1996 fundraising scandal, trying to funnel more than 600,000 laundered dollars into the Clinton Defense Fund.

Seal told Brown they were to take a trip from Mena. "It was real early in the morning that I had to be there .... I wrote in my book 'October 23rd.' It's either the day we went, or the day he first wanted to go." By this stage, Brown was extremely cautious about the entries in his diary. The notation for October 23 is the single word "OIIEOT" in Cyrillic script, meaning "Flight." Underneath was the letter "C," Russian for "S." It was code for Barry Seal. There are no other entries for the whole week. It stands there in isolation, making it hard for Brown to reconstruct events ten years later.

The details are of some significance because a CNN reporter named John Camp -- the eminence grise of the Mena debunkers -- claims that he was on the "Fat Lady" with Barry Seal the entire day of October 23, 1984. At the time, Camp was making a documentary about Seal for WBRZ-TV in Baton Rouge. So far he has failed to produce the filming schedules to support his claim. He certainly failed to impress the House Banking Committee when they interviewed him about the matter. "Camp was so evasive; we just concluded the guy was not credible at all," said one aide. [7]

Brown was surprised when he arrived at Mena Airport. "He hadn't told me it was going to be this huge airplane. It reminded me of the C-130s in the Little Rock Air Force base, but it wasn't four engines." Seal told him to leave everything behind, even his car keys. The crew was already waiting. "There was a white guy, probably 35 years old in the copilot's seat, and two Hispanic guys, they never said anything to me at all. They had little baseball hats on, like a military kind of hat."

"We flew for an hour or something like that and landed to get some gas. I was later told it was New Orleans, but I don't know that. We took off normally, but then he told me, 'Hang on, we're going down low.' We were over water and flying pretty low. I thought it was pretty dangerous to be flying like that."

They went up over land, then plunged again. "The back of the airplane opens up, I mean opens while we're flying. I could see out, it was mountainous, like tropical, jungle kind of stuff. They run this thing out the back door -- a big pallet, about four feet wide and eight feet long, covered by a tarp thing. I didn't know what was going on, but I hung onto my seat."

They turned and landed at an airport. Brown was told later that it was Tegucigalpa in Honduras. "The two Hispanic guys got off. They came back with some duffel bags, like Army duffel bags, I guess you'd call it, with a green strap."

Seal did not say much when they returned to Mena. He gave Brown a manila envelope with $2,500 in cash and said he would be in touch. "The first person I told was the governor when I went back to work. I was anxious to let him know how everything was going. He was coming out of the kitchen, and we met on the walkway there and, you know, I had a big smile on my face. He said, 'Well, are you having any fun yet?' I said, 'Yeah, but this is some scary stuff.' He said 'Oh, you can handle it,' and pats me on the back .... He knew before I even said anything. He knew."

Seal was more expansive when they met a few days later at the Cajun's Wharf. He told Brown, "That was M-16s. They're going to the Contras in Nicaragua."

In his deposition, Brown was asked: "Did you believe that the trip was part of an operation sanctioned by the U.S. government and the CIA?"

Brown answered: "Absolutely."

Half of Mena knew that the gun-running was sanctioned. Note the rather cheeky testimony of Ken Maddox, an undercover contractor for the State Police, the FBI, and the drug task force in the Mena area. [8]

Maddox: "It's common knowledge it's a federal operation down there -- you know, a CIA operation. They transport guns to foreign countries, they bring dope back, you know .... I mean, it's something that's common knowledge."

Q: "Can you tell me what information you have regarding guns being shipped out of Mena?"

Maddox: "I'd just as soon not disclose it at this time."

Q: "Because of your work you're doing with the federal government, you just don't feel like you can disclose that?"

Maddox: "Correct."

Q: "Did you personally see weapons that were either loaded or being shipped out of Mena?"

Maddox: "Yes, sir, I have."

Q: "On how many occasions?"

Maddox: "Several."

Q: "What kind of plane were they being shipped out on?"

Maddox: "Two different types. One of them was a big camouflaged plane, and one of them was a big black plane."

Q: "Was it a C-123?"

Maddox: "C-123s and C-130s."

Q: "Who was responsible for shipping those weapons?"

Maddox: "Other than our federal government, bless their hearts?"

Q: "It was your understanding that it was a federal government operation."

Maddox: "Correct. Uh-huh."

Q: "Did you have any reason to believe it was a CIA operation?"

Maddox: "To my knowledge, that is what it was."

Critics have tried to impugn Brown's credibility by asserting that the Contras had already shifted from U.S.-made M-16s to Soviet block AK-47s by late 1984. They are mistaken, however. The record shows that Contra leader Adolfo Calero was still contracting for M-16 ammunition as late as May 1985. [9] In any case the Contras balked at switching wholesale to Soviet gear, as General Richard Secord recounted in his memoirs, Honored and Betrayed. "With each successive arms deal, we tried to work Calero closer to standardizing his weapons. I often told him 'Look Adolfo, you've got all this crap-why not stick with one weapon, say, the Russian AK-47.' He'd only reply 'No, no, we like the G3 because of this, and the M-16 because of that,' as if he were on Safari .... The whole principle of standardization seemed to escape the Contras."

The North-Secord Enterprise was only just getting off the ground in October 1984, when L. D. Brown flew with Barry Seal. Secord had arranged for a $2.3 million purchase of weapons from Communist China through a Lisbon dealer called Defex Portugal. The shipment, however, was delayed. It did not arrive until April 1985. [10] In the meantime, Defex found arms elsewhere. It delivered the first load in January 1985. But the Contras could not wait that long. Their supply lines were dangerously stretched after a rebel offensive that had penetrated deep into Nicaragua. I was covering Nicaragua during that period and traveled extensively in the conflict zones around Jinotega and Matagalpa. I can remember hearing the gunfire in the hills around the provincial capital of Esteli. For the first time since the war began, the Contras were causing real psychological and military disruption to the Revolucion Sandinista. Oliver North, schooled in Vietnam, had vowed that this time the United States would not abandon its ally in the field.

The CIA had already spent the $24 million cap in Contra funding allowed under the first Boland Amendment. A second version of the Amendment, banning all assistance to the Contras, was already in the works, and would come into force on October 11, 1984. [11] There was a desperate need for a bridging operation as the CIA pulled back and the North-Secord Enterprise moved in. Barry Seal was the bridge. His organization equipped the rebel forces during the critical months of late 1984.

At the time the Contras were flat broke, although the first trickle of money was coming in from the $1 million a month that Saudi Arabia was paying into a secret fund controlled by Contra leader Adolfo Calero. The pallet of guns that L. D. Brown observed being pushed out of the back of the C-123 was probably surplus inventory that the CIA had stockpiled in advance. There is no doubt that the CIA tried to do this. Page 34 of the Congressional Iran-Contra Report has a section entitled The CIA Tries to Stockpile. It describes how the Agency was trying to get $28 million of weapons "free-of-charge" from the Defense Department in order to stay below its cap on Contra spending. The Department of Defense balked, but not entirely. "The project was finally terminated on February 12, 1985, after the CIA had obtained, without cost, 3 surplus Cessna aircraft, 10 night vision goggles, and a Bushmaster cannon." [12] If the CIA was able to get three aircraft in this manner, it would not have been hard to obtain Vietnam-era M-16s from the surplus inventory of the National Guard.

The second flight Brown took with Seal was on or around December 24, 1984. It was the same routine. Seal told him to leave behind any rings, keys, or papers that could identify him. "In case something happens, we're on our own."

Seal explained that they were essentially carrying out a covert operation in defiance of the U.S. Congress, one that was crafted with the specific intent of hoodwinking the Democratic leadership. He told Brown that Congress "didn't want to give money to these people down there, the guns ... and what we were doing was circumventing this .... I wasn't going to ask any questions. He obviously knew what he was doing."

At the airport in Honduras Barry Seal picked up two duffel bags. Back at Mena Seal opened one of the bags as they were getting into Brown's Datsun 310 hatchback. "He reaches down and he pulls out a little wrapped package like I've seen kilos of coke packaged over the years and it had a number on it, number 2. Then I kind of reacted, it was obvious to him that I was very upset. I wanted to get out of there. First thing I started doing is looking around. Who's watching us? I got pretty panicky about it and that's when he says, 'Settle down, everything is going to be alright.' I drive back to Little Rock. I'm thinking, well, this is some kind of sting that they're working, maybe they're trying to nail somebody down there who is dealing drugs. But I thought the worst, you know, is this guy making some bucks on the side? Is he dealing dope? I'm trying to settle myself down. I'm thinking, well, this is an official operation. Clinton got me into this, the Governor did, it can't be as sinister as I think it is."

But his next encounter with Clinton was far from reassuring. "When I said they were bringing back coke he throws up his hands and said, 'Oh no, that's Lasater's deal.' I wanted him to tell me, oh, that's terrible. We've got to report this. I wanted him to deny knowing anything about it or to explain it away to me. But no, it was no surprise to him. He was surprised only that I had found out about it, that Seal showed it to me. I honestly don't think he ever thought I was going to see any of that stuff."

'''That's Lasater's deal,' and it hit me then that this was not a sting. This was actually a bad thing. I didn't think that we had Lasater working undercover for us. I was mad. I said, 'I'm out of it. Stick a fork in me, I'm done.'''

In his deposition Brown was asked: "When he said 'Lasater's deal,' did you know who he was talking about?"

Brown replied: "Oh, absolutely. I had met him a lot through the Governor. He came to the Mansion several times. There are not many people that can just drive through the back gate and go in the kitchen door. We've been to his racing box at the races. We flew on his airplane. He was a fixture. I knew that he was involved in cocaine. I had been at Lasater's house one time where there was a silver platter of what I thought was cocaine and I got the Governor out of there. I said, 'We need to go. Let's get out of here.' There were a lot of people there, a lot of girls there. He had to have seen it; I mean, it was obvious."

Feeling profoundly betrayed, Brown withdrew his application to the CIA and began agitating for a transfer from the Governor's security detail. But it was not so easy to escape. Once in, always in -- like the Mafia. In January 1985 he was visited at the Governor's Mansion by an emissary from the CIA, sent to placate him. The man seemed to know his way about the place. He came in through the little-known Spring Street access, and nonchalantly pulled up next to Hillary Clinton's parking spot. He was Felix Rodriguez, the legendary Cuban emigre who had tracked down Che Guevara in the mountains of Bolivia.

Rodriguez had served as a CIA officer under Donald Gregg in Vietnam. It was Gregg who brought him into the Central American operation. Working under the code name of Max Gomez, he served as an adviser on aerial counterinsurgency against the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador. [13] At a meeting in Washington, on December 21, 1984, Oliver North recruited Rodriguez for the North-Secord Enterprise. North later received a memo discussing "FR's Project" and "those who will be put under FR's care." [14]

Clearly, L. D. Brown was a designated member of this new White House venture know as "FR's Project." Rodriguez could be immensely charming, and he succeeded in reassuring Brown that "no more monkeying around with Seal would be involved. Don't worry about Barry," he said. "We're going to take care of that." Brown's next assignment was to guard the shipments of short-stock AK-47 rifles and other weapons that were arriving in metal canisters on a boat in the Bahamas, on their way to the Contras in Central America. [15] He made three trips to Freeport in the Bahamas on a twin engine Seneca in the spring, summer, and fall of 1985.

Brown must have proved himself a reliable operative. In May 1986 Felix Rodriguez upped the ante dramatically. He assigned Brown the task of carrying out a political assassination. Barry Seal had been gunned down three months earlier, ostensibly by Colombian gunmen, but Brown suspected that Rodriguez was eliminating anyone who knew too much about Mena. Brown did not want to be on the wrong side of a house-cleaning operation by the CIA, so he accepted the mission. But first he consulted Governor Clinton. "I'm going to take care of that problem in Mexico." he told Clinton. "Oh, that's good, L. D., that's good," replied the governor. The target was the copilot Brown had seen on Seal's C-123.

Brown took an American Airlines flight to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on June 18,1986. A disassembled FAL 7.62 mm rifle was waiting for him in a straw bag at the guard house of the port. On the morning of June 21, he went to the Hotel Playa Conchas Chinas and was directed to his victim by the hotel desk clerk. He looked across and saw an American in his mid-thirties, playing with his children by the fountain. He shuddered and walked out. It was the end of his adventure with the CIA, or the Enterprise, or whatever it was that he had joined. The challenge now was staying alive.

As for the prospective victim, Brown had never seen him before.

* * *

The prospective victim was Terry Reed, another of the pilots who had worked for Air Contra.

He still has the hotel receipts from the Playa Conchas Chinas. It cost 15,250 old pesos a night, a lot for Mexico. He had driven down from Arkansas with his family on the instructions of Felix Rodriguez, his contact in the Enterprise. Felix had told him be at the hotel for a rendezvous with his new "handler" on June 21, 1986.

It was another ten years before Reed learned that an assassin had been waiting for him in the lobby of the hotel. It did not surprise him. Nor did it surprise him that the gunman should prove to be an Arkansas State Trooper and a close aide of Governor Bill Clinton. Nothing surprised Reed any longer.

Reed told his Byzantine tale in Compromised, an underground classic that has sold 200,000 copies. In his book, Reed alleges that Governor Clinton was a willing participant in Oliver North's clandestine crusade against the Frente Sandinista.

After the book came out in the spring of 1994, I flew to Kansas City with a retired U.S. intelligence officer to ascertain Reed's credibility. I listened for five hours as the officer -- who was himself involved in parts procurement for Air Contra, and who later gave classified testimony to the Iran-Contra Committee -- questioned Reed about everything from the bombing of Cambodia to the nuts and bolts of clandestine CIA activity in Arkansas. They had many friends in common. Both had dealt with a Japanese American described in Compromised as the CIA's station chief in Little Rock. His code name was Aki Sawahata.

"There's no question he's telling the truth. He may have mixed a few things up, but that's inadvertent," the source concluded. "Hell, I was involved in Mena, and I didn't know what was going on either."

In subsequent years, more and more of Reed's story has been corroborated. L. D. Brown provides a big piece of the jigsaw puzzle, and sworn testimony in civil litigation has flushed out more. The Commander of the State Police, Colonel Tommy Goodwin admitted that during the mid-1980s he receiving briefings on a "CIA operation at the Mena Airport. The gist of what we were getting was that they were flying arms into Central America," he said. [16]

* * *

Reed is one of life's wounded souls. You can sense the grief of the man. So much patriotic expectation, so much disappointment. One institution after another has let him down. He is a walking indictment of the whole American system. If it had not been for the unshakable faith of Janis, his wife of sixteen years, he probably would have cracked.

Terry came from Norman Rockwell's America: Carthage, Missouri. He served in Vietnam. One of his jobs in Air Force intelligence was selecting drop zones for C-130 transports carrying out aerial resupply in Cambodia. He was a photo-intelligence analyst for Task Force Alpha, providing backup for Air America. In 1976 he was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant, after eight years service. He went into the machine tool business, but was soon recruited by the FBI's counterintelligence division to help fight industrial espionage by the Soviet block.

One thing led to another. In February 1982 he was called to the FBI offices in Oklahoma City to meet Oliver North, who was using the alias of John Cathey. North allegedly flashed CIA credentials -- "The photo, the eagle, the whole nine yards" -- although he was actually a Marine lieutenant colonel working for the National Security Counsel at the Reagan White House. [17] This may sound surprising, but note this little aside in Richard Secord's memoirs: "We used fake identities. Ollie's name was 'Goode,' for which he had a set of complete CIA-furnished dummy documentation."

North recruited Reed to assist a joint CIA-FBI investigation of Toshiba Machine Tools which was selling restricted U.S. defense technology to the Soviet Union. He would drop in at Reed's office in Oklahoma City from time to time, and he was close enough to the Reeds that he visited Oklahoma City's Mercy Hospital to give Janis Reed flowers to celebrate the birth of the Reeds' first child.

Reed's secretary, Anne Ellet, remembers North's office visits well. He would sit on the corner of her desk and try out his flirtatious banter. [18] She was stunned when he resurfaced four years later as Lt. Col. Oliver North, the star of the Iran-Contra hearings.

The Arkansas State Police went to great lengths to destroy evidence that linked Terry Reed and Oliver North to each other and to the Contra operation at Mena. In a sworn deposition, Michelle Tudor, a secretary at the intelligence unit of the state police, testified about "shredding parties" that took place in 1988. [19]

Question: "Did you see references to Oliver North and Mena?"

"Yes, sir, there was one document in particular that I do distinctly recall. There were certain areas blacked out as classified. It was by Oliver North."

"In respect to these records, relating to Mena, did you see the name Terry Reed?"

"Yes, sir."

"Was that on more than one occasion?"

"Yes, sir. It was repetitious."

"Was there anything unusual about the [shredding]?"

"Yes, sir, because it was so massive.... It began to bother me later because the more I thought about it, the less sense it made to me."

When Oliver North was assigned the task of "holding the Contras together in body and soul" by National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane it was natural that he would turn to Terry Reed. The two had struck up a friendship, of sorts. It was a Vietnam thing. What North needed was a team of operatives like Terry Reed to form a Freikorps. Terry says this happened in the fall of 1983. Critics claim that this is impossible: Oliver North did not get involved until 1984. But again, they have not studied the official record. The Iran- Contra committee found a note dated November 7, 1983, revealing that North was already in contact with John Hull, an American rancher who provided the Contras with an air strip in Costa Rica. It also discovered White House memos from November 1983 in which North was discussing the minutiae of weapons shipments to the Contras. [20]

Terry Reed was activated that same month. A big, gregarious man, who turned out to be Barry Seal, arrived unannounced at the ultra-light aircraft plant that Terry had built in Little Rock. He was accompanied by none other than Dan Lasater, whom he described as his "investment banker." He took Terry aside and explained that he was part of the John Cathey/Oliver North operation. Seal arranged to meet Terry at Fu Lin's, Charlie Trie's place. It was the insider's haunt for the staff of Governor Clinton. One of Trie's close friends was Bob Nash, then economic adviser to the Governor and now chief of personnel at the White House.

Seal explained that the mission was to create a "deniable" airlift to resupply Contra forces in the field. A few weeks later Seal's first C-123K would arrive at Rich Mountain Aviation at Mena. The chronology indicates that the White House was already making plans to "go private" with Air Contra a year before the Second Boland Amendment actually came into force. Barry Seal was the principal subcontractor. By law, he could continue working under CIA auspices until the cut-off date on October 11, 1984, then he would have to peel away and go private. It made sense for the CIA to use Seal. The best way to disguise a clandestine airlift in Latin America -- where there was widespread sympathy for the Sandinistas -- was to co-opt a narcotics smuggling fleet. It was also a good way to deceive the press and the Democrats in Congress. Smugglers had excellent "cover."

Terry Reed's job was to create a remote Arkansas air base to upgrade the skills of Contra pilots and teach them techniques for aerial resupply inside Nicaragua. It was reminiscent of the training given to Cuban exiles before the Bay of Pigs, except that this was an operation in the twilight zone, evading congressional oversight.

Reed chose a spot called Nella in the Ouachita National Forest, twelve miles north of Mena. [21] There were four flight instructors. One was Emile Camp, who had accompanied Seal on the Medellin sting in Managua. He died in a plane crash in 1985. Another, code named "Nebraska," was Seal's ex-brother-in-law, Billy Bottoms. [22] It was not long before the State Police started getting reports of paramilitary activity.

"They were conducting military training at a small airport, dirt ramp just north of Mena. I forgot the name," said the police commander, Colonel Tommy Goodwin, in a sworn deposition.

"Nella?" he was asked.

"Nella, that's correct, yes."

Reed's critics say that the Nella story cannot be true because the Contras did not have an air force. But this is to misunderstand the purpose of the training. What North and Secord needed were Nicaraguan-born crews to fly the C-123 and C-7 Caribou transport aircraft into the combat zone. It became clear why this should be a top priority when the "Fat Lady" was shot down by the Sandinistas in October 1986 with three Americans on board. But it was not easy to find Contra pilots. Most of them had no skills beyond single-propeller crop dusters. The flight instructors at Nella, including Terry, taught the teams to fly twin engine Cessna 4045. Barry Seal later upgraded five of the pilots to C- 123 military transports. But the instructors were never able to train enough Nicaraguans to take over the whole fleet.

If Terry Reed's role had been confined to flight training at Nella, he might not have become a liability to Governor Clinton. But Barry Seal needed his machine tool expertise to help with the clandestine production of weapons parts at a series of plants scattered around Arkansas. Most of the M-16 components were surplus inventory from National Guard stockpiles, according to Reed. They could not be traced with any precision. But the parts that were required to make the M-16 fully automatic came under much more restrictive ATF tracking controls, so it was necessary to manufacture untraceable substitutes -- bolt assembly, lower receiver housing, etc. -- before assembling the M-16s for shipment to the Contras. Interestingly, the Iran-Contra Committee found a document from Secord's files discussing an outfit called American Arms Project, along with plans to purchase a manufacturing plant for gun parts. It specifically mentioned building "lower receiver housing."

It was this side of the operation that drew Terry into the vortex of the conspiracy, where he would witness meetings with the Governor of Arkansas. He paints a colorful scene in the book. Oliver North, Felix Rodriguez, and Bill Clinton holed up together in an ammunition storage bunker at Camp Robinson while an envoy from the CIA reads the riot act. "We didn't plan on Arkansas becoming more difficult to deal with than most banana republics," says the man from the CIA, dripping with contempt. "Our deal with you was to launder our money. This has turned into a feeding frenzy by your 'good ole boy' sharks, and you've had a hand in it, too, Mr. Clinton."

Reed was flabbergasted by what he heard. Nobody had told him that the Governor himself was mixed up with the operation. As it happened, Clinton had gate-crashed the meeting. He had heard that the Enterprise was shutting down in Arkansas -- where endemic corruption had become a security risk -- and he had come demanding an assurance that the White House would take care of all the loose ends stemming from Mena. It was a foolhardy thing to do. He had now exposed himself to Reed.

Far- fetched? Yes, but as we shall see, it was Terry and Janis Reed who invested five years building a federal lawsuit to prove this happened -- and much else besides -- and it was the White House that prevented them having their day in court.

For years Clinton denied all knowledge of trouble at Mena. He is contradicted by a mass of sworn testimony. For example, Trooper Larry Patterson was present when Governor Clinton was told that there were "large quantities of drugs coming into the Mena airport, large quantities of money, large quantities of guns, that there was an operation training foreign nationals .... [Clinton] had very little comment to make. He was just listening to what was being said." [23]

Clinton's position evolved at a televised press conference in 1994. Blindsided with a question about Mena by Sarah McClendon, the indefatigable doyenne of the White House press corps, he said, "The state really had nothing to do with it. We had nothing, zero, to do with it, and everybody who's ever looked into it knows that." [24]

Really?

It would be more accurate to say that every attempt to investigate Mena was shut down before it could reach any conclusion. The first, and most heroic, was a joint IRS and State Police probe into narco-money laundering by Barry Seal's associates at Rich Mountain Aviation.

"The evidence was never presented to the grand jury," said IRS investigator Bill Duncan in a deposition. "There was a cover-up."

Q: "Are you stating under oath that the investigation in and around the Mena airport, of money laundering, was covered up by the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas?"

Duncan: "It was covered up." [25]

As for the State Police investigator, Russell Welch, he is lucky to be alive after a near fatal bout of poisoning. He would later discover that the commander of the State Police was helping the other side, slipping highly sensitive information to the targets of the probe. An internal State Police memorandum reveals Colonel Goodwin allowed an employee of Rich Mountain Aviation, Rudy Furr, to spend a day at the State Capitol going through the current investigation files of Russell Welch. "He could sit down with the records and make notes from them. Colonel Goodwin had been advised of his being there and periodically checked back to see if he was still there." [26] What sickened Russell Welch most of all was that Colonel Goodwin gave the man his telephone records, putting Welch's sources and informants in grave danger.

"It was a very disappointing, humiliating experience. I've got a lot of feelings, bitterness is certainly one of them," said Welch. [27] His handwritten diaries capture his mood of despair. "I feel like I live in Russia, waiting for the secret police to pounce down. A government has gotten out of control. Men find themselves in positions of power and suddenly crimes become legal. National Security?!" [28]

Bill Clinton was eager to see Terry Reed move away from Arkansas. In April 1986 he chatted with Reed outside Juanita's restaurant in Little Rock and strongly encouraged him to take up a new venture being offered to him in Mexico. Terry agreed. A month later Trooper L. D. Brown was sent to Puerto Vallarta to carry out the assassination.

When that failed, the State Police resorted to a different method. In October 1987 Captain Raymond "Buddy" Young, the commander of the Governor's security detail, planted a false profile of Terry Reed in the federal data bank. "Buddy Young has advised that he has received information which indicates Terry Reed may be involved in Mexican and/or South American drug trafficking." [29] Young claimed that the information came from the DEA via the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC). It was not true. [30] In collusion with the FBI office in Hot Springs an alert was put out asserting that both Terry and Janis Reed were "armed and dangerous." [31]

In June 1988 Terry and Janis were indicted on federal wire fraud charges in U.S. federal court in Kansas. The details of this case are exceedingly complex. Suffice it to say, it was later shown that Buddy Young had fabricated the physical evidence of a crime and backdated his police reports. After two and a half years of purgatory in the criminal justice system, the Reeds were absolved of all wrongdoing. This was something of a miracle, given that the Arkansas State Police had ignored an order by the judge to release critical documents that the defense had requested -- many of them had been shredded, as Melanie Tudor testified, but not all. The irate judge accused Buddy Young of demonstrating "a reckless disregard for the truth."

Buddy Young continued to provide services for Bill Clinton. As the presidential campaign got under way he warned the troopers who had served on the security detail not to reveal secrets. "It was pretty blunt. If I wanted to keep my job, I would keep my mouth shut," said Corporal Barry Spivey, in sworn testimony. [32] "If you don't want to get fired, you need to forget what you heard."

President Clinton rewarded Buddy Young by appointing him director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the south central United States, a powerful position with access to most of the federal machinery of coercion. Ensconced in his offices at FEMA headquarters in Denton, Texas, he resorted to more naked threats.

"I hear you're thinking of coming forward [with Troopergate]," he told Trooper Roger Perry in the late summer of 1993.

"We're thinking about it," said Perry.

"I represent the President of the United States," warned Young. "If you and whoever do that, your reputations will be destroyed, and you will be destroyed."

The Justice Department did not distinguish itself in the case against the Reeds. On June 5, 1990, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the case, Robin Fowler, gave the game away in a memo to his boss. "For some time I was prepared to dismiss the defendant's story as too incredible for any jury to believe, and I myself gave it little serious thought. Last week, however, I learned that the defendant was involved in classified FBI operations in 1981-1982 (at least part of which involved missions in Eastern Europe). This information, at the least, gives the defendant an aura of credibility that will take further investigation to dispel." [33]

During the criminal trial Terry and Janis had flown to Washington to meet with investigators for the Kerry Committee, which was looking into drug smuggling by the Contras. They were debriefed by Kerry's counsel, Jack Blum, over a period of three days in September 1988. At first Blum seemed excited. He already knew a covert operation had been based at Mena-Nella. In 1988 he had visited the area, confiding his thoughts to IRS investigator Bill Duncan at a meeting at the Lime Tree Inn in Mena. "Jack Blum ... told Russell Welch and myself that PDF (Panamanian Defense Forces) were being trained at Nella .... The information that I received from Blum indicated to me it was sanctioned at high levels of the U.S. government." [34]

Reed's information was exactly what the Democrats were looking for. He could provide details of the conspiracy to violate the Boland Amendment and subvert the will of Congress. But Terry and Janis never heard from Blum again. The final Kerry Report was a useful document, though the authors were clearly bent on scoring partisan points. The Reagan administration was fair game; Governor Clinton was not. The report did not contain a word about weapons being shipped from Mena, or about Air Contra training at Nella.

Terry and Janis launched their counterattack against Buddy Young on July 5, 1991, filing a federal lawsuit that charged him with violating their civil rights and planting false evidence. Their purpose was to discover why the chief bodyguard of Governor Bill Clinton had conspired to cause them so much injury. They had no prior quarrel with the man, so why had he done it? Who was behind it? The lawsuit worked its way slowly through the court system, ignored by the press but followed avidly by a large block of the American people in the alternative media. By the end of 1996 Reed's legal team were confident that they could prove their case in court.

"We were very close to cracking this. If we had been able to go to trial, we would have forced a lot of information to the surface in the legitimate venue of a courtroom," said Michael Dowd, the lead attorney for the legal team. But it never did go to trial.

On March 8,1996, U.S. Federal Judge George Howard, Jr., ruled that Terry Reed could not introduce any evidence related to his "participation in missions sponsored by the FBI, the CIA or any other agency of the United States government ... as well as any operations conducted in Southwest Arkansas regarding the training of Nicaraguan nationals ... any reference to President or Governor Bill Clinton and/or Hillary Clinton and the Mena or Nella airports. Further, any reference to Dan Lasater ... any reference to a business relationship of Barry Seal and Dan Lasater ... and the Arkansas Development and Finance Authority." [35]

"It was a crippling blow. It meant we couldn't get in the question of motive, which was the whole point of the case," said Dowd. "The whole thing made me physically ill.... Now I know what it is to play hardball."
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Re: The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories

Postby admin » Sun Jul 03, 2016 8:05 am

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: PAULA JONES: PERVERSE JUSTICE

I BECAME EMBROILED IN the Paula Jones affair by accident, on a houseboat in the Arkansas River. I was visiting two grizzled veterans of the fight against the political machine: Everett Ham, a top aide to Governor Winthrop Rockefeller in the 1960s; and Gene Wirgess, a former newspaper editor who had become something of a legend thirty years ago when he was sentenced to hard labor after all else failed to silence him. It was bad back then in Arkansas, explained Wirgess, who had had his teeth knocked out, and it was not much better now. [1]

I told them that I was having no luck persuading Paula's lawyer, Danny Traylor, to give me her unlisted telephone number in California. The Washington Post had been given an exclusive in the hope that a big liberal newspaper would give credibility to her story. Fine in theory, I told my companions, but the chances that The Post would ever publish such an article were close to zero.

Everett Ham agreed. It so happened that he knew the Traylor family. He picked up the telephone and bellowed: "Danny, get your ass over here right away."

Ten minutes later, Traylor came hurrying up the gangplank onto the boat. A pudgy, amiable young man with a taste for the good life, he happily accepted Everett Ham's tumblers of whiskey. We all did, even though it was the middle of the day, and it was not long before we were saying things that perhaps should not have been said.

Danny Traylor calls himself a "yellow-dog Democrat, " but he is not very political by temperament. He must have felt slighted in some way, however, for he was cursing the White House. "My great grandfather didn't take a minie ball in the forehead at Shiloh to see the country finish up like this, " he said, suddenly, a little taken aback by his own flourish. [2]

He started fulminating against the feminists who had refused to give Paula the time of day. Then he let rip against The Washington Post. He had handed them everything on a platter. A team led by Michael Isikoff had spent weeks investigating. They knew her allegations were true, said Traylor, but there was trouble higher up at the editorial level.

"They can't find it within themselves to hurt their boy. They just don't have the backbone or the gumption to run the piece, " he said. "It sure does make them look bad, when you think of the way they went after Clarence Thomas."

Then he dropped his bombshell. Paula was so disgusted with the antics of the newspaper -- although she liked Isikoff, personally -- that she was thinking of filing a "Tort of Outrage " lawsuit against the president. That would make the press stand up and pay attention.

"Do you think it would be piling on, what with all of Bill's other problems?" asked Traylor, grinning a little sheepishly.

Nobody had ever filed a lawsuit involving private actions against a sitting president of the United States, let alone a country girl from Lonoke, Arkansas, with an attorney who was by trade a real estate conveyancer. Traylor was the first to admit that he was hopelessly out of his depth, but he did not know where to turn for a co-counsel of national stature.

In the banter that followed, I suggested that he talk to Gerry Spence, a Wyoming lawyer with a track record of confronting abuse of power. For a few minutes, I suppose, it could be said that I had become a consultant to the embryonic legal team of Paula Jones. Traylor did in fact contact Spence afterward, sending him an outline of the complaint. But nothing came of it. I mention this because James Carville has more or less accused me of orchestrating the lawsuit, and as a result I have been fielding calls from reporters about my putative role in "instigating" the case.

As the whisky flowed, Traylor admitted that he had already made overtures to the White House, passing messages through an intermediary with ties to Clinton. I later learned that this go-between was a Little Rock businessman named George Cook. Without telling Paula Jones, Traylor had explored the possibility of a quiet settlement. ("I found out about it the day before we filed in court, " she told me later, in tears. "I couldn't believe Danny had done that to me.") But the damage was done. When the story came out in the press it looked as if she had been trying to extort money from the White House.

According to Traylor, the White House had sent a message back that there was a slush fund for the skirt problem, but before making an offer they wanted to gauge the final fall-out from the Troopergate scandal that had broken in The American Spectator a few weeks earlier, just before Christmas 1993. To their relief, the polls showed Clinton's approval rating actually rising. In early January it topped 60 percent, reaching the highest level of the Clinton presidency. Not even the gender gap was closing.

"The public ain't biting, Danny Boy. Take your girl and go on home, " said the contact.

By the end of the afternoon, I had obtained what I wanted: Paula's telephone number. It was the beginning of a conversation that would stretch over three years. I made one trip to Long Beach to see her. Otherwise it was all conducted on the telephone. Over time, she pulled back on the instructions of her lawyers, handing me over to her husband Steve. An aspiring actor, who works as a ticket agent for Northwest Airlines, he is a greatly underrated figure in the Jones saga.

Paula went through the details of the story that are now known to the world. On May 8, 1991, then 24 years old, she was working the registration desk for a conference given by the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock. At about 2:30 PM Governor Clinton appeared in the lobby and gave her a long look. A little later, State Trooper Danny Ferguson came over to fetch her, saying the governor wanted to talk to her upstairs. He added that "she made the governor's knees knock, " which should have given her pause for thought. But Paula was a vivacious extrovert who sought to please. Besides, if Clinton had taken a shine to her, perhaps he would offer her a job at the governor's office. [3]

She accompanied Trooper Ferguson in the hotel elevator and was escorted to a suite where Bill Clinton was waiting. It soon became clear that his intentions were carnal. He praised her "curves" and started to run his hand up her legs.

"His face was red, beet red. I'll never forget that look, " Paula said. "I tried to move away. I thought if I started asking about his wife he'd get the message."

He didn't.

"He pulled his pants down to his knees; he had an erection, and he asked me to kiss it. Then he just stood their holding it." At this point she jumped up from the sofa and said "I'm not that kind of girl."

Paula never mentioned noticing the "distinguishing characteristic, " which she now says will buttress her claims against him. The subject never came up, and I never revealed what I had learned from two other women with apparent knowledge of Clinton's middle anatomy.

I suspect that it is a distinctive mole at the base of Clinton's stomach. Sharlene Wilson mentioned it to me during an interview at the Women's Penitentiary in Tucker, Arkansas, in May 1994. She had seen it years before during those toga soirees at the Coachman's Inn. It was not a subject she chose to dwell on. The detail came out in passing, offered spontaneously and without comment.

I was told exactly the same thing by Sally Miller Perdue, who was working in a home for the disabled in St. Louis when we discussed it in the spring of 1994. (She later went to China, her great passion in life, and took a job teaching English.) The two women moved in different worlds. It was highly unlikely that there had been any cross-contamination of the story. Perdue was a little more specific. She noted that the mole was a half-inch wide, but otherwise the descriptions were identical. [4]

A former Miss Arkansas, Perdue says that she had a three month affair with Clinton in the fall of 1983 when she was a radio host in Little Rock. He used to drop by her place at Anderson Square to smoke a "joint" of marijuana and play old songs from the 1950s on the saxophone, while she accompanied him on her Steinway grand piano. Clinton, she remembers, liked to cavort around wearing her black nightdress. Years later, during the 1992 presidential campaign, she was promised a federal job if she remained silent about the affair. The offer was overheard by a witness, who also heard the accompanying threat that "we can't guarantee what will happen to your pretty legs" if she declined the offer. [5]

As I looked into Paula Jones's story it became obvious to me -- just as it had to Michael Isikoff -- that there was substance to the allegation. It was more than a case of "he- said- she-said." Pamela Blackard, who was stationed with Paula at the registration desk, had signed an affidavit describing the approach by Trooper Ferguson, and then Paula's reappearance in a state of "embarrassment, horror, grief, shame, fright, worry, and humiliation." [6] Paula told her everything in graphic detail within minutes of her return.

An hour later she recounted the tale to her best friend, Debra Ballantine. "She came over to my office at about four in the afternoon. I could tell right away by her demeanor that she was upset, " Ballantine told me. "Then she said 'You're not going to believe what just happened to me, Debbie, he pulled his pants down right there.' It was out of the blue. She didn't know anything about Clinton's reputation. She had the highest regard for him." [7]

I went to visit Paula's mother, Delmar Corbin, in a house full of religious artifacts. She had been married to a Bible missionary from the "Old Nazarenes, " and the family had not allowed a television in their home until Paula, the youngest of three girls, was eighteen. An overweight, other-worldly woman, Mrs. Corbin told me how Paula came to see her two days after the incident. "Paula was afraid after it happened; it was on her mind night and day, that she was going to lose her job, " she said. "She's a good girl. She doesn't know how to tell a lie." [8]

The list of witnesses went on. Paula's middle sister, Lydia, told me that Paula had come to see her, "trembling, " afraid that she was going to lose her job. [9] It was simply inconceivable to me that this whole story had been fabricated three years later. Yet the American media had made a collective decision to dismiss her claim as "tabloid trash" to use the phrase of Clinton's $475-an-hour power lawyer, Robert Bennett. Why didn't she report the harassment immediately, they demanded? Why did she wait three years before coming forward? The questions displayed great naivete about the prospects for a 24-year-old secretary, working at an annual salary of $10, 270 for the State of Arkansas, if she confronted the political machine.

"Who was I supposed to report it to? It was a state trooper who took me up; it was the governor of the state who did it to me; he controls every judge in the state; my boss was his best friend. Who could I trust?" she said. "Anyway, who's going to hire me again if I'm hollering sexual harassment?"

It was not until they moved to California in the summer of 1993 that they felt safe. Even so, Paula would not have come forward if it had not been for David Brock's Troopergate article in the December 1993 issue of The American Spectator, which set off the chain of events by suggesting, erroneously, that a woman called "Paula" had been a willing mistress of the governor.

The press continued to treat her case with derision until Stuart Taylor wrote a 27-page article in The American Lawyer in November 1996 asserting the merits of her case. Confronted by Taylor's body of facts, and chastened by his accusations of both ideological and class bias, the media then performed a lockstep cartwheel and started chirping in unison that her claims had some validity after all. Nothing had changed in the nature of the case. The same witnesses were telling the same story that they had told from the beginning. Their affidavits had been available for two years. All that had changed was journalistic fashion.

If The Washington Post had run the story, Bill Clinton would not be facing a court date on May 27, 1998, on charges of sexual harassment. Paula was adamant that Clinton be held to account for his affront, but the accounting did not require a legal stamp. It would have been enough to shame him in the public square. True, her desire for punitive retaliation was growing by the day as the White House tried to blacken her name. It drove her to fury that Clinton's surrogates could simply call her a liar and get away with it. "It's got to get out. People have got to know what he did to me, " she said "What's right is right." But she was wavering during the days and weeks before she filed the lawsuit.

"Maybe I'm just not strong enough for this, " she confided. "Steve wants to go all the way. It's me that's dragging my feet. Clinton's got so much power. He can manipulate people, and it really upsets me. I've had some fear for retaliation against my family and my little boy. What do you think they'll do?"

"They'll attack your reputation, but they won't hurt you, " I told her. "It's far too late for anything like that."

"Look what happened to Vince Foster. I really don't know if I'd be scared for my life if I get into this."

"And Steve?"

"He's not scared of anybody. He wants to sue the crap out of Bill Clinton."

In the end The Post ran a diluted version of the story, but only after the impending lawsuit had propelled Paula Jones into the news headlines. By then Michael Isikoff had already been suspended for two weeks after a shouting match in the newsroom with the national editor, Fred Barbash. He later left the newspaper to join The Post's sister publication Newsweek. "Having done the reporting, I felt to not publish the story was withholding information from the readers, " he later told The American Journalism Review.

Clinton's lawyers came close to stopping the lawsuit with an eleventh hour offer stating that the president had "no recollection" of meeting Paula Jones in "a room" but did "not challenge her claim that we met there .... I regret any untrue assertions that may have been made about her."

It could have been the basis of a settlement. Paula's legal team agreed to delay the suit to think about it overnight. Then the White House leaked to CNN that Paula Jones had delayed filing because she knew her case was hopeless. It was the propaganda reflex, once again. Incensed, Paula filed the lawsuit the next day. James Carville responded on the airwaves with his famous quip: "Drag a hundred dollars through a trailer park and there's no telling what you'll find." It went downhill from there.

They underestimated Paula Jones. Perhaps they thought she would wither under fire, perhaps they thought they could stall until eternity. Instead they have turned her into an implacable enemy, armed with the subpoena power of legal discovery.

"May God have mercy on Bill Clinton, because Paula is not going to have any, " Steve told me, when the Supreme Court upheld the ruling by 9 to 0 that the president, not being a monarch, could not claim immunity from civil suits. "After the things they've put us through for the past two years -- calling Paula a trailer-park whore -- he can't expect much, can he?" [10]

In a belligerent mood, Steve warned that he was going to use subpoena power to reconstruct the secret life of Bill Clinton. Every state trooper used by the governor to solicit women was going to be deposed under oath. "We're going to get names; we're going to get dates; we're going to do the job that the press wouldn't do, " he said. "We're going to go after Clinton's medical records, the raw documents, not just opinions from doctors, and we're going to find out if he ever overdosed on cocaine; we're going to find out everything."

An offer to settle would not be enough any longer. When Clinton's lawyers agreed to pay $700, 000 along with a fudged apology in September 1997, Paula Jones refused. Her own lawyers pressed her hard to take the money and declare victory, warning that they could not continue representing her any longer. She still refused. A full apology, or nothing, she told them. Best of all, a trial, for by now she was determined to break the president of the United States.

Two weeks earlier, on August 22, 1997, Judge Susan Webber Wright had ruled that Paula Jones had "sufficiently alleged that the then-governor's actions were based on an intent to harass because of her status as a woman, " while at the same time dismissing Paula's claims for defamation.

At first blush this looked like a partial victory for the president. In fact it was a disaster. Clinton's mounting legal fees were being covered by his personal liability insurance. State Farm and the Chubb Group had already paid out more than $1.5 million, but those payments were triggered by the defamation component of the case. The underwriters are not obliged to pay costs in a sexual harassment suit because the offense is considered "intentional" rather than "negligent" behavior. State Farm withdrew after the ruling by Judge Wright, and Chubb was expected to follow.

Huge sums of money have been wasted on power lawyers when the case could have been resolved so easily at the beginning with an honest word of apology. Three and a half years later it threatens Clinton with acute humiliation, collateral revelations, and personal bankruptcy. By any accounting, the penalty is now out of all proportion to the original offense. Clinton did not assault Paula Jones. He did not use force. He certainly did not try to rape her. When she rebuffed his squalid proposition, he said: "I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do." In the opinion of many, it is questionable whether it constituted sexual harassment in the first place.

Of all the sins committed by Bill Clinton during his ascent to power, this was surely one of the most picayune. Yet it would not surprise me if he escaped retribution for everything else he has done, only to see his life ruined by the country girl from Lonoke. Fate has a strange way of meting out justice.
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Re: The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories

Postby admin » Sun Jul 03, 2016 8:06 am

EPILOGUE: AMERICA'S HOPE

I EXPECT THAT Bill Clinton will drift into cafe society at the end of his eight-year term, with one foot in Hollywood and another at Pebble Beach, not quite disgraced, but not exalted, either. Over time, history will exact its toll, even if he is never held to full account for his offenses. President Nixon, I think, will look better in the end.

But if Clinton eludes justice, at least it can be said that his destructive influence has been checked. The common citizens of the United States have fought battles of resistance across a wide front. They have not always prevailed, but even in defeat they have helped to expose the malice and dishonesty of his agents. Linda Ives has not achieved justice for her murdered son, but she has landed so many punches that the FBI is reeling and on the ropes. Terry Reed has not been able to prove who was behind the campaign of persecution against him, but his quixotic lawsuit brought to light the incontrovertible fact that Governor Clinton's right-hand man was sent to assassinate him. The late Glenn Wilburn did not live long enough to learn why the FBI and U.S. Justice Department are suppressing the truth in the Oklahoma bombing, but he demonstrated beyond doubt that the "OKBOMB" investigation is a sham. With time, I believe, the lawsuit that he bequeathed to the nation will reveal exactly what the Clinton administration is trying to hide.

Countless others have fought their little corner against abuse of power. The cumulative effect of all these individual acts of courage is decisive for a democracy. A lesser nation would have succumbed to Clintonism, a little at a time, from complacency and servile nature. Americans are too high spirited. They have shown that it is impossible to graft the practices of a banana republic onto their political culture. It makes me feel almost proud to witness such defiance.

The protagonists have come from all walks of life, but mostly they have been simple people. While credentialed officials looked the other way or colluded at the edges, it was the construction worker, the paramedic, the man-in-the-white-van who refused to change their testimony in the Foster case. The well-connected, privately-educated prosecutors on the staff of the Independent Counsel went along quietly with the coverup; the Hispanic son of migrant farm workers resigned on principle.

The American elite, I am afraid to say, is almost beyond redemption. Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush -- sophistry washed down with Chardonnay.

The ordinary citizens, thank goodness, still adhere to absolutes. A lie is an abomination. A vow is sacred. Injustice cannot be excused. It is they who have saved the republic from creeping degradation while their "betters" were derelict.

As I bid a fond farewell to America, I commend these words from Bill Clinton's fine speech to the Democratic Convention in Atlanta in August 1992:

"We have seen the folks in Washington turn the American ethic on its head. For too long, those who play by the rules and keep the faith have gotten the shaft. And those who cut corners and cut deals have been rewarded."

It makes you want to cry, doesn't it?
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Re: The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories

Postby admin » Sun Jul 03, 2016 8:09 am

NOTES

ABOUT THE NOTES


For reasons of readability, I have limited my use of endnotes to situations in which I consider them to be absolutely essential. Therefore, for each chapter I offer a bibliographical note highlighting my main sources for that chapter. I have supplemented the bibliographic note with endnotes only when I cite official documents, such as those of the ATF, the FBI, or the Park Police; when I cite court documents or other information obtained from court proceedings; or when I have obtained information through personal interviews. In addition, I occasionally offer explanatory endnotes to the reader.

INTRODUCTION

I am indebted to Carol Moore's well-documented work, The Davidian Massacre: Disturbing Questions About Waco Which Must Be Answered (1995).

1. There was an in-depth study by Failure Analysis, a firm of experts that prepared its findings for the House investigation of Waco. In the end the firm's work was never used because it had been sponsored by the NRA.

CHAPTER 1

Many have commented on how the Oklahoma bombing helped President Clinton politically, including President Clinton himself, as reported in a November 1996 Reuters News Service story.

1. Brady was a landmark case that set the standard for what evidence the prosecution has to provide the defense.

2. Writ of mandamus, Timothy McVeigh defense team.

3. Inspector General's report. It noted that the blast might have been an ANFO bomb but it was also consistent with a dynamite explosion. Residue of nitroglycerine was found at the crime scenes, and so was a dynamite wrapper. Yet the FBI failed "to address the possibility that the main charge consisted of dynamite."

4. Ibid. There was no science to back any of this up. The FBI labs never measured "the radius of the curvature of the fragments" so it was "virtually impossible" to know where the plastic came from.

5. Ibid.

6. For evidence about the controversy over harassment, see the Inspector General's report.

CHAPTER 2

For this chapter, I am of course particularly indebted to the crusading efforts of Glenn and Kathy Wilburn. And I must commend the gritty, heroic reporting of John "J.D." Cash and The McCurtain Daily Gazette. ABC's 20/20 was a valuable resource. Other sources: The Panola (IX) Warthman, The Oregonian, and CNN.

1. The Wilburns later inspected the records kept by the manager of the daycare center. No law enforcement agent had ever put a child in the creche.

2. Patriot's Day commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1775.

3. ATF press release, May 24, 1995.

4. Joseph Hartzler court documents.

5. At the meeting, Franey had his right arm bandaged. He claimed to have been wounded in the blast. But Wilburn discovered a photograph of Franey after the blast, doing rescue work in the building. He was carrying a heavy box in his right arm. His left arm was free.

6. Author interview with Edye Smith, April 1996.

7. Author interview with Glenn Wilburn, April 1996.

8. After stonewalling for months, the Fire Department later admitted that it did get a warning. The spokesman issued a statement saying it concerned a possible sarin gas attack, similar to the deadly attack on the Tokyo subway. If so, why did the Fire Department deny that there was a warning for so long? And what happened to the dispatch tapes?

9. FBI 302 report, statement of Renee Cooper.

10. Exhibit H, petition for writ of mandamus for Timothy McVeigh, Tenth Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals, March 25, 1997.

11. FBI 302 report, statement of Deputy Bill Grimsley.

12. Author interview with J.D. Cash, August 1997.

13. Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder: amended claim for damage, April 17, 1997.

14. District Court of Oklahoma County, CJ-97 2661: petition for wrongful death.

CHAPTER 3

Published sources: The Junction City Daily Union, The Daily Oklahoman, The Denver Post, and the Associated Press. Daina Bradley's baby face description of the second man she saw occurred in trial testimony.

1. Author interview with Hoppy Heidelberg, April 1995.

2. Pre-trial hearings for Timothy McVeigh, February 18, 1997.

3. FBI 302 report, April 20, 1995.

4. McVeigh trial, May 23, 1997: cross-examination of FBI Agent Rozycki.

5. McVeigh trial, May 23, 1997: cross-examination of FBI Agent Hersley.

6. Author interview with Glenn Wilburn, February 1997.

7. FBI 302 report, statement of Vicki Beemer, April 19, 1995.

8. McVeigh trial, May 22, 1997.

9. McVeigh trial; author interview with Nancy Jean Kindle, May 1996.

10. Author interview with Tonya, June 1996. She did not want her surname revealed.

11. McVeigh trial, May 22, 1997.

12. Writ of mandamus submitted by McVeigh defense team.

13. Author interview with Hilda Sostre, June 1996.

14. Author interview with Barbara Whittenberg, June 1996.

15. Author interview with Barbara Whittenberg, May 1996.

16. Author interview with David King, May 1996.

17. Wilburn archive: tape of Kyle Hunt.

18. Wilburn archive: tape of Dave Snider.

19. McVeigh trial, May 23, 1997.

20. McVeigh trial, May 23, 1997.

2I. FBI 302 report, May 3, 1995; FBI 302 report, May 21, 1995.

22. FBI 302 report, statement of Daina Bradley.

23. Author interview with Mike Vanderboegh, January 1997.

CHAPTER 4

Information on the Christian Identity religion came from The Christian Research Journal (Fall 1992). J.D. Cash introduced me to Elohim City.

1. FBI memo of Special Agent Sorrows, May 10, 1995.

2. Carol Howe's ATF notes.

3. Carol Howe's ATF notes.

CHAPTER 5

J.D. Cash's work for The McCurtain Daily Gazette established a groundwork for my research for this chapter. My research also included articles from The Denver Post and a documentary presented by the Canadian Broadcast Company on October 22, 1996. Specific information about Mapco Incorporated can be found on the company's website (http://www.mapcoinc.com).

1. ATF informant agreement, CI 53270-183.

2. Tulsa police report, August 22, 1994.

3. Ibid.

4. Testimony of Carol Howe at her trial; letter from Carol Howe to her father.

5. White Aryan Resistance (hereinafter "WAR") Report #001, August 30, 1994.

6. Expert testimony of former ATF official Robert Sanders at Howe trial.

7. WAR Report #003, October 26, 1994.

8. WAR Report #002, September 26, 1994.

9. WAR Report #004, November 29, 1994; Carol Howe's handwritten notes.

10. WAR Report #005, January 1, 1995.

11. Ibid.

12. WAR Report #006, February 28, 1995.

13. Ibid.

14. ATF WAR file, Report #004, November 29, 1994.

15. Howe trial, August 1997.

16. Kathy Wilburn interviewed Howe in late August 1997. At that point Howe had withdrawn from the press, but she continued to talk to Kathy Wilburn.

17. FBI memo of Special Agent James Blanchard, April 21, 1995.

18. Criminal Alien Information, INS, January 9, 1995.

19. Trooper Safety Alert, Angela Finley of the ATF.

20. WAR Report #006, February 28, 1995.

2I. ATF deactivation request #001, March 3, 1995.

22. Testimony of Carol Howe at her trial.

23. Ibid.

24. WAR Report #007, May 22, 1996.

25. FBI memo of Special Agent James Blanchard, April 21, 1995.

26. McVeigh motion for a new trial, filed July 7, 1997, p. 72.

27. McVeigh trial, May 12, 1997.

28. Mahon told me that he had met McVeigh many times, contradicting news accounts that the two men had never met.

29. McVeigh's defense team accused the FBI of malfeasance in the writ of mandamus. "We believe that this information was deliberately misspelled in order to disguise or hide it from a computer search by the defense counsel."

30. ATF memo to Dallas Field Division, April 22, 1996.

31. Under cross-examination at the Howe trial, Rickel admitted receiving the call.

32. Howe trial, July 1997.

33. Exhibit at the Howe trial.

34. Testimony of Special Agent Pete Rickel at the Howe trial.

35. Author interview with Roger Charles, former ABC assistant producer, July 1997.

CHAPTER 6

As with the other chapters on the Oklahoma bombing, The McCurtain Daily Gazette proved to be an invaluable resource. Other sources: ABC's Good Morning America, The Denver Post, and The Los Angeles Times.

1. FBI memo of Special Agent James Blanchard on Carol Howe debriefing 174A-OC-56120 JRB/csc, April 21, 1995.

2. Author interview with Andreas Strassmeir, May 1996.

3. German federal directory.

4. Author interview with Lt. Col. Vincent Petruskie, May 1996.

5. Non-Immigrant Information System Basic Display Data.

6. Author interview with Petruskie, May 1996.

7. Author interview with a confidential source from the Texas Light Infantry, July 1996.

8. Author interview with Kirk Lyons, May 1996.

9. FBI Memo of Special Agent Travis K. Sorrows, May 10, 1995.

10. Author interview with Kenny Pence, May 1996.

I I. Writ of mandamus, Tenth Circuit, March 25, 1997.

12. FBI Memo, May 10, 1995.

13. Author interview with Petruskie, May 1996.

14. Author interview with Joan Millar, June 1996.

15. FBI, April 21, 1995.

16. ATF WAR investigation file, Report #004, November 29, 1994; WAR Report #005.

17. The call was made on the pre-paid card of Daryl Bridges, which the government claims was used by McVeigh. It was also used by Nichols at times, but this call originated from the Imperial Motel in Kingman, where McVeigh was staying.

18. Author interviews with Kirk Lyons and Dave Holloway, May 1996.

19. Author interview with Katina Lawson, June 1996.

20. The tape would normally have been discarded, but it was kept by pure chance because there was an incident later that night. J.D. Cash's story came out in The McCurtain Daily Gazette, September 26, 1996.

2I. FBI memo, April 28, 1995.

22. Confidential intelligence source.

CHAPTER 7

J D. Cash's work for The McCurtain Daily Gazette was an essential source for my research. Other sources: Kevin Flynn's and Gary Gerhardt's Silent Brotherhood (New York: Free Press, 1989) and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

1. The Order, "Declaration of War, " December 25, 1984.

2. Bruders Schweigen Manual, Membership and Structure.

3. Author interview with Dennis Mahon, July 1997.

4. FBI Evidence Recovery Log.

5. FBI 302 report, statement of Kevin McCarthy, June 14, 1996. Special Agent Paul Henderson: "Approximately three days before the bombing McCarthy and Stedeford left the Strassmeir residence to travel to Pittsburgh, Kansas."

6. This was the story he told when Josh Friedman from Newsday interviewed him at Elohim. Carol Howe's notes show that it took her some time to find out his true name, and where he came from.

7. Glenn also had ABC News and The New York Times at work on the mission.

8. Author interview with Connie Smith, 1996.

9. Katina subsequently lost touch with Lindy Johnson. We were unable to locate her.

10. Her FBI statement does not reflect this. Either she is changing her story, or the FBI-once again-has suppressed relevant witness testimony.

11. Author interview with Joan Millar, July 1996.

12. Author interview with Andreas Strassmeir, May 1996.

13. Author interview with George Eaton, June 1996.

14. Author interview with Kathy Wilburn, July 1997.

CHAPTER 8

In September 1997 I offered Kenneth Starr the opportunity to respond to the issues which I raise in this book. I submitted a written list of questions to Mr. Starr. In response, Jackie M. Bennett, Jr., Deputy Independent Counsel, wrote a brief letter stating that "we will be unable to accommodate you with answers."

I owe a great debt to my gentle friend Hugh Sprunt, who became involved in the Foster case as a private citizen because his own grandfather had shot himself with a .38 caliber revolver. An accountant, educated at Stanford and MIT, he has done extraordinary work examining the primary documents released by the Senate Banking Committee in late January 1995. "I figured that the journalists up in Washington would be going through the books just as I was, " he told me. "I kept expecting to pick up the newspaper one day and see a big expose, but nobody was doing anything." So, American that he is, he took matters into his own hands.

The Sprunt Report -- properly, the Citizen's Independent Report-is a meticulous deconstruction of the Fiske Report, showing that it distorted witness testimony in a systematic fashion. The final version was released in July 1995 and sent to every member of the Whitewater Committee, to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and to the Office of the Independent Counsel. It cost Sprunt about $5, 000, which he paid out of his own pocket. I have it on good authority that the investigation of Kenneth Starr is seriously afraid of Hugh Sprunt. For that reason it is relying heavily on secret grand jury testimony to sustain its final report on the death of Foster. The transcripts will never be made available to the public, which ensures that Sprunt will not be able to check the report against witness statements.

Published sources: The Legal Times, Strategic Investment, and Reuters News Service.

1. Task list compiled by Associate White House Counsel Jane Sherburne, December 13, 1994. Provided to House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. First reported by Philip Weiss in The New York Observer, May 26, 1997.

2. Senate Whitewater Special Committee (henceforth "SWSC") Deposition of Webster Hubbell, July 13, 1995.

3. Report from the 1994 Senate Hearings Related to Madison Guaranty S&L and the Whitewater Development Corporation-Washington, DC Phase (henceforth "Green Books"), p. 741. Deposition of Captain Charles Hume, July 22, 1994.

4. Author interview with Luca Dalla Torre, June 1995.

5. FBI agent's handwritten notes and FBI 302 statement of William Kennedy dated May 6, 1994.

CHAPTER 9

Published sources: Ronald Kessler's The FBI (New York: Pocket Books, 1993), Peter Boyer's article entitled "Life After Vince, " appearing in the September 11, 1995 issue of The New Yorker, Ellen Joan Pollock's April 4, 1994, Watt Street Journal piece, "Fiske Is Seen Verifying Foster Killed Himself, " and the Sprunt Report.

1. Many people are already aware of the witness's identity. His name has been disclosed in a number of news articles. However, my interviews with him were conducted on the basis of strict confidentiality over the last two years, so I will abide by that agreement to protect his privacy from a wider public.

2. He was not the only witness who noticed this. Detective John Rolla said he saw "brush that had been trampled out. No other indications of struggle." That was the version in his handwritten notes of the FBI interview (notes 192). This was left out of the FBI 3°2, which instead stated that "there were no signs of struggle."

3. Green Books: deposition of Kevin Fornshill, July 12, 1994.

4. Ibid.

5. FBI 302 report, statement of Todd Hall, March 18, 1994.

6. FBI 302 report, statement of Todd Hall, April 27, 1994.

7. Author interview with a confidential grand jury source, January 1996.

8. Fornshill deposition.

9. Ibid.

10. Author interview with a member of the Fairfax County rescue squad, March 1995.

11. Green Books, p. 491: Senate deposition of Detective Cheryl Braun, July 23, 1994.

12. Green Books, p. 871: Senate deposition of Richard Arthur, July 14, 1994.

13. Ibid.

14. Robert Bryant, FBI special agent in charge, Washington Metropolitan Office, August 10, 1993.

15. Author interview with Alice Sessions, February 1995.

16. Author interview with Alice Sessions.

17. Green Books, p. 398: Senate deposition of Detective John Rolla, July 2 I, 1994.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Green Books, p. 2153: interview with Lisa Foster, July 29, 1993, Supplemental Criminal Incident Record.

21. Green Books, p. 2227: notes of Captain Hume, July 29, 1993.

22. Fiske Report, p. 38.

23. Author interview with Lee Bowman, April 1995.

24. Green Books, p. 1806. FBI 302 report, statement of Lee Foster Bowman, June 28, 1994.

25. Ibid.

26. Green Books, p. 1633. FBI 302 report, interview with Lisa Foster, May 9, 1994.

27. The Fiske Report finessed the deception by ignoring the color of the gun. But the 1994 Senate Report 103-433 Vol. I states baldly: "Mrs. Foster examined the revolver recovered from Mr. Foster's hand ... a silver-colored handgun."

28. Green Books, p. 1903. FBI Lab memo, May 9, 1994.

29. Green Books, p. 2°06: The National Tracing Center of the ATF says that the gun could not be traced because it "was manufactured prior to 1945."

30. Fiske Report, p. 57: There was microscopic residue of gunpowder in the soft palate obtained from the autopsy.

31. Fiske Report, p. 44.

CHAPTER 10

In my research for this chapter I benefited from the work of Christopher Ruddy of The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and from the Sprunt Report. Other sources: Newsweek, David Halperin's work for The Nation, and Ralph Nader's and Wesley J. Smith's No Contest: Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion o/Justice in America (New York: Random House, 1996). On January 6, 1995, Lisa Howard of the Scripps-Howard News Service published one of the earliest stories reporting that Starr had concluded his investigation into Foster's death.

1. Author interview with a confidential informant in March 1995.

2. Author interview with a confidential source inside the Starr investigation (Office of the Independent Counsel, hereinafter referred to as "OIC").

3. Fiske Report, p. 44.

4. Fiske Report, p. 45.

5. Green Books, p. 63: Senate testimony of Dr. Charles Hirsch, July 29, 1994.

6. Fiske Report, Exhibit 2.

7. Ibid.

8. Author interview with a confidential source at Ole.

9. Author interview with Victor Ostrovsky, former Mossad agent.

10. Green Books, p. 425: Senate deposition of Detective John Rolla, July 2I, 1994.

11. FBI 302 report, statement of Officer Franz Ferstl, May 2, 1994.

12. Green Books, p. 652: Senate deposition of Peter Simonello, July 14, 1994.

13. Green Books, p. 631: Simonello deposition.

14. Green Books, p. 658: Simonello deposition.

15. Fiske Report, Exhibit 1, p. 13.

16. Green Books, p. 2112: FBI property receipt.

17. Haut Report, July 20, 1993. Office of Chief Medical Examiner.

18. Green Books, p. 892, deposition of Richard Arthur, July 14, 1994.

19. Author interview with a confidential source at OIC.

20. FBI 302 report, statement of Corey Ashford, February 26, 1994.

21. FBI 302 report, second statement of Corey Ashford, April 27, 1994.

22. FBI 302 report, statement of Roger Harrison, March 11, 1994.

23. EMS Incident Reports list exact times of each crew.

24. Green Books, p. 891 Arthur deposition, July 14, 1994.

25. Ibid, p. 885.

26. Green books, p. 996, deposition of Sgt. George Gonzalez, July 20, 1994.

27. FBI 302 report, statement of Dr. Julian Orenstein, April 14, 1994.

28. Author interview with Orenstein, May 1995.

29. FBI Notes, p. 287, notes on interview with Orenstein.

30. FBI 302 report, statement of Detective Rolla, April 27, 1994.

31. FBI notes, p. 196.

32. The investigator, an Arkansas native, was carrying out an investigation for The Sunday Telegraph. Wittenberg clearly did not realize that he was being taped.

33. Green Books, p. 2128.

34. Green Books, p. 370: Autopsy report, gunshot wound chart.

35. Senate testimony of Dr. James C. Beyer, July 29, 1994.

36. Green Books, p. 138: Senate Resolution 229, June 19, 1994.

37. Author interview with Beth Burkett, September 1995.

38. Author interview with a confidential source in OIC.

39. B1ackbourne worked as the deputy chief medical examiner in Washington, D.C., under Dr. James Luke, the leading pathologist in the Fiske investigation. Why did Starr choose a man from the same incestuous group?

CHAPTER 11

1. Josie and Duncan are not their real names. I have disguised their identity after Josie pleaded with me, alarmed about the consequences for their marriages. Their true names can be discovered in the archive of official documents, but only true researchers are likely to get that far. The narrative is drawn from a mixture of their FBI statements and an interview with Josie in September 1995.

2. Author interview with Josie, September 1995.

3. Park Police Supplemental Criminal Incident Report by Detective John Rolla.

4. Author interview with Josie, September 1995.

5. Fiske Report, p. 11: Exhibit 1, FBI documents.

6. Green Books, p. 67: Senate testimony of Special Agent Larry Monroe, July 29, 1994.

7. Fiske Report, p. 35.

8. FBI 302 report, statement of Patrick Knowlton, April 15, 1994.

9. Interestingly, this contradicts the jacket being folded over the passenger seat, as in the Fiske report.

10. FBI 302 report, statement of Patrick Knowlton, May 11, 1994.

I I. Park Police vandalism report on Knowlton.

12. Author interview with Mary McClaren of the U.S. Attorney's Office, October 1995.

13. The Defense Department document is reproduced in the appendix.

14. The sketch is reproduced in the appendix.

15. Park Police evidence receipt.

16. FBI 302 report, statement of Lisa Foster, May 9, 1994.

17. FBI notes, statement of William Kennedy.

18. Green Books, p. 2153: Park Police interview with Lisa Foster.

19. Fiske Report, p. 25.

20. FBI 302 report, statement of Lisa Foster, May 9, 1994.

21. Green Books, p. 50: Senate testimony of Larry Monroe, July 29, 1994.

22. Green Books, p. 2390: Park Police photographs.

23. Green Books, p. 1522: FBI 302 report, statement of Jeanne Slade, April 4, 1994.

24. Green Books, p. 1422: EMS narrative report.

25. Author interview with Dr. Donald Haut, March 1995. This is confirmed by the handwritten notes of Dr. Haut's FBI interview. It says "red compact."

26. Green Books, p. 1628: FBI 302 report, statement of Franz Ferstl, May 2, 1994.
27. Green Books, p. 393: Senate deposition of Detective John Rolla, July 21, 1994.

28. Green Books, p. 2189: Park Police evidence control receipt.

29. Fiske Report, p. 13: Exhibit 1, FBI documents.

30. Green Books, p. 153: Park Police supplemental criminal incident report.

31. The hospital staff are adamant that Kennedy arrived before the Park Police. The Park Police themselves cannot get their story straight. In his FBI statement Detective Rolla said he went to the hospital "after we made a death notification, to recheck him." But his colleague Cheryl Braun contradicts this in her Senate deposition, saying they went to the morgue first, then to the Foster house in Georgetown.

Kennedy says that he was notified about the death at 8 PM (SWSC deposition July 11, 1995). He was negotiating with Livingstone and the Park Police on mobile telephones while the body was en route to the morgue. It appears that Kennedy set out for the hospital while the body was still en route. It arrived at 8:31, according to hospital logs.

Kennedy says that he was there for almost two hours before sorting things out. This does not square with the recollections of the hospital staff. The chronology is highly confused. The conclusion of this author is that Kennedy reached the morgue early that evening, before the Park Police.

32. Author interview with a confidential source, June 1997.

33. Green Books, p. 443: deposition of Detective John Rolla.

34. House hearings on Travelgate, p. 198.

35. Ibid. Zeliff, p. 429

36. SWSC deposition of William Kennedy, July 11, 1995. Technically the invitation came from Hillary Clinton.

37. SWSC deposition of Craig Livingstone, July 10, 1995.

38. SWSC deposition of William Kennedy, July 11, 1995.

39. FBI Notes, p. 238, statement of William Kennedy.

CHAPTER 12

Published sources: The Washington Post and United Press International.

1. OIC subpoena signed by John Bates.

2. The details are catalogued in Knowlton's "Witness Tampering Report."

3. Knowlton v. United States, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, case number 96-2467.

4. Author interview with Patrick Knowlton, October 1995.

5. Patrick had requested frequent breaks during his testimony so that he could step outside and write down the questions, giving us a record, of sorts, of the secret proceedings. Kavanaugh asked him if he had received a fax the day before. This was highly suspicious. I had sent Patrick a fax of "Rule 6" explaining that grand jury secrecy laws did not apply to the witness -- only the jurors and court officers. How did they know about this? Were they monitoring his fax machine?

I complained to one of Starr's prosecutors: "I damn well hope you've got a court order for the wire-tap on Knowlton's phone."

"That's an outrageous thing to say, " was the reply.

6. This is all outlined in detail in the Witness Tampering Report.

7. Knowlton v. United States.

CHAPTER 13

Published sources: The Mertonian, The Albuquerque Journal, The American Spectator, and Elizabeth Drew's On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994).

1. Green Books, p. 2527: Detective John Rolla's notebook.

2. Senate deposition of Detective Rolla, July 21, 1994.

3. Author interview with Reed Irvine, June 1995.

4. Green Books, p. 2517: Park Police evidence receipt.

5. Senate deposition of Rolla.

6. FBI 302 report, statement of Lisa Foster.

7. Green Books, p. 2551: US Secret Service.

8. Author interview with Pat Gavin, April 1995.

9. Author interview with David Watkins, January 1996.

10. Author interview with David Watkins, January 1996: He is adamant that Foster had exhibited no signs of clinical depression.

11. Green Books, p. 1421: EMS incident report.

12. FBI 302 report, statement of William Bianchi, March 17, 1994.

13. FBI handwritten notes, p. 28.

14. FBI 302 report, statement of Victoria Abbott Jacobs, March 11, 1994.

15. FBI handwritten notes, p. 28.

16. FBI 302 report, statement of William Bianchi.

17. Ibid.

18. Author interview with a confidential source, March 1995.

19. Author interview with Dr. Donald Haut, April 1995.

20. FBI 302 report, statement of Dr. Donald Haut, April 14, 1994: "Haut recalls that the USPP [United States Park Police] had an Arkansas driver's license belonging to Foster and it was known that he was employed at the White House."

21. FBI Notes, p. 251, Cheryl Braun.

22. FBI 302 report, statement of Detective John Rolla. Also, Senate deposition of Rolla.

23. FBI 302 report, statement of Richard Arthur, March 21, 1994.

24. FBI Notes, p. 252, Cheryl Braun.

25. FBI 302 report, statement of Cheryl Braun, April 28, 1994.

26. FBI notes, p. 251, Cheryl Braun.

27. The Park Police cannot keep their story straight, even on this elementary point. When I interviewed the shift commander, Pat Gavin, he inadvertently contradicted Cheryl Braun, saying that it was John Rolla who called to tell him about the discovery of the White House 10. Gavin failed to appear for Senate testimony in July 1994. No explanation given.

28. Author interview with Roger Perry, January 1995.

29. Ibid.

30. Author interview with Larry Patterson, April 1995.

31. Author interview with Lynn Davis, April 1995.

32. Affidavit of Helen Dickey.

33. SWSC deposition of Helen Dickey, February 12, 1996: comment by majority counsel Viet Dinh.

34. SWSC Archive of Documents: Letter to Robert Giuffra dated September 30, 1995.

35. SWSC Helen Dickey deposition.

36. Ibid.

37. SWSC archive: "Movements to/from Living Quarters."

38. Author interview with Senator Al D'Amato, May 1994.

39. SWSC deposition of Henry O'Neill, June 23, 1995.

40. SWSC deposition of Maggie Williams, July 7, 1995.

41. Senate testimony of Patsy Thomasson.

42. As with the peripatetic gun, so too is there a peripatetic briefcase. Several witnesses saw the briefcase in the Honda at Fort Marcy Park, but the U.S. government denies it was there.

43. The Freeh family are deeply involved in Opus Dei. Louis Freeh's brother was a "Numerary" in the Order.

44. SWSC deposition of Mack McLarty, July 6, 1995.

45. Fiske also "disappeared" the FBI 302 of Tom Castleton, an intern in the White House Counsel's Office who saw Foster leaving with his briefcase.

46. FBI notes, p. 384: statement of Bruce Lindsey.

47. Green Books, p. 1800: FBI 302 report, statement of Bruce Lindsey.

48. SWSC deposition of Linda Tripp.

49. SWSC deposition of Betsy Pond.

50. SWSC deposition of Betsy Pond.

51. SWSC deposition of Lisa Caputo, July 10, 1995.

52. SWSC deposition of Maggie Williams, July 7, 1995.

53. SWSC deposition of Betsy Pond, p. 51.

54. SWSC deposition of Tom Castleton, June 27, 1995.

55. SWSC deposition of Deborah Gorham.

56. SWSC deposition of Betsy Pond.

57. SWSC deposition of Deborah Gorham.

58. SWSC deposition of Patsy Thomasson, July 25, 1995.

59. Author interview with David Watkins, January 1996.

60. The logs misspell a number of names. In one case it wrote "Thomison, " in another "Tomlinson, " but there was nobody on the White House staff by these names, certainly nobody with routine access to room 015-018. It clearly refers to Thomasson. ("Nussbaum" is sometimes spelled "Naussbaum, " for example.)

61. FBI 302 report, statement of Maggie Williams.

CHAPTER 14

Christopher Ruddy's tenacious reporting for The New York Post and The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review was essential to my research for this chapter. Other sources: ABC News, The New York Daily News, Editor &Publisher magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Observer, and Hannah Arendt's The Origins o/Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966).

1. Newt Gingrich did in fact appoint Congressman Steve Schiff of New Mexico to investigate the death. Schiff kicked the ball into touch, saying that he would wait to see what Kenneth Starr did. It nullified the whole purpose, which was to keep Starr honest by running a parallel probe. But by then Gingrich was fighting for his political life. The matter was quietly dropped.

2. One of the journalists was Phil Weiss from The New York Times Magazine and The New York Observer. It backfired badly when he started looking more deeply into the subject and began to write some harsh articles of his own about corruption by the Clinton machine.

3. Author interview with Chris Ruddy, May 1997.

4. The Fiske Report makes much of the presence of mica particles on Foster's shoes and clothing, but this is meaningless. Mica floats in the air and settles on leaves and vegetation. It does not indicate whether Foster walked to the spot, or was carried -- only that the body was lying on foliage.

5. Author interview with a confidential source.

6. Author interview with Jim Davidson, May 1997.

7. Green Books: Senate deposition of Pete Simonello.

8. Affidavit of Reed Irvine: When shown blown-up samples of the exemplar and the suicide note Lockhart concluded that the two were incompatible.

9. Green Books, p. 2047: FBI lab report, June 13, 1994.

10. SWSC deposition of Deborah Gorham, July 31, 1995. Foster's secretary said that he did not usually rip up his notes for the burnbag. He rolled up the paper and tossed it.

11. SWSC deposition of Louis Hupp, July 14, 1995. Brett Kavanaugh from the OIC was present. He left the room to consult with Mark Touhey and was told that the witness was not to answer.

12. SWSC deposition of Pete Markland, June 28, 1995.

13. SWSC deposition of Linda Tripp.

14. SWSC deposition of Deborah Gorham, July 31, 1995.

15. SWSC archive of support documents.

16. SWSC deposition of Webb Hubbell, July 13, 1995.

17. FBI Notes, p. 281: FBI interview of Lisa Foster.

18. Green Books, p. 2665: Letter on Swidler & Berlin letterhead.

19. Author interview with Joe Farah, May 1997.

20. Green Books, p. 2187: Park Police Evidence/Property Control Receipt, July 20, 1993.

21. Green Books, p. 2191: Park Police Evidence Receipt, July 21, 1993.

22. Green Books, p. 1658: FBI 302 report, statement of Dr. Donald Haut.

CHAPTER 15

Published sources: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The American Spectator, Newseek, Peter Boyer's interview with Lisa Foster, published in the September I I, 1995 issue of The New Yorker, and James Stewart's Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries (New York: Touchstone, 1996).

1. SWSC deposition of Webster Hubbell, July 13, 1995.

2. FBI 302 report, statement of Lisa Foster, April 12, 1994.

3. Park Police interview with Lisa Foster, July 29, 1993.

4. FBI 302 report, statement of William Kennedy, May 6, 1994.

5. FBI 302 report, statement of Dr. Larry Watkins, May 16, 1994. This was misrepresented in the Fiske Report.

6. FBI 302 report, statement of Lisa Foster, May 9, 1994.

7. SWSC deposition of Tom Castleton, June 27, 1995: comment by majority Counsel Michael Chertoff.

8. FBI 302 report, statement of Lisa Foster, April 12, 1994.

9. SWSC deposition of Deborah Gorham, June 23, 1995.

10. Author interview with Boyden Gray, March 1996.

I I. SWSC deposition of Linda Tripp, July 11, 1995, p. 52.

12. Green Books, p. 1613: FBI 302 report, statement of William Kennedy.

13. Author interview with a confidential source.

14. SWSC deposition of Webster Hubbell, July 13, 1995.

15. FBI 302 report, statement of Lisa Foster, April 12, 1994.

16. FBI 302 report, statement of Webster Hubbell, April 13, 1994.

17. FBI 302 report, statement of Deborah Gorham, April 19, 1994.

18. Lisa Foster went through the accounts later and claimed that the credit union had made a mistake with every withdrawal. The sums were actually $35 each. This does not pass the smell test. Foster had $292 in cash in his wallet when he died.

19. FBI 302 report, statement of Marsha Scott, June 9, 1994

20. FBI 302 report, statement of Linda Tripp, April 12, 1994.

21. FBI notes of Marsha Scott, p. 353: This is subtly different.

22. SWSC ancillary documents.

23. FBI 302 report, statement of Marsha Scott, June 9, 1994.

24. FBI 302 report, statement of Marsha Scott, May 12, 1994.

25. Green Books, p. 1829: deposition of President Clinton June 12, 1994.

26. July 21, 1993. Presidential Documents 1351, 1411.

27. Author interview with Luca Dalla Torre, Swiss exchange student staying at the Fosters' home.

28. Ibid.

29. FBI 302 report, statement of Bruce Lindsey, June 22, 1994.

30. Deposition of Hillary Clinton, June 12, 1994.

31. Confidential interview with a family member.

32. Park Police interview with Lisa Foster, July 29, 1993.

33. Confidential interview with a family member.

34. Fiske Report, p. 9.

35. FBI 302 report, statement of Dr. Larry Watkins, May 16, 1994.

36. FBI 302 report, statement of Deborah Gorham, April 19, 1994.

37. Fiske Report, p. 24.

38. Deposition of Detective John Rolla, July 21, 1994.

39. Park Police interview, August 22, 1993.

40. Author interview with David Watkins, January 30, 1996.

41. FBI 302 report, statement of Webster Hubbell, April 13, 1994.

42. FBI 302 report, statement of James Lyons, May 12, 1994.

43. FBI 302 report, statement of Nancy Hernreich, June 9, 1994.

44. FBI 302 report, statement of Beth Nolan, June 7, 1994.

45. FBI 302 report, statement of Lorraine Cline, May 18, 1994.

46. FBI 302 report, statement of Susan Thomases, June 14, 1994.

47. FBI 302 report, statement of Sheila Anthony, April 28, 1994.

48. Confidential interview with a family member.

49. FBI 302 report, statement of Dr. Hedaya, May 17, 1994. In the handwritten notes of the interview there are multiple references to Top Secret issues.

CHAPTER 16

Published sources: The Washington Post and The American Spectator, Meredith Oakley's On The Make: The Rise of Bill Clinton (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1994), Roger Morris's Partners In Power: The Clintons and Their America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), and David Maraniss's First in His Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

1. Author interview with Gary Parks, February 1994.

2. Author interview with Jane Parks, April 1994.

3. Composite of the police report, family interviews, and witness observations. It differs somewhat from the police version, which is incomplete.

4. Parks already had the contract for the building, which was owned by The Democrat-Gazette, so the campaign inherited Parks. But Parks later expanded his role by displacing the Pinkerton security guards and taking over everything.

5. Author interview with Walter Pincus, February 1996.

6. Confirmed by Little Rock Police Department Sgt. Clyde Steelman in an interview. There is no police report of the burglary but Steelman said: "The files were taken, the family is not lying to you."

7. The identity of the witnesses is known to the author, but their information was provided under strict confidentiality.

8. Author interview with a confidential informant from the Arkansas State Police, June 1994.

9. Author interview with John D. McIntire, March 1994.

10. Two hour surveillance tape filmed at the apartment of Rodney Myers, viewed by the author; transcripts.

11. Author interview with a confidential source from the House Banking Committee investigation into money-laundering in Arkansas.

12. The tape is hard to make out because of background noise, but Detective Bunn was traveling with Roger Clinton in the car and insists that he heard the words clearly at the time.

13. Author interview with a confidential source.

14. Author interview with Jane Parks, April 1994.

15. Author interview with Harvey Bell, September 1996.

16. Author interview with Lee Bowman, July 1994.

17. Author interview with Jane Parks.

18. The pretense, still maintained by a few in the media, that Bill Clinton abided by the usual conventions of married life is so preposterous, after so much evidence to the contrary, that I will take it for granted that I don't need to address the issue here.

19. I presume that this is a misunderstanding. Foster must have been buying one of those $10 or $20 phone cards sold at many convenience stores.

20. Deposition of President Clinton, June 12, 1994.

21. Author interview with Lee Bowman.

22. Green Books, p. 2157: Park Police incident report of interview with James Lyons.

23. FBI 302 report, statement of James Lyons, May 12, 1994.

24. The checks were paid to American Industrial Services, but the main company was called American Contract Services.

25. American Contract Services company records.

26. Ibid.

27. In late 1996 Jane Parks met with two prosecutors from Starr's OIC. No FBI agents were present. No notes were taken. It was off-the-record in a Little Rock park. They mentioned to Jane that telephone records showed several calls to Webb Hubbell. They also seemed to know that Parks and Foster had been seen lunching at a restaurant in Mena.

CHAPTER 17

Sources: Obstruction of Justice, Integrity Film's 1996 documentary. Also: The Benton Courier, The Democrat Gazette, and Meredith Oakley's On the Make.

1. Author interview with Jean Duffey, May 1994.

2. The U.S. Attorney, Charles Banks, subsequently gave a press conference saying that one of the witnesses -- he was referring to Sharlene -- had refused to submit to a polygraph test. But this was not true. As Jean Duffey's March 1, 1991, diary entry confirms, Sharlene had told the assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Alexander -- Govar's replacement -- that she was happy to do the polygraph but could not get to Little Rock that week. Her sister was recovering from surgery and Sharlene had to look after her shop. She asked whether the test could be scheduled for the following week. Alexander was abusive. Sharlene called him the next week to arrange a time for the polygraph. But Alexander never returned her call.

3. Govar talked of resigning at the time, but decided to stay on and fight from the inside. He later told Phil Weiss of The New York Observer that the "federal system failed Jean Duffey."

4. The diary for January 7 reads: "She was more frightened today than I have ever seen her. She says what worries her the most is that they realize that she knows an enormous amount about a lot of important people and although she has not told everything she knows, they do not know what she is telling and what she isn't. I asked her for a specific. She told me about a time she went to a party in Hot Springs with Roger Clinton. He picked her up in the governor's limo and Bill Clinton was at the party. She said Bill was very intoxicated and she saw him 'do a line' and then stumble into a garbage can." The version is slightly different, but Duffey said she wasn't taking notes and wrote it up later that day. She now thinks she mixed up the different incidents that Sharlene had told her.

5. Author interview with Gary Martin, DEA agent, Little Rock, June 1994.

6. It was revealed in the Circuit Court, Hot Springs County, CR 94-160, page 25, that Potts was a defendant informant, "working off' criminal charges.

7. The details are disputed. In her appeal, Wilson accused the informant of signing a false affidavit.

8. U.S. Supreme Court, Wilson v. Arkansas, case number 94-5707, May 22, 1995.

9. Author interview with Margie Wilson, June 1994.

10. Author interview with Sharlene Wilson, June 1994.

11. Investigator's notes from Undercover Officer Scott Lewellen: his interview with the parents of the late Don Henry, January 2, 1991.

12. Police interviews from the Duffey investigation.

13. Author interview with Arkansas State Trooper L. D. Brown, June 1997. Brown was assigned to the case.

14. Author interview with Linda Ives, June 1994.

15. Autopsy report.

16. Author interview with L. D. Brown, July 1997.

17. Author interview with Linda Ives, June 1994.

18. Author interview with Linda Ives, June 1997.

19. At this point Sharlene Wilson was not telling Duffey everything she knew about the operation.

20. Neither I nor my American editors have been able to penetrate this, apparently, Arkansan expression.

21. Scott Lewellen's investigation notes.

22. He was later appointed Chief of Police for Alexander.

23. Author interview with Linda Ives, who was taken to the site by the witness.

24. Author interview with FBI Agent Phyllis Cournan, May 1994.

25. Author interview with Sharlene Wilson, May 1994.

26. Author interview with Linda Ives, December 1995.

27. Ibid.

CHAPTER 18

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, Time, Business Week, CBS's 60 Minutes, James Stewart's Blood Sport, Roger Morris's Partners in Power, and Virginia Kelley's Leading with My Heart (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

1. Author interview with Rex Armistead, May, 1995.

2. Criminal Investigative Section memo, dated March 22, 1976, written by Doug Fogley. (Fogley later became a close ally of Don Tyson.)

3. Documents from the Criminal Investigations Division, dated February 5, 1980.

4. Author interview with Beverly Weaver, June 1994.

5. Ibid.

6. Author interview with Michael Fitzhugh, September 1994.

7. Memo from J. N. Delaughter to Major Doug Stephens, dated July 19, 1988.

8. Author interview with]. N. Delaughter, April 1994.

9. Author interview with Michael Fitzhugh, September 1994.

10. Author interview with Colonel Goodwin, September 1994.

11. Author interview with]. N. Delaughter, April 1994.

12. Author interview with Trooper Larry Patterson, June 1994.

CHAPTER 19

The Albuquerque Journal published excellent articles on this subject. Other sources: The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, The Whitley Republican, The Louisville Courier-Journal, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Times.

1. Statement of Patty-Anne Smith to Arkansas State Police, September 15, 1986.

2. Author interview with Patty-Anne Smith, June 1994.

3. In a hilarious confession to the FBI, Senator Locke later said that he found himself in bed with an unknown female after snorting "bump amounts" of cocaine and "could not perform his manly duties." The experience was so shocking that he never used cocaine again.

4. Statement of Michelle Cochran to Arkansas State Police.

5. Statement of Gina Hartsell to Arkansas State Police, September 22, 1986.

6. Author interview with J. N. Delaughter, April 1994.

7. Statement of Patty-Anne Smith to Arkansas State Police. She was not the only one to be threatened. Jacquelyn Teel told the Arkansas State Police that Chuck Berry had warned her "never to discuss anything about his or Dan Lasater's business .... He made it very clear that anyone, no matter how close they were to him, will be taken care of if they crossed him." Berry was found dead in a motel room in Dallas in 1995.

8. Author interview with Patty-Anne Smith, June 1994.

9. See, for example, the Lasater Deposition to the SWSC, February 22, 1996.

10. Deposition of Corporal Barry Spivey, August 9, 1995, Reed v. Young LR-C- 94-634.

11I. Arguments by Lasater's defense lawyer at his sentencing, December 18, 1986, LR-CR-86-158.

12. FBI 302 report, statement of Dan Lasater, November 14, 1986.

13. Statement of Michael Drake to Arkansas State Police.

14. FBI 302 report, statement of Dan Lasater, November 14, 1986.

15. Statement of Michael Drake to Arkansas State Police.

16. Document from Regional Organized Crime Information Center in Nashville, dated May 15, 1986, noted a request by the Attorney General's Office of New Mexico for criminal intelligence on Dan Lasater "in reference to narcotics trafficking via aircraft with possible ties to organized crime."

17. Deposition of Dan Lasater, SWSC, February 22, 1996.

18. The contact was Maurice Rodriguez. Roger had requested $16,000 to $20, 000 but Lasater told the FBI he only paid $8, 000. Roger then pocketed half the money for himself.

19. FBI 302 report, statement of Dan Lasater.

20. Author interview with a confidential informant.

2I. Author interview with Ron Davis, March 1994.

22. Statement of Dan Lasater to FBI, 1986.

23. Ibid.

24. DEA file GJ-83-Z001, dated March 12, 1984.

25. FBI 302 report, statement of State Senator George Locke, October 10, 1986.

26. Report by Little Rock Police detective Tom James. Also, Police interview with pilot Ronald Ziller, September 8, 1986.

27. FBI 302 report, statement of Dan Lasater. He was mixing up his terminology, of course. There is no "governor of Belize." The country is a sovereign state with a prime minister.

28. FBI 302 report, statement of Dan Lasater.

29. Investigation notes of Russell Welch, p. 51. Welch mistakenly thought it was in Venezuela.

30. Author interview with Basil Abbott, June 1994.

3I. FBI 302 report, statement of George Locke.

32. FBI 302 report, statement of Dan Lasater.

33. Ibid.

34. FBI 302 report, statement of George Locke.

35. Michael Drake, memo of interview, October 14, 1986

36. Author interview with J.N. Delaughter, May 1994.

37. Author interview with Dick Lyneis, December 1994.

38. SWSC deposition of Patsy Thomasson, February 23, 1996.

39. Interview with a confidential informant, June 1994.

40. SWSC deposition of Patsy Thomasson, July 25, 1995.

41. Author interview with Dennis Patrick, April 1994.

42. Lasater & Company, Patrick & Associates account number 61-1041943. Some of these account statements are reproduced in the appendix.

43. The bank official was Gerenthia Calloway, the account number was 00- 5674.

44. Author interview with ATF officer John Simms, Lexington, Kentucky, April 1994.

45. This is the version recounted by Patrick. It occurred at the ATF offices in London, Kentucky.

46. Deposition of Danny Starr Burson, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Kentucky, October 15, 1986, Civil Action 85-497.

47. This was in a sworn statement taken by his lawyer in Grand Prairie, Texas, on January 13, 1986, at 3 AM. It was an effort to belittle the attack on Dennis, but the slip about Steve and Little Rock was revealing. Burson later changed his story, omitting any reference to this. A copy of the document was later slipped to Dennis by somebody sympathetic to his case.

48. Author interview with John Simms, May 1994.

49. The author has heard the tape. Josey was extremely distraught, saying that he too had been a victim of something much larger. He promised to tell Dennis what really happened, but not on a prison telephone.

50. Spring 1987. Dennis taped the conversation.

51. May 1994. It was also taped.

52. This report was sent anonymously.

53. Dennis was tipped off at the time by a friend in the local sheriff's department.

54. The meeting was attended by Officer Rick Moseley, who later told Dennis what had happened.

55. Author interview with Steve Love, May 1994.

56. ADFA also issues bonds for housing, displacing the old Arkansas housing authority.

57. Documents released as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit by Mark Swaney versus ADFA.

58. Author interview with Mark Swaney, July 1997.

59. Wilson said that ADFA needed to issue the bonds "before the cap expired." He was afraid that the federal law allowing issuance of these bonds was going to expire.

60. "The Reoffering Memorandum does not include $2,085,000 principal amount of the Bonds which are being retained by the Owners thereof."

61. ADFA minutes, December 17, 1987, released as a result of a FOIA lawsuit by Mark Swaney.

62. Letter August 18, 1992, from Delaware Supervising Insurance Examiner to ADFA.

63. SWSC depositions of Dan Lasater. He nominated Bill Mathis, Mort Hardwicke, Donny Spears, Margaret Davenport-Jacks, James Branyan, George Wright, Jr., Jim Tom Bell, and Ed Williams. The Committee also obtained message slips from some of Lasater's calls to the Mansion.

64. As an experiment, I tried to audit the $175 million July 1985 issue of Single Family Mortgage Revenue Bonds. The explosion of housing issues in 1985 seemed excessive. The money was transferred in blocks to private banks, which then commingled funds from other sources. It was absolutely impossible to track the money flow -- which I believe was the purpose.

65. Author interview with Bill Wilson, July 1994.

66. Lasater & Company participated in the underwriting of $660 million of ADFA and other state bond issues before Lasater was convicted in 1986 (as reported in the May 7, 1994, issue of The Economist). Usually there would be a group of five underwriters, managed by Paine Webber. ADFA refused to tell me how much of the pie was cut for Lasater, insisting vaguely that it was less than 5 percent. Mark Swaney says that records he reviewed indicate the figure was much higher in the 1985 period.

67. First American v. Lasater, U.S. District Court, Little Rock, October 9, 1985.

CHAPTER 20

Published sources: The Wall Street Journal, and Richard Secord's Honored and Betrayed: Irangate, Covert Affairs, and the Secret War in Laos (New York: Wiley, 1992).

1. I wrote an entire piece on the incident, which The Washington Post's rival The Washington Times picked up and ran on the front page.

2. The quotes from Debbie Seal are based on a series of interviews conducted by the author between 1995 and 1997.

3. In a deposition to the House Subcommittee on Crime, March 11, 1988, DEA agent Ernest Jacobsen was asked if there was a "national security defense" in the case.

4. LeBlanc testimony at DEA, Baton Rouge, April 2, 1986.

5. Author interview with Debbie Seal, June 1997. She knew that it was June because she kept a piece of paper with the name and number of a babysitter. It was a receipt with a date on the other side.

6. Jacobsen deposition.

7. Testimony of Billy Bottoms to the House Subcommittee on Crime, June 20, 1988.

8. Deposition of Russell Welch at the Arkansas Attorney General's office, June 21, 1991.

9. Testimony of Barry Seal, October 7, 1985.

10. Sheriff AI Hadoway of the Arkansas State Police, May 1, 1986.

11. Duncan IRS investigation. Seal bought N62856 from Air America Inc. in May 1982. Contrary to news reports, this had nothing to do with the famous CIA front also called Air America.

12. Jacobsen deposition.

13. Seal told the Arkansas State Police and the IRS that the only laundering done at Mena was to cover local expenses.

14. Statement of Billy Earle, Jr., to the Arkansas State Police, October 10, 1985.

15. Testimony of Barry Seal, October 7, 1985.

16. This was a calculation by the Louisiana Attorney general in a letter to the United States Justice Department, dated March 3, 1986.

17. Jacobsen deposition.

18. Ibid. There is some dispute over whether it was Somoza's house, (the DEA version) or the property of a former diplomat.

19. Duncan interview of Peter Emerson, June 9, 1988. Emerson was Seal's flight engineer on the C-123.

20. Jacobsen deposition.

21. Ibid. The DEA had the fuel analyzed, just to be sure that Seal really had landed in Nicaragua and not somewhere else.

22. I am not entirely convinced that this incident took place on Nicaraguan soil. It strikes me as odd that the Frente Sandinista would let a U.S. military C-123 come and go.

23. Deposition of Ronald J. Caffrey, DEA cocaine chief, before the House Subcommittee on Crime, March 15, 1988.

24. Deposition of Ronald J. Caffrey. Also in the report issued by the Kerry Committee.

25. Defense motion in U.S. District Court, Louisiana, case 84-77.

26. Testimony of Richard Secord to the Iran-Contra Committee, May 5, 1987.

27. Another slip was leaving a paper trail mentioning four C-123 for "delivery to Tucson." In his testimony to the Iran-Contra Committee (May 5, 1987), Secord said he had only two Fairchild C-123K transports. But there were in fact a total of four C-123s used in the resupply network.

28. Author interview with Joe Cadiz, September 1997.

29. Department of Transportation, aircraft bill of sale. Conveyance recorded July 27, 1983.

30. FAA Aircraft Registry.

31. Jacobsen deposition.

32. Ibid.

33. Author interview with a confidential source from the House Banking Committee.

34. Jacobsen deposition.

CHAPTER 21

Both R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s Boy Clinton: The Political Biography (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1996) and Terry Reed's and John Cummings's Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA (New York: Spi, 1994) have been important sources. Terry Reed has been of great help in providing me with depositions from his lawsuit. Other published sources: James Stewart's Blood Sport and Richard Secord's Honored and Betrayed.

1. Deposition of Ernest Jacobsen before the House Subcommittee on Crime, March 11, 1988.

2. Deposition of L. D. Brown, Terry K Reed, Et Al v. Raymond Young, Et AI, LR-C-94-634, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Arkansas.

3. Interview with L. D. Brown, December 1985.

4. Brown deposition, Reed v. Young.

5. Walsh Report, page 485; Congressional Iran-Contra Report.

6. Author interview with L. D. Brown, July 1997.

7. Interview with a confidential source from the House Banking Committee, June 1997.

8. Deposition of Ken Maddox, Brotherton v. Reed, Case 94-2071, June 25, 1996.

9. Walsh Report, p. 296.

10. Walsh Report, p. 161.

11. The First Boland Amendment allowed the CIA to spend $24 million to support the Contras, provided it was not to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. This was made much more restrictive in the Second Boland Amendment passed in October 1984, which limited the CIA to gathering intelligence only. But the wording was a compromise, drafted to avoid a veto by President Reagan. It left some wiggle room for the White House. It was in force from October 1984 to October 1986.

12. Iran-Contra Report, pp. 34-35.

13. Walsh Report, grand jury testimony of Donald Gregg, October 23, 1987.

14. Walsh Report, p. 487.

15. Author interview with L. D. Brown, July 5, 1997.

16. Deposition of Tommy Goodwin, CIV-94-2071, Brodix v. Reed, June 24, 1996. This is supported by testimony from other sources. Ken Maddox, an undercover narcotics agent working for the DEA, FBI, and drug task force talked about military training at Nella.

17. The FBI was worried about the legality of CIA activity in the U.S. They claimed that North was based in Toronto, coordinating a Finnish connection.

18. Anne Ellet interview with Joe Dunlap of the Kansas public defenders office.

19. Deposition of Michelle Tudor, Reed v. Young, July 25, 1995.

20. Iran-Contra Report.

21. There is extensive police documentation of suspicious activities at Nella, e.g. DEA October 28, 1986. "The farm on which the airstrip has been the object of a DEA/Arkansas State Police investigation in 1983 and 1984 as a possible smuggling field for the Barry SEAL organization." In addition, in his deposition of June 2I, 1991, Arkansas State Trooper Russell Welch talks of "air traffic at the Nella airport" and movements by "camouflaged subjects."

22. Author interview with a confidential source, July 1997. For obvious reasons Bottoms now denies all involvement. But he confessed his role in a meeting with three people, including a veteran law enforcement official.

23. Deposition of Trooper Larry Patterson: "Tommy Goodwin was in the Lincoln, I was driving, the governor was in the front seat. Bill Clinton turned to Tommy Goodwin in the backseat and said verbatim 'Tommy, I want to know what the hell is going on at Mena.' Goodwin said 'Governor, I have been told by Senator Pryor and Senator Bumpers to stay out of Mena.'''

24. Press conference, October 7, 1994.

25. Deposition of Bill Duncan, taken by Arkansas Congressman Bill Alexander.

26. Memo from Lieutenant Doug Williams to Capt. Doug Stephens, re: Rich Mountain Aviation, dated January 7, 1987.

27. Deposition of Russell Welch, June 21, 1991.

28. Welch's handwritten diary, 1987.

29. FBI teletype, Little Rock office, October 10, 1987.

30. EPIC's lawyer would refute this in Reed's criminal case.

31. Cover sheet of the FBI file on Terry Reed.

32. Deposition of Barry Spivey, Reed v. Young.

33. Memo from Robin Fowler to US Attorney, June 5, 1990.

34. Deposition of Bill Duncan, p. 34.

35. Order of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Arkansas, case LR-C- 94-6343.

CHAPTER 22

Published sources: The Washington Post, The American Lawyer, and Newsweek.

1. Author interview with Gene Wirgess, March 1994.

2. Author interview with Danny Traylor, March 1994.

3. Author interview with Paula Jones, March 1994.

4. Author interview with Sally Perdue. I had been talking to Perdue since January 1994, but this occurred in May 1994.

5. The threat was made at the Cheshire Inn by a man named Ron Tucker. The witness was Denison Diel, who signed an affidavit detailing the conversation. There is further corroboration. Tucker was heard talking about the subject on the telephone at his job at the Marion Mining Bolt Company in Kentucky. When confronted by his boss, Tucker said that he had been asked by someone in the Democratic Party in St. Louis to "shut the woman up."

6. Affidavit of Pamela Blackard, February 7, 1994.

7. Author interview with Debra Ballantine, March 1994.

8. Author interview with Delmar Corbin, March 1994.

9. Author interview with Lydia Cathey, March 1994.

10. Interview with Steve Jones, May 1997.
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Re: The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories

Postby admin » Sun Jul 03, 2016 8:10 am

APPENDIX A: OKLAHOMA

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(A) Carol Howe.

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(B) ATF confidential informant document for Carol Howe.

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(C) FBI debriefing of Carol Howe at the Oklahoma Command Center two days after the Oklahoma bombing. No agency of the United States has interviewed Dennis Mahon (misspelled "MEHAUN"), whom she implicates in the bombing.

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(D) ATF debriefing of Carol Howe about Elohim City and her investigation of Andreas Strassmeir.

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(E) ATF debriefing of Carol Howe regarding John Doe Two and her discovery of a "big secret" at Elohim City.

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(F) ATF report complaining that Carol Howe has been "severely compromised" by the FBI.

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(G) ATF document assessing the threats to Carol Howe. Note that the ATF states that Elohim City "is tied to the OKC bomb case." Note also the last paragraph, in which the ATF defends the credibility of Carol Howe.

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(H) Andreas Strassmeir.

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(I) State department telegram: background check on Andreas Strassmeir.
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Re: The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories

Postby admin » Sun Jul 03, 2016 8:10 am

APPENDIX B: VINCE FOSTER

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(A) Vince Foster's car registration, confirming that it was a grey 1989 Honda.

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(B) Park Police Detective Rolla's notes, noting a grey Honda and the phone number of Lt. Walter, Secret Service.

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(C) Dr. Haul's FBI statement that he arrived on the scene at 6:45 and found no blood on or around Foster's body.

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(D) FBI statement of Richard Arthur, emergency medical service technician, referring to Foster's neck wound from a small caliber bullet.

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(E) Dr. Beyer's statement to the Park Police that his X-rays found no evidence of bullet fragments in Foster's skull. Beyer later testified before the Senate Banking Committee that he never took any X-rays.

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(F) Intelligence document that links the man who attacked Patrick Knowlton's car to the FBI and the Defense Department.

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(G) Suspect sketch of the menacing man Knowlton saw in Fort Marcy Park, done for The Sunday Telegraph.

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(H) Secret Service Alarm logs for the night of Foster's death. Note the multiple appearances of Patsy Thomasson (her name is misspelled). Also note the appearance of the "MIG GROUP"-a confidential technical branch of the Secret Service.

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(I) Susan Thomases's FBI statement that Foster's death came as a complete shock-a glaring contradiction to what she later told Blood Sport author James Stewart.
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Re: The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories

Postby admin » Sun Jul 03, 2016 8:11 am

APPENDIX C: ARKANSAS

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(A) Kevin Ives.

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(B) DEA report on the "Donald TYSON Drug Trafficking Organization."

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(C) State Police criminal investigation documents linking Tyson to "every kind of shady operation especially narcotics."

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(D) FBI statement of Dan Lasater confessing, among other things, that he took cocaine with Roger Clinton, whom he hired at the request of Governor Clinton.

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(E) Patty-Anne Smith, the young girl "introduced to cocaine use by Dan Lasater."

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(F) Dennis Patrick's account statements from Lasater & Company, indicating the millions of dollars flowing through his account.

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(G) Rich Mountain repair receipts for Barry Seal's "No Problema, " indicating Seal operated the "phantom plane" as early as February 1984.

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(H) The first official document with the serial number of "No Problema."

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(I) The paper trail of "Fat Lady" registrations.

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(J) "No Problema": the phantom plane.

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(K) Judge George Howard's order barring Mena evidence In the Terry Reed case.  
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Re: The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories

Postby admin » Sun Jul 03, 2016 8:34 am

INDEX

Abbott, Basil, 294
ABC News: story on Howe, 71-72
Ables, Alan, 59
Accuracy in Media, 180, 210
Adams, James Ring, 245, 309
Adomitis, Daniel J., 17
Air Contra supply operation,
315-354
The Albuquerque Journal, 296, 297
Alexander, Arkansas: youth deaths
in, 268-269
Alexander, Bill, 316
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building,
3; America's Kids daycare center,
9; specific naming as a target, 62
Alley, Wayne, 15
Alton, Reginald, 216
American Arms Project, 348-349
American Contract Services, 250
The American Journalism Review,
362
The American Lawyer, 361
American media, 202
The American Spectator, 245, 309,
361
Anaya, Tony, 291-292
Angel Fire, 292
Anthony, Sheila, 230-231
Arkansas: mores of, 272, 281.
See also specific counties, towns,
and locations
Arkansas Committee, 309-311
The Arkansas Democrat, 257, 258
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,
205,234-235
Arkansas Democratic Party, 298
Arkansas Development and
Finance Administration,
309-311;
attempt to audit, 311
Arkansas Group, 223, 225,
226
445
Index
Arkansas Securities Commission,
312
Arkansas State Police: Contra
evidence destruction, 345-346;
Criminal Investigations
Division, 276; Lasater's agents
in, 294-295; Tyson
investigations and, 279, 280;
Tyson's alleged drug activities,
282
Arkansas Teachers Retirement
System, 245, 309
Armistead, Rex, 275-276
Arnold, Gary, 256
Arthur, Richard, 127, 143, 182
Aryan Nations, 46,81,86
Aryan Republican Army, 95-101;
equipment and arsenal, 98-99
Ashford, Corey, 127, 144,207
Asman Custom Photo Service, 140
Ayman,175-176
Ball, Karen, 208
Ballantine, Debra, 360
Banks, Charles, 257
Bates, John, 172, 177
Beam, Louis, 50
Bearden, Boonie, 269
Beemer, Vicki, 27-28
Bell, Harvey, 244-245
Ben-Veniste, Richard, 320
Bennett, Robert, 360
The Benton Courier, 257,272
Beyer, James c., 146-147, 148
Bianchi, William, 143, 182-183
Bickett, Scott Jeffrey, 163-164
Bieder, Richard, 21
Blackard, Pamela, 359
Blackbourne, Brian, 153
Blair, James, 282
Blanchard, James, 68
Blood Sport, 230
Blum, Jack, 352-353
Bone, Robert "Red," 283-284
Bottoms, Billy, 347
Bowman, Lee, 245
Bowman, Sharon, 130-131,227
Boy Clinton, 33 2
Boyer, Peter, 132
Bradley, Daina, 33-34
Brandon, David L., 284
Bransford, Russell, 171, 173, 177
Braun, Cheryl, 126-127, 165, 168,
184, 185
Brescia, Michael, 50, 100-105; as
John Doe Two, 51,102,
104,105; Lady Godiva club,
86-87,88,104
Brewster, Clark, 73, 74
Brock, David, 361
Brown, John, 269-270
Brown, John Y., 291
Brown, Larry Douglass, 268,
332-343; CIA and, 333-335,
342; December 24 trip from
Mena, 340-341; "FR's Project"
and, 342-343; Hillary Clinton
and, 333; "Lasater deal"
comment by Clinton, 341-342;
October 23 trip from Mena,
336-339; Reed and, 343, 351.
See also Reed, Terry;
Rodriguez and, 342-343; Seal
and, 335-337, 340-341
Bryant, Robert, 70
Bunn, Travis, 241, 242
Bunting, Todd, 25, 27, 104
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
Index 447
and Firearms: Howe and, 37,
53.
See also Howe, Carol; Murrah
building and, 9, 10; Patrick and,
302; post-bombing responses,
14; press release, 12-13;
Strassmeir's protection of, 90;
Vanderboegh and, 36
Burkett, Tommy, 148
Burson, Danny Starr, 304-305
Burton, Dan, 123, 177
Cadiz, Joe, 325, 326
Calero, Adolfo, 339, 340
Camp, Emile, 347
Camp, John, 336
Cardow, Mike and Harolyn, 223
Carver Ranch, 294, 297
Carville, James, 357, 362
Cash, John '']. D.," 13, 101;
accomplice theories, 26; Elohim
City and, 36-37; evidence
compiled, 95; Howe interview,
69,71; Lady Godiva club,
86-87; Mahon confession to,
46,50-51; Martz interview
with, 14; Millar and, 40-41;
visit to Kessinger, 103-104
Cathey, John. See North, Oliver
Central Intelligence Agency: base
of operations in Arkansas, 316;
Camp Robinson event, 349;
Contra funding, 339-340;
Contra support restriction, 315;
gun-running to Contras,
337-339; Mahon on, 44; Mena
operations, 331-332; portion
of Iran-Contra report, 340; Seal
and, 318; Strassmeir and, 92, 93
Chandler, Ken, 209-210
Charles, Roger, 72
Chicago Mercantile Exchange:
REFCO and, 284
The Chicago Tribune, 311
Christian Identity, religion of
Elohim City, 40
Chubb Group, 363-364
Clarke, Floyd, 129
Clarke, John H., 177-178
Cline, Lorraine, 230
Clinger, William, 129
Clinton, Bill: ADFA and, 309-311;
call to Foster, 225-226, 248;
civil suit against, 363; cocaine
use, 243,257,258,289-290;
denial of Mena operations,
349-350; "distinguishing
characteristic" in Jones affair,
358-359; involvement in
Contra aid, 316; Larry King Live
appearance, 186, 189, 191-193;
Lasater favors, 292; notice of
Foster's death, 192-193; Parks
and, 236, 250; personal liability
insurance, 363-364; sexual
activities, 262-263; Tyson and,
282,285; Vantage Point and,
242-244,251; White House
Map Room incident, 193-194
Clinton, Hillary, 139; Brown and,
333; Dickey and, 188-189;
First American case, 311 ; Foster
affair, 333; Foster suicide note
and, 215; Hamilton and, 115;
Parks and, 246, 247, 248; stock
trading, 282, 283, 284; Williams
and, 194
Clinton, Roger, 238-244, 259,
271,292,301
Index
The Clinton Chronicles, 210
Clinton-Gore headquarters:
bugging, 247
Cochran, Michelle, 288
Cockburn, Alexander, 316
Cole, john, 258, 268
Column, Blanquita, 202
"Communication Stream of
Conspiracy Commerce," 200,
204-205,216-217
Coney, Kevin, 269
Confidential Witness: FBI and,
121,122-123; Fiske Report
and, 123; Fort Marcy Park
crime scene and, 119-120;
hindsight, 123-124; identity of
victim, 121; Liddy and,
121; McAlary's writing on,
208-209
Contras: Air Contra, 315-354;
gun-running to, 337-339; Mena
scandal and, 315-317; pilot
training, 347-348, 352-353
Cooke, George, 357
Cooper, Renee, 17
Cooper, William, 325
Coral Reinsurance, 310
Corbin, Delmar, 360
Cotter, Chester, 294
Cournan, Phyllis, 270-271,
272-273
Cox News Service, 211
"Crimes of Mena," 316
Cummings, Ed, 294
The Daily Oklahoman, 23, 106
The Daily Telegraph, 199-200
Dalla Torre, Luca, 117
D'AJnato,Al,187-191,203,312
Daniels, Belden, 309
Darmer, Roman E. 111,180
Dateline, 266
Davidson,james, 114,210,
211-213
Davis, jeff, 28-29
Davis, Lynn, 186
Death of Vincent Foster, 113;
ballistics check on gun,
127-128; ballistics evidence,
132-134; Bianchi gag
order, 182-183; chemical testing
of body, 133; close
ties to Clintons and, 222;
Davidson's view as extrajudicial
execution, 212; forensic
pathology, 137; Gingrich and,
204; gun, 130-134; Kennedy
on, 117; missing bullet, 133,
134; neck wound photo,
140-141,142,144, 153; no shot
heard, 127, 134, 157; position of
body, 127, 137,207; postmortem,
144-148; Scalice's
forensic team, 210-211; suicide
note, 191, 193, 197,205,
211-217; suicide ruling, Ill,
122,125-126,128,142-143,
202-203; taboo subject for
journalists, 114; testimony of
friends and associates, 229-231;
time inconsistencies, 182-183;
White House and, 114-115,
179-181. See also Confidential
Witness; Fort Marcy Park
crime scene; Foster entries and
Foster, Vincent
Defense Department: Contra
support restriction, 315;
Index 449
National Security Agency,
221-222; weapons for Contras,
340
Defex Portugal, 339
Delaughter,]. N. "Doc," 279-281;
Lasater and, 295-296
Delaware Insurance Department,
310
Denton, Sally, 316
The Denver Post, 29, 59
Dickey, Helen, 185, 186, 187,
188-189,205
Dittmer, Thomas, 283
Dixie Canel, 237
Dixie Mafia, 275-276; Tyson and,
276-280,284-285
Doan, Harry, 326
Dowd, Michael, 353, 354
Drug Enforcement Agency: drug
enforcement sting, 323; Seal
and, 327-328; Tyson and,
277-278
Duffey, jean, 255-257, 256, 258,
269,271
Duncan, Bill, 350, 352
Eaton, George, 104-105
The &onomist, 307
Edmondson, Drew, 23
Edwards, Bob, 141
Edwards, jim, 184
Eisele, Thomas, 296
Ellet, Anne, 345
Elliot, Eldon, 25-26, 27
Ellison, james, 58
EJohim, meaning, 39
Elohim City, Oklahoma, 35-37,
58; possible ATF raid, 63;
training at, 55
Elohites, 41,57
Escobar, Pablo, 321-322, 324
Espy, Mike, 281
Ewing, Hickman, 152-153
Excelsior Hotel, Little Rock, 358
Extremism movement: Oklahoma
City bombing and, 4
Fabiani, Mark, 222
Faircloth, Lauch, 147
Fairfax County Emergency
Medical Services, 124-125, 127
Fairfax Hospital morgue, 14, 168
Farah,joe, 216
"Fat Lady," 323, 326, 327, 331,
336,348
Federal Bureau of Investigation:
altered statements in Foster
case, 166-167; April 21 memo,
66-68; Braun interview, 185;
Confidential Witness and, 121;
Foster death, 113; Foster death
cover-up, 139-140, 145-146,
178, 193-194; Foster experts
ties to, 137; Foster Honda
statements, 166-167; Foster
witness interviews, 122-123;
Hall interview, 125; Haut
statement, 217-218; Howe and,
36; josie's and Duncan's
interviews, 156-157; Knowlton
interview, 161, 162; Knowlton's
falsified statement, 162;
Knowlton's ton claim and, 177;
Lasater probe, 296-297; Lisa
Foster interview, 131-132, 165,
221,223,227; Millar and, 43;
Oklahoma City bombing and, 5,
11, 18,25; Kansas interviews,
452 Index
Homemade C-4, 67
Honored and Betrayed, 339
Hot Springs, Arkansas, 276
Howard, George, Jr., 353-354
Howe, Carol: ATF informant, 37,
53; background, 53-54;
bombing plot, 60, 62; Cash
interview, 69, 71; Elohim
City training, 56-58; FBI memo
of April 21 and, 66-68; Finley
and, 54-55, 56,60-61,64,
68-69,71,73; indictment, 71,
72-73; John Doe One and, 65,
89; John Doe Two and, 64;
letter to family, 74-75; Mahon
and,45,46, 47, 48, 49, 54, 56;
Millar and, 57-58; return to
Elohim City, 63-65; Strassmeir
and,56,59-60,63, 71, 77,84;
trial, 74-75; Viefhaus and,
70-71; witness protection and,
69, 70
Howe, Robert, 74-75
Hubbell, Susie, 223
Hubbell, Webster, 115-116, 139,
150,215,223,225,229,248,
250
Hull, Elenora, 28
Hull, John, 346
Hume, Charles, 116, 130
Hunt, Kyle, 32
Hupp, Louis, 214
Iacone, Sgt., 182
Illinois: thrift failures, 311-312
Internet, 201-202
Irish Republican Army, 97-98
Irvine, Reed, 180, 210
Isikoff, Michael, 356, 359, 362
Ives, Kevin, 264; death of,
265-266; investigation into
death of, 267
Ives, Larry, 271
Ives, Linda, 267-268, 269;
cover-up of son's murder,
271-274; Obstruction o/Justice
video, 273
Jacobsen, Ernest, 321, 328, 329,
332
James, Duane, 13
Jeremiah Films, 210
The John Doe Times, 34-36
Johnson, Bennett, 134
Johnson, Lindy, 103
Jolson, Norma, 17
Jones, Larry: Wilburn funeral
service speech, 107
Jones, Paula. See Paula Jones affair
Jones, Stephen, 8, 51; writ of
mandamus, 72-73
Josey, James, 306
The Jubilee, 50
Justice Department: failure to
question Mahon on bombing,
51; Foster death, 113; Howe
and, 55, 71; Knowlton's car
vandalism, 163; and McVeigh's
knowledge of explosives, 67;
Oklahoma City bombing and, 4,
11,26,62,92, 106; Oklahoma
City bombing report of the IG,
6-8; Reed case, 352
Kathryn (Knowlton's girlfriend),
161,171,174
Kelley, Virginia: Lasater and, 291,
294-295; malpractice
cover-up, 266
Index 453
Kennedy, William H. III, 223;
envelope in Foster safe for,
195; Foster and, 168-170; true
reason for Foster's
death, 117
Kerry Committee, 352-353
Kessinger, Tom, 27; Cash visit,
103-104
Key, Charles, 23, 24, 26
Kindle, Nancy Jean, 28
King, David, 31
King, Herta, 31
Knowlton, Patrick, 143, 158-164;
Ayman and, 175-176;
deposition to Burton, 177;
federal tort claim, 177;
harassment of, 171-174; lie
detector test, 176; psychiatric
exam, 176-177; "Report of
Witness Tampering," 177;
vandalism of car, 163-164;
Wechsler Memory Scale, 177;
Whitewater grand jury, 164,
171,174-175; witness
protection request, 172
KTOK radio, Oklahoma City,
OK, 24
Ku Klux Klan, 40, 43, 45-46,81
Langan, Peter, 99
Lasater & Company: Illinois thrift
failures and, 3II-312; Patrick
and, 298-309
Lasater, Dan, 274; ADFA and,
310-3 II; Belize trip, 293-294;
Clinton's pardon of, 297;
cocaine trafficking network,
288,293; Contra supply
operation, 289; conviction for
"social distribution of cocaine,"
290; corruption of law
enforcement, 294-295; Kelley
and, 291; philanthropy, 295;
plea agreement, 296; political
connections, 291-293; Smith
and, 287-290; State Police
agents, 294-295; Thomasson
and, 297-298; as a victim,
296-297
Lawson, Katina, 85-87, 101-104
Le Bistro, 257, 258, 262-263
Lee, Henry, 134
Lehder, Carlos, 321, 324
Liddy, G. Gordon, 202;
Confidential Witness and, 121
Limbaugh, Rush, 202
Lindsey, Bruce, 193-194,248
Livingstone, Craig, 168-170
Locke, George, 288, 292
The Los Angeles Times, 152,266
Love, Steve, 300, 301, 308-309
Lowrey, Steve, 328
Luke, James L., 137
Lyons, Gene, 187-188, 190,205
Lyons, James, 229
Lyons, Kirk, 85
Macy, Bob, 24
Maddox, Ken, 338
Mahon, Dennis: author interview
with, 43-51; bomb plot and,
106; confession to Cash, 46,
50-51; FBI April 21 memo,
66; on Howe, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49;
Howe rape, 54;
knowledge of explosives, 66-67;
on McVeigh, 50, 51; as
possible informant, 68; self454
Index
implication, 37; Strassmeir's
possible betrayal and, 50, 51
Mahone, Mike, 294-295
Malak, Fahmy, 265-267
Markland, Pete, 116,214
Martz, Lester, 13
Mathews, Robert "Carlos," 96-98
Ma~ch,Richard, 7-8, 73
McAJary,~ke,208-209
McCarthy, Kevin, 100
McCauley, Alex, 13, 14
McClaren, Mary, 163, 164
McCord, Billy, 301
The McCurtain Daily Gazette,
18-20,36,37,41,71
McDoughal, Jim, 150, 282
McDoughal, Susan, 150
McFarlane, Robert, 346
McGown, Lea, 30--31
McIntire, John D., 238
McLarty, Mack, 192, 193
McLean Fire Service, Company
One, 124, 143
McNulty, Paul, 332
McVeigh,Jennifer,95
McVeigh, Timothy, 67; bomb plot
and, 106; Brescia and, 101-103;
Daryl Bridges alias, 32, 37;
defense team, 20--21;
indictment, 25;John Doe Two
and, 25; Lady Godiva club,
87-88,104; Mahon on, 50, 51;
Robert Kling alias, 25;
Strassmeir and, 84-85; trial of,
5-8; witness interviews, 26-34
Medellin Cartel, 294, 321-323,
324
Melcher, Mark, 203
Mena Intermountain Airport, 268;
Clinton's denial of Mena
operations, 349-350; cocaine
traffic,259,263;gunrunning,
337-339; investigation,
309-311; money-laundering
investigation cover-up, 350;
Parks's trips to, 246-247; probe,
294; scandal, 315-317. See also
Brown, Larry Douglass; Reed,
Terry; Seal, Berriman Adler
Midwestern Elevator Company,
13-14
Milam, James "Dewey," 266
Militia movement: Oklahoma City
bombing and, 4
Millar, Joan, 37, 84,104
Millar, Robert "Grandpa," 39-43;
FBI informant, 68; Howe and,
57-58,65; Snell and, 59
Minor, Paul, 176
Moldauer, Lanning, 177
Monroe, Larry, 157, 177
Moody, Jim, 132
Moore, Ron, 308
Moroz, ~ke, 33
Morris,Roger,240--241,316
Morrison, ~cah, 273
Myers, Dee-Dee, 250
Myers, Rodney, 240
Nader, Ralph, 150
Nash, Bob, 310
The Nation, 316
National Security Agency,
221-222
National Security Council, 222
Nella, Arkansas, 347-348, 352-353
Nelson, Jack, 152
Nesheim, Linda, 306
Index 455
~euwirth,Stephen,214-215
The New York Daily News, 121, 208
The New York Observer, 273
The New York Post, 201,208
New York Review of Books, 187
The New York Times, 95-96, 283
The New Yorker, 130
Newweek, 362
~icaragua. See Contras
~ichols, Terry, 7,67; indicnnent,
25
No Contest: Corporate Lawyers
and the Perversion of Justice
in America, 150
"~o Problema," 324, 325, 327
~olan, Beth, 229
~orth, Oliver, 316, 323, 324, 325,
339,342,345-347
~orth-Secord Enterprise,
339-340,342
~ussbaum, Bernie, 115, 128, 195,
197,214,215
Oakley, Meredith, 239, 266
Obstruction of Justice video, 273
Ochoa, Jorge, 324
Oklahoma City bombing: alerts to
and rumors of bombing, 11,
16-18,21; bank robbery theory,
95-96, 99; Clinton
political revival and, 3-5; crime
scene, 31-32; evidence
tampering, 6-8; investigation
and trial, 5-8; John Doe
Two sketch, 25, 33-34,
103-104; Jones on, 107; Kansas
interviews, 26-34; "lone
bomber" theory, 24, 34;
retribution for, 6; Ryder truck
and, 27-34, 37, 85; state's role,
23-25; tort claim against U.S.
government, 21; Wilburn
family ordeal, 9-21, 105-108.
See also Wilburn, Glenn; witness
accounts, 26-34
Oklahoma City Sheriff's
Department, 18
Oklahoma Supreme Court, 24
On the Make, 239, 266
O'~eill, Henry, 190-191, 197
The Order, 96-97
The Oregonian, 15-16
Orenstein, Julian, 145
Organized Crime Drug
Enforcement Task Force:
Lasater probe, 296-297
Parker, Steven, 152
Parks, Gary, 233, 235-237
Parks, Jane, 233, 235; Clinton
brothers and, 238-244;
interview with author, 237-239,
244-249
Parks, Jerry Luther: Foster and,
245-249,250; murder, 233-257
Partners in Power, 240, 316
Patrick & Associates, 299,308,312
Patrick, Dennis: assassination
attempt, 304-305; attacks on,
303-304;background,299-300;
contract hit, 302; D'Amato and,
312; harassment of, 302-303;
Lasater & Company account,
299,301,302; Love and, 300;
move to South, 306-307; new
identity, 307; plot to murder,
305-306; REPORT
FLI~LOCK SCORPIO
Index
000289 document leak,
307-308; Thomasson and,
298-299
The Patriot Report, 105
Patterson, Larry, 186,285
Patterson, Zara, 84
Paula Jones affair: apology and,
364; delayed filing of lawsuit,
362; merits of Paula's case, 361;
Pawa's coming forward, 361;
Paula's fear of retribution,
360-362; Paula's story,
358-359,360; settlement, 362,
363; slush fund, 357; Tort of
Outrage lawsuit, 356; Traylor
and, 355, 356-357;underestimation
of Paula, 362
Peckham, Rufus, 16
Perdue, Sally Miller, 359
Perry, Roger, 185-186,352
Petruski, Vincent, 80, 81
Piernick, Kenneth, 70
Pincus, Walter, 234-235
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 139,
193,202,210
Pollack, EllenJoan, 208
Pond,Be~y, 194, 195,229
Ponnoy,James,189
Potts, Joann, 259-260
Proctor,c;eorge,296
Quotationsfrom Chairman Mao
Tse- Tung, 99
Radio talk shows, 4, 202
Reagan, Michael, 202
Reagan administration: Contra aid,
315
Reed, Janis: indictment, 351; Kerry
Committee and, 352-353;
lawsuit, 349, 353-354
Reed, Terry: Air Contra and,
343-351; background, 345;
Brown's assassination plan, 343,
351; Clinton liability, 348, 351;
Compromised, 344; Contra pilot
training, 347-348, 352-353;
indictment, 351; Kerry
Committee and, 352-353;
lawsuit, 349, 353-354; North
and, 345-347; Seal and,
346-347; WeIch and, 350;
Young and, 351-352
REFCO, 283-284
Reno, Janet, 128, 195
"Report of Witness Tampering,"
177
Republican party, 4-5
Reuters, 211
Reyna, Richard, 20, 101
Rhodes, Jeff, 269
Rice, Cecil, 324-325
Rich Mountain Aviation, 319,
324-325,350
Rickel, Pete, 60, 69
Ricks, Bob, 63
Rodriguez, Felix, 342-343
Rodriguez, Maurice, 239
Rodriguez, Miquel: Clintons and,
222-223; Fort Marcy Park
crime scene, 135-136; Foster
case probe, 112; grand jury and,
185; investigation, 136-144,
148-149; Josie and Duncan and,
158; Starr and, 149-152
Rolla,John, 127, 129-130, 141,
142, 146, 167, 168, 179, 184
Rose Law Firm, 116, 139, 169,
245,311
Index 457
Ruddy, Christopher, 139, 145,
172,174,185,193,205-218
Ryan, Pat, 12, 34
Saline County corruption: death
squad, 265; drug dealing and
smuggling, 257, 271; Duffey
and, 255-257, 258,269,271;
extortion and racketeering,
255-257; railroad tracks
incidents, 263-264, 269,
272-273. See also Harmon,
Dan
Samizdat media, 201-203, 218
Sandanista Interior Ministry, 323
Say It in Arabic, 98
Scaife, Richard Mellon, 200-201,
205,210
Scalice, Vincent J., 210-211
Scalice Report, 210-211
Scott, Marsha, 188; affair with
Clinton, 224; FBI interview,
224,225
The Scottish Chiefs, 99
Seal, Berriman Adler: Air Contra
supply operation, 317-330;
Ben-Veniste and, 320; cocaine
trafficking charge, 317-318;
contact with Colombian cocaine
cartels, 318; DEA stings and,
328; "Fat Lady" and, 323, 326,
327, 331, 336, 348; gunrunning
under cover of drug
smuggling, 320, 327; moneylaundering,
320; murder,
329-330,343;~icaraguan
prison, 321; "~o Problema"
and, 324, 325, 327; October 23
trip from Mena, 336-339;
"Operation Screamer," 320;
Parks and, 246; Rich Mountain
ATIation,319,324-325;
smuggling, 294, 316, 317, 319,
320; snitch for the DEA, 320
Seal, Debbie, 317-318, 329-330
Secord, Richard, 325, 339,345
Secret Service: alarm logs, 196;
delay in Foster death
notification, 185; Foster death,
113; MIG GROUP and, 196;
Murrow Building and, 9; Parks
murder, 249; telephone
number in Rolla notes, 179-180
The Seekers, 58
Senate Banking Committee, 129,
143, 146-147, 157, 168
Senate Whitewater Committee,
221,312. See also Whitewater
entries
Sessions, William, 128-129
Sharp, J. D., 17
Shepherd, Robert, 269-270
Sherburne, Jane, 188
Simms, John, 305
Simonello, Pete, 141-142
60 Minutes, 217-218,281,284
Smaltz, Donald, 281-282
Smith, Chase, 9
Smith, Colton, 9
Smith, Connie, 101-102, 103, 104
Smith, Edye, 9-11, 15. See also
Wilburn family ordeal
Smith, I. C, 272, 273
Smith, Mike, 301
Smith, Patty-Anne, 287-290
Snell, Richard Wayne, 58-59,104
Snider, Dave, 32-33
Somoza, Anastio, 321
Index
Sostre, Hilda, 29
Spence, Gerry, 357
Spetz,Julie,156
Spivey, Barry, 290-291,352
Sprunt, Hugh, 143
Stafford, Roy L., 326
Stahl, Charles, 137
Starr, Kenneth: Davidson on, 114;
Foster case, 129, 133-134, 143,
149-152,164,183; Foster
suicide ruling, 111; motives,
112-113; Whitewater and, 113
Starr Report, 111, 143, 152, 158
State Farm, 363-364
Stearns, Rick, 192
Stedeford, Scott, 100
Stern, Carl, 215
Stewart, James, 230
Strassmeir, Andreas Carl "Andy
the German," 35, 37, 77-78,
105; alibi, 88; Aryan Nations
and, 81; author's
investigation of, 42; background,
78-82; bomb plot and,
106; bombing threats, 61, 62;
Brescia's housemate, 51;
conversations with author,
89-92; diplomatic immunity,
83; Elohim City, 41, 81-83; FBI
April 21 memo, 66; German
intelligence and, 93; Howe and,
56,59-60,63,71,84;
investigation, 78; involvement
with U.S. government agencies,
92-93; Joan Millar on, 84; Ku
Klux Klan and, 81; Lady Godiva
club, 86-87, 88; Lawson on,
86-87; Mahon on, 45,50;
McVeigh and, 84-85; Patterson
on, 84; politics of, 83; as possible
informant, 68; roadblock
incident, 83-84; Texas Light
Infantry militia and, 81
Strategic Investment, 114,202,210,
211-212
The Sunday Telegraph, 49, 187,200,
202,307
Swaney, Mark, 309-311
Swidler & Berlin, 130
Talley, Patrick Henry, 302
Tarr, Mike, 196
Taylor, Stuart, 361
Tea, Christina, 168
The Telegraph, 35
Temple, Bill, 271
The Ten-orist Handbook, 83
Thomas, Clarence, 260-261
Thomas, Mark, 50, 51,100
Thomases, Susan, 230
Thomasson, Patsy: evening of
Foster's death, 197; Foster's
desk search, 191, 196, 197;
Lasater and, 292, 293-294,
297-298,306,312
Time, 281-282
Tonya,28
Traylor, Danny, 355-357
Tripp, Linda, 222
Truong, Renda, 31
Tucker, Jim Guy, 150, 186
Tudor, Melanie, 351
Tuohey, Mark H. III, 138, 139
The Turner Diaries, 49
20120,14,71-72
Tyson, Don, 276-280, 284-285
Tyson Foods: alleged deliveries of
cash to Governor's
Mansion, 282
Index 459
u.s. Customs, 9, 296-297
U.S. Park Police, 113, 116,
127-128; facts mixup, 156, 159;
Foster crime scene, 124-125;
McAJary and, 208-209;
suicide ruling, 125-126, 128;
time inconsistencies, 184-185;
White House notification,
183-185. See also Fort Marcy
Park crime scene
Vanderboegh, Mike, 34-36
Viefhaus, James, 70-71
The Village Voice, 316
Virginia medical authorities:
Foster death, 113
Waco assault, 4-5,58; Fiske report
omission, 220; Foster and, 195,
221
The Wall Street Journal, 122,201,
205,208,215-216,273,284,
312,320
Wallace, Mike, 217-218
Walter, Danny, 179-180
Ward, Peter, 65-66, 88-89, 105
Ward, llony,65-66
The Washington Post, 316, 355, 356,
361, 362
The Washington Times, 201,211
The Watchman, 100
Watkins, David, 181-182, 196,
197,229,250
Watkins, Larry, 219, 228
Watson, William, 184, 185
Weathers, Harvey, 15
Weaver, Beverly "B.J.," 278-279
Weiss, Phil, 273
Welch, Russell, 294,328,350,352
Western Journalism Center, 210,
216
Wheeler, Scott, 240
White Aryan Resistance action
squad, 46, 54, 55,62-63
White House: Foster's death and,
179-197
White House Office of
Administration, 298
Whitehurst, Frederick, 7
Whitewater Development
Corporation, 222
Whitewater grand jury, 125, 143;
Knowlton subpoena, 164
Whitewater investigation: Patrick
interrogation, 301; Starr and,
113
Whitewater land deal, 282
Whittenberg, Barbara, 29-30
Wilburn, Glenn: accomplice
theories, 26; AllF visit to, 14;
bombing alert and, 15-16;
Brescia and, 101-107; evidence
compiled, 95; Magaw interview
with, 15; Oklahoma grand jury
and, 23-25; resolve of, 105-108;
Vanderboegh and, 36; witness
gathering, 32-34
Wilburn family ordeal:
background, 9-10; bombing,
10-11; Cash and, 18-20; family
as "conspiracy theorists,"
20-21; McVeigh defense team
and, 20-21; morning of
bombing, 10; post-disaster
activities, 11-12; tort claim, 21.
See alsoWilburn, Glenn
Wilkinson, Beth, 92
Williams, Maggie, 197; Foster's
office and, 190-191; Hillary
Clinton and, 194
Index
Wilson, Bill, 311
Wilson, Margie, 261
Wilson, Sharlene, 257-258,
259-260,270,271; appeal,
260-261; author interview,
261-265; Clinton's
"distinguishing characteristic,"
359; parties with Clintons,
262-263; prosecution of, 260
Wirgess, Gene, 355
Wittenberg, Tom, 146
Wood, Chris, 307
Wright, Betsey, 241, 250, 267
Wright, Susan Webber, 363
Young, Raymond "Buddy," 236,
237,351-352; Reed and,
351-352
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