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‘American Made’ sheds light on shady Arkansas airfield deals

There’s only one mention of Bill Clinton in Tom Cruise’s new movie, “American Made,” which is about a Washington-sponsored operation in the early 1980s to send guns to rebel forces in Nicaragua from an airfield in Mena, Ark.

That operation didn’t go quite as planned for a number of reasons, including the fact that Cruise’s character, the real-life and long-dead Barry Seal, was enlisted by the Medellín drug cartel to bring cocaine to the US.

Rather than fly his planes empty on the return trip — and probably get killed for refusing the cartel’s request — Seal agreed. And the former TWA pilot made a lot of money in the process, leading to a one-man economic boom for Clinton’s Arkansas.

I happen to know a fair bit about the Mena operation because I was investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton’s financial dealings in the late 1990s, and that mysterious airfield repeatedly came up.





And as a result, I acquired copies of a whole lot of Seal’s documents, including phone records, legal documents and notes scribbled on napkins and bits of hotel stationery.

Toward the end of the movie, Seal (Cruise) has been picked up by Arkansas investigators and is about to be charged when then-State Attorney General Joe Svoboda is interrupted by a phone call.

Gov. Clinton is on the line.

“He says it’s urgent,” the AG’s receptionist says. Svoboda picks up the phone and says: “What you need, Bill?”

Seal has already taunted the investigators by saying that he was going to walk out a free man. Then, Svoboda says, “He’s free to go.”

The implication, although not stated in the movie, is that Seal was released at the request of someone in Washington — probably someone in the Reagan White House, whose CIA was deeply involved in the gun-running operation that later became known as the Iran-Contra Affair.





The Hollywood Reporter, which says the film was based on “one conspiracy theory,” recently wrote that Bill was supposed to get more of a mention in the movie.

“Those hoping for some Clinton dirt will ultimately be disappointed. The filmmakers decided to cut a scene showing a young Clinton getting a lap dance at an Arkansas strip club,” said the paper.

But let me tell you that the Mena operation isn’t some “conspiracy theory.” The drug operation was as real as it gets and those notes, interviews and other records I mentioned prove it.

And even though it was being run out of Arkansas, from everything I’ve seen and heard, it wasn’t anything that then-Gov. Clinton controlled or even took an active part in. This was way over his young head.





But that doesn’t mean Clinton wasn’t aware of what was going on.

Investigators at the time found people who swore they saw Bill at Mena’s airport at various times. But nobody said they saw him with either Seal or Fred Hampton, who ran a company called Rich Mountain Aviation at that airport.

“I heard that [Clinton was at Mena airport] from so many people who had seen him there. At least five or six people,” said a professional investigator who looked into the case. One even recorded the wing number of the plane Clinton flew in on.

Clinton, of course, was running the state at the time. So his visiting any part of Arkansas would not have been unusual. And while the Mena area of Polk County is a tourist center, the 134-mile drive from the state capital in Little Rock would make it unlikely that anyone would take a lot of trips there unless for a specific reason.





And it’s clear that state investigators had their eye on the airport. So, unless Bill was completely blind as to what was going on, he undoubtedly knew about Mena.

One document I have contains a sworn interview with a woman named Mary Kathryn Corrigan who worked as a secretary for Hampton at Mena. “Did you ever see anything suspicious while working at Rich Mountain Aviation?” she was asked by police in September 1985.

“I think probably what seemed suspicious to me was to have so many people coming in at night and paying cash and leaving the cash in a drawer and working at all hours of the night to get planes out for people,” she said.

That interview took place in Mena and was conducted by Arkansas State Police Special Agent William Duncan and was attended by Russell Welch, also of the state police.

In another document from 1985, Seal himself testified about some of what he did. It’s referred to as a “synopsis” of Seal’s transcripts and, citing his real name, is titled, “Testimony of Adler Berriman Seal.” The case was the US vs. Saunders et al. in Miami federal court.

“Mr. Seal testifies the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) gave him an undisclosed amount of money for expenses on renting a Learjet…” Also, Mr. Seal, who also went by the name Bill Elders as well as variations of his real name, “testifies he made 6 or 7 hundred thousand dollars in trafficking drugs after he went to work for the DEA [from March 1984 to March 1985]. Mr. Seal testifies the DEA knew about the money and let him keep most of it.”

Now I’ll give you a conspiracy theory to chew on.

After Seal pleaded guilty in February 1986, he was given an extremely light sentence of 100 hours of community service — thanks to the intervention of the CIA and others — and ordered to live at the Salvation Army in Baton Rouge, La.

Was there a conspiracy to get him killed because someone in Washington was afraid he’d spill the beans? The movie doesn’t even hint.





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