Brown says he realized then that everything is going to come out. Nonetheless, he still seemed reluctant to disclose all he knew. According to a 1988 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, Seal's associates at the Mena airport were also being investigated. I mean I didnt have a chance to tell him anything about it. About 25 pages of that trove refer to Arkansas or Mena. I'm a multi-engine, instrument-rated commercial pilot," Cruise said in a Wired interview. She was an experienced writer and had prepared for the legal review. No. Buddy Young that little beady-faced fellow, and said he was with Clinton at Mena. Barry's widow, Deborah Seal, says that he began smuggling drugs in 1975, first focusing mainly on marijuana. Current Address: HERA E Avalon Dr, Phoenix, AZ. During the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, the U.S. plotted to secretly help the rebels (Contras) overthrow Nicaragua's Communist Sandinista government. "Despite the availability of evidence sufficient for an indictment on money laundering charges, and over the strong protests of state and federal law enforcement officials, the cases were dropped," according to the report. pennymac insurance claim check tracker. In the film, his abductors take him to a secret airstrip in the Colombian jungle where three businessmen, including Pablo Escobar, make him an offer he can't pass up. In the 1980s, the Mena airport was the reported base of a drug-smuggling, money-laundering and arms-smuggling ring run by Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal, according to an Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry on the airport. Arthur, the chief council, investigated the CIA and questioned Col. Oliver North, who is depicted in American Made. Jacoby mentioned Seal's mission as evidence, which effectively outed Seal as a government agent. Watch an interview with the real Barry Seal where he discusses his undercover mission, and listen to President Ronald Reagan talk about the photos Seal obtained on the mission. When asked how, he replied, "Oh, Barry stole an airplane from me. Things became worse when a report in the Washington Times on July 17 . Not all of Barry Seal's heirs were happy with the making of the movie. Regardless, Jacoby's article led to the abandonment of the final piece of Barry Seal's undercover operation. The is the latest repackaging of allegations previously made by the Wall Street Journal. Brown was 28 years old in 1984. "I trusted him so I didn't ask questions," says Debbie. var sc_invisible=1; It was dark almost black, and had only the minimal tail markings necessary for civilian operation. var sc_click_stat=1; Yes. And the U.S. was covertly backing the Contras. With the publication of The American Spectator article, we expect more. The pine and hardwood forests of the Ouachita Mountains surrounding it have long been an outlaws paradise, home to generations of moonshiners and red-dirt marijuana farmers. It was also just seventy miles south of the sprawling Fort Chaffee Army Base at Fort Smith, Arkansas. When Wattenberg reported this, an angry Tucker retaliated against Brown by demoting him from white-collar investigations to highway patrol. The book was to be called, The Mena File: Barry Seals Ties to Drug Lords and U.S. Officials. Leveritt knew the story well and had researched it earlier, writing about Seals murder and other related events. -The Independent, Not likely. "Allegations later surfaced that many of the gun shipments sent to Nicaragua as part of the Iran-Contra Affair were sent from the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport. FITTON: #TwitterFiles EXPOSE FBI & CIA Election Interference! This document may not be reprinted without the express written permission of Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. Material from the Associated Press is Copyright 2023, Associated Press and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. In February 1986, Seal was killed in a hail of machine-gun fire outside a Baton Rouge Salvation Army halfway house. What is certain is that Barry Seal did work for Pablo Escobar and the Ochoas as a drug smuggler for the Medelln Cartel and single-handedly had one of the largest impacts on the cocaine epidemic in the U.S. in the early 1980s. After being caught in Honduras with 40 kilograms of cocaine in 1979, Barry spent nine months in a Honduran jail. It is believed that the Colombians put a hit out on Barry after they learned he was going to help the feds with the extradition of Jorge Ochoa from Spain, one of the heads of the Medelln Cartel. The story took on a new life when Bill Clinton ran for president. A Seal associate cut a runway deep in the woods. Corporate Office Arcadia Inc. 2301 East Vernon Ave. Vernon, CA 90058. About 25 pages of that trove refer to Arkansas or Mena. Asa Hutchinson was U.S. attorney for Arkansas' Western District in the early 1980s. ", Copyright 2023, Northwest Arkansas Newspapers LLC. Current Address: ZGFJ N 18th St, Phoenix, AZ. In an effort to reduce or altogether avoid his 10-year prison sentence, Seal first tried to make a deal with a U.S. attorney, volunteering to give up information on the Ochoa family, but the deal was rejected. I never saw drugs, that's for sure." In the 2017 Doug Liman-directed movie "American Made," which was previously titled "Mena," Deborah DuBois, the third wife of Barry Seal, was portrayed by the character Lucy. "The aircraft flew with various cameras used to obtain photographic evidence of the Sandinistas in the act of smuggling narcotics," Sherwood wrote. He spent his spare time hanging around the old Downtown Airport, now Independence Park, working odd jobs in exchange for flight time. He says that Clinton arrived in a Beech aircraft, and was still there when he left for the day. However, some still allege the opposite, that the government turned a blind eye to Seal's drug running in order to use him to deliver weapons to the Nicaraguan rebels. In the movie, Lucy's brother JB (Caleb Landry Jones) steals money from Barry (Tom Cruise). They also claimed that the pilot who died lacked the necessary experience for the flight. The FBI in Little Rock began investigating Seal's operation at the Mena airport in February 1984, according to the recently released FBI document. "Despite the availability of evidence sufficient for an indictment on money laundering charges, and over the strong protests of state and federal law enforcement officials, the cases were dropped," according to the report. For their efforts, their careers were crushed. An interesting fact we learned while researching the true story was that while training for the Civil Air Patrol in Baton Rouge, Barry Seal met President John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. This document may not be reprinted without the express written permission of Northwest Arkansas Newspapers LLC. The AP will not be held liable for any delays, inaccuracies, errors or omissions therefrom or in the transmission or delivery of all or any part thereof or for any damages arising from any of the foregoing. But I was in for a shock, Leveritt writes. "Tom Cruise doesn't look like Barry Seal. Other photos like the one below show Federico Vaughan (center, striped shirt), a man that Seal claimed was a top aide of Tomas Borge, the Sandinista Minister of the Interior. In Mena, meanwhile, things were getting stranger. Neither these AP materials nor any portion thereof may be stored in a computer except for personal and noncommercial use. The state really had next to nothing to do with it. As Barry opened the driver's side door to get out of the car, the gunman rushed from behind the drop box and fired a .45 caliber Mac-10 machine gun, hitting Barry in the head and body several times. In 1994, Brown told Daniel Wattenberg of The American Spectator that Jim Guy Tucker, then the Arkansas governor had asked him and trooper Larry Patterson for compromising information on Clintons private life in 1990, when Tucker was contemplating a race for governor. Hagan said he didn't know how many pages of material on Seal have yet to be made public by the FBI. In its review of the 2017 movie "American Made" -- about Seal -- the New York Times called it the Conspiratorial Industrial Complex. Seemingly panicked, the White House mistakenly presumed that Brown was talking to ABC News about his involvement with Mena when he was actually discussing Whitewater. More than 1.2 million registrants have been removed from the voter rolls in Los Angeles County, California, since 2022 as part of a settlement agreement with Judici Al Qaeda Plans Plane Attacks Using New Techniques and Tactics as Air Mars Hackers Tied to Chinas Govt. Jeffrey Epstein: Predator, Spy plus FULL access to all newsletters. "You know, we're not making a biopic," said director Doug Liman. Hadaway. The memorable scene never happened in real life. See Rafael L Mena's age, phone number, house address, email address, social media accounts, public records, and check for criminal records on Spokeo. (function() { He also says he was mindful of the secrecy agreement he had signed with the CIA. The real Barry Seal never had a brother-in-law who was killed by a car bomb. attorney.". Bill Clintons favorite bodyguard, but also a close friend. I was young and it was impressive." Seal flipped, becoming a valuable government informant. The life of the former TWA pilot, Barry Seal, inspired the film. After a barrage of requests from different people and media outlets under the federal Freedom of Information Act, on Wednesday the FBI released more than 1,000 pages of its file on Seal: vault.fbi.gov/recently-added. Patterson was being deposed in a legal suit filed against Buddy Young, the former head of Clintons security detail, and another man by Terry reed, who says he trained Contra pilots, under Seals supervision, at Nella, Arkansas. Like Clinton, Brown passed through a radical stage when he attended the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. The man who made Baton Rouge headlines in the mid-1980s for the machine-gun killing of drug informant Adler "Barry" Seal died in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola on Aug. 25, Louisiana. In other words: nothing to see here, move on. BEST OF: Left Targets Elon Musk, FBI Investigated Fauci Agency, CA Court Vi BEST OF: Twitter Changed Rules to Ban Trump! ABC was also told that brown had failed a psychological test. "The original information dates back to the activities of a pilot, Barry Seal (now deceased), who is purported to have flown guns to South America from Mena and drugs back into the United States," according to the memo. The Sandinistas overthrew Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, ending 46 years of dictatorship by the Somoza family. -Daily Mail Online, No. Lasater went to jail for a cocaine connection, as did his friend, Roger Clinton, Bill Clintons brother. "The DEA agents who worked with Barry loved him," said director Doug Liman. The explosives were supposedly going to anti-Castro Cuban fighters. In another deposition in the case, John Bender, a mechanic, says he saw Clinton at Mena three times in the summer of 1985. When he returned to Little Rock, he called his brother Dwayne. At present, although there is no reason to believe any of the allegations, we are declining to comment publicly, pending exhaustive searches of DO files, as tasked by ICA. In the autumn of 1984, Brown found himself seated on a bench inside a cavernous C-123K cargo plane roaring over a Central American jungle. But there were still questions regarding the Mena airport and people who worked there, according to the FBI memo. Three Colombians eventually were arrested and convicted of the murder. "I can state absolutely that Oliver North had nothing to do with my story as far as I knew, or as far as I know today," said Jacoby. His daybook records one visit to Mena by Clinton on May 21, 1984, and he says that he accompanied Clinton to Mena on several other occasions. I started it and pursued it but was unable to complete it because I left the office. "One day Barry came in and said there was a contract on him - half a million dead, a million alive," says widow Debbie Seal. I knew the agency had an extensive file on Seal, Leveritt wrote, because Id read it decades earlier, shortly after Seals murder. A Baton Rouge, Louisiana native, Barry Seal was eventually forced to move his drug smuggling operation after he drew the attention of Louisiana authorities. He suspected a CIA involvement, although his brother did not confirm it. It's certainly possible and it's what the movie proposes. In essence, not only was the airport used to smuggle illegal drugs into the United States, but it was also a departure point for weapons used to arm the Contras in Nicaragua.". According to a 1988 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, Seal's associates at the Mena airport were also being investigated. In researching the American Made true story, we learned that Barry Seal was arrested by customs officers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1983 as he tried to smuggle 200,000 units of Quaalude, a recreational drug, into the country. Msg&data rates may apply. UNLOCK PROFILE. Approved for Release Date:September 28, 2009. Past Addresses: See available information. _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); At a press conference in October 1994, for instance, he was asked a rambling question about the remote air strip, and gave an equally rambling answer. Phone Number: (602) 256- KDYM +1 phone. In the years that followed his split from Clinton, Brown investigated white-collar crime for the Arkansas State Police. "Allegations later surfaced that many of the gun shipments sent to Nicaragua as part of the Iran-Contra Affair were sent from the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport. Counterrevolutionaries, known as Contras, were battling the Sandinistas. Seal is purported to have flown guns to South America from Mena and drugs back into the United States, according to the memo. "Little Rock [FBI] is attempting to establish that [redacted] modified, maintained and stored Seal's aircraft with the knowledge that he was involved in cocaine smuggling activities prior to Seal's plea bargaining agreement on March 24, 1984," according to the memo. During the past few years, the activity at the airstrip has aroused the interest of local law enforcement, who then attempted to conduct some investigations but were blocked by the U.S. Many names in the documents have been redacted. jewish british actresses; how old is meryl lipstein Yes. The name of another person under investigation was redacted. He gathered information on Medellin cartel kingpins and participated in at least two drug runs to Nicaragua, where the Reagan administration was ramping up operations against the Sandinista government. Cocainea lot of itflowed in. I guess he also thought Colombians would stick out like a sore thumb in Louisiana and they wouldn't come here." He said parts of it could have been provided to people under previous information requests. By 1983, his earnings totaled $60 million, making him one of the wealthiest people in America. Material from the Associated Press is Copyright 2023, Associated Press and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. . The New York Times and "West 57th," a CBS television news show, were working on stories about CIA activities at the Mena airport, according to a 1987 FBI memo released last week. Later Seal confirmed Browns suspicions: the palettes contained M-16s for the Contras. Exclusive: Tom Cruise's portrayal of drug-smuggler-turned-government-informant Barry Seal is a fast-paced visit back to the Reagan era's shadowy world of the CIA, cocaine and secret wars . Brown has identified him as Dan Magruder, and says that he spoke admiringly of Clinton. It does seem, however, that Clinton was far less cautious. Hadaway said an informant told him a "narcotic smuggling operation" was headquartered out of the Mena airport and that a man named Barry from Baton Rouge was in charge of it. There is no real-life Monty. In the 1980s the smallairportin Arkansas known as Mena became part of the largest covert operation in history. Two years later, he would be shot dead in Louisiana. "The information indicates that Seal was an informant for DEA at the time but also working as an operative of the CIA. In February 1986, Seal was killed in a hail of machine-gun fire outside a Baton Rouge Salvation Army halfway house after allegedly crossing Pablo Escobar and the Medellin drug cartel. He didn't meet Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers in person until 1984, after his arrest when he was working as an informant for the DEA on an undercover operation. As Slate notes, Seal stuck a plea deal, where he testified in three major drug trials and got five years' probation and six months at a halfway house. var _gaq = _gaq || []; He then was able to get a meeting with Vice President George H.W. JB is fictional. Subsequently, Brown says, Seal called him at home, and set up a meeting at Cajuns Wharf, a popular Little Rock watering hole. "The information indicates that Seal was an informant for DEA at the time but also working as an operative of the CIA. Alexander said he has been meeting weekly with the GAO investigating team and has been in touch with the House and Senate subcommittees . Seal's Drug Enforcement Administration file also supports this, noting that he was smuggling marijuana as early as 1976, then adding cocaine to his resume in 1978. This doesn't add up with the true story. The Sandinistas overthrew Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, ending 46 years of dictatorship by the Somoza family. 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