Chapter Four

Dancing on Barry’s Grave

I find it absolutely amazing that seemingly intelligent reporters will buy into the craziest conspiracy fables in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. An example is the life and times of Barry Seal, who was gunned down by Colombian hit men in Baton Rouge in February 1986. The killers were caught a few hours later, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. It was an open and shut case of the murder of  a DEA informant.

But with the help of President Ronald Reagan and Colonel Oliver North, outrageous rumors gained momentum about Seal’s death, his alleged CIA connections, and a small airport in Mena, Arkansas. Was he assassinated because he knew too much? Maybe his death was staged.

As the only reporter with first hand knowledge about Seal’s drug smuggling and CIA adventures, I knew the real story. And looking at his cold body in a coffin, I relied on my investigative reporting prowess to deduce that he was dead as a door nail.

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Twenty-six days after Barry Seal’s funeral, he was raised from the dead by President Ronald Reagan. In a nationally televised speech aimed at influencing Congressional approval of a $100-million aid package for Contra rebels, the President displayed one of Barry’s Nicaraguan undercover photographs. The picture showed close-ups of Seal, Federico Vaughan and Pablo Escobar as they loaded cocaine onto the C-123 transport. Citing Vaughan’s link to the Colombian cartel, Reagan said the snapshot was proof that “top Nicaraguan Government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking.” Barry was at last getting the kind of attention he craved.

Drug Enforcement Administration officials disputed the President’s portrayal two days later, describing Vaughan as a corrupt bureaucrat, who held a low-ranking position  in Nicaragua’s Interior Ministry. But truth was not a high priority in the Administration’s effort to assist the Contras. Even as Reagan spoke, funds were illegally being funneled to rebels,money that was generated from the secret sale of arms to Iran. A month before his speech, the President had authorized the CIA’s participation in a scheme that led to the Iran-Contra investigation in which eleven Administration officials were convicted.

As a result of a confluence of loosely connected episodes, Barry Seal’s undercover work made him a tangential character in the scandal. He was an anti-hero of Right-wing and liberal loonies in a milieu that created the Mena myth, and gave credence to conspiracy fables linking the drug smuggler/turned informant to the CIA, and three Presidents.

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A former Army criminal investigator named Eugene Wheaton was among the first to link Mena to wild and crazy conspiracies. Learning of Seal’s assassination, he deduced that Mena was a CIA base linked to the Iran-Contra arms scandal. Wheaton shared his epiphany with a left-wing do-gooder legal group called the Christic Institute. Relying in large part on the information, Christic lawyer Daniel Sheehan filed a racketeering lawsuit in federal court in Miami against thirty defendants with alleged CIA ties. They were accused of murder and mayhem, drug smuggling and gun-running.

Sheehan asked for $23-million in damages. What he got was a $955,000 judgment against the Christic Institute for filing a frivolous lawsuit “based on unsubstantiated rumor and speculation from unidentified sources with no first hand knowledge.”  The sanction bankrupted his organization.

But many so-called journalists believed the Christic allegations, several of which involved Barry Seal and his presence in Mena. What evolved was a remarkable case of the left-wing joining forces with characters that Hillary Clinton accused of participating in a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”