Reed Irvine - Editor
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For the growing number of Americans willing to believe the worst about President Clinton, a new book named Compromised seemingly contains a cornucopia of scandal. Drug dealers aligned with the CIA and the Nicaraguan Contras take over an airport in Mena, Arkansas. Governor Clinton's "fee" for laundering Contra funds for the CIA is 10 percent of the money, paid in cash which is air-dropped onto a ranch owned by Hillary's Rose Law Firm.
When Clinton becomes too greedy in using CIA money for economic development, he is summoned to a bunker at Camp Robinson, an army base outside Little Rock. Lt. Colonel Oliver North and William Barr (formerly a CIA officer, later U.S. Attorney General) read him the riot act. Barr tells Clinton the operation is being moved to Mexico, but that the CIA and director William J. Casey have long-range plans for him.
Barr tells Clinton, "Bill, you are Mr. Casey's fair-haired boy. But you do have competition for the job you seek. We would never put all our eggs in one basket....The beauty of this, as you know, is that you're a Democrat, and with our ability to influence both parties, this country can get beyond partisan gridlock.
"Mr. Casey wants me to pass on to you that unless you [deleted] up and do something stupid, you're No. 1 on the short list for a shot at the job you've always wanted...You and guys like us are the fathers of the new government..."
On another occasion, Clinton staggers out of a Tex-Mex restaurant in Little Rock, "eyes glassy" from marijuana, meets a mercenary pilot in the back of a state police van, and urges that he obey North and move the drags/arms deals to Mexico.
Those are some of the--well, more interesting--episodes in the 556-page book, written by Terry Reed (who claims to have been a contract flier for the CIA and a covert FBI informant) and former Newsday reporter John Cummings.
We heard of Compromised in the spring when conservative talk show hosts we respect gave it publicity. We read and analyzed the book and concluded that it is so nonsensical that it was best ignored. Then Compromised was discussed on Pat Robertson's "700 Club"
For update on cable systems that broadcast AIM's "The Other Side of The Story" see the Editor's Notes
TV show and featured in the Clinton Watch newsletter published by Floyd Brown. The Lyndon LaRouche organization began publicizing it. A friend who formerly worked for North called, asking excitedly what we knew "about the new Clinton scandal book." We had the sad task of telling him that according to Compromised, Ollie North was at the core of the arms/drags scandal. "Oh," he said.
Compromised is a waste of time. In terms of credibility, it ranks alongside the so-called "October Surprise," in which the Reagan-Bush campaign supposedly conspired to have Iran keep the embassy hostages until after the 1980 election, thereby insuring President Carter's defeat. The left pursued this senseless scenario for more than a decade until it collapsed of its own absurdity. Now too many persons on the right are pursuing an equivalent hoax.
Much of the Mena story will be familiar to persons who followed the Contra/drugs/CIA yarns spun out by the left and its media friends during the 1980s. Under this thesis, the CIA-directed traffic to Central America was two way: planes flew arms to the democratic resistance in Nicaragua, then brought cocaine and marijuana back to the United States. The most Byzantine version of this theory, crafted by the far-left Christic Institute, had a cabal of retired intelligence and military officers ("The Secret Team") actually running a covert American foreign policy.
We were not surprised, late in the book, to learn that an investigator for the Christic Institute identified only as "Pierre" played a major role in Compromised. According to the book, Pierre is a bulky man with a gray beard, wearing a black beret, who spent 30 years as an Army criminal investigator. He accompanied Cummings to his first meeting with Terry Reed, and after debriefing him for three days, agreed to help him "free of charge." Terry said that he and Pierre shared the "common belief that the country was being run out of Langley, Virginia, the headquarters for the CIA." Pierre thereafter worked closely with Cummings and Reed to produce Compromised.
What their book does is toss Bill Clinton into a stew of Christic nonsense, in an apparent attempt to make their nonsense more attractive to conservatives. The real disservice of Compromised is that legitimate questions exist about Clinton and drug trafficking in Arkansas during his governorship and his sincerity about drug programs since he became President.
--In 1986, Dan A. Lasater, a major Clinton campaign contributor and a friend and legal client of Hillary Rodham Clinton, was sentenced to 30 months in prison for distributing cocaine. Lasater served four months in a halfway house and two months under house arrest, then was pardoned by Governor Clinton and almost immediately received a multi-million dollar contract to overhaul the Arkansas State Police radio system. During the time he was being investigated, Lasater's investment firm handled $664 million in sales of Arkansas state bonds.
--On June 8 in The Washington Times, Jerry Seper reported that special counsel Robert Fiske is investigating whether Lasater's "drug profits were laundered through banks and other financial outlets, and later masked as campaign contributions" to Clinton.
--Roger Clinton, the President's brother, was involved in the Lasater drug ring and went to prison on cocaine distribution charges.
--Patsy L. Thomasson, another Clinton friend, ran Lasater's company while he was confined. She now is the White House administrator, and critics have blamed her for long lapses in staff persons' receiving their White House security clearances which require drug testing. The Senate voted, 98-0, on June 22, to require the White House "to certify that White House employees administering the drug testing program do not have a history of drug abuse." The sponsor, Senator Lauch Faircloth (R, N.C.), stated during floor debate, "Congress should see to it that drug addicts are not in charge of the White House drug- testing program."
--Several of President Clinton's actions have alarmed drag enforcement officials. Less than a month into his term, he reduced the Office of National Drug Policy from 146 staff members to 25 and moved it into a bureaucratic backwater away from the White House. His budget asked for substantial cuts in federal drug enforcement personnel.
--There is a good deal of sham in what Clinton claims to be doing about drugs. In February 1994 he visited a corrections center in Prince Georges County, Maryland, just outside Washington, which has a highly-regarded drug counseling program for prisoners. Clinton used the highly-publicized visit to announce a new "national drug strategy." What he did not announce was the decision, a few days earlier, to eliminate the $375 million program of grants to state and local law agencies which financed the program.
--There is more. On May 1, the Pentagon stopped providing intelligence that helped Peru and other Latin nations interdict drug flights (a decision reversed after Congressional protests). His surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, has called repeatedly for drug legalization.
Unfortunately for Clinton critics, the wild charges leveled in Compromised deflect legitimate inquiries into the President's con- duct.
Much of Compromised rests on the word of Terry Reed, grafted onto some documented facts about drug trafficking in Arkansas. The Mena airfield was used during the early 1980s by one Barry Seal, who flew cocaine into the U.S. from South America. After being arrested, Seal became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration. On a flight through Central America, his cocaine-laden plane was damaged by ground-fire, and he had leave it in a hanger in Nicaragua. He returned in another plane rigged with a hidden camera, which filmed Sandinista officials reloading cocaine into the replacement plane. President Reagan showed the photo on national television, revealing that Seal was a double agent. The betrayed drug lords killed him.
Reed repeatedly states that Seal worked for the CIA. Unsurprisingly, he offers no corroborative evidence, for none exists. Here the best evidence comes from the record of a Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator John Kerry (D, Mass.) which in 1988 was out for Reagan/Bush/CIA blood in a probe of Latin drug trafficking. One target was Seal, who had been shot to death two years earlier.
We obtained a deposition given to the Kerry committee by DEA chief John C. Lawn on July 12, 1988, which perhaps explains the secrecy DEA put around Seal. During the period DEA used Seal as an informant, Lawn testified, "we had an operation in which we had an undercover chemical store in Chicago. We were providing ether to the drug processors. We were putting beepers in the ether, in the barrels, and following them to South America. The beepers emit signals and you can follow them. I can't go on because of rules of secrecy to some of the details, but I can tell you that, where the barrels went and the signals that were emitted went to more sensitive supertechnical gear which recorded where exactly the barrels were."
What do we know of Terry Reed's credibility? Reed has trouble keeping his story straight even in his own book. He writes in the book's first pages that he went to Laos as a 2l-year-old sergeant who worked as a "target selector and photo analyst." This is on page 17. But his rank and responsibilities progress until he is a "former air force officer" (p. 472) who had "written contingency war plans, known as Emergency War Orders" (p. 427).
Reed claims he was recruited into the Contra operation through an ad he ran in a Denver newspaper citing his business experience and his willingness to travel. This is Walter Mitty stuff. If anything, the operation had a surfeit of willing recruits, through such groups as the Air America Association (for pilots and crew members), the Decade Association (for special forces and para- military personnel) and elsewhere.
Reed devotes much of his book to his claimed betrayal by the government. He states that early in his work with the Contras, Oliver North suggested that he donate his private plane to the cause, tell his insurance company that it was stolen and collect on his policy. Reed said he refused to do so. But shortly thereafter his plane did disappear, and his insurance company paid a claim.
Several years later, Reed's plane was discovered in a hangar rented in his name by State Trooper Buddy Young, who headed Clinton's security detail at the time. Under charges for insurance fraud, Reed and his family went into hiding for several years. When he finally faced trial, the judge ruled the government had not proved its case.
Reed uses this acquittal as affirmation that everything he says in Compromised is the truth. In fact, his book abounds with absurdities. He has the CIA manufacturing arms in Arkansas for the Contras. In fact, ample stocks existed in Taiwan and elsewhere; the problem was of transport. Persons directly involved in the Contra supply operation flatly deny that any Nicaraguan guerrillas or pilots were ever trained in Arkansas. Special counsel Lawrence Walsh, in his exhaustive study of the Contra supply mechanism, made no mention of any Arkansas connection. Nor did the joint Congressional committee.
Then there is the money. By Reed's account, the 10 percent of the Contra money flow paid to Clinton's government came to $7 million to $9 million monthly, suggesting that Contras had ten times that amount available monthly. This simply was not the case. He has dramatic accounts of planes swooping out of the Arkansas night to drop duffel bags of cash onto a ranch owned by a principal in the Rose Law Firm. The mode of delivery caused a quiver on our curiosity meter--given Reed's claim that Clinton condoned what was happening, why not just put the cash into the back of a rental car and drive it out to a ranch?
Finally, Reed claims all this scandal was covered up by both Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh and the Congressional Iran/Contra Committees. Since the Mena stuff predated Clinton's emergence as a national figure, we find it unlikely that it would have been suppressed, for Walsh could have used it to bring down the Bush Administration. And we find it even more unlikely that Ollie North, had he known of such nefarious activities by Bill Clinton, could have kept his mouth shut during the 1992 campaign.
Pat Robertson's "700 Club" did a long segment on Mena on April 26, narrated by correspondent Gary Lane. The broadcast is summarized in a two-page "Fact Sheet" circulated by Robertson which begins, "In the 1980s, a secret CIA operation involving guns, drugs and money, was conducted through Mena Airport--a small airport in Western Arkansas. This operation involved political connections from the Reagan Ad- ministration to then Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, as well as friends of Clinton, and an Arkansas state agency." Reed is identified, erroneously, as a "CIA operative and pilot."
Conspicuously absent from the Pat Robertson broadcast and "fact sheet" is any mention of a central figure in the conspiracy claimed by Reed--Oliver North, who is identified in the book by the code name "John Cathey." We appreciate Robertson's dilemma: he has been publicly identified as a major supporter of North's senatorial candidacy in Virginia. Bringing North into the Mena story would suggest he was involved in the drugs/guns/money-lundering scandal outlined in Compromised.
What really astounded us about the CBN segment was its use of a deposition given in 1991 by Richard Brenneke, surely one of the more discredited persons ever to grace a political conspiracy. We first exposed Brenneke as a phony in 1988, yet Gary Lane identifies him as a "CIA pilot" who was involved in the Mena drug operation. Lane flashed on the screen excerpts from the Brenneke deposition, which was given to Arkansas Congressman Bill Alexander:
"From Mena, I would take people who had been trained in and around Mena...paramilitary and military forces from Central America. They would be taken back to Panama City, where I would drop them. And, in addition to that, we would carry weapons that were being shipped down there."
In the same deposition Brenneke makes other interesting claims which were apparently too far-fetched for Gary Lane to present to the CBN audience. The drugs he brought into Mena, Brenneke stated, were turned over to the famed Mafia figure John Gotti. He claims to have met Gotti through another of the Mena conspirators, the security director of Kennedy International Airport in New York City, who was a "lieutenant" of Gotti. He claimed to have met with the security man and Gotti in a "private club that I was taken to" in New York in 1984 or 1985. On assignment from the CIA, Brenneke claimed, he helped launder drug money from Gotti and other "organized crime families" in New York.
Congressman Alexander asked Brenneke, "Are you saying that the CIA was in the business of bringing drugs into the United States?" Brenneke replied, "Yes sir. That's exactly what I'm saying...I would say that they worked with Mr. Gotti and his organization very closely. Whether it was a formal partnership, I don't know."
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What Lane did not point out was that Brenneke is perhaps as discreditable a source as any who ever talked to a journalist. We first wrote about him in May 1988, when ABC News used him as a source for some outlandish charges arising from the Iran-Contra investigation, including U.S. government connivance in drug smuggling. The CIA took the rare step of denying publicly that Brenneke ever worked for the agency. Most of the media stopped taking Brenneke seriously at that point.
Undeterred, Brenneke moved on to claim he was a key figure in the next leftist conspiracy du jour, the so-called "October Surprise." This was the claim that the Reagan-Bush campaign conspired with Iran to delay the release of the embassy hostages until after the 1980 election, in return for arms shipments later. Brenneke said he flew Bush and Reagan campaign director William J. Casey (later the director of the Central Intelligence Agency) to Paris in October 1980 for a meeting with Iranian negotiators.
Congress spent several million dollars investigating the "October Surprise" before dismissing the story as a hoax. In the interim, Brenneke asked a friendly Connecticut writer, Peggy Adler Robohm, to help write a memoir. In going through Brenneke's credit card receipts and daily calendars Robohm found he had lied about his whereabouts on crucial "October Surprise" dates. Instead of being in Europe, he was in the Pacific Northwest. She gave the material to Frank Snepp, the reporter on the 1988 ABC News segment which first brought Brenneke to public attention. Writing with the fury of a deceived journalist, Snepp denounced Brenneke as a fraud and a liar in an article in the Village Voice.
Another "source" on the CBN segment was William Duncan, a former investigator for the Internal Revenue Service, who said there was "no doubt in my mind" that there was drug corruption in the Arkansas state government. CBN did not tell his viewers of another statement that Duncan made in his deposition with Congressman Alexander, taken the same day as the Brenneke statement.
Duncan said he had "heard" an allegation that "Attorney General Edwin Meese received a several hundred thousand dollar bribe from Barry Seal directly." He said this information came from Russell Welch, an Arkansas state police detective who had investigated Mena. Alexander deposed Welch the same day; the record does not show that he asked about the Meese allegation. These kinds of wild charges help put the Mena allegations into perspective.
Pat Robertson sat alongside correspondent Lane after this segment aired and said, somewhat wide-eyed, "You're not talking about $100,000 in the commodities business, or a few little indiscretions about a second-rate housing development on a river. You're talking now about tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars.
"Remember, this went back to the 1980s, with both the Reagan and Bush Administrations. There are some things that certainly warrant some further investigation."
With some exasperation we must remind the Reverend that the Contra/drugs link is one of the more enduring--and investigated --myths of modern journalism. Congress conducted two extensive investigations in the late 1980s and found nothing to substantiate the reports. On behalf of the Joint Committee on Iran-Contra, investigator Robert A. Bermingham wrote Chairman Lee Hamilton (D, Ind.) on July 23, 1987 (in a letter reproduced in the committee's final report, pp. 630-2), "Despite numerous newspaper accounts to the contrary, no evidence was developed indicating that Contra leadership or Contra organizations were actually involved in drug trafficking.
"Sources of news stories indicating to the contrary were of doubtful veracity. There was no information developed indicating any U.S. government agency or organization condoned drug trafficking by the Contras or anyone else."
Bermingham continued, "We have discovered that almost all of these allegations originate from persons indicted or convicted of drug smuggling. Justice has stated that such persons are more and more claiming as a defense, that they were smuggling for the benefit of the Contras in what they believed was a U.S.-government sponsored operation. Typically, they furnish no information which can be corroborated by investigation."
Rep. Charles Rangel (D,N.Y.) had his crime subcommittee look into the charges also. He told The Washington Post on July 22, 1987, that after interviews with hundreds of witnesses, his committee "developed no evidence" showing Contra involvement in drugs.
Despite its many---and provable--shortcomings, Compromised is on several best-seller lists on the West Coast. Herein might lie a problem for authors Reed and Cummings. As long as the book was read only in the fever swamps of American politics, persons it accused of criminal wrongdoing were content to ignore the charges. Reliable sources tell us that at least two of the central figures are consulting libel lawyers, in which case Reed and Cummings will have to offer hard evidence, rather than gossip, to substantiate their accusations.
As the critic Bernard DeVoto once said of another political fantasy, Compromised is useful only if one wishes to grow paranoia from seed. Forget the book. President Bill Clinton deserves to be judged on scandals of his own making, not on wild allegations that do not warrant serious attention.
Send the enclosed postcard or your own letter to Pat Robertson, asking why he would permit his news program to use such a tainted source as Richard Brenueke.
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NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine
LET ME SAY A WORD ABOUT THIS MONTH'S REPORT, WHICH CRITICIZES PAT ROBERT- son for publicizing the book Compromised on his Christian Broadcasting Network. I've known and respected Pat for years as a fellow conservative, and more times than not we are on the same side on issues. When the "religious left" defended the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and the communist terrorists in El Salvador, Pat sided with the forces fighting for democracy. I also applaud Pat's efforts on behalf of traditional family values. Sadly, on the Mena story, Pat permitted CBN to recycle nonsense that the leftists were peddling a decade ago. Putting Bill Clinton into the middle of the conspiracy perhaps makes the story more palatable to some conservatives. But fantasy is fantasy, however packaged. Clinton deserves to be judged on his own record, which is sordid even without embellishments of the sort offered in Compromised.
CAN EITHER SOCIETY OR O.J. SIMPSON RECEIVE A FAIR TRIAL? THE TRIAL IN THE CELEBRATED double murder remains months away, but saturation coverage has made the media an inextricable part of the case. Talk show breastbeaters are into their Media Responsibility Mode, debating endlessly (and senselessly) whether the press gave too much attention to the case. Oh, nonsense! No news director or editor worth his title would ignore a juicy story involving a famed athlete and the murders of a blonde bombshell former wife and an aspiring actor. My colleague Joe Goulden was at a Baltimore Orioles game the evening Simpson led a caravan of police cars over LA freeways. Joe reports that TV monitors in the stadium con- course, which usually show the game, switched to network coverage of Simpson. Hundreds of persons ignored the Orioles game and watched O.J. News is news.
WHAT DISTURBS ME MORE THAN THE COVERAGE IS THE MEDIA'S TENDENCY TO FIND excuses for the most heinous of criminal behavior. Los Angeles district attorney Gil Garcetti feels that such sob-sister talk show hosts as Oprah Winfrey are engendering instant sympathy for defendants in criminal cases. In prescient comments to Bill Boyarsky of the Los Angeles Times (July 7) Garcetti said that news and talk shows inevitably affect the opinions of jurors and potential jurors. "The pervasiveness of the media is a factor that has been dramatically underestimated," Garcetti said. "In terms of the radio talk shows and your TV talk shows like 'Oprah,' you have all these rationalizations and excuses as to why we should be forgiven for every wrong act, criminal act or not. We have been willing to accept to a large degree that any particular conduct can be excused and that we....are not responsible."
THE SAME WEEK THE SIMPSON HEARING WAS IN PROGRESS, A JURY IN A VIRGINIA suburb of Washington convicted a man of murdering a member of the Marine Corps Band during a car- jacking--blasting off part of the non-resisting victim's head with a shotgun as he lay helpless on the ground. During the sentencing phase, defense lawyers tried to avoid a death penalty by presenting testimony about the disturbed background of the killer, including a mother who was mentally ill. WRC-TV, the NBC affiliate in Washington, interviewed the widow. She asked, plaintively, why she didn't have a chance to tell her story during the sentencing, of how the killer deprived her of her husband's love and company. Coverage elsewhere that we saw, on TV and in print, stressed the killer's childhood experiences. I agree with the widow: victims (and their survivors) deserve equal time, in both the court and the media.
OUR WEEKLY TELEVISION SHOW, "THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY," IS NOW IN ITS seventh month, and we are nearing a decision on whether to continue it for another year. Your generous contributions put us on the air for the initial year, and I feel the 30 shows we've done had considerably more substance than the talking-head fare you find elsewhere on TV. AIM even had a "scoop" -- the first television interview with Paula Corbin Jones, the woman who was subjected to crude sexual overtures by Clinton in May 1991. My colleague Deborah Lambert is doing double-duty these days as producer of the TV show in addition to her regular job as AIM public affairs director (two full-time jobs!). Deb has made a major effort to find outlets for "The Other Side of the Story" in addition to National Empowerment Television, the network over which it airs each Wednesday evening. On behalf of Deb, I'd like to ask your help: Is there a TV station or cable system in your community which might show "The Other Side of the Story"? We can supply tapes of each broadcast, or information on how stations can pick up a telecast from a satellite feed. If you have any ideas on getting the AIM show on your local outlet, call Deb at (202) 364-4401. In the mean- time, here is a current listing of outlets where you can see "The Other Side of the Story" (other than on NET or via satellite). Some of them are already airing it and others are in the decision-making stage. Give them a call and show your support for their good programming judgment.
TO ORDER THE LATEST VIDEOCASSETTES OF AIM'S PROGRAM The Other Side of The Story just fill in the coupon below. Here is a list of the latest shows: #28. McCarthyism at CBS, June 22, 1994 (CBS Reports' celebrates 40th anniversary of Edward R. Murrow's attack on Sen. Joe McCarthy) Guest: Herbert Romerstein. #29. Attacks on the Religious Right, June 28, 1994 (Media attacks on "religious right") Guests: Matthew Brookes, Murray Baron and (by phone) Tom Pauken. #30. Fiske Fools the Media, July 6, 1994 (Fiske and media ignore FBI evidence indicating Vincent Foster's body was moved) Guests: Arthur Randall and Christopher Ruddy.