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Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 8 Num. 05
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("Quid coniuratio est?")
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COMPROMISED
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(From the May 1996 Conspiracy Nation Newsletter)
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CAST OF CHARACTERS
Hillary Rodham Clinton -- wife of Bill Clinton, her office at the
Rose Law Firm is right next to "WEBB" HUBBELL's office.
Roger Clinton -- brother of Bill Clinton. Roger works for DAN
LASATER.
Webster ("Webb") Hubbell -- a close friend of then-Governor Bill
Clinton. "Webb" Hubbell works at the Rose Law Firm.
Dan Lasater -- Arkansas "Bond Daddy" and close friend of Bill
Clinton. His firm, Lasater & Co., was handling more than $300
million per year in preferred state bond activity.
Barry Seal -- a skilled pilot, from his plane he drops duffel
bags filled with cash onto the Triple S Ranch near Hot Springs,
Arkansas.
Finis Shellnut -- son-in-law of SETH WARD. Finis lives at the
Triple S Ranch and is the go-for who retrieves the bundles of
cash being dropped by BARRY SEAL. Finis works for DAN LASATER as
a "bondsman".
Seth Ward -- owner of the Triple S Ranch. His daughter, Suzy, is
married to WEBSTER ("WEBB") HUBBELL.
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John Cummings is a former prize-winning investigative reporter at
New York Newsday. He has co-authored the Heist (1987), Goombata:
The Improbable Rise of John Gotti and His Gang (1990) and Death
Do Us Part (1993). His latest book, Compromised: Clinton, Bush
and the CIA (Clandestine Publishing, ISBN: 1-883955-02-5),
co-authored with Terry Reed, has been a bestseller. For over
thirty years, since the Bay of Pigs, Cummings has studied the
confluence of intelligence gathering, money laundering and
drug-trafficking.
I spoke with Mr. Cummings on March 25, 1996.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
CONSPIRACY NATION: I heard you and Terry Reed, I think it was on
Radio Free America with Tom Valentine. And as I recall, you were
investigating some kind of corruption in Florida that led you to,
when you first became aware of Terry Reed and his situation...
JOHN CUMMINGS: It began around the time of the Bay of Pigs. And
I came to know a lot of the guys who were involved in that. And
it worked out that I began to look into this question of covert
operations. And the more I looked into it (prior to that, I'd
been working on organized crime), the more I found organized
crime and drug trafficking. They always seemed to go hand-in-
hand. And that led to my looking, some years later, at Barry
Seal. And from Barry Seal, I was led to Arkansas by some friends
in the Louisiana State Police who believed that Seal was doing
more than what most people *thought* he was really doing. This
one particular cop came to believe that Seal had some kind of
government protection and that he was probably engaged in some
kind of covert activity. And he said that he left Louisiana and
he went up to Arkansas. And then I started to look up there.
And the more I looked up there, the more suspicious I got, the
more it smelled of an intelligence operation. (Which I had seen
a lot of in Florida.) And *that* led me, eventually, to Terry
Reed.
CONSPIRACY NATION: How did you first get in contact with Reed?
JOHN CUMMINGS: I heard about Terry Reed from a friend who is a
private investigator in Washington. (He's a retired CID man.
[IRS Criminal Investigation Division]) And he told me about
Terry's case. Terry at the time was under indictment for mail
fraud. And so I called his lawyer (and in the interim, I'd done
a big piece on Barry Seal for Penthouse, and she had read it.)
And she sent me some of the pleadings from the case. And here I
see Terry was at Mena. So I began to pursue Terry.
CONSPIRACY NATION: What exactly was Mena about?
JOHN CUMMINGS: Terry came in contact with a man who was
introduced to him as "John Cathey." And John Cathey was, in
reality, Oliver North. And he came into contact as the result of
the Toshiba investigation. And you know what that was, right?
CONSPIRACY NATION: That was something with submarines, wasn't
it?
JOHN CUMMINGS: The Toshiba Machine Tools was secretly selling
propeller technology to the Soviet Union. This equipment would
allow the Soviets to make propellers that would elude American
detection. There was a *big* scandal about it. At one point,
Congress wanted to totally stop trading with Toshiba and not
allow them in the country. There was a tremendous tumult about
this.
Well North, or "Cathey," asked Terry to make... Terry, at
the time, was working for Toshiba. And they wanted him to try to
find out what was going through the Toshiba warehouse.
Anyway, that's how he came to meet North. (Although he
didn't know his name was Oliver North. He only knew that he had
been in Vietnam like Terry had been.) And they were very
So at some point, Terry decides to go into business for
himself and he's gonna move to Arkansas. And North tells him,
"Well. If you're moving to Arkansas, there's a guy there who's
running some stuff for us that you ought to meet." And he says,
"You can probably make some money out of this."
So anyway, North gives him the name of Barry Seal and says
that Seal will contact him. And Terry moves to Little Rock, and
not too long thereafter, Seal comes to see Terry at his place of
business. And he has with him, when he comes that day, a guy
name of Dan Lasater. And working for Lasater, as a chauffeur,
was [Bill] Clinton's brother, Roger.
Well he meets Seal, and they hit it off. And Seal tells him
that he needs someone who can train *Contra* pilots to drop
supplies into areas of Nicaragua at night; you know, teach them
how to do air drops.
CONSPIRACY NATION: And they trained those pilots so that the CIA
would have plausible deniability.
JOHN CUMMINGS: Right. The CIA would appear to have no
"hands-on" knowledge. This [would appear to be] simply a
free-lance operation.
At the same time, Terry (whose background is in machine
tooling)... Seal needed help with producing untraceable weapons
that they could give the *Contras*.
Anyway, that's how it came about. That's how he met Barry
Seal.
CONSPIRACY NATION: And then, what wound up happening was that
the guns were being flown down there, but either (I'm not clear
on this) it was, say, "individual entrepreneurship" that caused
some pilots to decide to fly back with drugs? Or were the
drugs...
JOHN CUMMINGS: Well Terry did not know about the drugs. All he
would do was go to Mena, teach these guys, in various places,
[about flying]. And they were kept at a place out in the woods.
This area is very remote. And they built a makeshift base out in
the woods near Mena, Arkansas. And all Terry would do was take
'em up and try to teach 'em. And although these guys had had
pilot training, they were very rough. They could fly, but
barely.
So Terry's job was trying to teach them how to drop this
stuff at night, in the jungle, to supply their own troops.
Because they didn't want (what later happened), they did not want
a plane shot down with an American crew on board. (And of
course, that *did* happen.)
And one of the people working with Terry, working with Seal
at that time, was William Cooper -- who was a pilot of the C-123
that *was* shot down.
CONSPIRACY NATION: And Cooper died in that crash, right?
JOHN CUMMINGS: He died. Only [Eugene] Hasenfus survived.
CONSPIRACY NATION: But in general, these planes were not flying
back to the U.S. empty.
JOHN CUMMINGS: Well, separate and apart from this. See, my
suspicion was, as they were flying weapons in, since the cargo...
You know, the planes were empty. They weren't gonna come back
empty. I mean, Seal's (how shall I say?) "cover" was that of a
drug trafficker. In other words, he had gotten into that game
early. And for all the world, all the time they were chasing
Seal around Mena, they were looking for drugs. But what they
were *really* doing was running a supply operation.
Now if Seal was running stuff *back*, it was not something
Terry was involved in. Terry didn't find out about the drugs
until much later, when he was in Mexico.
CONSPIRACY NATION: And that was what caused him to break off
from the operation.
JOHN CUMMINGS: Yeah. He broke off from that. And right after
he did, he started having legal problems.
CONSPIRACY NATION: So he found out, while he was in Mexico, that
drugs were involved. And he didn't want to have anything to do
with the drugs.
JOHN CUMMINGS: He was down there supposedly to run a machine
tool company. And he had acquired a big warehouse for putting
machine tools. He'd been told that what they were gonna do with
this proprietary company was run guns from the U.S. to Central
America. But when he went to his warehouse one day, he opened
one of these big, huge containers, and it was full of cocaine.
And at which time he then confronted his then boss, a man named
Felix Rodriguez (although *he* was going under a pseudonym too.)
CONSPIRACY NATION: Yeah. "Max Gomez."
JOHN CUMMINGS: Max Gomez. Yeah.
And he [Terry Reed] bargained his way out of there. He
thought he was home free. He says, "I just want out. I'm gonna
go home. I'm not gonna say anything to anybody. I just want out
of this."
And then suddenly, it turns out that a plane that had been
stolen from [Reed] years earlier turns up in a hangar he had
rented in Little Rock.
CONSPIRACY NATION: Wasn't Buddy Young, then working as Clinton's
chief of security, involved?
JOHN CUMMINGS: Buddy Young is one of the people he's sueing.
CONSPIRACY NATION: And what happened was, Reed thought
everything was okay, and he heads north. And Buddy Young puts
out a "profile" on him, through the computers.
JOHN CUMMINGS: He put out a phony profile on him! Saying that
he was a known drug trafficker and that he had been dealing in
drugs in Central America. He put that into the government
computers.
CONSPIRACY NATION: So then, Reed figured they must be out to get
him. He figured that they'll probably, since they've got this
false profile on him, that he's this "dangerous drug trafficker",
he'll be lucky if he gets captured alive.
JOHN CUMMINGS: Yes, well that was the idea. They had listed, on
this alert, "Armed and dangerous" -- which is a tip-off to every
cop: shoot first and ask questions later. But, you see, he had
enough knowledge that he could have implicated both Bill Clinton
- and* George Bush in this.
CONSPIRACY NATION: So Reed went "underground" for what, 18
months or so?
JOHN CUMMINGS: Well, a little less than a year. He and his wife
took off with their children and drove across the country, trying
to stay out of sight, figuring that he had been marked for a hit
like [Barry] Seal had been! He was convinced they would do the
same thing to him that they did to Seal.
CONSPIRACY NATION: Barry Seal had taken that secret videotape of
[the Sandinistas] loading that plane with narcotics. And who
leaked that tape? Was it Reagan or North?
JOHN CUMMINGS: It was photos, not videotape.
CONSPIRACY NATION: But wasn't it North, or Reagan, that made the
photos public?
JOHN CUMMINGS: Reagan put 'em on the air.
CONSPIRACY NATION: Yeah. Because Reagan was under political
pressure.
JOHN CUMMINGS: He wanted to get aid to the *Contras* through
Congress. And they wanted to show, "Look. These guys
[Sandinistas] are all drug dealers." And by doing that, they
made it known who was informing on them.
CONSPIRACY NATION: And then Seal was a marked man. And by the
government putting him in a position where he was easily found,
it was the same as setting him up.
JOHN CUMMINGS: Yeah, that's a well-documented story.
CONSPIRACY NATION: So after about a year underground, Reed
decides that he's gonna turn himself in.
JOHN CUMMINGS: No, he learns that he's been indicted. So having
been indicted, he decided that he'd better surrender before they
tried to come and find him. And he did. He arranged to
surrender. And he went with an attorney and surrendered. And
his wife was also indicted. And she had done absolutely nothing.
CONSPIRACY NATION: Yeah. She says in the video ["The Mena
Connection"] that the judge at one point said, "Mrs. Reed, I
don't even understand why you're here in court."
JOHN CUMMINGS: What he said was, "Why is *she* here?" And
Terry's attorney said, "I guess because she's married to him."
The judge asked, several times, "Why is *she* here?"
CONSPIRACY NATION: So then Reed was exonerated, and found not
guilty.
JOHN CUMMINGS: He was acquitted, yeah. He was acquitted by the
judge. It was an order of acquittal, from a judge (which you
hardly ever see.) There was no jury trial.
CONSPIRACY NATION: So he was so obviously innocent that...
JOHN CUMMINGS: He was acquitted on the law. Not on the facts.
Because the jury decides the facts. But the judge said that the
government had no case! (This was after two-and-a-half years.)
And when I spoke to the judge about it, he told me that he
thought the case "had a high odor to it."
CONSPIRACY NATION: And after he was acquitted, he had gone
through a lot of hardship because of all this and had to spend a
lot of money, I assume, with legal fees and everything.
And at what point did you meet up with him?
JOHN CUMMINGS: I met up with him while he was still under
indictment. I met him for the first time, personally, the Summer
of 1990. The judge's acquittal came in the following November.
CONSPIRACY NATION: One of the reasons he decided to work with
you on a book was because he figured if he got his story out, he
and his family would be safer.
JOHN CUMMINGS: *I* told him that. If he got his story out, it
wouldn't be a suit of armor, but it would raise more suspicion if
something happened to him. Otherwise, if they were to shoot him
dead, I mean, who knew about this guy?
CONSPIRACY NATION: So after he was acquitted, he wanted redress
of his grievances and he also wanted to get the truth out.
JOHN CUMMINGS: He was very angry because of what they had done
to his wife. He was very angry that they had put her through
this. And they had three small children. And it's very obvious
that she had done absolutely nothing. In fact, I read the grand
jury minutes: there was virtually no case going on there at all.
But you know, there's a saying: "A prosecutor can indict a ham
sandwich."
And that's what really pissed him off. So the two of them
decided... They were still wary of me, at that point. They
decided that they were going to go back into court and seek
justice. (Not really realizing that that is a relative term, and
seeking justice sometimes can be a very burdensome thing.)
But anyway, they decided to do this. And then I went to
visit him in early 1991. And that was the first time, in our
conversations, that he brought in Bill Clinton, and ADFA
[Arkansas Development Finance Authority], and money-laundering,
and all the rest of it.
CONSPIRACY NATION: The book *Compromised* was kind of a landmark
book, or a ground- breaking book, in that it outlined what was
going on; it provided a road map for what had been going on in
Arkansas.
JOHN CUMMINGS: What it was, it was a kind of diary of a foot
soldier in that war [i.e. *Contras*]. This is something that he
really believed in. He believed in the *Contras* and he felt
that they should be helped. (You know, he and I had many
arguments about that.) And he said that he, at the time, thought
that Oliver North was (although he didn't know, at the time, he
was Oliver North), he thought he was a great guy. And he was as
pissed off as Terry was about what had happened in Vietnam.
CONSPIRACY NATION: And so Reed brought suit against the
government?
JOHN CUMMINGS: No, it wasn't a suit against the government. It
was a suit against the two men who testified against him. There
was a third man, who was an Arkansas state trooper, who works for
the DEA.
CONSPIRACY NATION: He brought suit against these 3 people. Do
you know the names of the people?
JOHN CUMMINGS: Buddy Young. Tommy Baker. And Sanders -- he's
an Arkansas cop who was working with the DEA.
Sanders was brought in because of the contacts... I tell you
what: to really understand the court case you have to read the
chapter, "Department of Injustice." Because these guys lied so
many times, in their testimony. They kept getting caught: they
would say one thing, and then the facts would show something
else.
See, the reason he brought suit against those guys, it was
very clear that they were lying in their testimony. And they
didn't even really make any attempt to hide the fact they were
lying.
CONSPIRACY NATION: And by bringing suit, this allows what they
call the discovery process, right? That he (at least
theoretically) should have access to documents that aren't
normally available?
JOHN CUMMINGS: He got documents from the FBI and from the DEA
Intelligence Headquarters in El Paso which showed that Young had
planted the profile about him being a drug trafficker, and that
they claimed when they found the airplane that they took the VIN
number through NCIC [National Crime Information Center] -- but
not when they said they did!
CONSPIRACY NATION: And so this lawsuit was proceeding well. And
in the video, "The Mena Connection," it ends with a request that
people try to help with the legal expenses.
JOHN CUMMINGS: If they can. Yes.
CONSPIRACY NATION: Did he get much help with the legal expenses,
from people?
JOHN CUMMINGS: Yeah, there was help that came in. Basically,
Terry is taking what income, his share of what income there has
been from the book, to plough into this case.
CONSPIRACY NATION: So he's in a situation that happens to a lot
of people: the government has got unlimited funds, but an
individual citizen, if they're gonna pursue something like this,
they've got to spend their own money.
JOHN CUMMINGS: That's right. There's no way you can really
out-spend the government.
CONSPIRACY NATION: And so, this case was proceeding well, up
until recently, right?
JOHN CUMMINGS: There was a motion, from the other side, to limit
the amount of evidence that Terry could bring in. And that copy
of the court order I sent you [See CN 7.56] just about wipes away
any reference to Mena or... In other words, he can try his civil
rights case, but you can't go into *why* they would have wanted
to frame him.
CONSPIRACY NATION: So the judge is like a gatekeeper, right? He
decides what gets allowed in.
JOHN CUMMINGS: The judge is, of course, a product of Arkansas
politics.
CONSPIRACY NATION: What's the judge's name?
JOHN CUMMINGS: George Howard.
He's the one that's trying the case now against Jim Guy
Tucker.
CONSPIRACY NATION: So that would indicate that the case against
Tucker is also likely to be biased.
JOHN CUMMINGS: I'm not familiar with that *case*. There's a lot
of people running interference for Bill Clinton.
And I think the thing that you might want to keep in mind:
every attempt to pull back the rock on Mena has been thwarted.
CONSPIRACY NATION: I don't know if you know this fellow named
Sherman Skolnick, out of Chicago...
JOHN CUMMINGS: I know who he is. I don't know much about him.
CONSPIRACY NATION: Well he's been looking into this whole thing,
with Whitewater and Mena, and his end of this is, he represents
somebody named Joseph Andreuccetti which, it's a complicated
case, but there was supposed to have been a transfer of an RTC
[Resolution Trust Corporation] contingency fund -- an *illegal*
transfer -- that this money went down to Arkansas to cover up an
embezzlement of a savings and loan down there.
But just generally, I'm familiar that the state just reeks of
corruption.
JOHN CUMMINGS: Arkansas? Oh geez. We have a chapter in there
which we refer to as "America's Banana Republic." Which is what
it is.
CONSPIRACY NATION: So at this point you're being stymied.
JOHN CUMMINGS: Terry has run into a big road-block with this
judge. Yeah.
CONSPIRACY NATION: And what's the prognosis at this point?
JOHN CUMMINGS: Well, I think that (I'm giving you my speculation
now), if Terry appeals this, if he can't appeal it now, it would
keep the case out of court until after the election -- which is
what I think they're after.
CONSPIRACY NATION: In your book, there's two occasions where
Reed actually meets with Clinton...
JOHN CUMMINGS: There were three meetings. Reed only talks about
two.
CONSPIRACY NATION: And the third is kept quiet, for now.
I talked with Sarah McClendon, the veteran White House
correspondent. And she thinks that Clinton is just, basically,
innocent. How involved was Clinton?
JOHN CUMMINGS: Up to his ears. Here was a guy, what he was
doing was playing ball with the Administration in Washington, and
for a lot of reasons. There was a lot of money flowing into the
state. You have to *really* understand the amount of money that
was flowing into Arkansas. And the net effect of this was, the
money went to finance firms run by Clinton's friends, who could
then make very nice campaign contributions to him. I mean,
Clinton never got any of that money directly.
CONSPIRACY NATION: When I talked with Sarah McClendon, she said
that there were several "Menas", so-called; that this was not an
isolated operation.
JOHN CUMMINGS: There was at least one other that I know of, out
in Texas. [Barry] Seal was involved.
CONSPIRACY NATION: The Arkansas Development Finance Authority
[ADFA], the way that worked: drug money goes into ADFA and then
it gets loaned out to people...
JOHN CUMMINGS: [Barry Seal] was dropping $9 million a month into
Arkansas. And the money ended up going to Dan Lasater. Where it
went from there, who knows? ADFA... Nobody knows where ADFA's
money came from. We know that they lent out a lot of money to
Bill Clinton's friends -- people who didn't need it! ADFA was
supposedly set up to help companies that couldn't get regular
financing.
CONSPIRACY NATION: You've looked into the drug corruption.
What's your opinion on the "War on Drugs"?
JOHN CUMMINGS: The "War on Drugs" is a joke.
CONSPIRACY NATION: Orlin Grabbe, a former finance professor at
the Wharton Business College, has theorized that what this "War
on Drugs" is about is inflating the cost of these drugs; that the
United States sells arms to the Third World and the Third World
has no way to pay, except with their drugs. And the way it works
is, the "War on Drugs" artificially boosts the cost of these
drugs.
JOHN CUMMINGS: I'm somewhat aware of his theory. And I have no
serious argument with it, although I have no personal knowledge
of that.
I'll put it to you this way: the guy who originally put me
on to Barry Seal was a narcotics investigator. And he said to me
(referring to Seal), "I thought I was chasing the biggest drug
trafficker in the country, only to learn that the biggest drug
trafficker in the country *was* the country." (And I think that
really tells it all.) He suddenly realized that he'd spent his
life on a fool's errand.
The "War on Drugs" is a tremendous farce. But it's easy to
sell this country on anything.
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Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et
pauperem. -- Liber Proverbiorum XXXI: 8-9