Mena, Arkansas

Clinton’s staff has also refused to comment on the series of connections.¹⁵⁰ Stephens played a part in the CIA-supervised cocaine smuggling operation based in Mena during Bill Clinton’s term as governor in the 80s. Mena was a key CIA trans-shipment point for Iran-Contra. Nevertheless, CBS News correspondent Bill Plante complained there is a trail of “tens of millions of dollars in cocaine profits [from Mena], and we don’t know where it leads. It is a trail that has been blocked by the National Security Council.”¹⁵¹

One estimate suggests that Barry Seal, the primary drug-runner for the operation, who also worked for the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Administration, ran as much as a hundred million worth of cocaine a month through Mena.¹⁵² It was Barry Seal’s plane crash in Nicaragua that exposed the Iran-Contra affair. Barry Seal had been recruited at the age of seventeen, along with Lee Oswald, by CIA agent David Ferrie, at a two-week summer camp of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol in 1957.¹⁵³

David Ferrie, a career U.S. intelligence agent, was a participant in the assassination of President Kennedy, and the first focal point of Jim Garrison’s investigation of Kennedy’s murder. The assassination team went by the name of Operation 40, established by Allen Dulles, which played a major role in the Bay of Pigs invasion. The group was run by then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon and recruited former Batista-regime intelligence officers and mob henchmen, mercenaries like Frank Sturgis and CIA case officer Howard Hunt, who would later become one of the Watergate burglars.

As revealed by John Hankey, in his film JFK II, at a 1975 Senate re-investigation into the case, William Colby, as head of CIA, testified that George Bush Sr. and Hunt headed the Kennedy assassination, but said that “...they weren’t really in charge. They were just taking orders from civilians like Allen Dulles and the Rockefellers.” Colby was then promptly dismissed, and George Bush was appointed to head the CIA in his place.

One important business in the Arkansas narcotics network was Park-on-Meter, or POM Inc. Commercially, POM was to produce parking meters and machine parts. Covertly, it was manufacturing untraceable custom weapons parts for the Contras, and shipping them to Mena. POM had subcontracted the job from a CIA front, called Iver Johnson’s Firearms, of Jacksonville, Arkansas. Former CIA scientist Michael Riconosciuto has told reporters that he was closely involved in these covert operations, and claims that he supervised high-tech equipment transfers to POM and had developed software to help launder the Mena drug money.¹⁵⁴

Riconosciuto is one of the original architects of the backdoor to PROMIS, a people-tracking software system sold to intelligence organisations and government drug agencies worldwide, originally part of a U.S. plot to spy on other spy agencies.

POM president and co-owner was Webster “Webb” Hubbell. Later Webb Hubbell would become a partner in the Rose Law Firm, which employed Hillary Clinton and which eventually was at the centre of the Whitewater scandal. Hillary Clinton, representing the Rose Law Firm, had also successfully defended Systematics, a subsidiary of Stephens Inc, during Stephen’s and Adham’s hostile takeover of Financial General. Clinton appointed Hubbell as the Associate Attorney General, the number-three position in the Justice Department, but he later resigned under questions about his role in Whitewater and a question about the million dollars owned by POM to the Rose firm. The names of Hubbell and the Rose law firm appear on the bond issues and loan agreements for the largest contributions to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. The banks were all owned by Stephens Inc.¹⁵⁵

Footnotes:

150 DeRienzo, Paul. “Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton President George Bush CIA Drugs For Guns Connection”. NCOIC
151 Dee, John. “Snow Job: The CIA, Cocaine, and Bill Clinton -Part I”, The Lumpen Times.
152 Lecture given by Gary Webb, author of Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, January 16, 1999.
153 Daniel Hopsicker, “Porter & ‘the boys’: Goss made his ‘bones’ on CIA hitteam”, Mad Cow Morning News, May 6 2006.
154 Ibid.
155 Ibid.