LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - A recently released FBI document indicates that a commercial airline pilot who became a major drug smuggler for the Medellín Cartel used the Mena airport for his smuggling operation in the early 1980s.
The “extensive joint investigation” by the FBI, Arkansas State Police and IRS disclosed in the May, 1986, FBI memo released last week, that pilot Barry Seal admitted to smuggling large quantities of cocaine from Colombia to the United States and testified before a Senate investigative committee prior to his death.
Seal was killed in February 1986 during a hail of machine-gun fire outside a Baton Rouge Salvation Army halfway house after allegedly crossing Pablo Escobar and the Medellín drug cartel, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He conducted his smuggling operation from Baton Rouge to Rich Mountain Aviation at the Mena Intermountain Airport.
The FBI in Little Rock began investigating Seal’s operation at the Mena airport in February 1984, according to the recently released FBI document. After a barrage of requests from different people and media outlets under the federal Freedom of Information Act, last Wednesday the FBI released more than 1,000 pages of its file on Seal. Many names in the documents have been redacted, however.
“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.
Connor Hagan, a spokesman for the FBI in Little Rock, said the release of so much information into the FBI’s public “vault” doesn’t mean that the documents haven’t previously been made public. He said parts of it could have been provided to people under previous information requests.
Seal’s activities spawned several books, conspiracy theories and movies, including the basis of the Tom Cruise 2017 movie “American Made,” in which the New York Times called it the Conspiratorial Industry Complex.
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