Chapter Ten
INSIDE THE ARKANSAS PROJECT
FROM ITS INCEPTION in November 1993, the Arkansas Project was kept so quiet that even senior staff members of the American Spectator had little notion of what the project was intended to do, let alone what Stephens S. Boynton and David Henderson actually were doing in the magazine’s name. The funds flowed reliably every six months or so from Richard Mellon Scaife’s office in Pittsburgh to the American Spectator Educational Foundation, as they had for many years. But from there, most of the money now went directly into an account controlled by Boynton, with virtually no oversight by Ronald Burr, the magazine’s publisher, or anyone else.
Not unlike the arrangements used to conceal CIA involvement in Scaife-financed press agencies during the Pittsburgh billionaire’s earlier adventures, this method of obscuring the purpose of Scaife’s money skirted the edges of propriety. Certainly it violated the transparency intended by the tax laws governing nonprofit and allegedly charitable or educational organizations like the Spectator Foundation. On the foundation’s internal documents and on the annual tax forms it filed with the Internal Revenue Service, the payments to Boynton were reported as “legal fees.” But Boynton was performing no legal services for the magazine. Internal Spectator Foundation tax documents recorded far lower total legal expenses, for services provided by other law firms (including Ted Olson’s firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher).
Moreover, the amounts transferred to Boynton were substantial. By January 1995, the sum advanced to the Virginia lawyer-lobbyist (usually in checks of $40,000 or more) totaled nearly $500,000. Nor did that include additional tens of thousands spent on expenses for telephone calls; books and office supplies; fees paid to writers, researchers, and other attorneys; and travel costs, along with the $800 monthly rent paid to Parker Dozhier for a house that was meant to serve as quarters for visiting Spectator personnel.
Meanwhile, the specific results of Scaife’s half-million-dollar investment during the Arkansas Project’s first year remained unknown to the magazine’s regular staff. Most assumed that Bob Tyrrell was running the operation himself. That was definitely the view taken by managing editor Wladyslaw Plesczynski, who regarded the project as Bob’s plaything, not to be confused with the normal business of the Spectator, which Plesczynski actually ran on a daily basis.
In a confidential memorandum written a few years later, Plesczynski recalled his own pointed skepticism about the Arkansas Project. “Initially Boynton and Henderson would occasionally mention a few things to me about the situation in Arkansas, but I wasn’t impressed by what they had to say. They seemed to have a source or two—David Hale, Parker Dozhier—but not much more than that. There always seemed to be lots of hush-hush and heavy breathing, but it never amounted to anything concrete enough for a story. In any event, I got the sense [that] Henderson spent most of his time with Bob when dealing with someone at the magazine, and Bob never asked me to pay any attention to Boynton and Henderson’s work. He seemed completely content to have them all to himself.”
As the sardonic memo conceded, Boynton and Henderson’s constant trips to Arkansas did bring some results, particularly in articles by James Ring Adams, one of four Spectator staff writers. Early in 1994, Adams produced a lengthy feature titled “Beyond Whitewater,” recounting the sad story of one Freddie Whitener, an otherwise obscure victim of James McDougal’s financial chicanery at Madison Guaranty. Apart from that article, which made few waves, and several contacts provided to Adams, Plesczynski and other top Spectator personnel were only dimly aware of what Boynton and Henderson did during their sojourns in Little Rock and Hot Springs. But as his passing reference to Hale and Dozhier indicates, Plesczynski seemed aware that the Arkansas Project maintained a close connection with the independent counsel’s key Whitewater witness.
Indeed, a significant portion of the project’s energy during its first year was directed toward the care and feeding of Hale, whose cooperation agreement with Robert Fiske, the first Whitewater independent counsel, was negotiated in the spring of 1994. From that point onward, Hale became a virtual ward of the U.S. government, from which he received a tax-free annual stipend of $60,000 for his services as a federal witness. In the meantime, however, he had lost or forfeited the ill-gotten assets from the frauds that had led to his indictment, along with his salary as a municipal judge. To all appearances Hale was a hard-up loser, a busted con artist with rapidly growing legal bills. In subsequent testimony, Hale would claim that he was so destitute that he and his wife were forced to sell their furniture to buy food. Questioned about how he paid Ted Olson’s fees, however, Hale boasted that he paid cash.
The ledgers kept by Boynton showed not only frequent visits to Arkansas, but numerous meals with Hale and his friend Dozhier, as well as airfare for Hale to Washington and expenses for sending packages to Hale’s Little Rock attorney, Randy Coleman. According to the testimony of Caryn Mann, who lived with Dozhier between late 1994 and early 1996, Hale spent much of his time residing in a cottage near the Hot Springs bait shop. “From August ’94 on, Hale was there two to three weeks a month, three or four days a week,” she recalled. “Under Fiske, he’d been in protective custody under the FBI. When Starr took over, they took that away. That was when he stayed there the most, after that.”
Accompanied much of the time by FBI special agent David F. Reign, who conducted more than forty interviews with him between March 1994 and November 1995, Hale was theoretically inaccessible to the press during the period—although he spent many hours with the Spectator team. Other frequent visitors to Dozhier’s compound on the banks of Lake Catherine included luminaries of the right-wing press, among them Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the London Sunday Telegraph and the Journal editorial page’s “investigative columnist” Micah Morrison.
Until Hale entered a federal prison in 1996, Dozhier also loaned a car to him and his wife. In 1995, Hale had an auto accident in Shreveport, Louisiana, where the Office of Independent Counsel (OIC) maintained a “safe house” for him. After the former traffic judge misidentified himself to investigating officers as Parker Dozhier, it was decided to add him and Mrs. Hale properly to the vehicle’s insurance policy. In addition, Caryn Mann and her teenage son, Joshua Rand, also recalled a steady stream of modest cash payments, in amounts ranging from $40 to $200, from Dozhier to Hale—an assertion that Dozhier, Henderson, and Hale’s attorneys hotly denied when Mann went public in 1998.
 
A native of Chicago’s South Side, Caryn Mann made her way to Hot Springs, Arkansas, by way of a failed marriage. She was working there as a funeral home administrator when she met Parker Dozhier in the process of making arrangements for his mother’s burial in February 1994. Initially, Mann found the talkative bait-shop proprietor energetic and likable. After a few dates, she and her son moved into a mobile home on Dozhier’s lakeshore property east of town.
A big-city girl from a large Italian American family, Mann felt slightly out of place at the fishing camp in the woods. But it was more than the rustic surroundings that caused her discomfort. According to Mann, Dozhier’s fascination with guns, his overt racism, his flirtation with political extremism—he wrote strident articles for a militia publication in New Mexico about an alleged government conspiracy to confiscate firearms—and his obsession with Bill Clinton gradually began to disturb her. Although a Democrat, Mann was unfamiliar with Arkansas politics. She was initially alarmed by stories about the president’s alleged involvement with embezzlement, drug smuggling, political assassination, and other crimes. “I believed Dozhier at first,” she said. “I thought, oh my God, what terrible things the president did.”
The more she saw of Dozhier and his Arkansas Project colleagues, however, the less credible she found their stories. (No stranger to speculation, Mann was something of an amateur astrologer.) To her there appeared to be a strong element of paranoia and make-believe among Dozhier’s crowd. Although the guns frightened her, she also found it faintly comical to watch Dozhier’s buddies swaggering around the fishing camp, carrying the semiautomatic pistols Dozhier furnished them on the pretext that their lives were in danger. Micah Morrison, she said, was prone to making noisy displays of his dislike for Clinton in Hot Springs restaurants and other public places. Between themselves, she and her son Josh began to refer to the Washington duo of Stephen Boynton and David Henderson as “Cisco and Pancho.”
At the beginning, the whole point of the Arkansas Project seemed to be to protect Hale from the consequence of his crimes. Dozhier even had a shelf of champagne bottles on the wall of the bait shop labeled with the names of Hale’s enemies—U.S. Attorney Paula Casey, Governor Jim Guy Tucker, Little Rock prosecutor Mark Stodola, and Hillary Rodham Clinton among them. Both Mann and her son described activities suggestive of the “source” relationship mentioned in Plesczynski’s Arkansas Project memo. Escorted by FBI agents, they said, Hale brought documents to be copied by Dozhier in an office he kept behind the bait shop, spending many evenings in intense discussion with his benefactors about developments in the Whitewater case.
“Once Kenneth Starr started dealing with David Hale,” she said, “he was dealing with P. D. whether he knew it or not. I don’t think they were sure of Starr until after Hale and Dozhier went to Washington to talk to Ted Olson. After they came back, there was a whole new level of confidence in what was going to happen.”
“Did Starr’s people know? They called there for him,” according to Mann. “The independent counsel’s office would call and ask for David Hale. How could they not know? One night during the summer of 1995, Hale came back from OIC with stacks of documents. He and Dozhier stayed up copying until 2 A.M.” Afterward, Dozhier told her “they had what they needed to bring Hillary down.” Stories began to appear in the national press to the effect that the first lady would soon be indicted. Testimony at Susan McDougal’s 1999 trial for contempt of court would reveal that Deputy Prosecutor Hickman Ewing, Jr., had drafted an indictment of Mrs. Clinton around the same time—a a document the independent counsel never presented to the Whitewater grand jury.
As Caryn Mann’s doubts about Dozhier’s activities grew, their personal relationship also deteriorated. Dozhier’s bullying of her son, to which Josh responded defiantly, only made things worse. By the time she determined that she and the boy would have to leave, Mann had become badly frightened. She was privately of the opinion that what Dozhier and his associates were up to was tantamount to “treason.”
 
The Arkansas Project’s money also helped the Spectator’s editors to cultivate a relationship with yet another former state trooper named Larry Douglass Brown, usually called “L. D.” Between 1983 and 1985, L. D. Brown had served in the security unit at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock. Better-educated and more articulate than the other bodyguards, he had developed an unusually close relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton. Then in his late twenties, Brown looked up to the sophisticated couple as friends and mentors. For him, the mansion’s atmosphere was intimate and familial. It was while he was in their orbit that he met his wife, Becky, who lived and worked at the mansion as Chelsea Clinton’s nanny. Becky’s mother, Ann McCoy, eventually became the mansion’s administrator (and went on to work in the White House). Until he fell out with the Clintons, mainly over state police politics, Brown was known as the governor’s “fair-haired boy.”
Like Patterson and Perry, the officers featured in Brock’s Troopergate story, Brown was known to be disgruntled and had been pursued by reporters since the 1992 presidential campaign. He had been a confidential source of derogatory information about alleged Clinton paramours for Sheffield Nelson (and, he claimed, Jim Guy Tucker, who denied receiving any smut from Brown) as early as 1990.
The reporter who finally persuaded L. D. Brown to talk was Spectator staff writer Daniel Wattenberg, author of a lengthy profile featured on the magazine’s May 1994 cover. “Love and Hate in Arkansas” was Troopergate’s sequel. In semiconfessional mode, Brown told how he too had solicited women for the governor; how he had enjoyed sexual “residuals” in the process; and how he had become disillusioned with the Clintons, describing them as monstrously selfish, foulmouthed snobs who secretly despised police officers and other regular folks. Openly displaying the same animus toward Hillary as the other troopers, he repeated their claims about her supposedly torrid love affair with Vince Foster. (Former Clinton aides in Arkansas insisted that Brown had been embittered by Hillary’s attempt to warn his future wife that L. D. was an incorrigible skirt chaser.)
In any case, Wattenberg forthrightly acknowledged the malice of his talkative new informant. Brown had broken bitterly with Clinton in 1985 after the governor reneged on a personal promise to appoint him assistant director of the state crime laboratory. When Clinton withdrew the offer, the furious trooper stormed out and quit his position in the security detail. He rarely spoke to Clinton after that, but they continued to feud publicly for years, mostly over what he believed to be another failed promise to support a bill funding the Arkansas State Police Association. He believed that Clinton was behind his eventual removal as the organization’s president, and had later instigated a criminal probe of the alleged misuse of association funds which led to Brown’s resignation. Portraying himself as a victim of the Clinton political machine, to many Brown appeared to be pursuing a mission of vengeance.
That mission continued long after Wattenberg’s story was forgotten. The Spectator crowd, as Brown discovered, had money and spent it freely; and the state trooper quickly found himself being courted by Boynton, Henderson, and especially Tyrrell, who brought Brown to Washington for wining and dining at his mansion in suburban Virginia. Between early February and late March, while Wattenberg worked on “Love and Hate,” the magazine paid Brown more than $10,000, listed as “travel expenses” in the Arkansas Project files.
Tyrrell in particular befriended Brown, who must have been impressed by the editor’s obvious wealth and connections. Brown had no way of knowing that the high-living editor—despite his own substantial inheritance and his frequent complaints about the Clintons’ alleged failure to pay their fair share of income taxes—had long misused the magazine’s tax-exempt funding to subsidize his extravagant tastes. The Spectator Foundation had paid one-third of the purchase price of Tyrrell’s lavish home in McLean, Virginia; had covered his large liquor bills and many other domestic expenses; had rented an apartment in New York City occasionally used by Tyrrell; had paid for his memberships at the New York Athletic Club and Washington’s exclusive Cosmos Club; and had reimbursed him for hotel and airfare on costly and frequent trips to London—all in addition to a salary that amounted to well over $250,000 a year plus the more usual benefits. No doubt Brown was awed by Tyrrell’s constant patter about London and New York nightlife, and the personally inscribed photographs of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon that hung on the walls of his big brick house. (He might have been surprised, however, to learn that the editor’s frequent drinking buddy, the right-wing Greek gossip columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, had served three months in an English prison for cocaine smuggling.) It wasn’t too long before Tyrrell discovered that Brown could tell impressive stories, too, about matters far more intriguing than Bill Clinton’s extramarital exploits.
 
 
In the fall of 1994, Brown made the stunning assertion that he could corroborate David Hale’s testimony about pressure from Clinton to lend $300,000 to Susan McDougal. Although he had never mentioned Hale to Danny Wattenberg during numerous interviews earlier that year—when the Little Rock embezzler’s name was constantly in the news—Brown now claimed to have witnessed a meeting between Clinton and Hale outside the state capitol sometime in 1985 or 1986 where the governor said, “You’re going to have to help us out. We’re going to need to raise some money.”
This incriminating memory was suddenly recovered by Brown after a year of fruitless searching by the independent counsel for any evidence connecting Clinton to the fraudulent $300,000 loan. Lacking such evidence, Starr would never be able to prove the central allegation of the Whitewater case. Even a biased source like Brown might prove useful, and investigators from Starr’s office took a statement from him, which was promptly leaked to the Washington Times. Citing “federal law enforcement sources,” the conservative daily reported on October 19 that Brown had told the independent counsel of overhearing Clinton press Hale to make the loan. Susan Schmidt followed up the next day in the Washington Post with her own interview of Brown.
The trooper’s account, which he said he had withheld until then out of fear that he would lose his job, was almost as vague as Hale’s. Exactly how vague may be deduced from the headlines of two stories which appeared side by side in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on October 23, 1994: “ARKANSAS TROOPER SAID HE SAW CLINTON PRESSURE JUDGE FOR MONEY” and “TROOPER DENIES STORY ON SBA LOAN.” Brown told the Post’s Schmidt he couldn’t recall whether he was still on the governor’s security detail or had already left to head the state police association. But Hale had placed the date in late 1985 or early 1986, well after Brown’s angry departure from the mansion. It seemed unlikely that Clinton would have conducted illicit business in front of a disgruntled former employee. When Schmidt called Hale’s lawyer, Randy Coleman, he wouldn’t confirm or deny Brown’s assertions. “You’ve got to save something for the wedding,” Coleman told her teasingly. Clinton lawyer David Kendall dismissed Brown as a liar with “an ax to grind against the president.”
Ultimately, Starr placed no more confidence in Brown’s claim than Kendall. But according to Caryn Mann, Parker Dozhier told her that he and Henderson had tried to bolster this fresh support for Hale. She claims that Dozhier told her they had debriefed Brown in a motel room while Hale sat in an adjacent room, providing questions as Dozhier went back and forth. Unable to offer a specific date for that meeting, Mann cannot be certain whether Henderson and Dozhier were trying to prepare Brown for his testimony.
“Parker said that it was important that L. D. and Hale never speak directly because it might appear like they were colluding with one another to put a story together,” recalled Mann. “But Parker said that Brown probably knew that Hale was in the room next door, because Brown made jokes about it. L. D. said, ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you guys know David Hale.’”
It is also unclear why L. D. Brown would submit to such an interrogation by agents of the Arkansas Project, except for his own growing commitment to their anti-Clinton crusade and the opportunities it presented him. Brown appears to have become convinced over time that Bob Tyrrell would believe almost anything the trooper told him. Eventually, he drew the Spectator editor into a story of international intrigue far more fantastic than his implausible but rather modest attempt to buttress Hale. Brown said he possessed direct, personal knowledge of Bill Clinton’s connection with a legendary CIA-SPONSORED narcotics-smuggling cabal, at a rural airport in the western Arkansas town of Mena.
 
The earliest rumors about the smuggling of weapons and cocaine at Mena Intermountain Regional Airport appeared in 1987, emanating from liberal and leftist opponents of the Reagan administration’s support for the Nicaraguan contra rebels. Outside Arkansas these rumors drew little attention, gaining wider circulation only when Reagan’s most fervent admirers, without a trace of self-consciousness, picked them up a few years later to discredit Bill Clinton.
Although the Mena story developed a baroque complexity with the passage of time, its essential outline was simple: The CIA had used the rural airfield as a transshipment point and staging area for its secret contra support activities, and had tolerated (or in some versions, encouraged) the importation of cocaine on planes returning from weapons drops in Central America.
A central figure in this scenario was Adler Berriman “Barry” Seal, a legendary pilot and drug smuggler who had indeed became a government informant in 1983 after being busted by the Drug Enforcement Administration. In 1984, Seal had participated in a CIA scheme to film Nicaraguan officials and Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar unloading cocaine from his plane in Managua. Seal was murdered in New Orleans two years later by hit men working for the Medellin cartel. Three Colombian gunmen were eventually convicted of the killing. On October 5, 1986, that same C-123 transport plane (known as the “Fat Lady”) crashed in the Nicaraguan jungle and set off the explosive revelation of Washington’s covert contra resupply operation. By that time, however, Barry Seal was already dead and the “Fat Lady” had long since been sold to a CIA front company.
Much additional evidence eventually emerged about the byzantine entanglement of arms purchases with cocaine smuggling during the contra war, an embarrassment that the CIA understandably tried to conceal as long as possible. Two federal grand juries in Arkansas had probed the goings-on at Mena without returning any indictments; the second grand jury was led by then U.S. attorney and later Republican representative Asa Hutchinson. Local law enforcement officials, such as IRS investigator Russell Welch and state attorney general Winston Bryant, believed that their efforts to prosecute suspected crimes at Mena had been frustrated by federal officials in Washington as part of the cover-up, “despite a mountain of evidence,” as Bryant said in 1990. As the contra war receded into history, however, the Mena story faded too, until it reappeared as an accusation against Clinton.
Revived by Clinton critics in The Nation magazine and other left-leaning outlets during the 1992 presidential campaign, but never pursued by mainstream reporters, the story proved fascinating to conservatives who previously had ridiculed all the charges of contra drug smuggling. Their belated acceptance of the Mena story necessarily implicated such right-wing icons as Oliver North, George Bush, and Ronald Reagan, of course, along with the contra leaders, in a vast narcotics enterprise.
That troubling aspect of the Mena conspiracy didn’t seem to alarm its new promoters, so long as most blame fell upon the former Arkansas governor. Reagan and Bush were history, after all, while Clinton was president; Reaganite complicity in contra drug trafficking could be treated as a footnote to garish headlines about the former Arkansas governor. In this convenient refurbishing of the Mena story, it was Clinton who had tolerated the illicit guns-for-drugs operation, enforced the cover-up, and, in the most outlandish versions, siphoned off a tidy profit from “billions” in narcodollars passing through the backwoods airstrip.
 
As the original popularizer of Clinton mythology, Larry Nichols naturally had concocted his own variation on the Mena theme, cleverly tying it into the Arkansas Development Finance Authority—the state agency from which Clinton had fired Nichols—to lend an air of authority. His narration of the Clinton Chronicles video suggests that Dan Lasater, the Arkansas investment banker, Clinton contributor and convicted cocaine user, was involved somehow with smuggling at Mena, using the ADFA as a money-washing machine. Nichols went so far as to claim that he had seen cargo planes loaded with cocaine at the airfield (although apparently he never bothered to report these blatant felonies to anyone in law enforcement).
Thousands of credulous viewers no doubt accepted all this creative yarn spinning, but Nichols’s wild accusations were unlikely to convince a wider and presumably more sophisticated audience. The daunting task of verifying them was taken up by the agents of the Arkansas Project.
Bob Tyrrell seems to have been particularly captivated by Nichols’s assertions. His interest was further piqued by the small-press publication that spring of Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA by Terry Reed and journalist John Cummings. According to Reed, a pilot, machinist, and former air force officer who claimed to have worked with Seal, he had been recruited by Oliver North to assist a secret contra-training operation in Arkansas. A highlight of Reed’s seven-hundred-page memoir, which sold well thanks to heavy promotion by Floyd Brown and the right-wing talk-radio circuit, is his account of an alleged 1986 meeting at a “bunker” somewhere outside Little Rock.
Gathered to clean up the Mena operation at this clandestine conclave were Reed himself, North, former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, Bush’s future attorney general William Barr (traveling then under the name “Johnson”), and of course Governor Clinton and Clinton’s ADFA director, Bobby Nash. As Reed tells it, they squabbled Hollywood-style over whether the 10 percent skimmed from smuggling proceeds by the state of Arkansas should be taken from the profit or the gross. Speaking as the representative of CIA director William Casey, Barr concluded the meeting with this soothing advice for the ambitious governor: “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. You and your state have been our greatest asset. 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 wanted me to pass on to you that unless you fuck up and do something stupid, you’re No.1 on the short list for a shot at the job you’ve always wanted. That’s pretty heady stuff, Bill. So why don’t you help us keep a lid on this, and we’ll all be promoted together.” A few pages later, Reed meets with Clinton in a parked van outside a Mexican restaurant to discuss Barry Seal’s assassination, while the governor of Arkansas casually smokes a joint: “He took a long, deep drag. After holding it in until his cheeks bulged, he then exhaled slowly and deliberately.”
Terry Reed found his way to Boynton and Henderson. Arkansas Project records show numerous meetings that Boynton and Henderson held with Reed and his lawyers in New York City (at the time Reed was involved in at least two lawsuits, both of which he would later drop). Early on, they also brought Reed to the Spectator offices to tell his amazing revelations. The bedazzled Tyrrell introduced him to Wlady Plesczynski, David Brock, and other staff members, all of whom found his story unbelievable. Later, Plesczynski bluntly rejected Henderson’s suggestion that the Spectator publish an excerpt from Compromised—the first of a series of skirmishes at the magazine over Tyrrell’s Mena fixation.
Convinced that proof of a link to drug-smuggling could finish Clinton, Tyrrell became a Mena enthusiast. But the amateur sleuths of the Arkansas Project couldn’t be expected to crack such a formidable case without professional assistance. For this and other tasks requiring investigative expertise, Boynton and Henderson had engaged the services of Rex Armistead, a sixty-five-year-old private detective recommended by their trusted adviser, Justice Jim Johnson.
 
 
After more than three decades in and around Southern law enforcement, Armistead had acquired a high profile and a decidedly mixed reputation. In 1983, the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger described him as “a flamboyant policeman who worked hard and sometimes took a few shortcuts during his thirty-five-year career.” A tall, bulky, bald-headed figure usually sporting gold jewelry and sunglasses, he flew his own airplane and sometimes arrived at a crime scene driving a Lincoln Continental. He was renowned for his underworld contacts, particularly in the so-called Dixie Mafia, and had killed at least nine people “in the line of duty.” Testifying in a 1985 lawsuit the veteran cop explained, “I never shot anybody that was not armed. I sleep very well at night.”
Though he was the scion of a wealthy Delta cotton-growing family, and surely was bright enough to enter college, Armistead instead opted for a job as deputy county sheriff of rural Coahoma County at the age of eighteen. Several years later, after serving as the local constable, he obtained an appointment as an investigator for the Mississippi Highway Patrol, where he continued working, frequently undercover, until 1975. That year he moved on to head the Regional Organized Crime Information Center, a federally funded coordinating office based in New Orleans, where he simultaneously participated in the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force, pursuing cases against the crime family of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello. When the ROCIC moved to Memphis in 1978, he went with it. Armistead retired from police work in 1982 to set up shop as a detective and security consultant in West Memphis, Arkansas, where his primary clients were in the oil and trucking businesses.
For the unique needs of the Arkansas Project, Armistead possessed important connections—especially his ties to federal law enforcement through the ROCIC and his stint in New Orleans, which had once served as the headquarters of Barry Seal’s smuggling network. His expertise in organized crime might also prove useful in a major narcotics investigation such as the Mena case.
But at least as significant as Armistead’s professional credentials was his political pedigree, reflected in his endorsement by Jim Johnson, the old segregationist and perennial Clinton opponent. They had met while Armistead served under John Bell Williams, the last openly racist governor of Mississippi.
Their paths had crossed again in 1992, when Johnson tried to find a letter that Clinton had written to a Mississippi draft board in the sixties endorsing conscientious-objector status for Paul Parish, a fellow Rhodes scholar from the Magnolia State. As Johnson later told an interviewer, he asked Mississippi senator Trent Lott for help in retrieving the Clinton letter. After his request to Lott, Johnson said, “I was subsequently contacted by Colonel Rex Armistead of Lula, Mississippi. Colonel Armistead was the head of the Mississippi State Police when my friend, former Congressman John Bell Williams, was Governor of Mississippi.” The letter never turned up, but within a year or so Armistead was working for Johnson’s friends in the Arkansas Project.
The “colonel”’s notoriety dated back to the infamous rioting against integration at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962, when Armistead is reputed to have flown retired general Edwin Walker to the Ole Miss campus from Dallas. Walker had resigned his commission after being suspended for ultraright propagandizing within the army and turned to agitating full-time for the John Birch Society and similar organizations.
Hoping to spark a rebellion at Ole Miss, the paranoid general helped to rally more than three thousand angry whites to prevent the court-ordered enrollment of a lone black student named James Meredith. In a radio speech, he cried: “Bring your flags, your tents, and your skillets! It is time! Now or never!” (He was later arrested, along with about two hundred others, and charged with federal offenses, including “insurrection:”) Before army units arrived to quell the mob, scores of federal marshals and National Guardsmen were wounded by rocks, Molotov cocktails, and shotgun pellets; a British journalist and a civilian bystander were killed by rifle fire.
While Armistead’s cameo appearance in the Ole Miss disturbances maybe apocryphal, there is no doubt that his earliest patron was Paul Johnson, Jr., the lieutenant governor who physically blocked Meredith from entering the university campus. The following year, Armistead flew Johnson around the state during his successful run for governor. (The candidate displayed his qualifications to succeed Ross Barnett by referring publicly to the NAACP as “Niggers, Alligators, Apes, Coons and Possums.”)
Upon taking office, the new governor rewarded Armistead with an appointment to the highway patrol as a plainclothes investigator. In that capacity Armistead worked mostly at the direct command of the governor, in particular as his official liaison with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission—an official propaganda and police outfit that spied on civil rights workers, prominent blacks, white liberals, and other suspected “subversives,” while funding and promoting the White Citizens Councils.
Armistead rose to prominence in the Mississippi police apparatus during an era of wanton official terrorism and repression against blacks and civil rights workers. One of the worst incidents occurred two years after he was appointed chief investigator of the highway patrol by Governor Williams. In May 1970, Armistead was present at predominantly black Jackson State College when city and state police officers opened fire on unarmed student protesters, killing two and wounding twelve. After the gunfire ended, the police picked up hundreds of shell casings to prevent ballistics identification of their weapons, in an obvious obstruction of justice. A congressional investigation of the Jackson State incident rejected Armistead’s claim that “sniper” fire had provoked the deadly fusillade aimed at a women’s dormitory.
Two years later another new governor took office and promptly demoted Armistead, who quit the highway patrol in 1975 and moved to New Orleans. His tenure at the ROCIC created further controversy, with the American Civil Liberties Union accusing him of conducting unlawful surveillance of law-abiding citizens. (Law enforcement officials in Memphis and Little Rock complained that Armistead had little to show for the $2 million budget his organization received annually from the Justice Department.)
Within a year after he entered the private sector, Armistead provoked a searing political scandal back in his home state. Bill Allain, the Democratic candidate for governor, charged in October 1983 that the hulking detective had masterminded a Republican plot to smear him as a homosexual. As a former assistant attorney general for the state of Mississippi, Allain had encountered the ex–highway patrol officer on other occasions. “If you know Rex Armistead like I know Rex Armistead,” he told the Jackson Daily News, “this is his bag, this is his kind of thing.”
Armistead denied that he had done anything more than interview a few police officers about the allegations against Allain. But he had made the mistake of bringing the charges to the attention of Charles Thompson, a producer for 20/20, the ABC News magazine program. Thompson and correspondent Geraldo Rivera went down to Jackson to investigate the story, and quickly uncovered a clumsy scheme by prominent Mississippi Republicans—notably including Armistead’s personal attorney and longtime friend, William Spell, Jr.—to pay three black transvestite prostitutes to falsely implicate Allain. Under questioning by Rivera on camera, all three recanted their slurs against the Democrat.
Waving off any notion that he was the “instigator … behind this plot,” Armistead insisted that he had merely helped out as a favor to Bill Spell. He seemed to regard the Republican dirty trick as a kind of civil duty. “If the man is a homosexual, the public has a right to know,” he said of Allain, who passed a lie detector test and went on to win the election.
 
Armistead’s costly investigate efforts for the Arkansas Project focused largely upon Mena and the death of Vince Foster, according to David Brock, who met with the detective at an airport hotel in Miami during the winter of 1995. For two days the young writer sat listening and taking notes as Armistead, Henderson, Boynton, and Tyrrell discussed their theories about the Foster and Mena cases. The short version was that Armistead had spent a small fortune, traveling as far as Belize and Costa Rica, without producing evidence that implicated Clinton in any wrongdoing at the rural airport or anywhere else. As they talked, Brock recalled, Armistead occasionally dropped a racist remark. Henderson and Boynton didn’t seem to notice. They thought Armistead “was great,” but “he struck me as a shady character. Actually, I thought they were all putting on a show for Bob, to make the money they were spending look worthwhile.”
As a conservative, Brock also found it strange that the Spectator would lend credence to a contra-cocaine story, with all its obviously ugly implications for Republican heroes like Reagan, Bush, and North. But as he learned in Miami, Tyrrell planned to spin the contra-cocaine allegations not only against Clinton but also Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who had first exposed evidence linking the contras to the drug trade back in 1986. The editor wanted Brock to prepare an expose, based on Armistead’s research, that would affect Kerry’s reelection chances in 1996. Its proposed thesis was that the senator, a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran, had aided Communists in Central America and covered up drug dealing by leftists in the region. According to Brock’s notes of their meeting, Armistead claimed to have a source who could place Kerry and the president of Costa Rica together at a fishing resort that was also “a big drug transfer point.”
Soon after the Miami conference, Brock quietly decided to avoid the Kerry piece and any assignments related to the Arkansas Project or Rex Armistead. He and other staffers later tried to convince Tyrrell that using Mena against Clinton made no sense, that Reed’s allegations were ridiculous, and that publishing this kind of dubious material would damage the Spectator’s reputation. There were many angry arguments at the magazine and at least one resignation prompted by disagreement over Tyrrell’s obsession. Brock came to feel that arguing with his boss about Mena was a waste of time: “Bob never made a coherent case for any of this stuff. If it would damage Clinton, that was the bottom line. Bob had no regard for the credibility of these sources.”
 
If Brock, Plesczynski, and most of their colleagues weren’t buying Armistead’s goods, other journalists were. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the London Sunday Telegraph and Micah Morrison of the Wall Street Journal editorial page both spent considerable time at Parker Dozhier’s bait shop, picking up leads and documents. (Evans-Pritchard quotes Armistead at length on the Dixie Mafia in his 1997 book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton.) The few Spectator staffers like Brock who spent any time in Arkansas eventually realized that the project’s material was turning up in other publications. Had the Spectator writers been aware of the dollar amounts being spent on Boynton, Henderson, and Armistead, they probably would have been even more appalled. (Adding insult to injury was the bureaucratic description of the Arkansas Project in correspondence between the Spectator Foundation and Scaife’s office. In those letters it was formally designated the “Editorial Improvement Project.”) Boynton’s ledger shows that before the project ended in 1997, the Mississippi detective collected more than $375,000 in monthly fees and expenses.
A separate document from the Spectator’s files shows that Boynton and Henderson were even more generous with themselves. Starting with monthly compensation of $12,500 for Boynton and $10,000 for Henderson, and adding on the annual raises they awarded themselves, their combined draw from Scaife’s tax-exempt “charitable” largesse totaled well over $1 million (excluding expenses) between January 1994 and June 1997. Boynton’s share came to nearly $600,000, while Henderson got just over $475,000.
With such loose financial controls, it may never be known how much of Scaife’s cash, if any, ended up with David Hale. But there are numerous entries in the ledgers that don’t seem to correspond with actual expenses—such as “article fees” paid to Brock, who got a biweekly salary check and said he received no such fees.
Neither Tyrrell nor the Spectator’s publisher, Ronald Burr, received any regular accounting of the project’s expenditures. Parker Dozhier, however, was at least dimly aware that his $1,000 monthly stipend compared poorly with the money being lavished on Rex Armistead, according to Caryn Mann. “He was very jealous and angry about Armistead, because when Rex was hired, P. D. went into rages, [saying] Armistead was getting money he should be getting.”
 
The frenetic efforts of the Arkansas Project took on a greater political salience when the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1995. Newt Gingrich, the incoming Speaker of the House, had warned before the midterm election that he planned to use “subpoena power” to wage war against the White House. In a private speech to business lobbyists at the Capitol Hill Club, he envisioned as many as twenty congressional committees simultaneously investigating the Democratic administration, which he called “the enemy of normal Americans.” The new chairmen of the House and Senate Banking Committees both announced that they intended to resume investigating the Clintons under the rubric of Whitewater.
This power shift immediately enhanced the influence of Floyd Brown and David Bossie, the Citizens United duo who had served as the early impresarios of Whitewater. “People who answer our phone calls now have ‘Chairman’ before their names,” Brown bragged to The Nation magazine, which described him as “elated by the prospect of a swarm of subpoenas flying off Capitol Hill toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” Brown said he was urging the new congressional leadership to “reopen the probe into the death of White House counsel Vince Foster and to investigate the drug smuggling in Mena, Arkansas.”
Justice Jim Johnson, Brown’s Arkansas mentor, also viewed Mena as an urgent matter. With characteristic hyperbole, he told an interviewer in February 1995 that there was “absolutely no doubt in my mind that the government of the United States was an active participant in one of the largest dope operations in the world, and that the [former] Governor of Arkansas enjoyed a benefit from its success.”
It was hardly a coincidence that Floyd Brown’s announced priorities for the new Congress mirrored Justice Jim’s concerns and Rex Armistead’s investigation. Brown and Bossie had remained in close contact with Johnson and the Spectator’s team while cultivating members and staff on Capitol Hill who might make use of the Arkansas Project. The Senate Banking Committee, with jurisdiction over the revived Whitewater investigation, had several receptive members, including its new chairman, Alfonse D’Amato, and the implacable North Carolina conservative Lauch Faircloth (who hired Bossie as a full-time committee aide in 1996).
Whitewater also topped the agenda of the House Banking Committee, taken over by ranking Republican James Leach of Iowa. Leach had a reputation for fairness and moderate, almost liberal, politics, making him an unlikely ally of Clinton’s enemies. But the Iowan had been close to President Bush and strongly disliked the man who had displaced him; almost from the beginning, he had adopted Whitewater as a personal crusade. (His zeal may also have been encouraged by the growing power of the religious right in his home state’s Republican Party. During the 1992 Iowa GOP caucuses, delegates loyal to the Christian Coalition had controlled forty-two of forty-six precincts.)
As early as March 1994, Leach had declared on the House floor that “Whitewater is about the arrogance of power,” accusing Clinton of “Machiavellian machinations of a single party government” that had virtually caused the entire savings and loan crisis. He compared Bill Clinton’s Arkansas to Huey Long’s Louisiana. The basis for that and other Leach speeches had been furnished by Citizens United, with information funneled from David Bossie to Leach’s press secretary, Joe Pinder. And Pinder, worried that his respectable boss would be tainted by proximity to those disreputable right-wingers, took care to keep his relationship with Bossie a secret. They never left their full names in phone messages, and met to exchange information in restaurants far from the Capitol.
Unsurprisingly then, the press releases handed to reporters by Pinder were virtually indistinguishable from Citizens United materials. A “preliminary briefing” prepared by Pinder in August 1995 for the committee hearings starred L. Jean Lewis, the Resolution Trust Corporation investigator who would testify about “events that suggest an effort by RTC Washington and highly placed political appointees at the Department of Justice to suppress or at least control her criminal referrals” regarding Madison Guaranty. Featured in villainous supporting roles were Hillary Clinton; Beverly Bassett Schaffer, the former Arkansas securities commissioner who allegedly helped Madison at Hillary’s behest; and an RTC attorney named April Breslaw, who Lewis claimed had tried to kill the Madison probe in February 1994 (and whom Lewis had “accidentally” taped during a meeting in her office).
Around the same time, Citizens United distributed a “Whitewater’s Most Wanted” poster with caricatures of Bassett Schaffer (over the phrase “AT LARGE” in red) and Breslaw (“RTC FLUNKY”). Over the protest of committee Democrats, Leach had decided to call none of these women to dispute Lewis’s accusations, nor any of the relevant officials from the Arkansas Securities Commission or the Federal Home Loan Bank Board whose testimony would contradict Lewis. Along with Bassett Schaffer and Breslaw, the first lady would be tried publicly in absentia.
 
The most important media outlets in Washington continued to play up the burgeoning scandal. Led by the New York Times’s Jeff Gerth and the Washington Post’s Susan Schmidt, both recipients of the November 1993 leaks of L. Jean Lewis’s criminal referrals, the press overwhelmingly took the Citizens United line in previewing the upcoming House hearings. Doing so required some real creativity. With the hearing scheduled to begin on Monday, August 8, GOP staffers made a preemptive leak late on the previous Friday afternoon. Anticipating that Democrats would attack Lewis’s motives, they released a number of documents damaging, if not downright devastating, to her credibility. Among them were former U.S. attorney Charles Banks’s letter refusing to pursue her allegations against the Clintons on the basis of weak evidence and political bias, and internal FBI cables and Justice Department appraisals that concluded: “No facts can be identified to support the designation of President Bill Clinton [or] Hillary Rodham Clinton … as material witnesses to the allegations made in the criminal referral.”
The Associated Press distributed a story quoting and summarizing those documents over the weekend. The New York Times, however, did not. No mention of their existence ever appeared in the newspaper of record. The broadcast media as usual followed the Times’s lead. The Washington Post buried a brief version of the AP story on an inside page.
Burying exculpatory material about Whitewater was becoming routine. On June 26, Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Joan Pollock had published details of a preliminary report prepared for the RTC by the San Francisco law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro. So closely was the firm identified with its principal Washington partner, Jay Stephens, the former Reagan and Bush administration U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, that White House aide George Stephanopoulos had bitterly protested its selection to probe the Clinton’s Whitewater investment. But the Pillsbury Report’s preliminary findings could hardly have been more favorable to the White House.
“A long-awaited report on the collapse of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan,” reported the Journal, “corroborates most of President and Mrs. Clinton’s assertions about their Whitewater real estate investment.” Specifically, Pollock wrote, the Pillsbury Report “shows that the Clintons were passive investors in Whitewater Development Corp. and weren’t involved in its financial transactions until 1986 [when state and federal regulators removed Jim McDougal from control of the institution] … . That is significant because of allegations that funds transferred from Madison to Whitewater before 1986 contributed to the thrift’s collapse.” The report also verified the amount lost by the Clintons on their investment with McDougal—just over $43,000. To any reporter who took the time to read it carefully, the report’s 143-page history of the Whitewater Development Corporation (with 768 footnotes) completely refuted the conventional wisdom. Without the Clintons’ knowledge, their deranged partner had looted their investment. “More and more,” the Pillsbury Report noted, “the McDougals lacked the money to pay their personal debts, so increasingly they transferred money between entities they owned or controlled to cover their obligations to third persons.” One of those entities was Whitewater. But few reporters did read it, and those who did managed to ignore McDougal’s chicanery. By the time the New York Times got around to it weeks later, reporters Jeff Gerth and Stephen Engleberg told readers that the Pillsbury Report’s real significance was that the Clintons had failed to pay “their half of Whitewater’s losses.” That Jim McDougal had deceived his partners did not strike the Times as worth reporting.
 
The House hearings that began on August 8, 1995, hardly lived up to their advance billing. In his opening remarks, Leach portrayed Jean Lewis as the protagonist of “an uplifting and indeed heroic story of middle Americans, public servants in obscure government agencies who refused to be cowed by the power structure.” And as predicted on page Al of that morning’s New York Times by Jeff Gerth, Lewis made sweeping charges of a conspiracy to “obstruct” her Madison probe at the highest levels of government. When asked by Democrats to identify any of these officials by name, however, she couldn’t. She also failed to provide any evidence that Whitewater had helped to sink the ailing thrift. The “obstructions” turned out to be two delays, of one and two weeks respectively, by RTC and Department of Justice lawyers examining her referrals.
When the tape of her recorded conversation with RTC lawyer April Breslaw was played aloud, it became obvious that Lewis had significantly misconstrued their conversation. During her prepared testimony, Lewis had stated boldly: “It is clear that Ms. Breslaw was there to deliver a message that, quote, The people at the top would like to be able to say Whitewater did not cause a loss to Madison, close quote. Of course, Whitewater did cause a financial loss to Madison, and Madison’s failure cost the American taxpayer millions of dollars.”
But Lewis, it turned out, did not accurately recount Breslaw’s words. First, the statement attributed to the RTC lawyer simply did not appear in her tape-recorded remarks. What she had in fact confided to Lewis was a bureaucratic truism: If they could do so honestly, the RTC’s top officials would be relieved to be left out of a high-stakes political probe. Even so, the tape also showed Breslaw pressing Lewis for definitive evidence that Whitewater had helped sink Madison Guaranty. Despite her categorical statements to that effect, Lewis provided none. Nor, it turned out, had she troubled herself to read the RTC’s own Pillsbury Report, dated four months earlier.
None of these weaknesses in her testimony appeared in the pages of the Times or the Washington Post—where Susan Schmidt reported that “Lewis gave a detailed description of how [her] investigation … was thwarted by [RTC] and Justice Department officials after Bill Clinton was elected president.” Schmidt was the reporter whom Lewis claimed to have banished empty-handed from her doorstep in November 1993. Only the Wall Street Journal reported that FBI and Justice documents belied Lewis’s allegations and noted that Lewis “didn’t seem wholly credible … [and] struck many as ready to draw the most incriminating conclusions from ambiguous circumstances.”
Two days later, Leach reversed himself and allowed April Breslaw to testify. Expressing shock at her treatment by Lewis and Leach, the RTC attorney pointed out that she couldn’t have tried to quash the Whitewater probe, which by the time she and Lewis had spoken in February 1994 was already in the hands of independent counsel Robert Fiske. To his credit, the chairman apologized for tarring Breslaw without first listening to her side of the story. Leach wasn’t as kind to Beverly Bassett Schaffer, who was never permitted to testify in the House despite Democratic protests.
The fizzling of the August hearings appeared not to discourage Leach, who clearly was determined to pursue the Clintons into the following election year. David Bossie and Joe Pinder had plans, too. Before summer’s end they had moved on to Mena, a fresher and sexier topic that had suddenly resurfaced in the pages of the Spectator and the Wall Street Journal thanks to the ever-improving memory of a compelling new eyewitness: Trooper L. D. Brown.
 
According to Tyrrell’s account in his disparaging biography, Boy Clinton, L. D. Brown first unburdened himself about Mena in late 1994 or early 1995, a few months after he spoke out publicly in support of David Hale. An interview concerning Hale that Brown gave to ABC News never made the air, Tyrrell writes, because Clinton attorney David Kendall filled the ears of network executives with invective against the trooper, calling him a “pathological liar.” Infuriated, Brown confided in Tyrrell, telling his eager listener a sensational tale that the editor finally convinced him to reveal in the pages of the Spectator. Having failed to interest any other writer on the magazine’s exasperated staff to write it up, Tyrrell published Brown’s story under his own name in the July 1995 issue.
It was a conspiratorial blockbuster. Brown claimed that in the spring of 1984, with Clinton’s eager help, he had applied for employment with the CIA. Five months later, even before the trooper had been interviewed by the spy agency, a clandestine operative (whom he later identified as Donald Gregg, the former ambassador to South Korea and national security adviser to Vice President Bush) lured Brown into “moonlighting” as a CIA contract employee. His first assignment, on October 23, 1984, was to accompany Barry Seal on a covert flight from Mena to Central America aboard a C-123K transport plane, the famed “Fat Lady.” The mission consisted of parachuting pallets of M16 rifles to the contras and picking up some “duffel bags” at a Honduran airport before flying home. According to Brown, Clinton behaved as if he knew about Brown’s adventure. “You having any fun yet?” he asked playfully at the mansion.
Brown told Tyrrell how he discovered the terrible truth at the end of his second trip with Seal on Christmas Eve. After they returned to Mena, the pilot reached into a duffel bag in the back of his car, pulling out $2,500 in cash and a kilo of cocaine, which he handed to Brown. The shaken trooper immediately confronted Clinton when he got home to Little Rock.
“Do you know what they’re bringing back on those planes?” he demanded. “They’re bringing back coke.” Clinton took this news quite calmly. “That’s Lasater’s deal,” he supposedly said, casually implicating a campaign contributor who also employed his brother Roger Clinton.
At this point, Brown recalled yet another incriminating tidbit he had neglected to mention a year earlier to Danny Wattenberg. As the governor’s bodyguard, he now recalled, he had accompanied Clinton to parties given by Dan Lasater where the entertainment had included “young girls” and “plenty of cocaine.” In this completed scenario, everything fit together exactly the way Larry Nichols had explained it in The Clinton Chronicles.
(A year later, only weeks before the 1996 election, Brown added yet another new element to his narrative: Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban exile and longtime CIA operative, allegedly had showed up at the governor’s mansion in January 1985 and, in brief summary, tried to entice Brown into assassinating one of the Mena accomplices in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The target, Brown claims to have discovered later, was none other than Terry Reed, whose book also fingers Rodriguez, a well-known associate of Oliver North in covert airdrops to the contras. Brown’s saga ended with him ditching an unfired weapon, flying home conscience-stricken from Mexico after a few days in the sun with his wife, and rejecting all further overtures from Rodriguez.)
 
Tyrrell professed amazement that his interview with Brown received so little media attention. The only significant response appeared on the Journal editorial page, which had published lengthy articles on Mena and related Arkansas drug arcana by Micah Morrison. Under the headline “Investigate Mena,” the newspaper’s lead editorial on July 10, 1995, declared that “a congressional committee with resources [and] subpoena power should look into this. If some chips fall on the Republican side, so be it.”
Evidently Jim Leach agreed. On July 11, the House Banking Committee chairman wrote to Vice Admiral John McConnell, the director of the National Security Agency, to request an immediate briefing on any information gathered by the supersecret intelligence agency about “money laundering in Arkansas in the late 1980s.” The Iowa Republican admitted he was pursuing “tales” from the press and the Internet, and had a list of specific allegations in mind, including “the laundering of drug money … through Mena, Arkansas”; “any covert activities by the U.S. government or any private parties (the so-called private benefactors) in or around Mena in the late 1980s”; and “any contractual or other relationship [of NSA] with the late Adler Berriman ‘Barry’ Seal.”
Appearing on C-SPAN a month later to talk about Whitewater, Leach hinted that he would investigate Mena. “There are activities at an airport that have been ruled outside the scope of these hearings,” he told host Brian Lamb. “But it is possible that we can hold later hearings to address those issues.”
Although Leach eventually spent more than a year (and an untold sum of his committee’s budget) delving into Mena, he never held any public hearings on the subject. But the congressman’s interest in the topic was sufficient to excite scandal buffs in the right-wing press, notably at the New York Post, where financial columnist John Crudele published frequent updates on the ever-widening probe, beginning with this dispatch on July 28: “Leach’s recent hearings on the Whitewater scandal will probably be expanded to look into the operations of the Arkansas Development and [sic] Finance Authority (ADFA) as well as the events that took place at Mena.”
To the dismay of his staff, Bob Tyrrell also continued to chase the Mena story for many months. He hired another detective to work the same beat in the fall of 1995. This second gumshoe was William T. “Tom” Golden, a former military intelligence officer who sometimes introduced himself as a Hollywood producer named “Tom Spielberg.” Golden had showed up in an army intelligence sideshow of the Iran-contra affair known as “Operation Yellow Fruit.” In 1983, after a stint as assistant military attaché in the U.S. embassy in Managua, a spy post, he was assigned to Yellow Fruit to learn how the project’s managers had spent huge sums of money advanced by the Pentagon for covert operations. What he discovered was that roughly $324 million intended to benefit the Nicaraguan contras and various other secret operations had been stolen by the officers in charge of Yellow Fruit. Golden turned his findings over to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, which spent years prosecuting his leads. After his retirement, Golden had set up shop as a private investigator in the southwest Arkansas town of Glenwood, not far from Mena itself.
Golden’s invoices, marked “Arkansas Project,” went directly to Tyrrell. More detailed than Boynton’s records, they trace a peripatetic two-year search for documentation of the Mena story in Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, Missouri, and Arkansas. Some expenditures indicate work on other leads, such as his entry of $110 for “dinner and drinks with Independent Counsel source regarding Hillary Clinton possible indictment.” (Another entry documents “dinner with Garland County prosecutor, Karen Fuller.” But Garland County has no prosecutor, and the district of which it is a part has never employed anyone named Karen Fuller. The best-known Arkansas citizen with that name is the evening news anchor on KATV, the ABC television affiliate in Little Rock. That Karen Fuller said she has never heard of Tom Golden or “Tom Spielberg.”)
The former army spy also provided some research on the Vince Foster case and for articles by James Ring Adams. And at one point in March 1997, Golden paid $5,000 for unspecified services to L. D. Brown, who had also established his own investigation business. By that time, the Arkansas Project’s pursuit of Mena had come full circle, with a payment to the story’s original source. Golden later conceded to a producer for CNBC that despite all the strenuous legwork, he had found no credible evidence of Clinton’s involvement in any illegal activities at Mena.
In the meantime, Rex Armistead’s activities had taken an ugly turn, reminiscent of his role in the Bill Allain smear. He had commenced a side investigation of Cable News Network correspondent John Camp. The CNN correspondent learned that Armistead was trying to discredit him when Patricia Byrd, his former wife, called with a warning in the fall of 1996. The two had been divorced for twelve years but maintained a friendly relationship. Byrd told her former husband about a distressing telephone call she had received from a man who identified himself as Rex Armistead. The detective had called her at home, asking about their marriage and Camp’s personal life, obviously looking for dirt. “I said that I didn’t know anything derogatory,” said Byrd, an assistant district attorney in Louisiana. “But he still persisted and kept trying to ask me questions.”
Armistead prepared a report on Camp and members of his family that turned up in the files of the House Banking Committee. A spokesman for the committee later admitted to reporter Murray Waas that its investigators had frequently spoken with Armistead, although he denied that the Mississippi detective had provided any information about John Camp. The spokesman didn’t explain why Leach’s aides had compiled personal information about a journalist.
There was no mystery, however, as to how Camp had attracted the attention of the Arkansas Project operatives. Beginning in 1994, the award-winning CNN correspondent had filed a number of reports casting doubt on the premises of the Whitewater scandal. After spending several days poring over documents in pursuit of an angle, he once told a National Press Club forum sponsored by Harper’s magazine, “I emerged with a huge dilemma. Was I going to believe the New York Times, or was I going to believe my lying eyes? And my choice … was to believe my lying eyes, because the documentary evidence did not support the premise of the initial story in March of 1992.”
Besides filing a sympathetic interview with beleaguered Arkansas securities commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer, Camp had profiled Dan Lasater, the Little Rock investment banker whom Larry Nichols and L. D. Brown had designated as the chief malefactor in the Mena story. Camp showed him as a reformed drug abuser who had found religion in prison. But what may really have turned the ire of the Arkansas Project upon the CNN veteran was his debunking of L. D. Brown’s tale of flying from Mena, Arkansas, to Central America on October 23, 1984.
Barry Seal’s C-123 did in fact make a flight that day, one of two days it left the ground that year—according to Arkansas State Police surveillance files that may well have been available to L. D. Brown. But it turned out that Seal had a different passenger on that particular date, namely John Camp himself. Then working for TV station WBRZ in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Camp and his crew were making a film documentary about Seal’s career as smuggler turned DEA informant. The Peabody Award—winning program was broadcast in November 1984. Camp and his crew had flown up from Baton Rouge with Seal before dawn that morning, spent the entire day shooting film, and returned with him to Louisiana late that night.
They had flown nowhere near Central America, and they had picked up no guns, no cocaine, and nobody resembling L. D. Brown.