A massive drug-running operation out of Mena, Ark., apparently had a guardian angel.
And congressional investigators are now trying to find out who interfered with the ability of law-enforcement authorities to stop the flow of Latin American cocaine into that state and why.
The matter is also likely to soon be incorporated into the massive probe of Arkansas state corruption now being conducted by Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr.
The drug-running venture poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Arkansas during the mid-1980s. And many believe it was at the root of substantial financial corruption now being uncovered in that state.
According to two Arkansas State troopers who I've interviewed by telephone this week, law-enforcement authorities were within minutes of confiscating an aircraft they thought was being used by Barry Seal to smuggle cocaine.
Seal was believed to have been a CIA operative who had been enlisted to smuggle guns from Mena, Ark., to Contra rebels in Nicaragua. It was on return flights from Latin America that authorities suspect drugs were stashed on the planes.
Seal was killed while working for the government on an undercover operation in the mid-1980s.
The troopers say they were ready to confiscate the plane one day in the winter of 1984 when they were suddenly told by someone working for the FBI to leave the aircraft alone. Eleven years later, neither could provide the exact date, but they still have official log books which they say would contain the entry.
Neither of these troopers has ever stepped forward with accusations before. And both have been interviewed by an investigator for Iowa Republican Congressman Jim Leach's office.
As I said last week, Leach's recent hearings on the Whitewater scandal will probably be expanded to look into the operations of the Arkansas Development and Finance Authority (ADFA) as well as the events that took place at Mena. There have been accusations that ADFA - possibly unknown to its officials - may have been used to launder drug money.
Starr isn't permitted to officially look into Mena unless a link between it and the corruption in the Arkansas banking system can be found.
One of the troopers, Steve Clements, told me that he was relatively new to the force and was working on the narcotics detail in 1984 when he and partners came upon a suspicious aircraft in Mena.
Clements and his partners were waiting in a hotel room, he says, for permission to seize the plane.
"All I remember is what my boss told me," said Clements. "He said someone called and told him we could seize it if we want, but they'd get it back in a few minutes."
His boss was a man named Finus Duvall, who was the company commander at the criminal investigations division of the state police. Duvall is now retired and says the decision not to take the aircraft was his biggest mistake.
"I should have seized it. The worst mistake I ever made was not seizing it because I let the government override the state," he said.
"We made a call. We called an outfit called Group 7. It was the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) operation in Miami. They told us that if we took the airplane down, they would be up there in three hours and take it away from us. That particular plane was smuggling cocaine."
Duvall couldn't explain why the DEA would quash an operation that could have stopped the flow of narcotics.
Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas at the time, was "aware that we were investigating but he never knew the minute details because it was too complicated," said Duvall, adding that nobody in the Arkansas government ever interfered with his Mena investigation.
Another trooper named L.D. Brown recently said that he told Clinton around 1984 that drugs were being smuggled into Mena. Brown has said a number of times - including during an interview with The Post - that Clinton had not appeared surprised about his accusations of drug smuggling. But he was surprised that Brown had been shown some of the cargo.
Duvall says that L.D. Brown never told the Mena investigators of his suspicions.
Duvall said he was "mad as hell" when the raid wasn't carried out. Later, he said, he handed over all his files on the case to Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor assigned to the Iran-Contra investigation.
"I shipped Walsh a complete case file of the Mena investigation," Duvall said. "It weighed 400 pounds. Where the hell is the case file?"
The Arkansas state police started investigating Mena in 1982, says Duvall. Others, including investigators from the Internal Revenue Service, later tracked several hundred dollars that were being laundered in Mena.
But Duvall indicates that the money coming from the Mena operations was much more substantial than that. In fact, he says that Seal made a video "that shows Barry Seal at the Mena airport counting $1 million. That's been documented."
'I don't have any idea where the money went," says Duvall.
As bizarre as it might seem, investigators believe that Barry Seal bank accounts may still exist in the banking havens in the Carribean. In fact, one source claims that the government recently seized one of Seal's bank accounts.
(John Crudele is a financial columnist with the New York Post. His mailing address is P.O. Box 610, Lincroft, N.J. 07738. Click here to send him e-mail).