The Army went to outside businessmen and arms dealers to make off-the-books airplane purchases, with funds that had been "laundered" through secret Army finance offices at Fort Meade, Md. More than $325 million was appropriated for the Special Operations Division of the Army between 1981 and the autumn of 1983. Had any of these operations become public then it would have caused enormous political damage to the Reagan Administration's campaign in Central America, according to a 1987 New York Times report by Seymour Hersh.

"Enter CIA Agent Adler Berriman Seal"
The flight plans for Seal's drug enterprise provided the perfect cover for the illicit resupply missions. Seal's planes would fly from Mena to Medellin Cartel airstrips in the mountains of Colombia and Venezuela, make refueling stops in Panama and Honduras, and then return to Mena, where, en route, the planes would drop parachute-equipped duffel bags loaded with cocaine over Seal-controlled farms in Louisiana.

"His well-connected and officially protected smuggling operation based at Mena accounted for billions in drugs and arms from 1982 until his murder four years later," said Dr. Roger Morris and Sally Denton in their book Partners in Power. They also reported that coded records of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) showed Barry Seal on the payroll beginning in 1982.

"My investigation established a conspiratorial period, chronologically, with a first overt act and a last overt act. The first overt act was April 12, 1982," stated Arkansas state criminal investigator Russell Welch, who was charged, he thought, with digging into Seal's Mena activities. Between March and December 1982, according to law enforcement records, Seal fitted nine of his aircraft with the latest electronic equipment, paying the $750,000 bill - as was his custom - in cash.

The effects of Barry Seal's efforts to take weapons one way and bring drugs the other were soon visible, in ruined lives in the U.S. and in the maimed bodies appearing all over Central America.

"Riding the Elephant Herd"
Barry Seal was not alone. When small private planes began to bomb the Nicaraguan capital, resulting in the crash of a Cessna 404 at the Managua airport, an account of how three Cessnas were secretly transported from the New York Air National Guard to Central America for the raid on Managua reached the press. It was later learned that custody of a number of additional planes were moved from the U.S. Air Force in a top-secret Joint Chiefs operation code-named "Elephant Herd," on to the CIA, via a Delaware aviation company where they were armed, and then transferred to their ultimate destination, the Contras.

A senior administration official admitted that small noncombatant military aircraft had been transferred from the Air Force to the Contras through the CIA. One company involved, Summit Aviation, was doing regular business with Barry Seal according to records in his widow's possession. In addition, according to Congressional sources, Summit, known to do Contract work for the CIA, had former CIA personnel on the payroll, and was linked through ownership records to the Cessna that crashed while bombing Managua.

That aircraft, according to FAA records, was purchased by Summit Aviation in October 1982 from Trager Aviation Center in Lima, Ohio. On the same day that Summit purchased the plane, the company sold it to Investair Leasing Corp. of McLean, Va.. Investair, which has an unlisted telephone number, does Contract work for the CIA, according to Congressional sources. Bruce W. Trager, who sold the Cessna to Summit for $308,872, says the deal was "put together" by Patrick J. Foley, Summit's "military director."

In addition to its work for Investair, Summit maintained and modified planes for Armairco, another company involved in covert government projects. Armairco, organized in 1982, also bought several multimillion-dollar Beechcraft King Airs, like Barry Seal's. Those aircraft were purchased directly from Beech in a procedure normally used only for military projects, according to Beech officials and aviation experts.