Barry Seal
Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal was an American commercial airline pilot who became a major drug smuggler for the Medellín Cartel. When Seal was convicted of smuggling charges, he became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration and testified in several major drug trials. He was murdered on February 19, 1986, by contract killers hired by the cartel.
Early life and career
Adler Berriman Seal was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the son of Mary Lou and Benjamin Curtis Seal, a candy wholesaler. Seal began to fly as a teenager, earning a student pilot certificate at 16 and a private pilot's certificate at 17. His flight instructor described him as a naturally gifted pilot.In 1962, Seal enlisted in the Louisiana Army National Guard for six years: six months of active duty, followed by five and a half years of inactive duty. Seal's active duty began in July 1962. He was assigned to the 20th Special Forces Group and graduated from the United States Army Airborne School selection and training. His non-active duty was served in the 245th Engineer Battalion, where his military occupation code was radio telephone operator.
In 1964, Seal joined TWA as a flight engineer and was soon promoted to the first officer, then captain, flying a Boeing 707 on a regular Western Europe route. He was one of the youngest 707 command pilots in the TWA fleet. Seal's career with TWA ended in July 1972, when he was arrested for involvement in a conspiracy to smuggle a shipment of plastic explosives to Mexico using a DC-4. The case was eventually dismissed in 1974 for prosecutorial misconduct, but in the meantime TWA fired Seal, who had falsely taken medical leave to participate in the scheme.
Drug smuggling
Seal admitted that he started smuggling small amounts of marijuana by air in early 1976. By 1978, he had expanded to flying significant loads of cocaine, pound-for-pound a much more profitable enterprise than marijuana smuggling.Seal's operations received an important boost when he was arrested and jailed in Honduras on the return leg of a drug-smuggling trip to Ecuador. Seal made important connections while in prison in Honduras, including Emile Camp, a fellow Louisiana pilot and smuggler who became one of Seal's closest associates, and Ellis McKenzie, a local Honduran smuggler. Also, after his release from prison Seal met William Roger Reaves on the flight back to the U.S. It was Reaves who provided Seal with his first connection to the Medellín Cartel.
To expand his smuggling capacity, Seal also hired William Bottoms, his ex-brother-in-law, as a pilot. From 1980 on, Bottoms was the main pilot in Seal's smuggling enterprise, often flying with Camp while Seal oversaw planning and operations.
In 1981, Seal began smuggling cocaine for the Medellín Cartel. At his peak, he earned as much as $500,000 per flight transporting shipments of cocaine from Colombia to the United States.
Seal's smuggling method was to use low-flying planes and airdrop drug packages in remote areas of Louisiana. They were then picked up by Seal's ground team and transported to the Colombian distributors in Florida. By 1982, Seal was using over a dozen aircraft in his smuggling operation. The number of planes and the frequency of flights soon attracted the attention of Louisiana State Police and Federal investigators.
To avoid this unwanted attention, Seal moved his aircraft to Mena Intermountain Regional Airport in Mena, Arkansas, where he did maintenance and modifications to improve the planes' carrying capacity and avionics. Seal's activities in Mena later became the subject of rumor and controversy, but according to Seal's biographer, former FBI agent Del Hahn, Seal did not use Mena as a drug transshipment point. However, an "extensive joint investigation" by the FBI, Arkansas State Police, and IRS revealed in 2020 that Barry Seal had in fact used the Mena airport for "smuggling activity" from late 1980 until March 1984.
Florida indictments and convictions
By 1981, DEA agents in Florida were aware of Seal's smuggling activities. In April 1981, a DEA informant introduced Seal to an undercover DEA agent. After several months of contact, the undercover agent negotiated a deal with Seal to smuggle 1,200 pounds of methaqualone tablets into the United States. The investigation into Seal was part of a major undercover operation called Operation Screamer in which over 80 pilots were eventually indicted. Two indictments were returned against Seal in March 1983. The first indictment charged Seal alone with two counts of conspiracy to distribute methaqualone. The second indictment charged Seal and three others with multiple counts of possession and distribution of methaqualone, phenobarbital, and meperidine.Seal surrendered to federal authorities at the end of April 1983 and attempted to make a deal, first with the Florida task force, then with the Baton Rouge task force. Both rejected any deals, even though Seal told them a little about his involvement with the Ochoa family. Without a deal, Seal was tried in February 1984. After a month-long trial, Seal was convicted on all counts listed by the first indictment.
Undercover work
In March 1984, now facing a ten-year prison sentence, Seal decided to contact the South Florida Task Force - a cross-agency drug interdiction team led by then-Vice President George H. W. Bush. The office referred Seal to the DEA headquarters, which assigned DEA agent Ernst Jacobsen to debrief Seal and evaluate his potential as an informant. Jacobsen was impressed with Seal's connections, especially those with the Ochoa family. On March 28, Seal signed a letter in which he agreed to act as a DEA informant. Afterwards, Seal pleaded guilty to the second indictment in Florida. Seal was then released from custody, with the terms of his sentence dependent upon his performance as an informant.The South Florida Task Force planned an operation that directed Seal to set up a cocaine purchase with the Ochoas and other cartel members, which would provide a basis for future indictments in the United States. Seal had concealed his true identity in previous dealings with the cartel by using the name Ellis McKenzie. Through his cartel contacts in Miami, Seal arranged a meeting using the same alias. He flew down to Medellín for the meeting on April 8, and was accompanied by a Miami based cartel pilot who was unaware of Seal's role as an informant.
In Nicaragua
Participants at the meeting included Pablo Escobar and Jorge, Fabio Jr., and Juan David Ochoa. The Colombian government had recently conducted a major raid on the cartel's manufacturing facilities at a remote jungle location called Tranquilandia, resulting in the destruction of millions of dollars of both processed and unprocessed cocaine. Seal's claims about this meeting and its aftermath, as presented by the Reagan administration, were denied by the Sandinista government and resulted in serious scrutiny by the media.According to Seal, the traffickers were making arrangements to set up shipping and production facilities in Nicaragua, where they had struck a deal with the Sandinista government. These arrangements were not yet complete, so Seal's first shipment was to be a direct flight to the U.S. Originally planned for mid-April, the flight did not take place until the end of May. When it did, the overloaded plane crashed at the Colombia airfield on takeoff. The cartel provided a new plane, but it lacked the capacity for a direct flight to the U.S., so the cartel arranged a stopover in Nicaragua, which was earlier than the originally planned stopover at an airfield in Los Brasiles near Managua. After refueling, Seal left Los Brasiles, flying without lights, and was fired upon by Nicaraguan military units as he flew near Managua. The plane was hit by gunfire, and Seal had to make an emergency landing at Sandino International Airport in Managua. The drugs were unloaded by the military, and Seal and his co-pilot were taken to detention in downtown Managua. They were then released to the cartel's Nicaraguan contact, Federico Vaughan. This account was criticized by reporter Jonathan Kwitny, then working as a staff reporter at the Wall Street Journal, in a critique of the administration's claims in April 1987, who pointed out that the Administration had earlier referred to Los Brasiles as a military facility, while later acknowledging it to be a civilian field primarily used by crop-dusters, as the field was listed at the time by Department of Defense documentation.
According to a Federal grand jury's indictment, Vaughan was an aide to Tomás Borge, Nicaraguan Minister of the Interior. This allegation was challenged by multiple reporters and congressional inquiries following the subsequent leaking of the story. Kwinty reported that Vaughn had worked in the interior ministry as the deputy manager of a state-run import-export business, and not as aide to Borge. In 1988, the Chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, William J. Hughes, released further information regarding Vaughn. The subcommittee affirmed that Escobar and his associates were operating from Nicaragua, but also cast doubt regarding Vaughn's ties. Hughes stated that subcommittee staff had called Vaughn's number, only to discover that the Managua residence had been rented since 1981 by a recently expelled member of the US embassy staff. Hughes also raised several references to a "Freddy Vaughn", particularly in July 1984, in Oliver North's diary, although it was not conclusively established if this referred to the same individual.
In Managua, Seal met again with Pablo Escobar, who was setting up a cocaine lab for production. After a discussion about how to move the increased flow of cocaine, Escobar decided to keep the first shipment in Nicaragua and have Seal return to the States and buy a larger plane.
The plane Seal acquired was a C-123K, a large aircraft used primarily for military transport. Before returning to Nicaragua, the DEA arranged for CIA technicians to install hidden cameras inside the plane.
Seal returned to the Los Brasiles airfield in Nicaragua on June 25. The pickup went as planned this time, and the cameras successfully photographed Seal and several individuals loading cocaine, aided by Pablo Escobar, José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, and Federico Vaughan. On his return to the U.S., Seal landed at Homestead Air Force Base and the drugs were transferred into a Winnebago camper, which Seal turned over to his Colombian contact. The Reagan administration would later claim that the men assisting Seal, Gacha and Escobar were Sandinista soldiers, but none of the men were dressed in military uniforms.
The drugs could not be distributed, and the immediate arrest of those handling the vehicle would suggest to the Colombians that Seal had betrayed them, so DEA agents staged an accident with the camper, allowing the driver to escape. Unfortunately, the driver was arrested by local police, and the circumstances of the seizure raised the suspicions of the cartel.
Seal said he made one more trip to Nicaragua on July 7, bringing money to Escobar to pay the Nicaraguans for landing rights. Another shipment was also planned at this time, but under instructions from the DEA, Seal told Escobar his landing site was under DEA surveillance and unsafe for transport to avoid the need to seize a second load. The DEA felt this would be impossible to explain away, and Seal returned to the U.S. without cargo.
The DEA plan was to keep Seal working with the cartel on other parts of the supply chain, such as moving cocaine base into Nicaragua from Colombia and inspecting smuggling airfields in Mexico and the U.S. The ultimate hope was to arrest the cartel leaders in a jurisdiction where it would be easy to extract them.
However, the Nicaragua undercover operation came to an end soon after Seal's return from his second trip when it was reported in the press. A leak regarding the operation came to light before Seal's second trip. On June 29, General Paul F. Gorman, US Military Commander Southern Command, made a speech stating the US had evidence that elements of the Nicaraguan government were involved in drug smuggling, though Gorman did not mention Seal or the undercover flights. It is not clear whether Seal and his crew were informed of this before they returned to Nicaragua.
A more detailed account of American efforts in Nicaragua appeared on July 17 in an article by reporter Edmond Jacoby, published on the front page of the Washington Times. Although not a complete account, it gave enough information to spell an end to Seal's work with the cartel, and to the DEA's hopes of capturing the cartel leaders outside of Colombia.