Compromised: Clinton Bush and the CIA

COMPROMISED is the true story of the Faustian pact that Bill Clinton made as governor of Arkansas. It tells how his unbridled political ambitions and his pledge to create jobs for Arkansas led him to compromise his ideals in exchange for support for his presidential candidacy in 1992. By selling out politically to the Reagan–Bush administration, by giving the Agency free rein to operate a secret training base near the tiny western Arkansas of Mena, and by looking the other way as Arkansas factories turned out untraceable weapons parts for the Nicaraguan Contra “freedom fighters,” the young governor helped create an operation that laundered untold millions of dollars and that enriched Clinton’s political friends and helped finance his campaign fund. The Arkansas-CIA connection became Clinton’s darkest secret, and only now is the tiniest shaft of light being shed on what has become known as the Whitewater Scandal. Coauthor Terry Reed, who helped train Contra pilots in rural Arkansas, became the first person to pull back the shroud on the “Arkansas Connection” long before most people ever heard of Clinton cronies like Webb Hubbell, Clinton’s former associate U.S. attorney-general, who became the first major figure to plead guilty in an ever-widening investigation that is confirming Reed’s disclosures. Former National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane also corroborates Reed’s revelation that former spymaster George Bush was in the center of the Iran-Contra loop, and he, like Reed, paints Bush as a cold-hearted powermonger bent on wrestling the White House away from Ronald Reagan. Reed, who was recruited into the Arkansas operation by Oliver North, reveals in this eyewitness account how the “black operations” in Arkansas worked, from the training of Contra pilots and the manufacture of weapons parts—all in violation of a congressional ban on Contra aid—to the airdrops of cash into Arkansas by CIA operative Barry Seal. Seal disclosed to Reed that more than $9 million a week was dropped from planes onto secret drop zones and later laundered through an investment banking firm whose president had close ties with Clinton.

Terry Reed is a former Air Force intelligence operative who served in the most secret project of the Vietnam War, Task Force Alpha. In civilian life, he was recruited by the FBI’s counterintelligence division to help combat the illegal sale of technology to the Soviet Union and later became a CIA asset. He is an FAA-certified flight instructor with more than 3,000 hours of flight time. John Cummings is a prize-winning former investigative reporter for Newsday in New York and has coauthored The Heist (1986), Goombata: The Improbable Rise and Fall of John Gotti and His Gang (1990) and ‘Til Murder Do Us Part (1993).