Terry Reed was a former Air Force intelligence officer and FBI informant who became involved with the [[Central Intelligence Agency]]'s Contra project in the mid-1980s as a pilot and machine tool expert.[^1] Reed's account provided parallel evidence to [[Tim LaFrance]]'s story about CIA-directed weapons manufacturing operations to supply the [[Contras]]. ### Recruitment and Contra Work Reed was initially recruited to train would-be Contra pilots at a clandestine airstrip near Nella, [[Arkansas]]. Later, he was asked to help the CIA set up secret weapons parts facilities in Arkansas and, later, in [[Mexico]].[^1] In his memoirs, *Compromised*, Reed wrote that he scouted locations and provided the corporate shell for CIA agents working with the Contras to set up and run a sophisticated machine-tool shop in Guadalajara in 1985–86, in order to keep a supply of untraceable weapons parts flowing to the Contras during a time when Congress had cut off the rebels' CIA assistance. He claims CIA operatives were shipping cocaine through the machine-tool company he'd helped the agency set up in Guadalajara.[^1] ### Park On Meter and Weapons Manufacturing One of the companies Reed worked with in Arkansas was a small manufacturer of parking meters called [[Park On Meter]] Inc., located in the town of Russellville. Reed claimed that the company was secretly manufacturing parts for M-16 rifles as a subcontractor on a CIA weapons project to supply the Contras.[^1] Park On Meter's former secretary and corporate lawyer was [[Webb Hubbell|Webb Hubbell]], who also happened to be the brother-in-law of the company's owner. Hubbell admitted to a *Time* magazine reporter that POM was also making rocket launchers.[^1] ### Washington Post Investigation The *Washington Post* sent a reporter to Arkansas in 1994 to investigate Reed's story. While the resultant article was a snide attempt to portray Reed as a crackpot conspiracy theorist, it nonetheless confirmed many of the basic elements of his story. "Some of the key relationships described in the book did exist in some form," the Post grudgingly admitted. "The Iver Johnson arms company near Little Rock, which the book portrays as being at the center of the gun-manufacturing effort, did ship a load of weapons to [[Nicaragua]] through a Mexican distributor, according to former plant engineer J. A. Matejko." Moreover, the Post found, the parking meter company Reed named "did make some gun parts for Iver Johnson, another relationship characterized in the book as part of the CIA weapons scheme." But the Post scoffed that the parts were "firing pins, not M-16 bolts as the book contends."[^1] ### Connection to Oliver North and Barry Seal Reed claimed that [[Oliver North]], who was the National Security Council official overseeing the Contra project at the time, was his CIA contact for both the pilot-training program and the machine-tool company front. A central figure in all of Reed's dealings with the CIA, he wrote, was a CIA and [[DEA]] contract agent named [[Barry Seal]]. Seal moved in 1982 from [[Baton Rouge, Louisiana|Baton Rouge]] to [[Mena, Arkansas]] and began running drugs and weapons.[^1] Reed claims that North has denied knowing anything about Reed or what was going on at Mena. A former Arkansas State Police Intelligence Unit staff member described in sworn testimony "a shredding party" in which she was ordered to purge the state's Mena files of nearly a thousand documents, including those referring specifically to North and Reed.[^1] ### Footnotes [^1]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 6: "They were doing their patriotic duty"