Barry and "the boys": The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History

Barry and "the boys": The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History, Daniel Hopsicker, Mad Cow Press, 2001

This book is all about a scandal feared by the White House more than Whitewater, a scandal not touched by the American news media. It's a totally different look at the last half century of American history, and it revolves around a place called Mena, Arkansas and a man named Barry Seal.

Seal grew up in Louisiana and was addicted to airplanes from an early age. While still a teenager, he could pilot nearly anything with wings. Joining the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol, he met a man named David Ferrie (later to be well known in JFK assassination circles) who introduced him to the clandestine world. Soon, Seal would disappear for days or weeks at a time, and come back with, for a teenager in the 1950s, insanely large amounts of money.

Becoming a life-long CIA operative, Seal started his career running guns to both sides in the Cuban Revolution, to Fidel Castro and Fulgencio Batista. Over the next 40 years, Seal was at the center of all the major events in US history, from the JFK assassination (the book blows more holes, as if more were needed, in the Warren Commission's Lone Gunman theory), to Vietnam drug-running, to Watergate, to Iran-Contra. The entire period is characterized by very deep ties between US intelligence and the Mafia, even going back to Cuba before Castro. The author isn't talking about vague ties with minor-league mobsters, he is talking about people like Johnny Roselli and Carlos Marcello, the absolute top of the Mob "pyramid."

Mena, Arkansas was a small town with an equally small airport. It was also a major entry point for a flood of airplane-carried cocaine into the United States (by the ton). Going on for years and years, one must ask if the major players in Arkansas politics, like Jackson Stephens and Bill Clinton, were somehow in cahoots with the CIA and the Mob. The author also explores plenty of ties between Seal and the Bush family.

This book surpasses the level of Wow. It has enough revelations for ten books. It is extremely highly recommended, especially for anyone interested in recent American history.