Barry and the boys
The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History
Daniel Hopsicker
Venice (Florida): The Madcow Press, 2006, $19.95, p/b
Barry is Barry Seal and ‘the boys’ are the CIA. There is a decent Wiki entry for Seal which conveys the outlines of his extraordinary life as a pilot, large-scale drug smuggler and, finally and fatally, government informant. Hopsicker goes into much more detail and ends up with Seal as a kind of Zelig figure, flitting in and out of many of the parapolitical stories since….. well, since Seal was a teenage member of a Civil Air Patrol group and did some joint activities with another CAP group which included……….Lee Harvey Oswald. (1)
And maybe Seal flew a plane out of Love Field airport at Dallas on the day of the assassination of JFK. But that’s a big ‘maybe’. How reliable is the story about Seal on 22 November 1963? Well, on the 22 November a light plane sat on the runway at another airport in Fort Worth and attracted the attention of an air traffic controller there. The plane took off and landed later at Love Field, Dallas. It was the same kind of plane as that then owned by Barry Seal. From this and the word of Seal’s widow, Hopsicker concludes that Seal flew the getaway plane for the JFK assassins. Ah-huh.(2)
What we have here is a jumbled trawl through some of the covert history of America from the mid 1950s and the alleged CIA arming of Castro, to the alleged drug-running through the airfield at Mena, Arkansas, in the 1980s. A vast number of items on that agenda are covered and many fascinating fragments are offered. But few of the items are done in enough detail for someone who doesn’t already know the story to make sense of it. (I know some of the story and found chunks of this, the blizzard of names, very difficult to follow; and one later chapter, covered in black redaction marks, is entirely impenetrable.) This is for American parapolitical initiates only. And Hopsicker’s attempts to weave the whole thing together is entertaining but no more convincing than any other attempt at producing what Tony Frewin once referred to as the Unified Field Theory of Conspiracy.
On Amazon.com’s reviews of this book there are many raves; but continue on down through the second page and you come to a very destructive review by a former FBI agent, Delbert Hahn, who was interviewed by Hopsicker. Before buying this read that.
Notes
- If the Zelig reference escapes you try <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelig>
- On getaway styles, I prefer the version in The Men on the 6th Floor (http://home. earthlink.net/ ~sixthfloor/) in which Loy Factor, the Indian rifleman, is dropped at the bus station to get a bus home after his part in shooting JFK. That was one of those telling little details which gave his account plausibility to me. In the American West the only hitch-hikers you see are Indians, too poor to own cars. And no, they don’t seem to call themselves ‘native Americans’. The biggest circulation magazine about their affairs is called Indian Country Today. See <wwww.indiancountrytoday.com>