Customer Reviews

Barry & 'the Boys' : The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Our government is in the hands of a criminal family. This book makes that clear. This book is about a lot more than Barry Seal, and for further discussion of what this book IS about, you can join the email list CIA_DRUGS@yahoogroups.com

This book covers a span of time that begins pretty much with the cold war, but it's really the root of a lot of stuff that is going on today. Barry Seal was dealing drugs for George Bush. Barry Seal was involved with Iran-Contra. Barry Seal's assassination was ordered by Oliver North. Running drugs in and through this country has financed covert operations that would be beyond imagination if they weren't all too true. If your family has been torched by the scourge of drug addiction (as too many families have been) you can not afford to turn away from this horrendous truth. Even more, it is no small detail that Afghanistan is known for its opium production. It's important to know this, and to learn as much as possible about it. Even more important is to work together to figure out what on earth we are going to DO about it -- beside "Pledging Allegiance to the Flag." There's a lot more to this flag than flying it -- and a lot more to democracy than voting. We're losing our freedoms, we're losing our country, and we are losing our lives to a conspiracy that is a lot more than a theory. Read this book. Than read the rest of my reviews. Do your own reading. Maybe we can figure out what to do before it's too late. With liberty, and justice, for ALL.

My only criticism is that the book could have been more readable. I wasn't crazy about the style of the language, but maybe that's just the style of the investigator (Hopsicker) in the work that he was doing. It's not my style. That doesn't make it a bad thing, just a little harder for me to follow, that's all. Hopsicker is a prolific and readable poster on the CIA_DRUGS list, and shares a great deal that is useful, so believe me, I don't hold his particular style against him. I just wish it were more readable for the general public, so that more people could be made aware. If you like James Bond type reading, though, or know someone who does, those are the people to target with this book. Those, and anyone who wants to know what on earth is going on in this world today.

"Barry & `the Boys': the CIA, the Mob, and America's Secret History" is a book that will expand the audience for parapolitical literature. "Barry and the Boys" is written to appeal to the serious student of Deep Political arrangements as well as the "casual interest" reader looking for something to help him or her understand today's news while simultaneously being entertained.

This journalistic tour de force presents the story of Barry Seal's career in intelligence and drug and gun running - from its inception as a teenager working along side Lee Oswalld in the New Orleans CAP under David Ferrie, to its conclusion, "in a hail of bullets, with George Bush's private phone number in his wallet."

It is rare these days for a single work to offer more than a few minor details of new information to add to our overall understanding of cold war crimes of State. It is even more rare to find a book in this category that satisfies both the intellect's need for new information and the heart's desire for human interest and style. Hopsicker's work - the result of two and a half years of full-time field investigation, living out of suitcases and pushing the limits of his own personal safety in his quest for "the story" - delivers all of this by the planeload.

Hopsicker ultimately got his story, and oh, what a story! Though he obviously did an enormous amount of research on the body of work already available, the details are all Mr. Hopsicker's - hence, no footnotes. But what his work lacks in scholarly annotations, he more than makes up for in old-fashioned sweat and shoeleather. The book is filled with the product of interviews with the principle participants from both sides of the Barry Seal saga. And through the judicious use of primary documents (available in a 58-page appendix), many of which have never been made publically available until now, Hosicker provides corroboration and authentication for his human sources. Among those primary documents, the one on the cover is a doozey: a group portrait of Operation 40 members at a January 22, 1963 meeting in Mexico City. (I wonder what they could be talking about?)

"Barry and `the Boys'" presents all of this material in a fascinating tapestry of new information and established facts stitched together with incisive wit. The result is an entertaining and illumitating whole, documenting 30 years of a man's life and a nation's peril.

In a perfect world, "Barry and `the Boys'" would be a best seller. In this world, it is still going to do very well.

An amazing story. Barry Seal was just a kid who flew well, That talent lead him straight into the arms of the shadowy world of "clandestine services." Daniel Hopsicker has really brought an amazing story to the American public. This book exposes the underbelly of corruption and assassination that has run rampant in our republic. This book has much to tell about the JFK assasination major players. Seal met Lee Harvey Oswald at Civil Air Patrol summer camp—along with David Ferrie. Hopsicker's revelations about Ferrie's involvement with intel agencies and extracircular activities are astounding. The whole book breaks much new ground. Barry Seals's photos and documents tell a story all in themselves.

It seems that Barry Seal was getting ready to talk and through Barry and 'the boys', Barry gets his wish.

Barry and 'the boys' lets the chips fall where they may. Hopsicker takes swings and lands on corruption no matter what party.

A must read!!!

Call me stupid, call me naive but I am continually surprised by the falseness and dishonesty of the United State's government in virtually all the reading explorations I undertake. I do not start these explorations with an outcome in mind: true, I have my normal bag of philosophies and mind-sets that any person alive in this world carries with them. But what has numbed my mind has been the extent of the duplicity that the US government has undertaken in that government's attempt to make the world safe for the further expansion and, at the least, protection of their economic system. Hopsicker, in this wonderfully enlightening book, mentioms at least six other books that continue unmasking various aspects of this mammoth cover-up and I will have my future filled with further frustrations regarding a government that the world has accepted as upright and straight-dealing on the international stage. How wrong we have been!

"Barry and the Boys" is a chronicle of American governmental lying-to both the media and, worse, to the legislative branch of their own government all in the name of countering an evil, as they saw it, greater than the evil they were perpetrating on the American people. I believe all that I read in the pages of this book; further, I believe that now that the genie has been released, as of the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination, there can be no going back and now that genie must be fed continuously so that it will not devour, not only America, but my world also.

It is difficult to imagine a country that would allow the evil of drug addiction to enslave its own people all in the name of acquiring illicit money to fund programmes propping up wasted, rightest dictators whose only vision is staying in office and keeping the American drug pipeline clear and flowing. Besides destroying these individual countries social cohesion, Hopsicker reports on the destruction of large sections of American society as a result of this drug pipeline.

The only negatives about "Barry and the Boys" that I saw, were the final chapters dealing with individuals connected with Barry Seal's "business" and the myriad interconnections of the major players. I had my hands full trying to keep so many people separated but this just shows the depth and the breadth of this entire "business."

This "high octane," fast-moving rendition of Barry Seal's lifetime of intelligence escapades covers a half-century of some of the most important if not the most sordid aspects of American history. The author makes a valiant attempt at pulling together disparate and often elusive, threads, and then tries to show how the "mostly hidden" elite managed drug trade is a systemic generator of corruption. He does this by connecting the dots in Barry Seal's various and numerous roles as a CIA contract agent in the JFK assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, smuggler for both the Pablo Escabar and Cali drug cartels, confidential informer for the FBI, and the events still going on in Mena, Arkansas, among many others.

In doing so, this guided rollercoaster ride speeding down what is normally recognized as "conspiracy lane" does indeed have its high and low points.

Its highs include moments like the picture on the cover that shows Porter Goss (ex-CIA head) living it up in January 1963 in Mexico city with members of the Operation 40 assassination squad; or the tale about GW and Jeb Bush being tricked by Seal into being caught on a hidden camera unloading cocaine from one of Seal's planes; or the way the CIA plays the corporate shell game to hide and launder unimaginable sums of drug money; or how officials from both political parties somehow always manage to find themselves blocking investigations of the lucrative "in house" drug trade; or how Jackson Stephens built up the Arkansas Industrial Development Corporation, the largest bonding company outside of Wall Street, by laundering huge sums of cocaine money -- some of which was smuggled across the border inside race horses destined for the Oak Lawn race track in Hot Springs; or how he and Don Tyson of Tyson's Chicken fame were the real powers behind the Clinton Presidencies; or how Oliver North sanctioned Barry Seal's "hit" after Seal threatened to reveal VP HW Bush's role in Seal's drug smuggling enterprises; and last but surely not least, the long-running and very lucrative cocaine operation that began with Iran-Contra and continues in Mena, Arkansas even today.

Also, to give credit where credit is due, it is worthwhile to mention in passing that another high point of the book is the author's attempt to place this sordid history of America's "Shadow Government" in a larger conceptual frame: that sketched out by David R. Simons' "Elite Deviance" theory and the "Deep Politics" of Professor Peter Dale Scott. In this regard, Gerry Patrick Hemming's (one of the Oswald look-a-likes during the JFK assassination and a long-term CIA contract operative) made perhaps the most prophetic statement in the book when he gave the only plausible explanation (other than greed, power and wealth) for why the U.S. is, and should remain, involved in the international illicit drug trade, he said: There is so much money involved in the drug trade that to leave it to "regular" criminals, is to leave the whole world at risk of being economically destabilized! It is for this reason that the U.S., through the CIA, has had to come in and take over the reins and lend order to an otherwise out-of-control and potentially internationally destabilizing global enterprise.

Had the author continued down this path, what a valuable contribution to American history and the American political process this book could have been. But, like so much else about this book, this bow to theoretical necessity turned out to be a mere genuflection, more an empty gesture or pose than a serious attempt to actually apply the theories mentioned in the introduction to the book.

Unfortunately, most of the book is a rehash of many well-known events better reported on and better documented in their original sources. And to his credit, the author makes liberal use of and properly credits these better sources. The main flaw of the book is thus excusable. It is that the author sets up for himself an almost impossible task. Thus he cannot really be blamed for failing at the one responsibility he laid out for himself: that of connecting the dots across the key events and across a half century of mostly hidden American history -- the period of existence of the shadow government that overlaps with and as viewed through the prism of Barry Seal's life.

Based on what is reported in the manuscript, no one can say that Mr. Hopsicker did not give it the proverbial good old schoolboy try. The ride has been interesting, with mind-altering scenery all the way down to the bitter end. But if we are to be entirely honest, in the end all of the meandering to make critical connections, were done loosely and mostly through innuendo, leaps in logic, third or fourth-hand reports, through weak historical analogies, and guilt by name association -- or guilt by the author's own clever but ultimately tiring snide remarks which punctuated the end of each chapter. This last trick obviously was designed for the reader to fill in the blanks, and to connect the dots for himself.

But there are other low points as we speed along the steep downward slope of this 450-page stretch of the rollercoaster ride. Like so many potholes in the road, the book is littered with all of the well-known tricks of the worst conspiracy writer's trade, the favorite one being that of treating "near-fact," fiction, "faction," poorly documented rumors, legends, and good natured yarns all as if they were one and the same: well-established fact. It does not take much scrutiny to determine that almost all of them are neither.

But of course this does not mean that Seal's life did not happen exactly as the author describes it, just that most of his research could not be proven in a court of law -- the hidden standard and almost impossible threshold against which all of America's "so-called" conspiracy theories are misjudged. Plausibility, cross-validation and sheer preponderance of interconnected facts it seems are not valid and acceptable standards of proof for those challenging the standard model of societal orthodoxy.

The saving grace of the book is that the sheer preponderance, utter penetration, persistence and totality of the drug trade on our way of life - from the upper echelons all the way down to the ghettoes and suburbs where the substance is plied - is so unmistakable that even its background noise and radioactive fallout makes it impossible to deny its staggering influence. There is so much money involved, and our political process is so distorted and compromised by it that the drug trade has its own aura, literally a life of its own, and dictates its own corrupt terms upon our political system and on our way of life more generally. So much so that it has become a regularized part of our culture and is now enfolded seamlessly into every aspect of what we do. To talk about it openly is to be a conspiracy theorists nut.

Bill Clinton in his 900-page autobiography did not mention Mena, Arkansas even once. Nearly 85% of the more than two million incarcerated in U.S. prisons have drug related problems. As well, a staggering 75% of all paper money in Miami has traces of cocaine on it. If these and Barry Seal's life and death are not the ultimate metaphors for a culture thoroughly corrupted by drugs, then I don't know what is.

I think the author's main point is that like the war on poverty, the war on drugs remains a war waged by "deviant elites" against the rest of us. What is needed is for "the rest of us" to wake up and recognize that these deviant elites - the greedy, power hungry and corrupt corporatists and their courtiers and minions -- are winning; and that Peter Dale's Scott's paradigm: that the corruption built into the system is an honest reflection of its realities. That is, that the nation's staggering amount of corruption is not just a distortion, but is indeed the way the system actually works. Pretending that America's built in corruption (as reflected in its CIA run "shadow government") is just a "conspiracy theory," or an accident or an aberration external to our culture is oxygen depleting illusionary self-deception.

The "shadow Government" is not an accident and it is not external; it is reality. The grand criminal enterprises like the drug trade and the influence that it buys in the American political process is real and is robbing us of our freedoms. It is not a conspiracy theory; it is a cold-blooded reality. And now, it is so well organized, and has so much momentum that no one can put this genie back in the bottle again - or even speak about it openly.

Can our own utter helplessness somehow trigger a revolting reaction?
In any other era, having the political process run by a "Shadow Government" would not be called freedom at all, but "stealth totalitarianism." George Orwell's 1984 is still with us in 2007 and beyond. For his efforts, Mr. Hopsicker deserves the Medal of Freedom. Amen.

Five stars

This truly outstanding work casts the glare of daylight into the darkest realms of the NSA and CIA's most disgusting crimes. It exposes the direct connection between the madmen directly responsible for the Vietnam War, the genocide bloodbath of Operation Phoenix, the JFK Assassination, Watergate, Iran Contra, the savings and loan scandal, and BCCI, in addition massive opium, cocaine and marijuana smuggled into the United States through the CIA's Air America, George Bush's Zapata Offshore oil rigs and a private airfield in a remote area of Bill "Slick Willie" Clinton's Arkansas among other avenues. This work includes an account of George W. and Jeb Bush caught very red-faced and red-handed on videotape unloading bags of freshly smuggled cocaine from an aircraft. It also discloses the fact that Barry Seal, who videotaped that incident while working with the DEA, later died in a hail of machine-gun bullets with George HW "Poppy" Bush's private phone number in his wallet. They don't call him "Poppy" for nothing.

Drugs, guns, and synthetic terror are well presented though difficult to keep all the connections clear. Highly recommend to all those who know something very fishy is going on within our intelligence/enforcement agencies.

I find few such books that are really worth the time and effort to read and understand. This is one. It is a roadmap to understanding the Faustian bargains made by our government. It is thoroughly and accurately researched from primary sources, and not just a compilation of newspaper clippings. Hopsicker may not be a finely polished writer and the prose can be a bit irritatingly awkward. But he worked hard, is well-informed, righteously enraged, irreverent and even entertaining.

It was well researched and documented but a bit disconcerting. Many of the assertions made can be corroborated from other sources.

I recommend the book for those interested in the dark secrets of our government and who can stomach unbridled hypocrisy.

Despite not being the most well written book ever, this book was one of the best books I have ever read. If you want to know what the secret government looks like and how it does business, look no further than 'Barry & the 'boys''