The saga of Barry Seal
The man behind the scenes

By nessie

Barry Seal could have been the biggest drug smuggler in American history, though certain people say smuggling was only his front. Whoever he was, he died in a hail of bullets, with George Bush Sr.'s private telephone number in his pocket. His life, and the lives of his friends and coconspirators make a first-rate story – like a Fleming or a le Carre creation. But truth is far stranger than fiction.

The saga of Barry Seal has already been the stuff of several books: Partners in Power, by Sally Denton and Richard Morris, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, and Compromised, by Terry Reed. A new one, Barry and "the boys": the CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History, by Daniel Hopsicker, has just come out. It's excellent. Pick up a copy. As I never tire of reminding you, our secret history is too vast to be learned from the Internet alone.

Want to know who is behind the War On (Some) Drugs? Barry and "the boys" is a great place to start. First of all, it's a fun and easy read. But he never lets the story get in the way of the facts, either. He is always careful to distinguish clearly between rumor, speculation, and fact.

As Hopsicker reveals, Seal joined David Ferrie's Civil Air Patrol unit as a teenager. And it was there that he learned more than how to handle his stick. Ferrie's CAP unit, you may recall, also included Lee Harvey Oswald. When New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison began to investigate JFK's assassination, he turned up Ferrie almost immediately. Then Ferrie died, just as he had lived, under very questionable circumstances.

Ferrie was, to put it mildly, a first-class oddball. His life is uniformly described as being full of strange activity and puzzling behavior. His assorted talents and eccentricities included being a hypnotist, medical researcher, amateur psychologist, victim of a strange disease (alopecia, which made him lose all his body hair), and senior pilot for Eastern Airlines until he was fired for homosexual activity on the job. He spoke fluent Italian and Greek. Not one, but two, seminaries had decided he was psychologically unsuited for what he saw as his true calling, the priesthood. At the time of Kennedy's murder, Ferrie was 45, living in New Orleans, and well acquainted with the most notorious names linked to the assassination: Oswald, Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, Jack Ruby, and Carlos Marcello. Garrison believed Ferrie's role in the assassination revolved around the getaway planes. A more than plausible case can be made that Seal flew one of these planes. If he didn't, he certainly could have. He knew how to fly, and he knew the right people. For all this, he could thank David Ferrie.

Ferrie, too, started young. The House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation stated, without even a raised eyebrow, that Ferrie had become a pilot in 1942 and then gone to work for an oil-drilling firm that had jobs in South America. Ferrie was 23 in 1942, prime draft age in the middle of World War II. In 1942 the oil business in Latin America was of great interest to the Nazis, as well as to their friends and competitors. It is barely conceivable that Ferrie was not involved with the FBI spy network there.

It was a time when you needed more than a note from your local congressperson to evade military duty. But instead of being drafted, as the HSCA report so blandly states, he "goes to work for an oil drilling firm with interests in South America." Another telltale sign of Ferrie's covert connections occurred when, while just a lowly rookie pilot at Eastern, he was already known and admired by none other than Eastern's president general Eddie Rickenbacker – himself no slouch in these matters – who wrote the seemingly inconsequential junior pilot a glowing letter of recommendation. "This man's efforts," Rickenbacker said, "bear watching and his qualifications justify his being used and helped whenever possible in line of duty – and even beyond."

"Beyond," indeed.

The oil business has always produced more than its share of spooks. Witness for example, George Bush. Then there was that other George, George DeMohrenschilt, Oswald's CIA baby-sitter in Dallas. Even the great "Ace of Spies" Sidney Reilly got his start by poking into the early Iranian oil industry. The oil and intelligence connection goes back a long way. It's a great place to learn the ropes. Seal studied at the feet of a master. He learned his lessons well. He became first the youngest 707 captain and then later the youngest captain of a 747 while at Howard Hughes's TWA. Seal was, by all accounts, a crack pilot (no pun intended). But was it flying ability alone that led to these early advancements, or was it also a case of "not what you know, but who"?

We can only surmise, of course, but that is how it's done and has been for a long time. To understand the web of relationships that bind the men behind the scenes, we must understand what bound their predecessors. The only thing more important than who you know is what you know about them. Knowing where certain bodies are buried, for example, or the numbers of certain bank accounts, can sometimes give you tremendous leverage. Other times they can get you killed. It depends on who you tell, and when. Consider Seal's special mission to Nicaragua. It seems he had gotten himself into a bit of trouble over some Quaaludes, some 200,000 of them. He offered to turn informant and go undercover, promising more cocaine than the agents had ever seen. Initially, his offers were rebuffed. So Seal went over their heads. Again he was rebuffed. Eventually, with help from his lawyer, Richard Ben-Veniste, he went over everybody's heads, to Washington, DC.

"I did my part by launching him into the arms of Vice President Bush, who embraced him as an undercover operative," Ben-Veniste later told the Wall Street Journal.

Seal appeared before Bush's Vice Presidential Task Force on Drugs in Washington, where he appeared to dazzle them with smuggling lore and how he had made millions in the "trade," as he called it. But what caught the panel's attention was the bombshell he dropped during his closed-door testimony: that the Sandinistas were directly involved in drug trafficking into the United States. According to Seal, the Medellin Cartel had made a deal with the Sandinistas, awarding them hefty cuts of drug profits in exchange for the use of an airfield in Managua as a transshipment point for narcotics. Presto. Seal had said three magic words. "Commie dope peddler." He was transformed overnight from major felon to star informant. Through the simple expedient of ratting out a country with which the Reagan Administration was dying to go to war, he walked away from felony drug convictions for which tens of thousands of American citizens are today doing life in prison. Bush was to have taken care of Seal's legal difficulties. At least that's how the rumor goes.

In exchange, Seal had gone to work for Bush and Oliver North at the busiest little airport in the South, the one at Mena, Arkansas. When he found himself in trouble again, Seal apparently felt he had been double-crossed by Bush. His reaction, people say, had been to use his DEA cover to set up a sting that netted two very red-faced Bush boys, Jeb and George W., on videotape picking up kilos of cocaine at a Florida airport. For his impudence, the story goes, he was publicly executed less than a year later. Be very clear about this, it is still just a rumor. But there appears to be substance to it. There was obviously something of value to somebody in the files that Seal took with him everywhere he went.

Whatever it was, less that 10 minutes after he died, the feds came to whisk it away. Hopsicker abundantly demonstrates that investigating this rumor can be extremely productive, even if the truth of the matter still remains elusive. The web of connections that such investigation uncovers seems to be nearly endless.

Ben-Veniste, to cite but one example, had another client whose name may ring a bell. It was William Jefferson Clinton. He was governor of the state where Mena is located during the height of the shenanigans that went on there. Then there's Ben-Veniste's close friend and associate Alvin Malnik, a man regarded as Meyer Lansky's "heir apparent."

Hopsicker calls him "Alvin of Arabia" because, unlike most Jews, he converted to Islam, took an Arabic name and married his son into the Saudi royal family. Both he and his son have taken up residence in the kingdom, where he acts as an advisor to the royal family. It's an odd little tale, but what does it have to do with Barry Seal?

In 1982 Seal began flying weapons to the Contras from Mena, Arkansas which had been paid for with Saudi Royal family money. Coincidence? Perhaps. Small world? Without a doubt.

Such stories abound, if you know how to find them. Hopsicker does. By examining in detail the life of Barry Seal, he has come upon far too many to list here. They are as illuminating as they are entertaining.

Barry and "the boys", check it out. You'll be glad you did."

Copyright © 2000 San Francisco Bay Guardian.