re: Vice Article On Barry Seal

Everybody knows this. frick you kids have all the info in the world at your fingertips and don't know shite. May god help us all.

Barry Seal, the son of a candy wholesaler, was born in Baton Rouge on 16th July, 1939. Seal's father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Seal became obsessed with aircraft and took his first solo flight at the age of fifteen and was soon making a living towing advertising banners. In 1955 Seal joined the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) in Baton Rouge. Soon afterwards Seal took part in a CAP joint training mission with the New Orleans unit that was run by David Ferrie. According to John Odom, a fellow CAP member, Seal met Lee Harvey Oswald during this training.

Tosh Plumlee claims that Barry Seal began working for the Central Intelligence Agency in the mid 1950s: "Barry Seal was involved with military intelligence in the early days... Military intelligence was the real game, with the CIA just acting as logistical people. Barry was a peripheral player back then, but he was a CIA 'contract' pilot all the way back to 1956 or 1957."

In 1958 Seal began ferrying weapons to Fidel Castro fighting against the the Fulgencio Batista regime in Cuba. At the time a section of the CIA was supporting the overthrow of Batista. However, the policy changed soon after Castro gained power and Seal is said to have taken part in air attacks on the new government.

The following year Barry Seal became a CIA pilot in Guatemala. It is also believed that Seal was involved in training Cuban exiles on No-Name Key in Florida and on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. He also ran a couple of companies based in Baton Rouge: Seal Sky Service and Aerial Advertising Associates and had an office in the International Trade Center run by Clay Shaw.

Gerry Hemming claims that Barry Seal was a member of Operation 40 in the early 1960s. Hemming told author, Daniel Hopsicker: "Yeah, Barry was Op 40. He flew in killer teams inside the island (Cuba) before the invasion to take out Fidel."



Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia

In December, 1962, Seal joined the 21st Special Forces Group and attended the Fort Benning Jump School. In May 1963 he was assigned to company D Special Operations Detachment of the 20th Special Forces Group Airborne. Seal also seems to have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. According to his wife, Deborah, "Barry Seal flew a getaway plane out of Dallas after JFK was killed."

In 1964 Seal joined the 245th Engineer Battalion based in St. Louis. He left in 1966. Soon afterwards he went to work for Howard Hughes and the TWA Corporation. According to his biographer, Daniel Hopsicker (Barry and the Boys), Seal "becomes first the youngest 707 Captain, and then later the youngest Captain of a 747."

Tosh Plumlee claims that Barry Seal also worked for Ted Shackley and the CIA: "Barry Seal did a lot of damn good stuff in the late 60s. In 67 and 68 he was with Air America in South Vietnam and Laos during Search and Destroy and Special Ops with Ted Shackley's boys. He'd been recruited for Special Ops because of the Cuban thing."

On 1st July, 1972, Barry Seal was arrested in New Orleans and accused of sending C4 explosives to anti-Castro Cubans in Mexico. A DC-4 was seized at the Shreveport Regional Airport loaded with almost seven tons of plastic C-4 explosives, 7,000 feet of explosive primer cord and 2,600 electric blasting caps. James Miller, Richmond Harper, Marlon Hagler and Murray Kessler were also arrested with Seal. Kessler's partner, Manny Gambino, was kidnapped around the same time the others were arrested. His corpse was later found in a New Jersey garbage dump.

The DC-4 was owned by James Boy, a known associate of the CIA. Boy's aircraft were later used to fly Oliver North's mercenaries in and out of Honduras. The man who organized the entrapment of Seal and his friends was Cesario Diosdado, an official with the United States Customs.

It took the authorities over two years to bring Barry Seal to trial. When the trial finally got underway in June, 1974, government prosecutors promptly introduced into evidence an automatic weapon that had nothing at all to do with the charges against the defendants. A mistrial was declared and Seal and his fellow defendants were released. According to Pete Brewton (The Mafia, CIA & George Bush), as soon as Seal was freed he "began working full-time for the CIA, travelling back and forth from the United States to Latin America." Daniel Hopsicker claims Seal was now "sheep-dipped" into the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as an agent for the Special Operations Group. Seal worked under Lucien Conein, who ran secret missions for the DEA. Egil Krogh, who was employed by Richard Nixon as liaison to the FBI and the DEA, later admitted that he placed Cronein in the Office of Narcotics in the White House.