20151122

Barry Seal wasn’t starring in a Jason Bourne movie

So here it is…This really happened.

On the evening of January 22, 1963 ten American men are on a night out on the town in Mexico City's Zona Rosa, wearing black suits and black skinny ties, smoking and drinking around a ringside table with a white table cloth. At some point, the men look up, then break into a drunken chorus of "Cheese!"

A shutter snaps. A flash-gun goes off. A nightclub photographer advances his camera.

Write "Gary Webb was right" 500 times on the blackboard
Most of the men wear loopy grins. Most of the other tables are empty. Maybe its almost closing time, maybe on the kind of night which began much earlier at a restaurant whose name no one remembers. The moment—even as it happened—probably meant nothing to anyone there.

Almost 40 years later that had changed, because the picture freezes an important moment in time, and is the only extant photograph of the CIA’s super-secret assassination squad known as “Operation Forty."

And look who was there: Yale graduate Porter Goss, who will one day become Director of the CIA during the middle years of George W. Bush's administration, sitting beside Barry Seal, whose cocaine fueled the go-go 80's, and who Federal prosecutors called ‘America's biggest drug smuggler.’

Its a picture that changes your worldview. It has historic significance. A young Porter Goss, in a photograph of Cuban exiles, Italian wise guys, and square-jawed military and intel types who look exactly like you'd expect a secret CIA assassination team to look. ..

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