Psst. Don’t tell anyone. Here’s the biggest open secret of the 21st Century:

The drug trade—the raging river of illicit drugs flowing into the U.S.—provides corrupt officials and the elite deviants who run America’s national security state a slush fund bigger than The Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.

Just don’t tell the truth about it… unless you want to become an American “non-person.” Its not a game for the weak-kneed or faint-hearted. 

Back during the Russian purges of the 1930’s, people who fell from favor were said to be “non-persons,” basically people whose existence –for reasons of ideological or political deviation— were systematically ignored and erased from public memory.

In Russia, such people were officially said to not exist. They were purged from documents, records, and even photographs, like ones showing Stalin with Molotov until  Molotov was “rubbed out”and  airbrushed out of history.

That sort of thing can’t happen here, though, can it?  Hell yeah.

It can.  And does.

Cuts like a knife, slices like a blade

The latest saw-toothed blade slicing through my thin-skinned hide is embedded in a recent book about the cocaine cowboys of the 1980’s.

Called “American Desperado, its being made into a major motion picture starring Mark Wahlberg. 

It’s an "as-told-to" about a guy, Jon Roberts, who claims to have been the de-facto “transportation chief” for the Medellin Cartel during the 1980s, as well as famous drug smuggler Barry Seal’s boss.

Both claims would certainly surprise Seal, except he’s conveniently (at least for the book’s author) dead.

And since the book doesn’t even mention truly significant Miami players on the Medellin squad, such as Carlos Bustamonte,  its claims should probably be taken with a large grain of salt.

An industry technical term, defined

But the book’s true shoddiness shines through when author Evan Wright casually relates—without attribution or credit, as if they were common knowledge—shocking revelations from “Barry & the boys: The CIA, the Mob, and America’s Secret History,” my book about famous American drug smuggler and CIA pilot Barry Seal.

Even worse, it insinuates the revelations came from HBO’s 1991 “piece-of shit” (an industry term) movie “Doublecrossed,” starring (in an ill-considered move which should not be held against him) Dennis Hopper, back in his pre-Betty Ford days when his skin appeared almost completely translucent.

"Barry Seal, subject of the 1991 HBO film Double-crossed, is one of the most storied figures of the early drug smuggling era,” Wright reports.

So far so good. Now here’s the next line:

“In 1955, at age 16, Seal joined the Baton Rouge Civil Air Patrol, a flying club whose members included future Presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. By 1963 Seal had been recruited by the CIA to join Operation 40 as an arms smuggling pilot.”

Wait a minute! That’s not in “Doublecrossed.”

I’m the guy that dug out that nugget of wisdom.

After unearthing a picture of a young Barry Seal wearing a Civil Air Patrol uniform, I discovered that he and Lee Harvey Oswald had both been at a two-week CAP training program at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana in 1955. 

The point being, uncovering previously-unknown and very unauthorized intelligence like this cost me, first two years of research in Louisiana. 

And then, because I found out more than (literally) the law allows, I then had to watch helplessly as spurious lawsuits kept "Barry & 'the boys’” from reaching bookstores for almost five years.

That's Operation WD-40 to you, bub

But the real kicker is the next line, another uncredited revelation:

“The group, based in Mexico, included Frank Sturgis, who would later gain infamy as one of the Watergate burglars, and Porter Goss, later a congressman and then director of the CIA from 2004 to 2006.”

That is from the picture on the cover of “Barry & the boys.” It includes Barry Seal and Frank Sturgis, and Felix Rodriguez, famous from Iran Contra and a good friend of  George Bush the First.

Rodriguez, before publication of “Barry & ‘the boys,’” had through a third party threatened me with death if I identified him. Though I’m still here, it was not a threat to take lightly: Rodriguez reportedly has a jar on a bedroom chest of drawers containing the hands of Che Guevara, who he tracked down and helped kill in Bolivia in 1967.

The identification of Porter Goss seated next to Barry Seal was in an exclusive story published on this website on May 7, 2006, when a correspondent wrote me—credit where credit is due—with conclusive evidence proving Goss was in the picture.

Walking into the buzzsaw

All this would be less than earth-shattering, except it’s clearly deliberate.

How I know: the author made a fetish of noting his sources, to the point where many comments about the book at Amazon.com are actually about the footnotes.

One reads,  “This book is actually a history lesson, with the footnotes backing up what Jon has to say. I actually have had more fun reading them than I did reading the book.”

“This book would have been better without all the unnecessary footnotes,” says another. “Maybe the authors thought they were academics,  or that the readers would get a thrill with all the footnotes. But most of them I could have done without.”

Telling the truth in America today often feels like walking into a buzzsaw, which is the title of a very good book about American journalists—Pete Brewton, Robert Parry and Gary Webb come to mind—who were exiled to the American gulag, which is a sort of Siberia of the mind for anyone having the temerity to speak the truth about America’s big dirty secrets.

When you try to investigate or expose anything this country's large institutions want kept under wraps, the buzzsaw rips through you.

In Part Two of "How to become an American Un-person,"  I'll have more to say about this, as well as more about the truth that's being (kindly) fudged in American Desperado.

Evan Wright, a Vassar graduate and the son of a former District Attorney in Cleveland, legendary home of burning rivers, philanthropist-cum- Vegas gangster Moe Dalitz and his vassal, long-time Hollywood Uber-Lord Lew Wasserman, clearly knows which side his bread is buttered on.

It’s the chief reason his book isn’t very good.