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Book Review of Black Eagles

Black Eagles
reviewed on


performed by Burt Reynolds, 4 cassettes 3 hours, abridged
Good factual-based thriller.
From Booklist
Readers who've followed national and international news over the past 15 years will find more fact than fiction in Collins' latest tale. The CIA may not have had an agent named John Featherly Lind IV who recruited a key Panamanian "asset" in the late '60s and "handled" him for two decades--through the gun-and-drug-running years of the contra war in Nicaragua--but it certainly did have anything-goes executives named Ted Hinckley and Bill Casey, and Manuel Antonio Noriega was an agency asset. The Drug Enforcement Administration may not have files on agent Kevin Grady or confidential informant Raymond Marcello, but Collins' portraits of players on all sides of the trade in and "war" on drugs have the ring of truth. There's a love story here, too, and an element of mutual respect in the conflict between Lind and Grady. But Lind's bosses are single-minded: because they define the nation's security, the American people--and, with the development of crack cocaine, America's poorest, most vulnerable people--must "pay any price" to protect their secret contra war. A disturbing reminder of just how sleazy "covert operations" can be. Mary Carroll