The American invasion of Panama began on December 20, 1989, five days after General Manuel Antonio Noriega declared a state of war with the United States.

The operation lasted forty-one days and produced numerous civilian deaths, the end of the Panama Defense Forces, the capture of Noriega - who for a time was an informant for the CIA - and costly material losses. The invasion of Panama, which was then codenamed "Operation Just Cause," was the largest U.S. military deployment since the Vietnam War, according to the New York Times.

But this critical moment in Panamanian history was the ultimate consequence of another much lesser-known one that will be available on the nine-episode Deep Cover podcast from Pushkin Industries - the podcast company of Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell - beginning July 13.

Deep Cover tells the story of the undercover operation that FBI agent Ned Timmons, who has infiltrated a drug trafficking network for years, started when he was a rookie.

Timmons had the conviction, which he followed to the very end - the ultimate consequence being the war between the United States and Panama - that “you don’t make progress unless you’re dealing with sociopathic, homicidal crazy people,” as he says in the Deep Cover trailer. 

The podcast, narrated by Jake Halpern - winner of the 2018 Pullitzer Prize - promises to tell an exciting and little-known story.

Although, because of the subject itself, it runs the risk of becoming a story in which the United States is portrayed as the savior of humanity, this is the point at which the fact that Deep Cover is a Pushkin Industries production becomes a seal of quality that guarantees, on the one hand, the rigor with which they did the reporting prior to the recording of the podcast and, on the other, that in this story no character is going to be completely good or bad.

Only one year old, Pushkin's podcasts -Revisionist History the jewel in the crown- have been guaranteed to tell complex stories from various perspectives, rigorous fact checking, illuminating unknown ideas and impeccable audio production.

So, once again, we can hear another story in which reality far surpassed fiction and whose consequences transcended time.