“I’ve been sucked into a world of terrorism against my will,” is the first thing that falcon trainer Alan Parrot tells the camera in this documentary — a gripping account of the fantastical connections between the sport of falconry and the intrigues of the C.I.A., KGB, and Al-Qaeda. Criss-crossing from hunters in Kazakhstan to desert camps in Afghanistan — Feathered Cocaine is a doc as gripping as any James Bond thriller today.

Named for the assertion that falcon smuggling is the world’s fourth most lucrative black market (after drugs, people, and weapons) — the film’s subject is Alan Parrot, a dorky kid who grew up in the ’70s obsessed with the birds. (His gramps was an ornithologist.) At 17, realizing that the only country that really appreciated falconry was Iran, he told his parents he was going on a road trip and, instead, bought a one-way ticket to Tehran. (Rock on!) He ended up as the Shah’s official falcon trainer and a regular at desert camp outs, where he canoodled with wealthy rulers and terrorists alike. “They wanted something that could connect them to what their fathers did, to what their grandfather’s did,” Parrot explains. He converted to Islam. He stayed for years.

But he also traveled — setting up trades for the birds, which went for around $30,000 and up to $1 million. The birds traveled, cooped up, on everything from Russian Nuclear Submarines to American planes. The highest price went for the snowy white Gyr falcons — native to the Arctic, the birds would die within a few months in the arid middle east.

“I felt like I opened Pandora’s box,” Parrot tells the camera from his farmhouse in Maine, where in solitude he roams around in sweatsuits and a Dastar, caring for the birds. “And now I have to close it.” Today Parrot is heading an operation to cut down on smuggling, citing not only the loss of the birds’ populations but also falcon smuggling’s role as a proponent of the Middle East’s terrorism networks.

The filmmakers show that to look at the history of falcon smuggling — as to look at any black market trade — is to see the history of the world’s political underworlds. The collapse of the U.S.S.R. loosened the trade of Russia’s birds; 14,000 came to the Middle East after its collapse.

And in the Middle East,  the carpeted desert hide-outs of falconry hunting camps are “Al-Qaeda’s board rooms,” explains Parrot. It was at a falconry camp in the ’90s that Osama Bin Laden was spotted when a US defense adviser chose not to shoot him down. Parrot and his team argue that terrorism is controlled by the camps; to control them would be to control the network. And Bin Laden’s whereabouts are easy to track if you know the hunting seasons. (Bin Laden’s known to go falcon hunting in Iran every fall, and Parrot argues that his exact position could be triangulated using the signals of his three birds.)

If this is intrigue enough for you, just wait. Things get much more complicated. An FBI cover-up of an anti-falcon smuggling bill is hinted at. And the film picks up the tone of a political thriller as we trace falcon deals from Alaska to Kazakhstan — where the filmmakers show there are very, very few native birds.

Forget the violence, the politics, the wheedling back alleys where these birds are sold — the real tragedy, the filmmakers show, is in a shot of empty sky over a valley. “Through the bird you learn to understand people,” Parrot says. “And how to control them.” To lose that would be terrible.

Feathered Cocaine

Directed by Thorkell Hardarson, Örn Marino Arnarson