Disreputable Men

Gary Sick's is an interesting story. Sick is the author of October Surprise, one of the best accounts of the covert deal struck in the Fall of 1980 between senior Republicans, arms merchants and Iranian mullahs to delay the return of the American hostages until Ronald Reagan's inauguration. But as interesting as it is, that's not the story I mean. I'm talking about Sick's own story: his passage from career White House insider to "conspiracy theorist."

Sick served on the National Security Council under three presidents and was the principal White House aide on the Iran file during the fall of the Shah and the hostage crisis. He knew, or so he thought, how Washington worked, because he'd been working it. And though the timing of the hostages' release appeared suspect, there was no need, Sick thought, to resort to talk of conspiracies. However, as time went on, "seemingly inescapable fragments of information began to appear....

My experience was not unlike that of a medieval scholar discovering traces of a hidden text beneath the script of an old parchment.... I felt as if I were wandering into a spy novel. The backgrounds and activies of some of these individuals who were emerging from the shadows of this operation seemed to come out of fiction, and yet they were real.... most of my professional life had been spent as an analyst of political and military intelligence. I knew that there were operatives for hire, ready to skirt the law for money, perhaps out of habit or duty, or simply for the thrill and sense of power illegal acts conveyed. But it was nonetheless a shock to meet them....

Gradually, this Beltway veteran was introduced to a whole other level at which Washington conducted its business. Despite all his years at the NSC he'd had no experience of this, and though he'd always known a covert world existed, he'd spared it little thought. But there it was, in the corroborating testimony of witnesses, arms dealers and operatives. And what he was learning was nothing less than the secret history behind the official history he'd helped to write.

If you think you've undergone a paradigm shift, spare a thought for Gary Sick.

He discovered the secret company which respectable men like William Casey and George Herbert Walker Bush kept: liars, cheats, gunrunners and drug traffickers. Disreputable men. Intelligence agencies would be lost without them. And if they ever squeal, they are readily dismissed on nothing more than the broad outline of their character; their incendiary allegations against the powerful and respectable extinguished with barely a sizzle, regardless of the evidence supporting their charges.

Here's Sick, again, in October Surprise:

Such characters are a researcher's nemesis; they are meant to be. When the CIA or other intelligence agencies need to hire a "contractor," who may be required to carry out taks that are potentially dangerous and of questionable legality, they look for three things: a specific and useful skill (a knowledge of money-laundering, perhaps); a romantic streak that glorifies both the secrecy and the risk; and a propensity for exageration and trouble. One former CIA officer, David MacMichael, has said that the agency looks for these freelancers at small community airports and gun ranges - places where men go to excape the boredom of everyday life. Looking for adventure, these men are fascinated by the imagined glamour and excitement of the world of espionage. MacMichael said that often, after one or two assignments, the agency will put a contractor on a case in which he runs afoul of the law. The contractor finds himself in a compromising position - nothing so major as to put him permanently out of commission, but significant enough that if he ever starts telling tales out of school about covert operations, his record will discredit his testimony.

This is something the coincidence theorist perpetually refuses to credit: the perfect plausible deniability inherent in employing such characters. These are scoundrels, liars and criminals. If they ever choose to talk, who's going to take their word over that of respectable men of high station?

And to the practiced coincidentalist, it doesn't matter how well the testimony is corroborated. The evidence is discarded, sometimes for fantastic reasons, with the circular, unspoken rationale that if it confirms the word of a known liar then it must be false.

Take, for instance, the case of Delmart Vreeland. A scoundrel by every account, but also one with exceptional information for those with ears to hear. He did pass on the "Let one happen, stop the rest" warning from a Toronto jail cell before 9/11; his claim that Canadian diplomat Marc Bastien had been poisoned in Moscow has been proven correct; the Pentagon unwittingly acknowledged his lengthy service record when it was called in open court, by relying on archived records undamaged by the 9/11 attack from which he had not been purged (the prosecution argued, incredibly, that Vreeland must have hacked into the Pentgon files from his jail cell); Leo Wanta, longtime intelligence asset who destabilized the Soviet ruble in the '80s at the White House request, confirmed Vreeland was an operative of the Office of Naval Intelligence; his lawyers did receive death threats and found their files vandalized; and Vreeland has vanished.

But none of that matters to the coincidentalists, who stubbornly refuse to see deeper than the "legends" created for men like Vreeland, which is precisely the point. So Lee Harvey Oswald is a "communist," and Barry Seal just a drug runner. That Oswald was seen with the CIA's David Atlee Phillips in September 1963, and Barry Seal was gunned down with Vice President George Bush's personal phone number in his trunk, need to be ignored. The coincidentalists can't make sense of such evidence, that respectable men would have anything to do with such characters. But without them, some respectable men would be able to do very little.