Word: covert
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...than a rationalization for North, who initially horned in on the affair as the NSC's antiterrorist expert. His electronic messages to Poindexter spoke in the crudest terms of so many weapons to be traded for each American hostage freed. But the operation sadly - illustrates how the obsession with covert operations became self-perpetuating. Because the arms sales aroused bitter opposition even within the Government, and would never have been approved by Congress, they had to be carried out in the deepest secrecy. And there was Ollie North with a ready network of gunrunners available to smuggle the weapons...
Secord's outfit, Stanford Technologies Trading Group International, was only one of many such firms that have grown up around the Washington Beltway in the past decade, most of them staffed with veterans of the huge CIA covert operations of the Viet Nam era. Reacting both to the end of the war and to congressional investigations of covert activities, Jimmy Carter's CIA director Stansfield Turner purged nearly 800 people from the agency. Some of them turned up in the Beltway firms. "One result of the purge was that many of the former agents set up private companies that began...
...Asia, formed a kind of old-boys network. Theodore Shackley, who knew Secord in Laos and had been the CIA's station chief in Saigon, worked from 1981 to 1983 as a consultant for Secord's business partner Albert Hakim. Shackley had been a candidate to become head of covert operations before his career was sidetracked by Turner. Another former Shackley associate at the CIA, Thomas Clines, helped Secord establish logistics for North's operation to supply the Nicaraguan contras...
...Grenada invasion was the occasion for North's involvement with a particularly amateurish group of private agents. Senate investigators have learned that North used a Macy's department store maintenance engineer named Kevin Kattke in covert operations in Grenada...
...became the "world' s most powerful lieutenant colonel" and a central figure in covert operations that in turn were a keystone of the Reagan Doctrine. -- On his route from all- American boy to reckless zealot, he always seemed to be the hero of his own movie. -- A look at Ollie' s army and his oddly assorted collection of private operators. See NATION...