CLAIR GEORGE: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Clair George, the highest-ranking CIA official convicted of perjury during the Iran-Contra affair, was in the Indy on 31 August, while I was in the USA, and if you missed it you can link to it here. That's George with CIA chief William Webster and the head of Pakistan's ISI, General Hamid Gul visiting our then-buddies in the Mujahadeen at a training camp. Of course terrorism didn't exist in the world at that point....

Although Lawrence Walsh's independent counsel investigation of Iran-Contra was full and extremely convincing, very few people paid the price for illegally promoting murder in Nicaragua, violating the law to provide arms to our so-called enemies in Iran, and engineering the wholescale export of drugs to the USA. Far from paying the price, the US names airports and anything else that isn't tied down after Reagan, elected Bush and his son president, allowed them to bring back the same bozos into the Bush II regime and quickly make the world safer for terrorism. That these ops were run out of the White House didn't preclude deniability--and although the CIA were merely facilitators in the business, they, and especially George, paid a higher price for their lies.

Iran Contra was an outgrowth of the second October Surprise, where the Reagan people persuaded the Iranians to keep the American hostages in Tehran hostage until after Jimmy Carter was beaten in the election. In return the USA armed Iran, via Israel, and thus made the world safer for democracy. I say second October Surprise because in 1968 Nixon had made a similar deal with the Vietnamese, convincing them they'd get a better deal from him than from the Hump. Sad thing was, they believed him. Robert Parry continues to produce material on the Reagan October at his excellent consortiumnews.com site, to which you can link here.

I described Clair George as a kind of American Smiley, but the reality is that Smiley came from the British equivalent of the CIA's 'old boys' whereas George was of the next generation, and perhaps deemed more expendable as a result. His life after the CIA is incredible: Jeff Klein's stories on it can be followed here. There should be an investigative sub-genre dedicated solely to the antics of ex-CIA people.