>Hi Charles, I'm curious, what's your opinion of Jack Idema? :o)

Don't really know what to make of him. Seems too high profile to be the real deal. Suit against Dreamworks just didn't ring like somebody who was really off-the-books.

I look at it this way - the model has always been : the white team, the grey team, the black team. In this context white teams is CIA etc, grey team Blackwater and assorted contractors, and then there are ... off-the-books. I would bet that when Cofer Black ran counter-terrorism some of the off-the-books capability got dusted off and ramped up. A lot of it useless as it was very Latin-centric ( the acronym used to be UCLAs - unilaterally controlled Latino assets ) But for the last thirty years the private sector has had a lot of people with experience swimming in murky water, since on-the-books has had to play by more and more rules. And there are a lot of people who have brushed up against them close enough to adopt that kind of coloration if they chose to but who are personally too unstable to be used for anything serious. This Idema guy may fall into that category. Some pretty strange people show up in colorful places during colorful times ( Thailand and Laos in the early 70s was full of people you never quite knew what they were doing there - and sometimes their very weirdness was their protective coloration - loony as legend <g> )

The types of denials that came out of deep background from the Jawbreaker team etc don't sound like the kind that involve an assets who was the real deal, but who knows. Overall my guess is there is a good story there but it's not the one Idema is telling. ( if you like this kind of stuff, go back and lookup the Edwin Wilson and Frank Terpil affair )



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>>>Ah me too...
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>>>>No, but it sounded like something I would like and I have always liked him. I am still reeling from how massively disappointed I was in The Good Shephard
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>>And the really sad thing was that there were so many good stories to be told - Bissell, Shakeley, Barnes, Harvey ( Berlin station chief in early 50 who was responsible for the Venona intercepts ), Wisner, Desmond Fitzgerald, Dulles, Tony Po . And of course James Jesus Angleton ( and if that is who they loosely based Damon's character on - he was I think supposed to be counterintelligence - then they really blew it. Just the relationship between Angleton and Kim Philby would have made a movie. In TGS it was a throwaway scene.
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>>Diniro's cameo certainly didn't do justice to Wild Bill Donovan. In the late sixties in Istanbul I was lucky to know a woman who had been there since her days in OSS. Her brother was one of the originals - Amherst, Williams, OSS, one of Donovan's first, one of the people at the table in Georgetown with Fitzgerald and Wisner and Ben Bradlee and Kathrine Graham and the Alsops and Cord Meyer ... god did she have stories ( and a drinking problem ) Lots of late nights listening to tales of the wild times. She knew Donovan, Casey, Alan Dulles and a whole lot of the case officers and field guys (she did Berlin, Vienna, Madrid and Beirut as well as Istanbul ) There were 100 good movies there.
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>>People don't know much about that history as a rule - though it is not very secret anymore. There are snapshots - they saw Colby - college professorial looking guy - couldn't tell by looking at him just how many times he'd been dropped in to Nazi occupied Europe on a Jedburgh team. They saw cartoon depictions of the agency during the Church hearings but never saw the stars on the wall in Langley or even know the names of the guys who went into Fukien in '50 or did crazy improbable things in the Bekaa and Berlin and Peshawar and the Plain of Jars. They mocked Richard Helms because he thought it mattered and had disdain for them. And they never understood how Bill Casey took it off the books and hid it all in plain sight.
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>>Robert Littel's The Company is a great read that would make a great movie. Buckley's Spytime is a lot of fun http://www.amazon.com/Spytime-Undoing-James-Jesus-Angleton/dp/0151005133
>>I'm reading E. Howard Hunts An American Spy now and loving it.
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>>The Good Shepherd was like a movie about the American Revolution where they decided to leave out Washington and Hamilton and Franklin and Arnold and just make up characters that were "composites" Silly.