LAST SPRING, I spent a week in Washington, D.C., hoping to interview national security reporters and former CIA officers for my upcoming book, Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood, and one of the people I contacted during that quest was Duane Clarridge, who died from cancer on April 9. Known as much for his love of safari suits and cigars as for his spycraft, “Dewey” was the CIA’s former Latin America director and the founding leader of the agency’s counterterrorism center during the 1980s. He was also one of the most high-profile culprits of the Iran- Contra scandal, in which Reagan administration officials illegally sold missiles to Tehran to help raise cash for anti-Communist rebels in Central America. In 1991, Clarridge was indicted for lying to Congress about his role in Iran-Contra, but President George H.W. Bush pardoned him the following year, along with five other intelligence officials.
In 2006, I wrote Kill the Messenger, a book (later made into a film) that probed the CIA’s involvement with drug trafficking during Clarridge’s tenure, so I figured he might be skeptical about sitting down for an interview. But perhaps the legendary spymaster wasn’t big on Google; within minutes of receiving my email, he politely agreed to meet.
On April Fools’ Day last year, I arrived at Clarridge’s retirement community in northern Virginia. Looking relaxed in a red track suit and tennis shoes, he was waiting for me at a small wooden table at the clubhouse, where we began what would prove to be his last major sit-down interview. Over four hours that culminated with a dinner of Italian soup and a few glasses of sangiovese, he told me his life story: how he was recruited into the CIA by a professor at Columbia University and worked his way through the clandestine service via postings in Nepal, India, Turkey and Italy. According to Clarridge, he never received any official training in spy-craft. Instead, he learned everything from Alexander Foote’s Handbook for Spies. “That’s all you need to know about real espionage,” he said.