[1]http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/09/disreputable-men.html
   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."
   ...
   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....
   ...
   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.
   ...
   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.
   ---
   Well, Vreeland had since the essay been written, convicted of
   soliciting child prostitution in Franklin County, which is a bit messed
   up if you heard the backstory of Franklin County.
   The moment we live in a free society is probably when Kiriakou is
   working at an Apple Store and is visited by the Attorney General and
   when Thomas Drake has a fellowship with a major think tank, and it is
   when Delmart Vreeland is a free man not on trumped up charges.
   I think Marine One with Obama in it flew by my house once.

References

   1. http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/09/disreputable-men.html