Jack Terrell

Who was Jack Terrell? I first read of the man in Leslie Cockburns book Out of Control, she had interviewed him for television a number of times and he was one of the many strange people coming out of the woodwork with tall tales about the Contra operation but with evidence to back it up, she suspected he might have been a military intelligence agent.

In this book Terrell denies that and presents himself as a drifter with a petty criminal past that just happened to get involved with the rightwing movement supporting the Contras and tried to go to Nicaragua to conduct paramilitary/terrorist operations in an attempt to find some meaning in his life, assisted in this by some strange government contacts he had and then later when it went sideways and he began speaking out a series of mysterious phone calls giving him information to share that consistently proved true and even coined the term Iran-Contra.

Gary Sick in his book about the October Surprise speculates that the intelligence community will seek out and cultivate unreliable and easily manipulated individuals with checkered pasts for use in operations so that should things go bad nobody believes anything they say and they either take the fall or cause so much confusion nobody can decide what to believe.

Was that the case with Terrell: was he being set up to conduct terrorist acts in Nicaragua, or being used by a faction within the government opposed to the Nicaragua policy? Unfortunately too much of the book is sidetracked with Terrells tepid life story and complaints about its unfairness to be able to properly delve into that.… (más)