Some of Clarridge's "agents" attempted to get Hamid Karzai's beard clippings, so the hair could be tested for heroin traces. (Image by Cpl Matthew Roberson.)

It’s stunning to realize that there are American citizens running their own shadow versions of the C.I.A., but that’s a reality in the murky era of military outsourcing. Duane R. Clarridge, a former C.I.A. agent and a staunch right-wing interventionist, operates a network of spies from his home base in San Diego who often work in opposition to American foreign policy–and it’s apparently legal. An excerpt from Mark Mazzetti’s eye-popping article on Clarridge in the New York Times:

“Mr. Clarridge — known to virtually everyone by his childhood nickname, Dewey — was born into a staunchly Republican family in New Hampshire, attended Brown Universityand joined the spy agency during its freewheeling early years. He eventually became head of the agency’s Latin America division in 1981 and helped found the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center five years later.

In postings in India, Turkey, Italy and elsewhere, Mr. Clarridge, using pseudonyms that included Dewey Marone and Dax Preston LeBaron, made a career of testing boundaries in the dark space of American foreign policy. In his 1997 memoir, he wrote about trying to engineer pro-American governments in Italy in the late 1970s (the former American ambassador to Rome, Richard N. Gardner, called him ‘shallow and devious”), and helping run the Reagan administration’s covert wars against Marxist guerrillas in Central America during the 1980s.

He was indicted in 1991 on charges of lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-contra scandal; he had testified that he was unaware of arms shipments to Iran. But he was pardoned the next year by the first President George Bush.

Now, more than two decades after Mr. Clarridge was forced to resign from the intelligence agency, he tries to run his group of spies as a C.I.A. in miniature. Working from his house in a San Diego suburb, he uses e-mail to stay in contact with his ‘agents’ — their code names include Willi and Waco — in Afghanistan and Pakistan, writing up intelligence summaries based on their reports, according to associates.”