Two years ago, I found myself poring over a long, complicated and hair-raising book written in 1994 called Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA by Terry Reed and investigative reporter John Cummings.

Reading this book was, alternately, like racing through a thriller, discovering (more) American history on the dark side, and trekking through a terrible legal labyrynth. It is the story of Terry Reed, from his early life as a patriotic boy in Missouri who turned 18 in 1960, and, as a ROTC officer, got to meet his hero Harry S. Truman; his service in the Vietnam War as an Air Force intelligence officer; and his subsequent life as a super-talented businessman, during which he would serve as an FBI/CIA asset assisting in the investigation of Toshiba Machine Tools, which was illegally exporting sensitive technology to Moscow. Later, Reed was tapped by his handler, "John Cathay" (whom Reed much later identified as Oliver North!), to serve inside  the CIA's black operation in Mena, Arkansas, where, in an "off the books" state (Bill Clinton) and federal (CIA) operation to thwart Congress's Boland Amendment(s), Reed trained Contra pilots, assisted in the set-up and manufacture and shipment (with Barry Seale) of arms to the Contras, and, later, after the Clinton Mafia got too greedy, opened up an new CIA arms business in Mexico (Operation Screw Worm) under the supervision of the counsel of CIA proprietary Southern Air Transport, Robert Johnson.

The scoop-tastic British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard went to interview and also vet Reed as a source when he was researching his book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton (1997). Evans-Pritchard writes:

In the final pages of Compromised, Terry Reed writes that in 1992, several years after working with CIA-connected Robert Johnson, he made the "miraculous find" that "Robert Johnson" was also William P. Barr.

Yes, that William P. Barr, the man now poised to become Donald Trump's Attorney General if he can just pledge deep enough fealty before the U.S. Senate to an unelected and unaccounatble super-dirty super-cop and Barr best friend, Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Ironically, Barr's tenure as Bush 41 AG was noteworthy for his aversion to "special counsels," and he earned himself the title "Cover-up General" from William Safire.

To round out Reed's story in brief, it was when he found cocaine transiting through his arms warehouse in Guadalajara that he quit the operation and the CIA both; immediately thereafter, his legal, financial, reputational and survival troubles began to take over his and his family's lives. The latter part of the book is devoted to some of his numerous court battles, including a libel suit against Time magazine, which had devoted a full page to smear Reed in July 1992, several months before Bill Clinton defeated George Bush to become president. 

More than any other scandal, Reed's story, unless it or he were stopped, could have compromised Bill Clinton and George Bush both.

Here, reproduced from Evans-Pritchard's book, is a concise sumarry of all of the things Terry Reed would not be able to talk about in his own defense in one of his court cases. 

After I read Compromised in 2017, I wondered whatever happened to "Johnson"/Barr -- and was "Johnson" really Barr and "Johnson" really Bush's AG? No confirmation; no curiosity in the intervening years, either. Barr vanished from Washington's radar. Then, 28 years later, Trump nominated Barr to be his AG, the most critical cabinet slot in his Swamp-besieged presidency.     

Would that a US Senator ask William P. Barr under oath if he ever was known to anyone under the alias "Robert Johnson." 

Of course, even if Barr is if not also "Robert Johnson," even if he is *only* a George "New World Order" Bush-retread, my deep concern is that he is nonetheless the ringer of all ringers, another Deep Stater foisted on/welcomed aboard by Donald Trump. US law enforcement aside: a "fixer" for Bushworld, that vast, submerged continent of the Swamp, does not seem like the man to Drain the Swamp for President Trump and We, the Deplorables. I wonder if Barr wrote that pro-Trump-firing-Comey brief as a perfectly scrumptious piece of bait Trump would (and did) find irrisitible. Why not? 

As Terry Reed knows better than anyone else, the Deep State functions in nefarious ways.