Duane Ramsdell “Dewey” Clarridge was born on April 16, 1932, and died on April 9, 2016.

He was a senior operations officer for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and supervisor for more than 30 years.

Duane was the chief of the Latin American division from 1981 to 1987 and a key figure in the Iran-Contra Affair.

His father was Duane Herbert Clarridge, and his mother was Alice Scott Ramsdale.

He Clarridge worked as a dentist.

Duane Ramsdell Clarridge went to the private college preparatory Peddie School for high school, and then went to the Ivy League Brown University.

After graduate school, he went to Columbia University’s Graduate School of International Affairs and joined the CIA in 1955.

Duane Clarridge then rose through the ranks of the CIA in “a normal career pattern up to the late 70s”, (as quoted in an interview he gave to CNN’s Cold War Episodes program), being chief of the CIA station in Istanbul, where he maintained close contacts with the Counter-Guerrilla, the Turkish stay-behind anti-communist organization.

Duane Clarridge transferred to Rome before becoming chief of the Latin America division in 1981.

Reported to the New York Times, “from his days running secret wars for the C.I.A. in Central America to his consulting work in the 1990s on a plan to insert Special Operations troops in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein, Mr. Clarridge has been an unflinching cheerleader for American intervention overseas.”

Over his three-year Career, he directed several of the CIA’s more notorious operations in Latin America, including the 1984 mining of Nicaraguan harbors, an act for which the United States was convicted in 1986 World Court at the Hague (Nicaragua v. United States).

Duane Clarridge became chief of the European Division of the CIA, where he ran a successful “counterterrorist” operation, in 1984.

Then later, with the support of CIA director William Casey, he set up a Counterterrorist Center that operated out of Langley, Virginia.

Duane Clarridge passed away at 83 yrs old.