Walt Smiley recruited me for a bloodless coup he could never be connected to

Who this is

Walt Smiley was a wealthy investor from Arkansas and one of the principal backers of Bill Clinton's runs for governor and for President in 1992 — ties so close that he could not afford the faintest scent of scandal. Which is exactly why, when Blyth Software needed its management team to tell the board the truth after three executives had been fired for trying, Smiley recruited the one person nobody suspected: Mike Minor's own protégé. He was, in Jonathan Hare's telling, a kindly southern voice on the phone and a CIA handler in function — the operation would have been denied and disavowed had it failed. It didn't fail.

When they finally met in person, Hare pitched him the next-generation architecture instead of a victory lap, and Smiley's reply is one of the record's best pieces of advice, delivered before the doctor independently confirmed it the same afternoon: you've already done what you need to do — you need to be on a beach in the tropics for six months, and I'll talk to the board about your vesting. More on Smiley — including Hare's first and only visit to the Oval Office — is promised in the source record and filed as an ask.

Connected from here

There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.

Where this came from

Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.

What is missing, and how to fix it

This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.

• The Oval Office episode, as promised in S-070
• How Smiley first identified Hare — the David Baron referral, in Baron's own words if possible
• The exact year