Redford headcanon

I have a headcanon that Robert Redford’s characters from Three Days of the Condor, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Spy Game are all the same guy — and also appears in Sneakers, if you understand that he is played not by Redford in that film but by Sidney Poitier.

After the events of Condor, the Rockefeller Commission subpoena’d the documentation which Joe Turner provided to the New York Times. After testifying to Congress, Turner got tapped to work on reforms within the CIA. To avoid reprisals from dirty agents, he took the new name “Nathan Muir”.

As Condor demonstrates, Turner is a nerd with a surprising knack for fieldwork, so by around 1980 “Muir” had secured a place as a mid-level CIA insider with a mix of friends and enemies. Among those friends: then-young S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury.

In the Reagan era Turner saw enough dirty business and geopolitical chaos to become bitterly disillusioned. The Hydra network paperclipped into the CIA turned him, and he became an effective Hydra recruiter, bringing in S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Sitwell & Rumlow and countless others. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hydra wanted to re-deploy this nerd good at fieldwork into the increasingly-important hacker underground. Spy Game depicts Turner on his way out of the CIA, securing the loyalty of rogue agent Tom Bishop (played by Brad Pitt) to bring in yet another Hydra recruit.

Turner took the name “Donald Crease” and joined the Sneakers crew; recall Sneakers’ running gag of “Crease” (played by Sidney Poitier, not Redford) coyly refusing to explain why he left the CIA. Turner saw guys like Redford’s Sneakers character Martin Brice as useful idiots. (He did eventually recruit the amoral Carl, played by River Phoenix, into Hydra.) “Bernard Abbott” — actually high-ranking Hydra CIA mole James Greer — allowed Brice to “trick” him out of Janek’s decryption box confident that Turner would just bring the box to Hydra later.

Stealing the box blew Turner’s relationships in the hacker underground, but having the tech meant Hydra no longer needed as much hacker support anyway. Hydra now needed political power to enact Project Insight, which would use the intel gathered using the box to target dissidents for mass assassination, so Hydra directed Turner to build a political power base.

Nick Fury, unaware of Hydra, set up yet another new identity for his buddy from the old days; when Fury tells war stories about working with “Alexander Pierce” at the “State Department”, he’s offering a classic intelligence operative’s cover. “Pierce” landed a position in the World Security Council, where he enabled Hydra infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D. and other institutions. Exercising Hydra’s resources and his personal networks at CIA, S.H.I.E.L.D., and elsewhere, Turner manufactured incidents which burnished “Pierce”’s reputation — Fury tells us he came close to a Nobel Peace Prize! — eventually winning “Pierce”’s appointment as Secretary of the WSC. In that position, Turner nearly succeeded in orchestrating a global Hydra takeover.

This all started with Leonard Atwood, CIA Deputy Director of Operations for the Middle East, attempting to avoid embarrassment over a botched rogue op by burning a nerd who just read books and wrote reports. It took nothing less than a team of superheroes lead by Captain America to finally stop that angry nerd. The moral of the story is fear blowback from burning your nerds.