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.

In the early 1970s, Joe Turner was a nerd working in a minor CIA analysts’ office sifting through seemingly-innocuous publications and writing reports on his findings.

Turner before the Condor Incident

In Three Days of the Condor we see how higher-ups assassinated the analysts in Turner’s office for stumbling across evidence of an illegal operation. Turner narrowly escaped through a combination of luck and wit, and responded by leaking documentation to the New York Times. This helped spark the Rockefeller Commission On CIA Activities Withing The US, which subpoena’d Turner to testify in a closed-door session. That got him tapped to work on reforms at the Agency, where he took on the new name “Nathan Muir” to avoid reprisals from dirty agents.

Because Turner was smart, diligent, and had a surprising knack for fieldwork by the early 1980s “Muir” had secured a place as a mid-level CIA insider with a mix of friends and enemies. Among those friends: then-young Army Sargeant Nick Fury, who would join the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division at Turner’s encouragement.

S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Fury in 1995

During 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.

S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Sitwell circa 2015, by then a highly-placed Hydra mole

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hydra wanted to re-deploy him. Spy Game depicts Turner making his exit from the CIA pay off by leveraging it to secure the loyalty of rogue agent Tom Bishop as yet another Hydra recruit.

Turner as “Muir” serving as Tom Bishop’s handler in the early 1980s

Turner then slipped into the increasingly-important hacker underground under the name “Donald Crease”, joining Martin Brice’s tiger team security crew, coyly refusing to tell them why he left the CIA.

(Note again that in Sneakers Redford plays not Turner as he does in other films but rather Turner’s asset Brice-aka-Bishop. In this one film, Turner is portrayed by Sydney Poitier. No doubt the studio made this confusing swap to blunt Brice’s ’60s & ’70s radicalism by eliding his involvement with Black nationalists. It is no coïncidence that Fury & Brice are both brilliant Black men Turner manipulated as assets; Hydra’s history of recruiting racist bigots long predates Turner.)

Turner saw most of Brice’s crew as useful idiots. No doubt his choice to use Tom Bishop’s name when creating Brice’s latest cover identity was a private joke. He did eventually recruit the amoral Carl Arbogast into Hydra.
Turner as “Crease” (left) noting Arbogast’s potential, circa 1995

When Brice’s crew stumbled across Dr. Gunter Janek’s SETAC ASTRONOMY decryption chip known as the “Box”, he coördinated with top-ranking Hydra military intelligence mole James Greer. Posing as “Bernard Abbott”, Greer engaged in a pantomime in front of a team of SpecOps soldiers suggesting that Brice tricked him out of the Box. This persuaded the US government to abandon the Box as lost, so that Turner could steal it and deliver it into Hydra’s hands.

Hydra mole Greer during the Red October Incident in 1984, pictured together with Jack Ryan (left)

This blew Turner’s relationships in the hacker underground, but he no longer needed them. The SETAC ASTRONOMY tech meant Hydra no longer needed as much hacker support because they could incorporate its decryption tech into Arnim Zola’s elaborate computer system.

A Zola System site found by Steve Rodgers & Natasha Romanov in 2014

Hydra directed Turner to build a power base to help accelerate Hydra control of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Fury, still unaware of Hydra, set up yet another new identity for his old friend, fabricating war stories about working with “Alexander Pierce” at the “State Department” in the classic intelligence operative’s cover.

“Pierce” landed a position at the World Security Council. Exercising Hydra’s resources and his personal networks at CIA, S.H.I.E.L.D., and elsewhere, Turner manufactured incidents which burnished both his own reputation and Fury’s. Turner came close to winning a Nobel Peace Prize as “Pierce”, which got him elevated to Secretary of the WSC in the early 2000s. He returned the favor to his asset Nick Fury by appointing him as Director of S.H.I.E.L.D..

Turner as “Pierce” in 2014, meeting Steve “Captain America” Rogers

In command of the WSC, Turner spent a decade supporting Hydra’s orchestration of escalating geopolitical chaos. Turner recruited the resulting fears to set up Project Insight, Hydra’s plan to use intel gathered using the Box technology to target potential dissidents for mass assassination by S.H.I.E.L.D.’s network of helicarriers. This plan for global domination was just baredly averted by the intervention of Steve “Captain America” Rodgers mere hours before it was enacted.

Again, this all starts with CIA Deputy Director of Operations for the Middle East Leonard Atwood killing off low-ranking analysts in an attempt to avoid embarrassment over an illegal operation. It took nothing less than a team of superheroes lead by Captain America to finally stop one angry nerd.

The moral of this story? Fear blowback from burning your nerds.