‘‘Of course he’s a fraud,’’ Berntsen said he replied. ‘‘He’s a blithering idiot.’’

According to Berntsen, Hunt said that he too had been suspicious of Simmons and intended to inform Bill Shine, a senior programming executive at the network. He suspected Fox would heed Hunt’s warning. (Hunt did not respond to requests for comment.) But then, one morning, Berntsen was at the network’s studios to make an appearance on a radio show, and he bumped into Simmons. He asked Simmons what division of the C.I.A. he had served in. ‘‘If you’re an agency officer, you know exactly what to say,’’ Berntsen told me. But Simmons’s response was, he said, ‘‘bloody [expletive] gibberish.’’

Clizbe knew from his days as a case officer that the most potent deceptions contain a kernel of truth. He developed a theory about Simmons based on this insight. Maybe, he speculated, Simmons had been caught by some government agency on a drug charge and was recruited into working as a street asset. Simmons’s recruiters, whoever they may have been, ‘‘likely blew air up his butt’’ and mentioned the C.I.A. After that, he became a spy in his own mind.

This assessment could be correct. Publicly available information on Simmons’s life after 1973, when he left the Navy, reveals a certain sort of aimlessness that doesn’t jibe with a career in the C.I.A. He worked as a headwaiter at Pisces, a nightclub in Georgetown, and as a manager for Making Waves, an adult-entertainment hot-tub complex in College Park, Md. He played semipro football for the Baltimore Eagles and, in 1978, was invited to try out with the New Orleans Saints. He played defensive back for them before being cut early in the season. In July 1980 he got into an argument with three men in a nightclub parking lot and shot at them with his 9 millimeter Walther — the sort of handgun James Bond carries. He pleaded guilty to assault and transporting a firearm and received probation.

In 1983, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the F.B.I. received a tip that Simmons was looking to purchase large quantities of Uzis, grenades and surface-to-air missiles. Undercover agents began meeting with Simmons late at night, in an effort to draw him out. Simultaneously, the Prince George’s County Police Department vice squad learned of a bookmaking operation that Simmons ran out of the small house he shared with his wife and two young children. The police monitored his phone activity and, after gathering enough evidence for an arrest warrant, staged a raid. In addition to gambling paraphernalia, the authorities recovered an old handgun stashed in the garage and a rifle in Simmons’s bedroom. They also confiscated a safe. Simmons was charged with possession of firearms by a felon.

When Simmons took the stand, an incredible story emerged. The prosecution revealed that Simmons was involved with a man named Tom Tindall, a pilot who had been caught by the United States Customs Service flying drugs into the country for the Patriarca crime family. Because Tindall decided to testify against the Boston-based organized-crime group, he had a contract on his head. Simmons claimed that the Patriarcas wanted him dead, too, simply because of his affiliation with Tindall. That, he said, was the reason for the rifle in his bedroom. As for the artillery he was looking to buy, Simmons claimed that was Tindall’s idea. The two were working undercover with Customs, buying weapons so they could infiltrate ‘‘anti-American forces’’ in South Florida and Central America. Simmons was found guilty, but his sentence was suspended and he was placed on five-year probation.

In a post-trial motion to modify the conditions of Simmons’s release, the prosecutor mentioned the safe seized from Simmons’s bedroom. When law-enforcement officers opened the safe, they found a ledger that contained documentary ‘‘evidence of large-scale narcotics activity.’’ Simmons, however, never faced any drug charges. The safe was barely mentioned during his trial. Simmons claims today that the lenient sentence is proof that he was working for the C.I.A. He also claims he perjured himself to cover up for his C.I.A. work. To Clizbe, though, the outcome of the trial supports his theory: Simmons was an informant. Drug charges were never pursued, perhaps, in exchange for some sort of cooperation. (Simmons denies being an informant and dismissed the notion as ‘‘amateur speculation.’’)

Clizbe’s theory seems plausible, but it was still missing some vital details. The typical informant doesn’t try his hand, let alone succeed, at conning his way into Pentagon public-relations programs. Clizbe eventually found what he thought was the missing piece: The 2012 obituary for Simmons’s wife, Corinne, a longtime military-hospital administrator, laid out the Simmons family tree, and further digging revealed that it was a remarkable lineage. Simmons’s father, Wayne Sr., joined the Navy on the day he turned 17 and was stationed at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked. He served in the Pacific during the war and belonged to the Baltimore Masonic Lodge. His mother had been an F.B.I. fingerprint analyst. Simmons’s sister, Patricia Bradshaw, had been the deputy under secretary of defense for civilian personnel policy. Before that, she held a number of high-ranking positions in the Defense Department and the Department of the Navy. She was married to a former admiral. (Bradshaw didn’t respond to requests for comment.)