This is going to sound very tinfoily. But here goes.

Prominent Baltimore banker Ed Hale has come forward to reveal he was a CIA NOC while Chair of the Bank of Baltimore from sometime around 1991 until 2001.

In a life that reads like a spy thriller, Hale says he was recruited into the CIA by former Alex Brown chairman Buzzy Krongard, who was with the agency. “He came to my officer one day and said ‘Let’s go for a walk,’” Hale said. Blue collar beginnings in Eastern Baltimore County to the world of espionage, Hale details this secret life in the CIA in a new biography called “Hale Storm.” “I was called a NOC,” Hale said, “N.O.C.” That stands for “non-official cover.” [snip] During his time with the CIA, from 1991 to 2001, Hale never told anyone.

That’s all very nice. But it suggests that Buzzy Krongard was at the CIA, recruiting other banksters, years before he was known to be (he is known to have started in 1998).

There are other versions of this, with slightly different dates and a different relationship with the CIA for Buzzy, which may be key. Still, they all show Buzzy recruiting a top banker to join the CIA in the early 1990s.

Which would mean that when Alex Brown was shorting United and American stocks in the days before 9/11, it didn’t just have a former employee at the CIA. It had served as a cover for that former employer while he was working for the CIA.

A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 (2001) as part of a strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter faxed to its subscribers, which recommended these trades.

The 9/11 Report goes on to report the SEC found these trades to be “innocuous.”

It doesn’t sound all that innocuous.