I went to school at a "TGS" myself... Maybe I should get a new hobby that doesn't involve the perils of paranoid synthesis.
Truly a delightful phrase. You have captured the core of tin-foil.
However, when looking at covert activities, one can't apply normal standards of paranoia. After all, covert activities are frequently bizarre, and false clues are usually planted with them.
Moreover, there is a tendency to go toward the extreme. This is partly because that fits the psychology of the participants, and partly because it helps hide the operation. How does it hide the operation? If the true story is sufficiently bizarre, reasonable people will usually reject suspicions as paranoia, relegating any such theory to the realm of crackpots. Ridicule by association is a powerful tool of disinformation.
How paranoid would one have to be to have taken seriously, in advance, the 9/11 plot, or Iran-Contra, or attempted assassination by exploding cigar, or any number of other similar incidents?
Some theories, on the other hand, are nonsense, of course.
I submit that there is no general way to distinguish, in advance, paranoid tin-foil from the bits and pieces of an actual covert operation.
And, although we don't know who was responsible for the anthrax letters, it is apparent that those mailings were a covert operation.
[I should add that I do not know whether the particular line of investigation being suggested on this thread has any merit.]
The use of monograms/initials may have been common among intelligence operativs at that time. Shackley's close companion Thomas Clines, who was convicted on income tax charges related to Iran-contra, used (at least) two secret Swiss accounts, one in the name T.C. and the other in the name C. Tea.
Found in Chapter 11 of the Walsh report, the special prosecutor's report on Iran-contra.