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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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October 1st,
2008 - Poker, Hookers, and Black Contracts: How To Make a CIA Trial Go Away |
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Poker, Hookers, and Black
Contracts: Or How To Make a CIA Trial Go Away It wasn’t the staff mistress that concerned Langley’s spymasters when
CIA official Kyle “Dusty” Foggo pled guilty to wire fraud this week. It was
the 27 other charges he faced. By Laura Rozen Mother Jones October 1, 2008 Yes, the stock market was
falling apart, but up on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters in Langley,
Virginia, you could almost hear the sighs of relief Monday thanks to another
bit of news: Former top Agency official Kyle Dustin Foggo had quietly entered
a guilty plea in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal courtroom. Henry Paulson
still has his job cut out trying to rescue the banking system, but Langley's
spymasters had just been spared the imminent prospect of having some of the
nation's most sensitive secrets spilled in what promised to be one of the
more revelatory and cinematic trials of the Bush era. As court documents laid out
in 28 charges, the man known to colleagues as "Dusty," a former
logistics officer, served as the CIA's number three official and effectively
day to day manager when he badgered the Agency to hire one of his mistresses,
identified in the indictment as "E.R.": "On or about March 19,
2005," the indictment reads, "Foggo sent the CIA Acting General
Counsel an email stating, in part, that his staff would tag E.R.'s
conditional offer of employment as 'ExDir Interest' in order to 'zip her to
the top of the pile.'" (E.R. was indeed hired, to a new position Foggo
created - deputy director of administration. "ExDir" refers to
Foggo's position as CIA Executive Director.) Foggo's generosity extended
beyond his girlfriend: He also, according to the indictment, engineered the
hiring of his best childhood friend's company for a CIA contract to provide
bottled water to staff in Iraq at a 60 percent price markup over the offer of
another contractor (who, under the deal worked out by Foggo, was hired as the
subcontractor to actually perform the work). He was frequently dealt into a
weekly poker game at various memorable Washington hotels (the Watergate was
one) popular with congressmen such as Randy "Duke" Cunningham
(R-Calif.), lobbyists, and House intelligence committee staff members; as
well as - according to other court documents - prostitutes. That childhood
friend, Brent Wilkes, also turned out to be among two defense contractors
bribing House intelligence committee member Duke Cunningham with tens of
thousands of dollars in antiques, travel, fancy meals, house payments, and
hookers in exchange for earmarks steering more than $100 million worth of
government contracts to Wilkes' San Diego-based firm, ADCS. But it wasn't the hookers,
the card games, the water contract, or even the staff mistress that concerned
the Agency's executives when Foggo spared them by entering a guilty plea on a
single count of wire fraud Monday. In exchange for the plea, prosecutors
agreed to drop the 27 other charges and requested only three years prison
time out of the 20 Foggo could have faced. ("Your lawyers did a good job
for you," US District judge James C. Cacheris told Foggo after he
accepted his guilty plea, with evident understatement.) No, what truly worried
Agency brass were the darker secrets their former top logistics officer was
threatening to spill had his case gone to trial as scheduled on November 3.
They included the massive contracts Foggo was discussing with Wilkes,
estimated by one source at over $300 million dollars. "Wilkes was
working on several other huge deals when the hammer fell," a source
familiar with Foggo's discussions with Wilkes told me. What kinds of deals?
According to the source, they included creating and running a secret plane network,
for whatever needs the CIA has for secret planes now that the network it used
for extraordinary rendition flights has been outed. "In or about
December 2004," the Foggo indictment says, "Foggo discussed with
Wilkes and J.C. the idea that Foggo might be able to get Wilkes a classified
government contract to supply air support services to the CIA…. In or about
January 2005, Wilkes directed various ADCS employees to begin developing an
air support proposal that would be designed to answer the CIA's classified needs
as outlined by Foggo." The indictment continues:
"On or about February 3, 2005, an employee of Wilkes' corporation
emailed J.C. with an offer to update him on their work developing the air
support proposal. …" (J.C., the indictment explains, is Wilkes' nephew,
whom I've identified as Joel G. Combs, the nominal head of a Wilkes' front
company, Archer Logistics.) The "classified air support contract"
and its implied purposes for renditions are among the truly damaging national
security secrets, along with the methods the CIA uses to create front
companies and dole out black contracts, that the CIA and Bush White House
would have been anxious not to have exposed, especially in a trial set to
take place the day before the election in a suburban DC courtroom within a
ten-minute drive of the entire national security press corps. "Greymail" is the
term of art for an old legal defense technique employed by those in
possession of classified information: The accused and his lawyers will demand
the revelation of so many government secrets in order to get a fair trial
that prosecutors come under pressure to make the case go away. And in Foggo,
the official responsible for the logistics of much of the administration's
war on terror, federal prosecutors met their greymail match. Foggo threatened
"to expose the cover of virtually every CIA employee with whom he
interacted and to divulge to the world some of our country's most sensitive
programs - even though this information has absolutely nothing to do with the
charges he faces," prosecutors howled in an early September court
filing, before they were evidently compelled to extend Foggo the lenient plea
deal; Foggo's lawyers, the filing continued, were attempting to "portray
Foggo as a hero engaged in actions necessary to protect the public from
terrorist acts." The plea deal hasn't stopped
Foggo's former CIA colleagues from continuing to fume in outrage at Foggo's
behavior, or from pointing the finger at former CIA director Porter Goss for
appointing Foggo to the Executive Director position in the first place.
"This behavior is not typical of CIA officials," one former senior
CIA operations officer told me. "We all knew him to be sleazy…This is a
guy who should never have gotten that job." Goss abruptly resigned in
May 2006 just as federal investigators were raiding Foggo's office. Foggo is
scheduled to be sentenced January 8. His co-conspirator Brent Wilkes is
currently serving a 12 year jail sentence in California. Cunningham, a
onetime ace fighter pilot who reportedly served as the inspiration for Tom
Cruise's character in Top Gun, is serving out an eight year sentence, the
longest prison sentence ever meted out to any member of Congress. Meanwhile
Foggo, based on his plea agreement, is likely to leave prison well before a McCain
or Obama administration finishes its first term. Laura Rozen is the national
security correspondent at Mother Jones. External link: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/10/how-to-make-a-CIA-trial-go-away.html |