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Last Updated: Oct 10, 2008 - 12:47:19 PM |
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 position in the CIA general counsel's office.
"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.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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