It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.
It’s reasonable to assume they knew it from the start he was getting money illicitly from the Navy and they might have enabled it. This was part of the leverage they had on him, to be used if he ever became a liability.
> It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.
Iran–Contra? Their cyber espoinage tools getting swiped? The self-admission from the US administration that the CIA failed to properly recognize and prepare for the tactics used in 9/11, in spite of ample forward warning?
Like most intelligence agencies, their unaccountable power often gets mistaken for actual intelligence. That power makes them dangerous, but it doesn't make them smart.
They also totally missed India's second round of nuclear weapon development and were blindsided by the tests:
U.S. Intelligence and India's Nuclear Tests: Lessons Learned
August 11, 1998 98-672
The U.S. Intelligence Community did not have advance knowledge that India intended to conduct nuclear tests beginning on May 11, 1998.
Although intelligence agencies cannot have foreknowledge of every significant development in world affairs, many observers (and senior intelligence officials) believe that, in view of the election of an Indian government committed to "inducting" nuclear weapons, much greater attention should have been given to indications of impending nuclear tests
I reject the the idea that these types of people are needed. It's probably that most of the people in the CIA happen to be like that because they're power-hungry and they're just selecting their kin and justifying their choices as "right kind" because they narcissistically believe themselves to be the right type... They're probably the wrong type. Especially if they all share narcissistic or psychopathic traits; it's too many, it cannot work.
The company hires people who match the company’s desired culture.
If the people in the CIA who do hiring want the talent who are excellent at lying and compartmentalizing their ethics, then that’s what the organization becomes over a generation.
Ha, this was explored in some credible article here on HN some months ago, wasn't it? It made complete sense.
You can't be a nice balanced guy doing work which often dips in shady stuff, sometimes being responsible for killing innocents, or in extreme cases one's failed actions can send some region into death spiral of some small or larger conflict. No, you need (relatively) smart folks for whom emotions are just a tool to use on others to achieve your goals.
And this obviously has various side effects, some quite negative.
the CIA is literally tasked with breaking (other countries') laws. tradecraft is a very similar skillset to being an effective criminal.
think about it: shell companies, lockpicks, bribes, theft, blackmail, hacking, forgery. two kinds of people do those things: spooks, and the mob. the difference is why you're doing it and to whom.
also, if anything the CIA is far tamer today than it was in the '60s.
A lot of the really sketchy stuff the CIA used to do has been folded under special ops parts of the military. After the church committee, the CIA has to report to the senate intelligence committee. The military only really answers to the Commander in Chief(POTUS), and gets away with a lot more.
Check out the book "The Fort Bragg Cartel". Tl;Dr, the US military and special ops were holding up the poppy industry in Afghanistan, something like 80% of the world's supply of Heroin came out of US occupied Afghanistan. The DEA would look the other way on shipments intercepted over a certain size.
The special ops guys brought the drug trafficking home, now i95 through the southern states is a major drug trafficking route.
Got it, thanks. The CIA's cocaine was still ending up on the streets of America during Iran-Contra, though, so I (in my very uninformed opinion!) don't feel like the CIA cared that much.
All spies are bastards. That's sort of their job. In the CIA it might speak more ill of the guy who was arrested that he was arrested than that he (allegedly) inflated his credentials and might have bilked the military for leave pay.
When I worked at Los Alamos, the head of counterintelligence was a former CIA ops guy. He seemed warm and intelligent; just an all around good guy. In presentations, he explained that his job at the CIA was to exploit that appearance to ruin people's lives. He said his approach was to gain the trust of a mark, and then provide him with what ever was required to get him to betray things he loved. The presentations were effective, enlightening and spooky.
Yeah, that's why in a functioning State you have means to control the damage. But now we seem to have accepted it is a free for all and just throw ours helpless hands in the air and hope we are next to enjoy the criminal bonanza at some point.
Like most people, unfortunately. But most people aren't entrusted with so much power and duty, and done so ostensibly for service to the people of this country.
If he's truly a "senior" CIA official, he probably actually was a reservist for much of his career, and continued to claim leave for reserve duties after he was discharged. And payroll eventually did pick up on this, which sparked an HR investigation of his credentials, which turned out to be inflated, and only then did they start to look at what this guy was doing with all the money he was taking home. Payroll is probably the only entity in this story that was actually doing their damn job.
When I had to have a TS/SCI with a SAP for a specific mission in the military, they weren't going to wait for the investigation, poly, etc. so a general just waved his hand and signed a hand written note (to be formally typed up later... which never happened) and, ta-da, I had clearance.
It's just like security in any system... sometimes it needs adjusted for expediency. The key is to be eventually consistent at the very least.
the CIA told him to make that part of his identity and then burned him with it
isn’t it obvious?
not being charged for the forty million dollars in gold and foreign currency missing, no explanation on why they are even looking for something that was rightly paid out as expenses, no explanation on what kind of expenses those could be to begin with to incur this much, no explanation on why the government wasn't using US dollars to pay a government employee expenses. Its a complete red herring because some client state is paying off a debt, CIA just needs this guy burned
> no explanation on what kind of expenses those could be
I think it's pretty obvious the gold was to pay a bribe. The only thing I'm surprised about is the value. That's A LOT of money for a single pay-off or bribe. It seems more than what would conceivably be paid to an individual at once because spy agencies tend to prefer to pay-as-you-go with individuals. Each round of documents, actions or whatever gets a payment.
So I suspect this was intended to either buy a one-time, career-ending action from someone very senior or, more likely, the ongoing cooperation of a company, gang or small nation-state. It's hard to guess but looking over major events in that time frame, Venezuela might be a good bet. The odd part is that the gold was in his house. Aside from the dumb trade craft of keeping it in the very first place anyone would look, why is the gold even in CONUS?
And why gold? Bulk gold is one of the worse ways to transfer that much money. It's big, heavy, and easy to trace until melted down (which is hardly trivial for most people). But the thing I'm stuck on is the places you can walk into and get cash for even one kilo of gold, much less over 300 of them, is extremely limited - and half of them will be under some form of "Know Your Customer" reporting, especially in North America, and the other half might prefer to "Kill Your Customer" and keep the gold. Diamonds, bearer bonds, offshore numbered account, even good old Benjamins seem far better. I think the amount and medium both narrow down the sort of person or entity the intended recipient must be.
One imagines the sort of folks who'd actually prefer to receive payment in that much gold bar all reside overseas where they might control a national bank or have their own precious metals smelting operation. That's why I'm struggling to picture the fake scenario this senior executive used to plausibly convince anyone at the CIA he personally needed to take possession of more gold than several people can comfortably carry and do so in the vicinity of rural Langley, VA. I mean, he can't carry it on any commercial flight and It's not like he's going to schlepp it himself in his family sedan to put it on a secret CIA cargo flight. The CIA has people for that. Also, someone that senior isn't generally doing any direct case officer work. They manage case officers who manage field assets.
So many interesting questions we'll never get answers to.
Even more tantalizing is that it was probably a domestic bribe he was tasked with. Traveling internationally with hundreds of kg of gold is not very reasonable and I'd assume they have access to resources in other countries as needed.
And we'll get all the answer, it'll just take 50 years, and then everything will probably make a lot more sense. Maybe even sooner if an administration finally gets the courage and brains to get rid of the CIA. So incompetently destructive to US interests, and an overall abhorrent organization.
I don't think it'd be difficult for the CIA to charter a cargo plane from somewhere in the USA without any questions being asked. They used to be very involved in the air freight trade. Guns don't move themselves!
Yes, I agree. CIA cargo flights out of U.S. military bases and private airfields probably happen all the time. My point was that if the guy's scheme to get the gold issued involved a cover story of flying the gold on such a cargo flight to some general or warlord somewhere, I can't imagine the normal process is "Ok, we'll deliver a pallet of >600 pounds of gold bars to your office desk."
The CIA must have people who securely transport illicit things like pallets of gold, RPGs, explosives, etc from a wherever they are warehoused to airfields for secret cargo flights. So, I was puzzled by how the culprit circumvented what I assume would be the normal delivery channel and took direct possession himself.
The reality may be more depressingly banal than clever clandestine deception. The guy was probably just the senior person in charge of approving dispersal of the CIA's slush fund 'petty cash' for illicit bribes and payoffs. And, incomprehensibly, there was no process for reviewing the approver's approvals, so he just wrote up his own paperwork and approved delivering it to himself in whatever way he found convenient. Hell, maybe he just had them deliver it to his house.
I guess that's the kind of stupid stuff that can happen when you combine "need to know" compartmentalized secrecy with massive bureaucracy. People just do what the paperwork says and don't ask questions or care.
I did consider that for a minute but if it really was the CIA acting in any domestic capacity, I think they would have taken him down on some other pretext. Not that the CIA doesn't quietly do domestic spying, they just wouldn't let anything get to the media that might lead in that direction.
Traveling internationally with hundreds of pounds of gold wouldn't be that hard for a CIA senior official on "official" business. A diplomatic passport and access to the State Department or War Department's fleet of aircraft would get you pretty far.
> But the thing I'm stuck on is the places you can walk into and get cash for even one kilo of gold
My sister had been hoarding our mother's & grandmothers' jewelry for decades. I finally got her to sell off the gold before another of her bad choices in boyfriends stole the rest (last guy took her for about $40k). We took a check for it, but the guy had most of the $70k in cash at hand. No KYC at all. Here in the US.
Sure, selling the sorts of gold grandmothers and crazy uncles horde like rolls of Krugerrand coins, etc and even raw flake amateur prospectors mine out in Nevada is common and probably pretty easy to convert into cash amounts up to a few hundred thousand dollars. But these seem to have been minted gold bars, very likely stamped and serialized.
Admittedly, I don't know that industry, but wouldn't trying to cash even a dozen 1kg minted gold bars with Federal Reserve serial numbers trigger some... questions? Or alternatively, require finding a vendor who explicitly asks no questions (basically a fence for probable stolen or illicit goods). And, even moving the gold a dozen bricks at a time is 25 separate transactions of over $1.7 million each. Are there a lot of places that just keep a couple million in $100 bills on hand for transactions? The largest branch of a national bank in our suburban area of 200K people gets pissy when we go to get $10,000 cash without calling ahead because "we might run out and need to schedule extra cash delivery."
If it's really possible to walk into a "We Buy Gold" place with 12 1kg gold bars and walk out with $1.7M in cash, no questions asked I'm just surprised. As someone who leans moderate libertarian, I don't have a problem with it. I do kind of resent having to fill out a government form (and the implied presumption I'm a criminal) anytime I get $10K of cash at the bank.
> If it's really possible to walk into a "We Buy Gold" place with 12 1kg gold bars and walk out with $1.7M in cash, no questions asked I'm just surprised
the spreads are horrible in most places, outright swindles
> the spreads are horrible in most places, outright swindles
Most of those retail locations will pay 60% of spot. My sister did a lot of research looking for better deals within about 200 miles of us. We negotiated 90% of spot with the guy we sold to. The smelter (who only dealt with the wholesale trade like the guy we sold to) would pay 95% of spot.
It’s funny to see how "normal" people talk about 40 million in gold and like a few million in foreign currency.
That’s really nothing in the theatres the CIA operates in. They simply gave it to him and followed up only after the agency’s bureaucrats couldn’t find it during auditing half a year to a year later.
To gain at least some loyalty from a warlord-based Middle East militia, the US was willing to spend 500 million in cash, plus another 200 million in weapons.
If you wanted to bribe a high-level drug trafficker, 40 million would get you laughed out of the room or put in a barrel and shipped around for other associates to laugh at.
According to the 2012 annual report of Sos Impresa, the total annual turnover of money by criminal organisations operating in Italy would be valued at €138 billion, with a net profit of €105 billion.
What’s 40 million to someone moving billions in product?
You’re also wrong about the gold. Gold is easily moved in the hawala system. You give the gold bars to a hawaladar in the US, they give you a piece of paper with a few numbers and you can take it out of the network minus the agreed fees at a different physical location within the network within a few hours in local currency or gold.
Witnesses testified that the trafficker kept track of his drug transactions using relatives who were hawaladars and who recorded the drug transactions
and profits in ledgers.
The ledgers were seized and presented as evidence at trial. One ledger, covering the year 2006-2007, contained a series of money transfers linked to opiate and precursor chemical transactions. Another contained financial records of heroin transactions, arranged by a trafficker, covering
the period March 2006 to March 2007. Analysis of the ledger determined that the defendant produced and sold over 123,000 kg of heroin, worth more than USD261,000,000: this represented over 19 per cent of the total amount of heroin produced worldwide in 2006, based on UNODC figures.
My bet is he is probably responsible for Middle East-related activities and saw an opportunity in this Iran mess to gain some pocket money while simply squeezing his contacts in the Middle East for whatever favour the CIA needed and keeping the money for himself. Not the first time this happened.
This usually either surfaces because the contact tells someone on a tapped phone that he got his balls squeezed by the CIA and not even got any money for it or when someone in CIA finance says, “Hey Lisa, I need to make this report where the billion for the Iran stuff went and how much we spend and for what and we’re missing six paperclips and 40 million in gold and a few mil in foreign currency. Did someone take it home with them again to make Breaking Bad Ka$h bed photos for their Instagram?”