← The Watch Floor with Sarah Adams
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Welcome to the Watch four. I'm Sarah Adams. What I learned over my career is that every organization has its 10%. You all know what I'm talking about. So it doesn't matter if it's the CIA, the military, law enforcement, Congress. Well, Congress is probably 40, 50% corporate America. Inside your own local offices, everyone somewhere has a pocket of people who are going to cut corners, abuse trust and put themselves ahead of the mission. And sometimes it's purely because of greed. You're not going to hear much more of an answer than they're greedy ass people. Now most people, every day, no matter where you work, you could be working in a school, you could be a firefighter, you could be in the military. Most people wake up every day and they do the right thing. Thankfully that's the majority of us, but a few do not. And we have to be aware that they are among us. So today we're going to talk about that, we're going to focus on the CIA and because of course we had this recent incident where federal investigators arrested a senior CIA officer after they discovered these gold bars in his home. Millions in cash, these luxury watches, watches of espionage must be eating this up. And it all sounds strange, especially because we throw these gold bars in there. But there is a deeper story here when we talk about trust, oversight, you know, how someone spent nearly two decades building a career based on fraud. And when we look at these type of things, we have to remember there's a human factor in here. And the human factor sometimes is why people get away with this type of stuff. And so we're going to walk through, first off, just talk about the gold bars case, you know, some of the stuff I've seen in the agency and the fact that we need to stay ahead of this 10% because they're constantly going to be a problem. So this arrested CIA officer David Rush wasn't some junior level employee. He was in the senior ranks of the CIA, having served 17 years joining, they say in 2009. I had never worked with him. They say at the time he was in a senior executive position. That's obviously one of the most senior roles you can have in the CIA. So also according to reporting in these court documents, he didn't just work in the CIA, he was also liaison to the Pentagon and he worked on a sensitive maritime and nuclear related program. So in the CIA he sat in the Directorate of Science and Technology. And then of course he was involved in this nuclear thing as well. So of course he held the top secret. He had sensitive Compartmented information clearance. So he had access, he had authority, he had lots of trust in years of relationships with inside the intelligence community. And so I think that's why this has shocked a lot of people because it's like, how can this be done in this way? So this investigation exploded into public view last month when FBI put out an affidavit. But we actually learned CIA is the one who uncovered this and then handed it over to the FBI. So it's very interesting. This was actually found internally. I don't think a lot of people have been honest about that. So what happened is from this period of time, from November 2005 to March 2026, so a very small window, Rush obtained large quantities of foreign currency in these gold bars. So a very short time period. So the funds were for work related operational expenses. Expenses. Of course they were not. Apparently now The FBI on May 18 then went and raided his home which was in Ashburn, Virginia. And they found like 303 of these gold bars. They say they totaled $40 million in value. They found about 2 million in cash. And then they found all of these luxury watches. It was like 35 of them, including a number of Rolexes. So. So think about that for a moment. None of this was hidden in offshore accounts. There was no cryptocurrency, no shell companies. That's not how I would have done it. But anyway, this is how he did it and he got caught. Now what is really interesting is I think a lot more charges are coming. So right now he was charged with theft of public money. But I don't know if you've been paying attention. We've been told he works in the Director of Science and Technology. Well, you wouldn't get those type of funds. We know most likely he was working on a covert action program. That's the only way you can get that much money within a six month period. We're likely never going to hear his operation unless it was completely a fraud and implodes and he gets charged for more of it. So as you see recently, the CIA is giving briefings on this case. But who are they giving briefings to? The Gang of Eight? I'm excited to tell you about the world's number one expanding garden hose and their new product, the pocket hose ballistic. 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Message and data rates may apply. So this is a highly classified likely covert action situation. So when they do these covert actions, there's lots of money involved. You kind of throw money quickly at a problem, whatever the problem is going to be. And there is this small number of members who are allowed to do oversight in Congress. And that's kind of what these eight people are supposed to do. Again, there wasn't an oversight official that found this. It wasn't an investigative body like the FBI, it was the CIA. Because the CIA said, hey, we handed over over this money. We're having trouble accounting for it. We don't know where it is. FBI, you're going to have to come in because it seems to be missing. Right. So the money didn't go into the operation. It's not in some sort of holdings in the CIA. They can't account for it. You need to come in. And so most was found in his house. And then there was a storage unit where they found some of this as well. So we know he was entrusted with some important operation to where he can request this amount of money. We know the money did not go into that operation. And then we know this is such a highly classified operation that they have not told us what it is. But clearly the operation sounds like a failure to me. Cause the funds for it never went to it. Right. So we do have a big problem here that people need to talk about. Now, setting aside that mess because it's a giant catastrophe, to be honest, we have other issues here. We first have this massive amount of money. We recently had Amaryllis Fox Kennedy. She was a former CIA analyst who became a noc, which is on the case officer side of the house. And then she ended up in this administration, brought into some of the senior leadership roles on the intelligence side mostly kind of touching on DNI issues. And she left. And in the aftermath, she said, you know, one of the reasons I left is I felt too much money was going out the door. There wasn't enough oversight. I didn't feel comfortable approving this type of funding. So it was a very interesting thing because this does seem like a shift because for many years CIA has been like these massive penny pinchers. So when I was in the agency, I had a number of issues I with this. So first off, one of the things that happened is obviously I was serving in Benghazi, right? The morning of September 11th, I fly to Europe for a meeting and I'm supposed to come back the next day. Our compound gets hit, as everybody knows. So I return to Libya and I go to Tripoli and I serve out the next couple months of my tour overseas in Tripoli. So in Tripoli, the support officer who ran it at the time starts giving me this hard time about this $500 in cash that was in the safe in my bedroom in the CIA annex. So I say, it's in the safe, we should be able to retrieve it. You know, it's not like the. It wasn't like the consulate. So the consulate got overran and ransacked. No one ever overran the annex. It stayed perfectly secure inside. But I kept getting this pushback, like, we think you're lying about the 500. We don't believe the 500 is there. It was this crazy thing for weeks now, mind you. I went to London for a one day trip. So I had two outfits, a pair of pajamas, okay? So I am now working in Tripoli in the same two outfits every other day. I luckily have the a GRS officer who gives me a T shirt, but it's a big Johnson T shirt. So I'm like, well, I'll make that jamas. And then I found a pair of sweatpants in the bathroom a State department officer left there as they were fleeing Libya. So I made those my jamas. And so my pajama outfit. I made my third daily outfit. So I am wearing the same three days of clothes every third day. I have like two pair of underwear, a bra, and I'm doing laundry like, you know, every 18 hours or something. So the funny part is I have nothing. The only bathroom product products I have. It was really cute. When I was up in Europe, the embassy there was like, oh no, all your stuff's gone. And so they collected all these travel size items and gave them to me in this huge bundle and I brought them back. So I had tons of facial lotions and shampoo and conditioner because they're very sweet. I still keep the bag. They gave it to me in. I store actually my challenge coins in it. But it was very sweet of them. So, yes, I had two outfits, pair of pajamas, and a ton of travel shampoo and conditioner. And that's what I was stuck with in Tripoli because all my belongings were in Benghazi. So I did. Finally, a month later, when our team went back to Benghazi, I asked one of our GRS officers, can you go into my room, grab the safe and just bring it back? So they brought the safe back, it had the $500, and I handed it over, and they had my gun and handed it over, and they finally stopped bugging me. But that was an entire month of constant harassment. About five $100 bills then, apparently. So when I came back to Tripoli, they overpaid me. It was like $117 in per diem because, as you can imagine, I shortened my trip in Europe and came back as quickly as possible. And I didn't go back to Benghazi. So I got back to the country like a half a day before I had int. So they overpaid me. This per diem. Never told me they overpaid it, never asked me, never tried to pull it out of my paycheck. And then they sent the $117 two years later to collections. So I'm in the CIA building. I go home, I have a collection notice that the CIA put me in collections for $117. Of course, I had to go deal with that. So that is the CIA I know. So they never handed me gold bars. It's a very interesting thing to see because Mrs. Fox Kennedy might be right here. Is there a change in the system? Is there less oversight? Is there potentially more of this corruption? Is money being handed out and not having the appropriate approvals? Because it does seem like a big shift from the organization I was in, where they dotted every I crossed every T and hounded you for every single penny you spent. So let's set this money and greed aside from it and talk about a whole other issue going on here. So we have mess of a covert action, whatever that's going to end up being. But we also have this problem where this individual does not seem to have been properly vetted. And he spent 17 years in the CIA. So there's a number of issues that have come up. He faked his degree from Clemson. He faked his Polytechnic institute degree. I mean, he Was working on a nuclear program and had like no engineering background. Then he was supposedly a Navy pilot. And when you look at his naval background, he wasn't a pilot. You know, he was in the navy for a bit. He went into the reserves. We have a problem here where he misrepresented himself for years. He was also like dipping in and getting what was I think like 77,000 thousand a year from the military for like service he didn't even earn. That was also like fabricated in some way. So we have this mess where a person was not properly vetted. He was given all these credentials. Nothing was challenged over the years and it allowed him to not just commit this fraud, but he committed fraud, obviously against DOD's payroll system in some way and who knows what else he got away with during this time. And this is a very concerning thing because, yes, it's so great. When they handed him this 40 plus million, they realized quickly something's off and that money didn't disappear and we recovered it. Really good news, success story, way to be on it, way to bring in the FBI, way to deal with it. But what happened to 17 other years? This is a very concerning thing. We want to bring in the best and brightest, but the most trustworthy, the ones who are going to be good, steward of the taxpayer dollars and someone you can rely on to keep this nation safe. And here we have someone that really seems to only care about themselves and who knows what program he has undercut that is highly sensitive. Only the gang of eight know it and probably super important to our nation's security. And I want you to think about this for a minute. Our government spends massive amount of money vetting people and this person just slipped through all the cracks. So I do think besides the fact that this money was taken and figure what all happened there, how that failed, how there was no checks and balances. But also he got in and then he continued to be able to stay. So in the government, they do your background check again and again and then eventually get into this continuous monitoring. But he went through multiple polygraphs, multiple background checks, and nobody checked these things. It's like it was kind of fake in the beginning and people just ran with it. Well, that then is laziness. So if you are doing it in this case, that means you're not properly vetting the majority of these people. So how many more are in there like this? That is a concerning thing and it is something we should ask across anybody in the space where they're holding these top secret clearances. Now when we talk about like a CIA scandal, of course what most people think about and most people are concerned of is a CIA officer working for a foreign government as a spy and selling our secrets, right? Everybody thinks Aldrich Ames, and that's actually what the CIA focuses on, right? Hey, we got to make sure our employees are loyal. They're not going to betray their access, they're not going to go sell our secrets. And that's what they're constantly looking for. It's less and less they're worried about the fact that someone's going to actually fraud internally the system because they're like, we didn't bring in those kind of people. We bring in the people who want to go steal from the enemy, not from us. And so, so when we talk about how kind of insider threat programs are developed, a lot of it in these organizations, especially with top secret clearances, are focused on someone who gives information to the enemy or someone who takes money from the enemy. So it is good they found this, but it is an outlier. So over time there has been a few of these outliers. The most notable was a senior CIA officer. He was like number three in the building. He was the executive director. His name was Kyle Dusty Fogo. So he began involved in one of these contracting scandals where if I give you a company the contract, I get some sort of kickback, some favor. He steered a bunch of contracts to a certain contractor. And this is something we hear about a lot, especially in the DoD. It is a common type of fraud. Not as common in the CIA, but, but you know, it's a person focused on personal gain, abuse of trust, and really they're focused on themselves over the mission. Now the way I like to look at it is as I said in the beginning, every organization has a 10%. It's just factual. And you have to really be on top of this because you do bring in bad actors, even if you don't mean to, even if you spent billions of dollars on vetting, clearly it does not work that well. So when you're in the CIA, there is constant systems to look at these things, right? They look at your travel expenses, your hours, right? There's a lot of kind of TNA fraud. It does seem like this individual probably had some sort of TNA fraud because he was double dipping into the DOD system. So we'll have to see how that works. There's budgets, approvals, there's a lot of legal pieces involved. You don't really get handed these blank checks. So that's why a story like, this stands out. So this could have been a situation. This was a joint program. So it could have been a CIA DOD program. And so CIA is like, well, the DOD's got it covered. And DOD's like, the CIA's got it covered. Who knows? There's a lot of issues when it comes to covert action or even just kind of this concept of black money. Once you put a number on a classified document, it then goes into kind of its own bucket, right? Its own compartment. Very few people can be in that compartment. You don't get a lot of answers. A really good example that a lot of people know about right now is the counterterrorism dollars going to the Taliban. So very publicly, the US government made it clear we give 40 million in humanitarian dollars to the Taliban. We all know that as public, it's humanitarian dollars. But on the black money side of things, The CIA and DoD, right, the counterterrorism community gives the Taliban money to fight isis. Obviously they're not, but they're giving them this money for this farce of a program, also another program where it's being mismanaged. And so that number is on some classified document somewhere, and it's supposed to stay that way. Well, of course, everybody's been concerned about the money, so people just started counting the money. So it became pretty clear, Taliban get $47 million a week also to fight terrorism. So now we're at an $87 million number. Right? So 40 is in this pocket. 47 is in this pocket. And we had a problem here, right, because where's the oversight of this black money, the 47 million? Why are we still paying it to a terrorist group who's not fighting isis? ISIS has grown. When Taliban fell, they maybe had about 4,000 members. In Afghanistan, just the Khorasan branch has now 11,000 members. And then there's a bunch of ISIS members in Syria and Iraq, staging temporarily in Afghanistan. So the number right now is about 22,000 members of ISIS, or at least sitting inside of Afghanistan. Yes. Not every one of them is operational, but again, when there was only a few thousand, three to four, when we pulled out to over 20,000. The money is not going to fight ISIS. Okay? So constant problems happening. When you have this dark money, Only so many people know the amount. Only so many people see it. There's a small oversight window and a number of people like we're seeing with this Gang of Eight issue, and it becomes a problem. And that's why people really like public budgets as much as possible. So you can do your Best to follow the money. But even there's. DOD has a public budget in Afghanistan and it was like last year, they laid it out and there was a huge number. I think it was 60 million went to women's education programs. Women can't go to school in Afghanistan. So where did that money go? We have no clue. So again, huge problem, tons of corruption. 10%. So the 10% is abnormal, but it's real and it happens. And I actually want to walk through, when I was in the CIA, some of the things I heard coming out of the 10%, just so you're aware and you understand that these things do happen. And it's why we have to be proactive against it. First off, there was a CIA officer. This one's the most benign one. He stole a piece of pizza every day from the cafeteria. Dude's making six figures and he steals one slice of New York style pizza every day. I mean, what was that, a buck fifty? Again, a simple thing, but it's a pattern. We had a CIA officer breaking into homes in McLean, Virginia and stealing women's underwear. A CIA officer. This is a person with top secret clearance. I'm going to break into this house and steal this lady's panties. Crazy. We had many cases of CIA officers, especially in Iraq, completely making up intelligence reports. In one case, I know a guy who got sidelined because he made up these intelligence reports so long, the military got excited. We need to hit this target he's talking about. It was fake, it was nothing real. And JSOC planned a whole operation to hit the target, which was never a real target. We had a situation, it was a co worker of mine in one of my training programs. Her boss, her CIA boss broke into her apartment and held her at knifepoint. He was never fired, by the way. We had women attacked inside CIA headquarters. So inside the actual building that they work in, we had a female case officer in Iraq, of course, you could do a whole episode just of crazy things that happened in Iraq that married her terrorist asset. Okay, CA officer marries a terrorist. We had at least one bank robber. We had former agency officers involved in a kidnapping for a murder plot. I mean, lurk, luckily detained. We had two CIA officers using a CIA plane to move drugs from California to the east coast of the United States. We had, as people seen very publicly, I would call them rape rings. In our Latin American division, you know, where our officers worked in South America and got away with it for a long time till they were charged. Oh, and talking about rapes, we had a senior CIA officer in Iraq who raped his own employees. And they didn't fire him. What they did is gave him a fellowship to the Ivy Leagues. I think he went to Harvard. So we took an adult rapist from the CIA and sent him to a school with a bunch of young 20 year olds. So that probably ended spectacularly. So people will always have that small bucket of individuals in any organization who thinks they're smarter than the rules, who convince themselves, I deserve more, right? I'm worth more money, I'm smarter, I should be paid more. There's also those people who really start convincing themselves, oh, I'm never going to get caught. And that's the story we should hear here. It's the human factor. It's not like from this situation, CIA is corrupt. It's, hey, every institution has this problem with the humans they bring in and some of those individuals clearly should not be in the building and you have to stay ahead of them. In this case, he was just stealing money for himself. Bad situation, we got the money back. But in worse situations, they steal information and give it to the enemy and it gives the enemy a leg up and it really affects our national security. And we don't even know the program yet. He is undermined in this case. So he also could have had devastating effects to our national security. So I do not want to downplay that until we know. But something like this, this gold bar story has gone everywhere. So it does damage, of course, the reputation of the CIA. It brings down people's confidence. They really start saying, hey, accountability, accountability, accountability. I mean, that matters to the American people and we need to see more of it. Because it's not like every organization is broken, but every organization does have its 10%. So you need to stay on top of this. Thanks for being here today on the watch floor.