How To Make a CIA Trial Go Away
Poker, Hookers, and Black Contracts
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. "
Laura Rozen
October 01 , 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.
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