David Ignatius has a good column in the Post tomorrow about Dusty Foggo, Patrick Murray and the mix of ineptitude, paybackism and mismanagement that did vast damage to the CIA under Porter Goss’s leadership. Ignatius views Foggo’s alleged corruption as a secondary part of the story. In that I suspect he’s mistaken, that we’ll come to see it was integrally connected to his other forms of ridiculousness. But the stuff he describes is bad enough. Give this one a read and absorb what it means about what’s been occupying the time of our intelligence agencies while we’re supposedly fighting a war on terror.
The Times also has a good run-down of Foggo’s increasing centrality to the expanded Cunningham investigation and a slew of new details fleshing out various aspects of the story.
The Times also came up with a new name for TPMmuckraker. They’re calling it ‘the Internet.’ See below …
Mr. Foggo was one of many C.I.A. officials close to Mr. Wilkes. In May 2000, Mr. Wilkes paid Brant G. Bassett, a retired German-speaking C.I.A. official known as Nine Fingers, a $5,000 fee to travel to Germany for five days as a consultant on a business deal that Mr. Wilkes was negotiating with a German software engineer, according to a former agency official aware of the arrangement. The official was granted anonymity to speak about the business deal.
Documents revealing the $5,000 payment to Mr. Bassett from Mr. Wilkes first appeared on the Internet on Tuesday.
Here’s the story. Here are the documents.
The Post was more specific.
