I was flabbergasted when Mr. Foggo was selected as the Executive Director. I found Director Goss’s selection to be quite revealing, that Mr. Goss would be taken in by a “con man” like Mr. Foggo.
That’s the view, as reflected in the appendix to the government’s sentencing memo, of Jim Olson, a former CIA chief of counter-intelligence, who also served as CIA’s chief of station at several different overseas locations, and supervised Foggo. (Olson is identified only as “John Doe #2”, but details of his career and current employment make clear that it’s him.)
That sounds like an indictment of Porter Goss, who has already taken his fair share of lumps in the Foggo matter, after appointing Foggo to be the agency’s number 3 man.
But it’s also worth considering that Olson admits in the memo that he too was impressed by Foggo, recommending him for continued employment — even though he knew about the incident in which Foggo assaulted a pedestrian, and about the fact that Foggo had failed to report contacts with numerous foreign women, as CIA rules require (for good reason.)
Says Olson:
As a result of his police encounter and his failure to report contacts with foreign nationals as required, I considered Mr. Foggo to be morally suspect at that point. Despite my misgivings, I recognized that Mr. Foggo was talented at his job as a Chief of Support, and I recommended him for continued employment with the Agency.
Sounds like either Foggo was exceptionally good at winning people over, or his supervisors were a little to easy-going.
Olson, who now teaches at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service as a “CIA-Officer-in-Residence” didn’t immediately respond to TPMmuckraker’s request for comment.
