The Post and the Times both have Saturday run-downs of the raids at the home and office of Dusty Foggo. Of the two, the Post’s seemed more detail rich.
Some interesting tidbits.
According to the Post, Foggo was in his office at Langley as late as late Thursday evening. In his resignation email he’d given readers the impression that he’d be around for a few more weeks. By Friday morning, though, he’d been barred access to the entire CIA campus.
Both papers are now hearing from intel sources that Goss had asked Foggo to resign early last week, a few days before Goss himself resigned. And both papers are also hearing and apparently crediting claims that Goss himself didn’t know Foggo before plucking him from relative obscurity to assume day to day management of the Agency.
If Goss didn’t know Foggo well enough to come up with the idea to hire him, who did? What we’ve been hearing of late is that the idea originated with staffers Goss brought over from the House. And the Times points to Brant “Nine Fingers” Bassett, the retired CIA officer who went to work for Goss on the Hill and then went back to the Agency with him as a consultant.
Remember, as TPMmuckraker was first to report on Tuesday, Bassett did consulting work for Brent Wilkes between retiring from the CIA and going to work for Goss. As another recommender of Foggo, we keep hearing the name of Patrick Murray. But the indications are less clear there. And it may be that Bassett is the one who sold Murray on Foggo. The whole question, as you can see, is quite murky.
Here’s one other graf that jumped out at me in the Post’s piece …
During his tenure, Foggo tightened the agency’s publication rules and launched several probes of leaks to the media.
I’m not quite sure what to make of this.
And before proceding, let me say that what follows is highly speculative. In fact, I’m just going to set out some connections between various facts already in the public record. I don’t know more than is already out there. With that said, let me proceed.
Foggo seems to have been close to the hack-in-chief in the partisanized hackocracy that Goss tried to create at the CIA. But does Foggo’s role in pressing what were apparently leak probes of unprecedented scope have some deeper connection to the story?
We now know that the CIA Inspector General’s investigation, which CIA spokespersons had until recently been calling perfunctory, was nothing of the sort. They were there on the scene yesterday helping haul documents out of Foggo’s home and office. That investigation has been going on for some time. And clearly it was a pretty big deal.
The biggest scalp bagged by those leak investigations was CIA historian and Africa specialist Mary McCarthy. You remember that a few weeks ago she was fired from the Agency, just before retiring, allegedly for leaking information to the Washington Post’s Dana Priest.
Now, in emails today, several readers noted the fact that at the time of her firing, McCarthy was working in the CIA’s Inspector General’s office, the same office that was then investigating Foggo and not more than a few weeks after McCarthy’s firing would participate in raids on Foggo’s home and office.
Is there some connection here? My professional instincts tell me not to jump to conclusions based on what are likely coincidences or press for the nefarious and complex explanation when the banal and simple ones are more common. Some version of this is what I emailed to readers.
But my experience with this case — and by that I mean the whole thing leading back the Cunningham part of the story — points in a somewhat different direction. At most every point there’s been much more going on under the surface of the story than was known at the time. And that’s continued to be the case over the last couple weeks.
So I’m not sure I’d dismiss this suggested connection out of hand. When McCarthy was fired, “several former senior intelligence officials [told the Post] they could not recall a similar sanction being levied against a serving CIA officer in the past several decades.” Current and former Agency used similar words today with both the Post and the Times, explaining that a non-espionage criminal investigation of a CIA official seemed unprecedented.
Clearly, over the last month you’ve had several things pop at the CIA that insiders call unprecedented in the Agency’s history. And I don’t think we can dismiss the possibility that they may interconnect in ways we don’t yet understand. I’m not saying it as simple as that Foggo managed to whack the IG’s office before they whacked him. Perhaps it is simply that the pressures that blew up over the last week had the place in such a tight vise that weird things were happening all over. Who knows.
At a minimum, if Foggo was the prime mover behind investigating and firing McCarthy and today he’s barred from entering the CIA campus and the target of a corruption investigation, the whole McCarthy saga deserves a fresh look.
I’ll just say I think there’s much more we’re going to find out about this story over the next few weeks. And little of it, I suspect, will be pretty.
