You read it here first. Former CIA executive director Dusty Foggo was conspiring to throw a major, approximately $100 million covert air plane contract to his friend, defense contractor Brent Wilkes, facts now charged in a new 30 count indictment.

As I first reported in March 2006:

As I have already reported, alleged Cunningham co-conspirator #1 Brent Wilkes already got a couple smallish CIA contracts ($5 million to $10 million/year deals each), through a company nominally owned by his nephew and former ADCS and Group W Advisors employee, Joel G. Combs, called Archer Logistics. As I reported in December, one contract dates to 2003 and was to supply water to CIA personnel in Iraq. But sources tell me far larger CIA contracts were in the pipeline, until Wilkes was revealed to be involved in the Cunningham corruption case. "Wilkes was working on several other huge deals when the hammer fell," a source indicates. "There were several more opportunities on the board when the federal investigation came down on Wilkes. Opportunities worth much more than the $5M or $10 million/year deals Wilkes was used to. The FBI probably knows about these from the raids they conducted, but I wonder if they have shared that information with the CIA." ...

And what were the forthcoming contracts for? According to a source, they were to create and run a secret plane network, for whatever needs the CIA has for secret fleets of planes. ... "I Imagine that since their whole flying operation has been outed, it makes it tough to operate clandestine flights," the source explained. "I bet it would cost a bundle to set up a whole new operation that no one knew about ... How do they operate a secret fleet of aircraft now that everyone knows about the planes we have? If I were high up in the CIA, this would be a big priority for me, and I would need a solution outside the normal range of solutions." Enter contractor Brent Wilkes and Archer Logistics, and perhaps a whole new front company to be invented for the purpose.

In fact, the would-be subcontractor was a company whose head I also interviewed who seems to have blown the whistle on Wilkes and Foggo after getting shaken down by them.

Posted by Laura at May 11, 2007 09:26 PM