Just Out: Black Contracts, Greymail: How to Make a CIA Trial Go Away:

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. [...]

Go read. A few years ago, I first broke several CIA-related aspects of the wider Cunningham case: the name of the Wilkes' front company to get the secret CIA contracts in a magazine piece, the covert plane network discussions between Foggo and Wilkes in a less formal way here on the blog, Foggo's connection to Wilkes and the CIA water contract at the Prospect's blog back in November 2005, just after Cunningham's guilty plea, a magazine piece that raised potential counterintelligence questions about the case. Thinking back, I had some extraordinarily unpleasant conversations with a CIA spokesman who screamed that I was wrong, that he had marched to Foggo's office and none of what I was saying was true (and I think only the I-was-wrong part was on the record), and they couldn't find any Wilkes' company that had gotten a CIA contract, etc. etc. And then suddenly, they stopped screaming. And I believe it was I who informed at least the public affairs folks that Archer Logistics was a Wilkes' front company, through Wilkes' nephew Joel Combs, and it must have registered as a hit on some database. Then suddenly it was polite ordinary civil discourse that they don't ordinarily comment on who does or does not get CIA contracts. But the tone was utterly different. And this was way back in December 2005, several months before federal investigators raided Foggo's CIA offices in relation to the wider Cunningham probe. (The Foggo indictment confirms much of what I was asking them about and reporting back in 2005).

And when they screamed at journalists when Porter Goss resigned as CIA director in May 2006 just as Foggo's office was raided by federal investigators that Goss' resignation had absolutely, positively nothing to do with Foggo and Goss's ill-advised decision to appoint Foggo to the number three job in the first place against the warnings of others, I was (and remain) convinced that that was baloney, and was amazed that so many major media went with the CIA's utterly facile explanation. 'Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin' eyes,' kind of extraordinary. Under Goss's hands off management style, Foggo effectively ran the CIA day to day during Goss's tenure. The CIA's Foggo problem was Goss's problem and Goss's fault.

More here.

Posted by Laura at September 30, 2008 10:29 PM