A former high-ranking CIA official has been sentenced to more than three years in prison for a fraud scheme in which he steered procurement contracts to an old friend. The 37-month sentence for Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who held the CIA’s No. 3 rank from 2004 to 2006, matched prosecutors’ recommendations. He pleaded guilty to a single count of fraud.
Defense lawyers had argued for probation and cited Foggo’s good deeds over two decades with the CIA, many of which remain classified. Prosecutors said Foggo received tens of thousands of dollars worth of lavish gifts and vacations in exchange for helping his old friend, contractor Brent Wilkes, obtain no-bid contracts.
They also say Foggo forced the CIA to hire his mistress for a six-figure job for which she was unqualified.
The sentencing documents make note of a second mistress as well. Also, Laura Rozen makes a good point about Porter Goss, the CIA director who hired Foggo and who now claims that he had no idea Foggo had such a checkered past at the agency:
If you were director of CIA, and your top two operations officers quit, do you think you might possibly inquire about why? The top two CIA ops officers Steve Kappes and Michael Sulick quit in November 2004 over a fight related to Goss’s appointing of Dusty Foggo to be CIA number 3. (Goss’s staffer Patrick Murray had demanded that Kappes fire Sulick because Sulick was standing up in defense of associate deputy director of counterintelligence Mary Margaret who said it would be a mistake for Goss to hire Foggo as ExDir because of a history of troubling behavior in his file. Murray had threatened Mary Margaret that if anything from Foggo’s file leaked to the press, they would blame her. Instead of firing Sulick, Kappes and Sulick both quit.) In other words, Goss found out pretty soon after he arrived at Langley that there was a problem concerning what was in Foggo’s file. But he didn’t do anything about it. Not then, and not until the spring of 2006 when the Feds were about to raid Foggo’s office and he and Foggo both were canned. You don’t have to be an intelligence specialist to figure that out.
