David Rush Built A High-Flying CIA Career On Pure Moonshine

A big story in yesterday's news was David Rush, characterized as a management-level CIA employee, but with no other specifics given, who was arrested last week with roughly $40 million in gold bars and currency that he's alleged to have embezzled from the agency. The New York Post asks the obvious question:

Ex-CIA officer David Rush’s alleged years-long scheme that netted him $40 million in gold bars and a top-secret security clearance has those in the Clandestine Service community questioning how he slipped through the fastidious vetting process — and who else may be flying under the radar.

Former CIA staff operations officer Tracy Walder was baffled over the stunning allegations against Rush and believes they could point to a much more troubling issue within the agency.

“This would have been a large-scale lying cover-up. There would have had to be a lot of other co-conspirators,” Walder told The Post.

Nevertheless, there have been other puzzling episodes that call the CIA's vetting and internal security measures into question. The YouTube embedded above is with former CIA employee and convicted leaker John Kiriakou, who worked for the agency from 1990 to 2004 and spent 30 months in federal prison from 2013 to 2015 for his role in disclosing the waterboarding of Al Qaida prisoners. In the interview, he describes his own vetting and hiring procedure, which seems to have been incredibly slipshod.

He was recruited for the CIA by one of his Georgetown professors, who apparently doubled as a talent spotter for the agency. He was sent to a non-descript suburban Virginia office building and told to meet someone named "Bob" there, although he says it's almost certain "Bob" wasn't his real name. After some perfunctory chat, "Bob" sent him on to another non-descript building:

So I go there, and there's a table with three chairs on one side and one chair on the other, and in the three chairs are three people who never identified themselves by name, but they identified themselvea as being a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and an anthropologist. So I sit down, no "Hello, how are you?" nothing. I sit down.

I said, "Hello," they all just kind of looked at me, and then one of them says, "Describe your relationship with your mother." And I said, "Yeah. My mom and I are close, she's a schoolteacher, she's a terrific mother, very nurturing, took good care of all three of us. . ." You know, what do you say?

And then thwy're like, "OK. Describe your relationship with your father." So I did. I said, "My dad's a good guy, he's kind of introverted, my mom was the extrovert of the family."

"Was your father the disciplinarian>" And I said, "No, actually, my dad's a big, strong guy, and I think he was always afraid he would hurt us or something, so no, my dad's a very gentle soul."

Then they asked me that question again [referring to the very brief initial interview with "Bob"], "Have you ever betrayed a friendship?" And I said, "I don't think so, let me think about it for a second," and then the anthropologist says, "No no, that's the answer we were looking for."

And then one of them says, "You need to go into the next room, and you need to give us some piss, some blood, and some hair." I go OK and gave him some piss, some blood, and some hair, and then I left.

I went home and I called my fiancee. She goes, "How did it go?" I said, "I have no idea. They asked me these three weird questions, it took 15 minutes, then they took my pee, my blood, and pulled some of my hairs out." I get a call like four weeks later from "Bob". He goes, "You blew the doors off that meeting!"

I go, "'Bob', it was like from Bizarro world, I didn't understand what they wanted, tbey wouldn't explain anything."

He said, "You aced it."

He describes a subsequwnt series of meetings at headquarters with similar innocuous questions and no feedback on his answers, followed by another call from "Bob", who tells him again, "You aced it!" The next step was a polygraph exam, which he describes as something of a charade, and which, as in the other meetings, he passed. And then he discovers that "Bob" was in fact the human resources director for the entire CIA.

My sense of things from this description is that, at least in Kiriakou's case, the whole process was "wired": the Georgetown University talent spotter had talked to "Bob", and the rest of the process was a foregone conclusion. But if that's the case, rightly or wrongly, if Kiriakou went to federal prison for violating espionage law, the vetting and hiring process hardly served the CIA's interest, although it certainly appears that Kiriakou had a clean record -- but the process nevertheless missed the possibility that he'd turn out to be a leaker, whatever his motives.

So this brings us to David Rush. According to Fox News,

A federal investigation revealed that despite holding a Senior Executive Service (SES) rank and Top Secret/SCI clearance, Rush routinely lied about his military background and education.

According to Wikipedia,

The Senior Executive Service (SES) is a position classification in the United States federal civil service equivalent to general officer or flag officer rank in the U.S. Armed Forces. It was created in 1979 when the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 went into effect under President Jimmy Carter.

According to the Office of Personnel Management, the SES was designed to be a corps of executives selected for their leadership qualifications, serving in key positions just below the top presidential appointees as a link between them and the rest of the federal (civil service) workforce.

SES employees make between $150,000 and $225,000 per year. However, Rush appears to have reached this lofty state entirely on fumes. According to the Post link,

In applications for his high-level job, Rush claimed he was a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and the "current director of test for a 145-person, 18-aircraft joint Army/Navy weapons test organization," according to court documents.

However, military records show Rush was never a pilot and held no FAA licenses; his actual duties in the Navy included working as an information systems technician.

He also allegedly faked his educational credentials to boost his federal salary, claiming he held a bachelor’s degree from Clemson University and a master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, according to the filings.

. . . Further, the FBI claims that Rush scammed the government out of $77,000 in fraudulent military leave, claiming 744 hours of paid time off by telling his employer he was actively serving as a Navy Reserve captain (O-6) through September 2025.

Kiriakou's account of his vetting and interview process suggests that Rush must also have "aced" all his interviews and the polygraph, with nobody bothering to check his degrees or his current or prior employment. Not only that, but he was promoted throughout his 20-year CIA career on the same basis. Later in his interview, Kiriakou goes into the CIA's polygraph policy. Applicants get a pre-employment polygraph, one after three years, and then subsequent ones at five-year intervals.

He points out that a routine question at every exam is, "Have you ever committed a felony?" and the subjects are expected to answer truthfully. Somehow, David Rush was able to get through some number of polygraph exams while apparently embezzling multimillions, falsifying military leave, and who knows what else, without setting off any sort of alarm.

So the New York Post's questions at the first link strongly suggest David Rush isn't just one bad apple. Very little has been revealed about precisely what his job was, to whom he reported, and how he was able to requisition multimillions in gold bars that he could simply take home. According to another Post story,

When the agency conducted a routine audit, the assets were missing from official custody, prompting the CIA director to refer the matter to federal investigators.

“After a CIA internal investigation identified potential violations of the law, CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred the information to the FBI for a law enforcement investigation,” the FBI said in a statement.

How did malfeasance at this level escape notice for so long? I suspect this is going to be covered up, but at least Ratcliffe finally took action -- still, what did his predecessors know?