Poker, Hookers, and Black Contracts: Or How To Make a CIA Trial Go Away (Mother Jones)

[kpete]

September 30, 2008

Just Out: Black Contracts, Gray Mail: 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.

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No, what truly worried Agency brass were the darker secrets their former top logistics officer was threatening to spill had his case gone to trial as scheduled on November 3. They included the massive contracts Foggo was discussing with Wilkes, estimated by one source at over $300 million dollars. "Wilkes was working on several other huge deals when the hammer fell," a source familiar with Foggo's discussions with Wilkes told me. What kinds of deals? According to the source, they included creating and running a secret plane network, for whatever needs the CIA has for secret planes now that the network it used for extraordinary rendition flights has been outed. "In or about December 2004," the Foggo indictment says, "Foggo discussed with Wilkes and J.C. the idea that Foggo might be able to get Wilkes a classified government contract to supply air support services to the CIA…. In or about January 2005, Wilkes directed various ADCS employees to begin developing an air support proposal that would be designed to answer the CIA's classified needs as outlined by Foggo."

"Gray mail" is the term of art for an old legal defense technique employed by those in possession of classified information: The accused and his lawyers will demand the revelation of so many government secrets in order to get a fair trial that prosecutors come under pressure to make the case go away. And in the person of Foggo, the official who held responsibility for the logistics of much of the administration's war on terror, federal prosecutors met their gray-mail match. Foggo threatened "to expose the cover of virtually every CIA employee with whom he interacted and to divulge to the world some of our country's most sensitive programs—even though this information has absolutely nothing to do with the charges he faces," prosecutors howled in an early September court filing, before they were evidently compelled to extend Foggo the lenient plea deal....

more at:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/10/how-to-make-a-CIA-trial-go-away.html
via:
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/008155.html