Democrats on the House intelligence committee who joined with Republicans to keep secret a 23-page unclassified report detailing Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s misdeeds on the panel:

1. Silvestre Reyes, Chairman, Texas
2. Leonard L. Boswell, Iowa
3. Robert E. (Bud) Cramer, Jr., Alabama
4. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, Maryland (No profile in courage award here for the first Democratic freshman ever appointed to the committee)
5. Mike Thompson, California. Wine country, to be precise.
6. Jim Langevin, Rhode Island
7. Patrick Murphy, Pennsylvania

Democrats voting in favor of releasing the report:

1. Rush Holt, New Jersey
2. Anna Eshoo, Palo Alto
3. Jan Schakowsky, Illinois
4. Alcee Hastings, Florida (In 1988, the House impeached Hastings, a federal judge, for bribery and perjury.)
5. John Tierney, Mass.

The Hill has the details. Jane Harman of California is no longer on the committee, but she’s still pissed about the way the panel dealt with it. “We still don’t know the whole story,” she told The Hill. “I felt that we should have subpoenaed [Cunningham].” Thank God Nancy Pelosi took her off the panel!

I have been fascinated, some would say obsessed, by the Counterintelligence Field Activity, whose employees have been dropping by this site of late. Setting aside the Talon fiasco for the moment, I feel sorry for you guys. I really do.

You had the unfortunate luck of having Randy “Duke” Cunningham as your congressional sugar daddy. That’s like having Boris Yeltsin as your AA sponsor. And then the Pentagon refused to give you operational control of military counterintelligence. So your legs were hobbled from the very start.

For those of you who have never logged on to Intelink, CIFA was created after the Sept. 11 attacks to bring order to the confused world of military counterintelligence. The Air Force, Navy and Army each have their own CI shops. The thinking was someone needed to see the whole picture or clues to an unfolding terrorist plot could once again get lost in the bureaucracy. There was a bureaucratic turf war, which CIFA lost. The Pentagon failed to give CIFA authority over the other military CI folks. So the Air Force, Navy and Army could keep doing whatever they wanted.

What CIFA lacked in authority, it made up for in money. Since it’s part of the intelligence community, CIFA’s budget is classified but I heard it got up as high as $1 billion a year. That’s a great deal in the world of counterintelligence. With that much money getting thrown around, it was only a matter of time before someone like Mitchell Wade showed up.

Alternatively controlling and paranoid and charming and generous, Wade ran a solo consultancy named MZM Inc., but he dreamed of life as a big shot. Through fellow (alleged) Cunningham briber Brent Wilkes, Wade met the Duke and stole Wilkes’ act. He outbribed Wilkes and spent a million bucks to buy himself a congressman on the defense appropriations subcommittee. While Wade and Cunningham were shopping for antiques, CIFA was being stood up.

Wade apparently boasted in 2002 that he could deliver money to CIFA from Cunningham and his other buddies in Congress (without mentioning that the money then came back to Wade in the form of contracts). On a page entitled “Benefits to CIFA from Congressional Mandates Initiative Support,” Wade trumpeted one item: “Delivery of over $67.62M in the last three fiscal years over budget – no other entity within the CIFA family has accomplished this task.”

On a page entitled “Election Impact on Congressional Mandates,” Wade wrote listed a number of politicians. The list included his buddy Duke, and Duke’s buddy, Dunk, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Speaker Denny Hastert, Jerry Lewis, Allan Mollohan, John Murtha, David Weldon, and Bill Young; Senators Robert Byrd, Larry Craig, Orin Hatch, Daniel Inouye, Trent Lott, Jay Rockefeller, and Richard Shelby. At the bottom, Wade wrote “Election enchanced MZM Inc….Thus CIFA position.”

A note of caution here: Wade said a lot of things, many of which were products of his vivid imagination.

What is clear is that CIFA didn’t want to risk hurting Wade or Cunningham, its sugar daddy, even when its own employees were making their concerns painfully clear. CIFA’s Chief Technical Scientist, Theodore Wiatrak, objected over $12.5 million going to MZM, which had performed poorly on a previous contract. “I believe this is wrong and respectfully decline to participate,” he wrote in a 2005 e-mail. Similarly, Amy Dall, CIFA’s chief information officer, also opposed the choice of MZM.

Wiatrak and Dall worked for people who lacked the same courage of their convictions. There were rumors that a new car and a plasma TV screen had been supplied, courtesy of contractors, to CIFA bigwigs. CIFA employees were calling the DoD inspector general’s hotline. To no avail. In response to complaints, CIFA’s Deputy Director, Joseph Hefferon, directed that CIFA stay with MZM. (Hefferon announced his retirement last year after 30 years of federal service.) The sad truth is that Hefferon, and Director David Burtt (who also suddenly resigned), were willing to look the other way at corruption because of the money that Cunningham brought their agency.

Sometimes it seems that al-Qaeda can’t do as much damage to us as we can do to ourselves.

Democrats regained control of Congress last year in large part by promising to end the “culture of corruption” that sent Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Bob Ney and lobbyist Jack Abramoff off to prison. More than a year later, however, Congress continues to hide the truth about Cunningham’s misdeeds. Why? Because the truth hurts.

Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times has managed to get his hands on a 23-page unclassified report by the staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on the Intelligence that helps flesh out the picture. That in itself is an amazing feat, since the committee has refused to release the report to other members of Congress. Democrats joined Republicans two weeks ago to make sure the report remained hush-hush, after Rep. Pete Hoekstra (right), the GOP’s ranking member, insisted it stay that way. (Cunningham has written Hoekstra from prison and invited him to come have a chat.) The report was narrowly constrained to focus only on Cunningham’s actions, not those of any other member. Even so, it was bad enough to shame the committee into silence.

Last year, Rep. Jane Harman, then the Democratic ranking member, had the temerity to release an executive summary of the report last year, which revealed that the committee approved $70 million to $80 million of Cunningham’s requests for his cronies. Republicans were outraged by the release. Hoesktra, then the committee chairman, suspended a Democratic committee staffer, ostensibly over the leak of a National Intelligence Estimate. Asked if the suspension was payback, GOP Rep. Ray LaHood told Fox News “There are some of us on the other side who can equally play politics, and I’m not afraid to do it.”

Most, if not all of the money Cunningham squeezed out of the committee went to the congressman’s new best friend, Mitchell Wade, president of defense contractor MZM Inc. Wade’s masterful manipulation of Cunningham over many a bottle of fine wine at The Capital Grille helped his company grow almost overnight from a one-man consulting firm into a mid-sized Washington defense contractor. In return, Cunningham used his position to help Wade by pushing for programs like Project Fortress.

Project Fortress was designed to get a handle on the foreign visitors who had been gathering intelligence on U.S. weapons systems. It was hatched by the Counterintelligence Field Activity and the U.S. Air Force to develop an analytical program that would provide an understanding of which foreign professionals visited which labs and bases to observe military exercises.

After Sept. 11, the Air Force and the Counterintelligence Field Activity decided to pay close attention to these visitors, especially during annual Air Force “Red Flag” exercises in Alaska and Nevada, which are attended by delegations from NATO, Germany, Sweden, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Mongolia, and the Republic of Singapore. In 2006, China was invited for the first time to watch U.S. wargames in Guam. In the photo below, a Chinese reporter and his military friends ask questions about the F-15, which the U.S. has sold to Taiwan (click here for link):

 

Over time, Fortress grew into a multimillion dollar program that involved dozens of people gathering human and signals intelligence at bases around the country. MZM employees ushered the foreigners around bases, while technicians sat in vans with equipment trying to pick up signals from laptops. The program is classified, which means there’s no real way to determine whether it served any value.

Cunningham has indicated he would have supported Fortress even if he had not received $1 million in gifts from Wade, who has pleaded guilty and admitted providing antiques, a Rolls-Royce, a yacht, a hunting video game the Duke installed his office and money that helped the congressman by a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe. In a letter from prison, Cunningham wrote that Fortress “will today save lives” and he would have fought for it “even if Nancy Pelosi had started the program.” House intelligence committee staffers were not quite so deluded. In a staff e-mail about Fortress, Miller’s story notes, one aide wrote, “HOOAH! Another $5 million of taxpayer money wasted.”

Nor was Cunningham the only member of Congress who wasted money on Wade and his company. Rep. Virgil Goode inserted a classified earmark into a defense appropriation bill to fund the Foreign Supplier Assessment Center in his Virginia district. State officials described it as “Project Goode” in internal e-mails. What was Project Goode? According to documents I obtained under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, a former civilian Army official working for MZM said that the program had been specifically requested by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. MZM intended to create databases on foreign companies and individuals that sought to supply equipment to the U.S. military. That way, the Defense Department could “track certain individuals” with a poor performance history. Subsequently, Project Goode – the Foreign Supplier Assessment Center – was revealed as little more than a cash cow. In June 2006, the Pentagon quietly closed the center.

MZM had many friends. It had people in the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Robb-Silverman Commission and the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center. The White House turned to MZM for help scrutinizing e-mails for potential threats to the president. A team of MZM translators was on the ground in Iraq providing support to the Coalition Provisional Authority, the transitional U.S. government in Iraq. One MZM linguist appeared in the company newsletter shaking hands with Sen. Hillary Clinton. Another translated for L. Paul Bremer and when he wasn’t translating, pulled duty with Bremer’s team of bodyguards.

Many of these contracts were and remain classified, shrouded from oversight under the rubric of national security. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the lingering secrets of the Cunningham scandal have more to do with potential embarrassment to members of Congress or the Bush administration. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle can play politics, as Congressman LaHood noted. But if they can’t even police themselves, how can they be expected to provide badly needed oversight of the intelligence community? By covering up its misdeeds, Congress is blocking the necessary disinfectant of sunlight from shining on the darkest corners of the “black budget” that funds secret operations. That is a far greater threat to our democracy than any revelations about Project Fortress, Project Goode or the other, unknown boondoggles that helped make a greedy Washington contractor like Wade into a wealthy man.

UPDATE: Apparently, what was left of Project Fortress was significantly scaled back in the last week or so, by as much as 75 percent.

 

A federal judge in San Diego has removed celebrity attorney Mark Geragos from the upcoming trial involving the former No. 3 official at the Central Intelligence Agency. The reason was Geragos’ stubborn refusal on principle to submit to a background check so he could review tens of thousands of top secret material.

I’m following the case because Geragos’ client, Brent Wilkes, is accused of bribing Randy “Duke” Cunningham with, among other things, prostitutes. In a separate case, Wilkes is accused of conspiring with his CIA buddy, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who lined up agency work for his friend in exchange for lavish vacations to Scotland and Hawaii the two men took with their families.

The judge, who had reviewed some of the classified material at issue in the Wilkes/Foggo case, practically pleaded with Geragos to get the background check, but he would not be swayed. He likened the security clearance process to something befitting a Soviet-bloc country. Sounding at times like a man running for office, Geragos summoned up outrages like the case of Scooter Libby to drive home the reasons for his distrust of the government.

The man who hired Geragos, Brent Wilkes, seemed crushed by the news he would lose his attorney. Wilkes told the judge he had lost his business, his reputation and much of his personal fortune, so losing his attorney was only the latest outrage perpetrated by the government. But Wilkes’ anger should be directed at his celebrity attorney.

Given his personal feelings about the intrusive nature of background checks, Geragos should never have taken a case involving the CIA’s former executive director. By putting his principles ahead of the man he represented, Geragos has left Wilkes swinging in the wind with his criminal trial set to begin in September.

I suspect that attorneys for Foggo aren’t exactly sad to see Geragos go. No doubt they wanted to have a concerted defense, not an ongoing sideshow about what is and is not classified. Geragos should stick to representing the Michael Jacksons, Winona Ryders and Nate Doggs of Tinseltown. For them, Geragos’ showmanship is a welcome distraction.

Why is Duncan Hunter running for president?

The issues that most concern the veteran El Cajon Republican are defense and national security, and those, he says, are more important now than ever. That may be so, but doesn’t he have a better chance of influencing them from his seat on the House Armed Services Committee? Surely he must know that the last representative elected president was James Garfield in 1880? In terms of fund-raising, he has raised less than Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee, and Dennis Kucinich is closing in.

Readers of Feasting on the Spoils will recognize Hunter as the man who more than anyone else was responsible for Cunningham’s election to Congress. The two were so close that Democrats called them “Duke and Dunk.” They were cut from the same ideological cloth, although Cunningham had a lust for the trappings of wealth that Hunter did not share.

Hunter never put much stock in appearances; his rumpled suit was his trademark and his house looked like a rummage sale. Both Hunter and Cunningham served in Vietnam, but they dealt with their experience in different ways. Hunter didn’t speak about his time in the Army Rangers or his Bronze Star; Cunningham could only talk about himself. And Hunter was a better friend than Cunningham deserved. No one else in Congress would have been caught dead at his sentencing hearing.

Still, there have been persistent signs that Hunter was playing the same games with earmarks as his fellow representatives. One recently retired senior Appropriations staffer told me that the word about Hunter was that there wasn’t a deal too dirty for him to touch.

For someone who says the military budget isn’t big enough, Hunter has been all too willing to spend defense dollars on things the military didn’t want. There was DuPont Aerospace’s DP-2 , which has never flown and Project M, a magnetic levitation technology the military didn’t want. And Hunter has literally forced the Navy to make use of his pet project, L3’s Sea Fighter, which looks like one mean-ass ferry.

Dunk, however, is no Duke. While they were digging into Cunningham’s dirty secrets, federal investigators looked closely at Hunter but came up empty. And unlike most of the gasbags in Congress, what Hunter does to and for the military affects him personally. His son, also named Duncan, is a Marine officer serving in Iraq and is now running for his father’s seat in Congress.

Hunter may not have been lining his pockets as his friend was, but earmarks were the currency of power in Congress. Until recently, Hunter wielded that power as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The Democratic takeover of the House cost him that plum assignment for which he had endured years as a member of the minority party. A few days before the 2006 midterm elections, Hunter announced his intention to bring his 26-year career in Congress to a close. But not before he went out with one final roar.