CIA's Goldfinger?
303 Gold Bars taken home? What? How? Amaryllis' fingers?
The recent news of a CIA officer caught with 303 kilogram gold bars in his house in Ashburn, plus several million dollars, must seem ridiculous and confusing to normal Americans.
Is Goldfinger lurking around Northern Virginia?
It might not be surprising to learn that it was a CIA employee caught with a stash of gold and cash. The first thing that many people imagine is that the culprit is involved in some sort of CIA “spying” operation.
It’s extremely likely that this guy was not a operational officer of the CIA clandestine services. While hundreds of millions of dollars do flow through clandestine operations run by actual espionage operators, the controls and bureaucratic obstacles to walking away with a bar of gold are generally so stringent in real espionage operations that walking away with $400 million dollars happening is virtually impossible.
However, there is section of the CIA that has billions of dollars in cash, supplies, And other valuables sloshing around the USA, especially in the DC area. Tied closely to the military, this group is less about espionage, and more about labs and engineering. Think Q in the James Bond movies. Reality’s nowhere near as sexy as those movies, though.
The Directorate of Science and Technology is a black box. They research and develop technical solutions for various problems. Some of their work has resulted in great success. The SR71 Blackbird spy plane is one example of the DS and TS work.
The SkunkWorks and Area 51, restricted areas in the desert Southwest were DS&T’s playground. They also were responsible for an operation in the 1960s that bought a ship from Howard Hughes and refitted it to raise a Soviet nuclear submarine, sunken in the middle of the Pacific. Their scientists/psychologists ran the project that explored the use of hallucinogenic and other drugs to in an attempt to manipulate people, generally known as MKUltra.
Besides these well-known projects—which show the extreme variation between successful (SR-71) and stupid (brain-washing) ideas—this group runs hundreds of well-funded projects that hide behind the cloak of classification and the public never hears about.
Operations like these require billions and billions of dollars. They require hiding the actual objectives and activities of the projects. And yet DS&T employees are not skilled in clandestine or covert tradecraft.
By and large, DS&T officers are scientists, engineers, and other technical specialists. They’re hired for their expertise in a specific area, that is relevant to a DS&T project. Once they are working in the DS&T, generally speaking, they become project managers.
The actual work, for example on the SR71, is done by contractors. These contractors might be typical Beltway Bandits, or defense firms, but depending on the project, DS&T officers oversee the projects. Acting as project managers, they might hire virtually any type of contractor.
The Howard Hughes ship project, for example, likely had contractors for oceanography, shipbuilding, welding, diving, navigation, air support, logistics, and a variety of other specialties. The DS&T officers would have been responsible for identifying the contractors, scheduling, assignments, payments, purchasing and approving purchases. That one project alone likely had dozens of contractors paid billions of dollars.
All of these project are highly classified. The true nature of the project even if it is obvious and visible to the public, must be hidden. The DS&T, although largely unskilled in clandestine and covert operations, must come up with scenarios that provide cover to these projects.
Not only do these projects cost outrageous amounts of taxpayer dollars; they can run for decades, with no actual results. A DS&T officer could run a project, or small family of projects, for his entire career, 20 to 30 years, and never have any actual results. Like any bureaucracy, they perpetuate their own office and job.
Because of the ineptitude of DS&T trade craft, we end up with well known urban legends based on the public’s perception of the visible actions taken by their projects. Area 51 being a UFO base is a perfect example of public perception of DS&T projects. Area 51 was used to test various experimental aircraft that had capabilities far beyond normal aircraft - - like high speed, low visibility, stealth. The public saw these aircraft and reported their sightings. The inept response of the CIA and the DOD encouraged belief in UFOs. It’s likely that the CIA even helped spread the UFO rumors to hide their actual aircraft in development.
It’s highly unlikely that the fraudster CIA officer busted with millions of dollars of gold bars and cash in his house in Ashburn was an actual espionage officer. It is much more likely that the scammer was a DS&T officer. It’s likely that he was managing some sort of DS&T project that required payments to a contractor, or a bank, or some other link in a chain set up to hide a harebrained project, with payments in gold and cash.
In addition to calling attention to the billions of dollars sloshing around and the potential for fraud, this case highlights the problems with the intel community’s vetting of applicants.
It’s also clear that the nepotistic appointment of a poser bimbo, Amaryllis Fox, to a high level position in the Trump administration, including overseeing CIA budgets, likely made such a scandal possible.
Fox, who wrote a fake memoir about her imaginary “counter-terrorism” operations while she was employed as a CIA ops officer, used her high-society connections to marry a chump in the Kennedy family. Once in the family, she has clawed her catty way up the political ladder—running RFK Jr’s campaign, and then wheedling the appointment in upper levels of the intelligence community.
Fox has now resigned, and there are likely more shoes to drop regarding her whole scam. Stay tuned!