Six Degrees of Bacon
By Maureen Dowd,
Op-Ed Columnist, NYTimes on the Web, May 13, 2006
WASHINGTON, -- I bet you're
wondering how someone like Dusty Foggo, who had his C.I.A. badge deactivated
yesterday because of his role in a scandal ripe with poker parties, Dominican
cigars, prostitutes, Scotch, luxury suites, bribed congressmen, defense
contracts and even a rumored Teutonic dominatrix, was ever chosen to run
day-to-day C.I.A. operations at such a parlous moment in American history.
It's because of Bacon Guy.
That would be Michael Kostiw, a conservative darling who was Porter Goss's first
choice to be the third-ranking official at the C.I.A. He was derailed in
2004 after fellow spooks leaked word to The Washington Post that Mr. Kostiw had
left the agency under a hickory-smoked cloud two decades earlier, after being
caught shoplifting a $2.13 package of bacon from a supermarket in Langley, Va.,
near C.I.A. headquarters.
Not the pork you usually associate with Washington.
Mr. Goss, W.'s absurd choice to lead our inept intelligence agency in the battle
against Islamic terrorists, was so loony he wanted to put a man in charge of
C.I.A. discipline who had to be disciplined for slipping chazerai into his
pants, or wherever he put the package to bring home the bacon.
Mr. Goss's departure, after a season spent sulking about losing the president's
ear to John Negroponte, has opened the window on a whole new level of
incompetence, turf wars, corruption and wackiness. Now we see that the
C.I.A. was mired not only in professional mistakes, but also in a complete lack
of personal and personnel judgment. The more you know about the people Mr.
Goss put in top positions, the scarier it gets.
When he was caught in 1981, Mr. Kostiw had been a C.I.A. case officer for a
decade. But his answers on a C.I.A. polygraph test and psych exam about
the purloined bacon were so sketchy that he was placed on administrative leave
and forced to get counseling, Walter Pincus wrote in The Post. Mr. Kostiw wound
up resigning.
Like Brownie, Bacon Guy found his comeback path greased by cronyism. He
worked on Porter Goss's terrorism subcommittee when Mr. Goss led the House
Intelligence Committee, after working as a lobbyist for ChevronTexaco.
(All roads lead back to oil.)
After Bacon Guy was forced to withdraw, Mr. Goss and his chief of staff, Patrick
Murray, were not moved to look for a sterling choice for the No. 3 post.
They were moved to go on a rampage to ferret out and get rid of the libs in the
agency whom they suspected of leaking the news of Bacon Guy's carnivorous crime.
With a Nixonesque sense of paranoia and vendetta, the Bush dominatrixes never
seem to worry about the nefarious activity itself — from shoplifting to
gathering data on all Americans' phone records. They just resent it when
the nefarious activity is revealed. When word got out that the government
was snooping on domestic calls, the administration rushed into action, not to
investigate the violation of the Constitution but to punish any government
employees who might have leaked it to The Times.
Despite rumors and complaints about Dusty, Porter Goss once more went for a bad
choice, installing Dusty in the inner circle of Gosslings, as the C.I.A.
director's cronies were known.
No doubt trying to save himself, Mr. Goss asked Dusty to step down once he
became publicly ensnared in a bribery scandal that includes a wild cast of
poker-playing characters, like Duke Cunningham and the retired C.I.A. official
Brant Bassett, a k a "Nine Fingers." He's said to have a prosthetic 10th
finger to hide his identity during cloak-and-dagger operations.
Dusty's childhood friend Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor who has racked up
almost $100 million in government contracts, is reported to have given Dusty's
other pal, Nine Fingers, a $5,000 fee to go to Germany for a few days as a
consultant on a business deal in 2000.
Investigators are looking into whether Mr. Foggo gave a contract to deliver
bottled water to a C.I.A. office in Iraq to a relative of Mr. Wilkes, and
whether Mr. Wilkes treated him to posh vacations in Hawaii and Florida.
In a scene that would impress even the "Law and Order" impresario Dick Wolf,
investigators from the F.B.I., the I.R.S., the Defense Criminal Investigative
Service and the C.I.A.'s inspector general showed up yesterday for the searches.
Dusty's C.I.A. office and his house in a nearby Virginia suburb were examined.
The dolts at F.B.I. headquarters could not get it together to search Zacarias
Moussaoui's computer before 9/11, but now we have the F.B.I. searching the C.I.A.
That's not progress.
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