A high-profile corruption scandal has erupted in the United States, with a senior Central Intelligence Agency official, David Rush, at its center. According to the charging documents, he stole $194 million from the American government. Rush had at one point listed on his resume degrees from two universities he never attended and passed himself off as a graduate of the US Air Force Test Pilot School. In reality, he never flew an aircraft and never held a pilot’s license, and he served in the Navy as an information systems technician. With that fabricated biography, Rush rose to the agency’s highest ranks and obtained clearance for top-secret material. In the end, he did $194 million in damage to the American government. The scheme was a simple one, since a good deal of intelligence spending is classified, and when money goes toward a secret program, questions tend not to get asked. Rush cooked up nonexistent authorities and even a fictitious special-access program so that his spending would look like classified government work. Roughly $145 million of it he moved around and blew on four houses in Florida, watches, and a car. To round out the picture, he also dreamed up a covert operation that supposedly called for buying gold. What stands out most in this story isn’t even the sum – it’s how easily Rush sailed through every check along the way.
All of which makes this incident not just a case of fraud but a systems failure in the way American intelligence agencies vet their people – and the total damage makes this theft one of the largest in CIA history in terms of direct financial losses traced to a single employee.