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\u2019s license, and he served in the Navy as an information systems technician. With that fabricated biography, Rush rose to the agency\u2019s 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\u2019t even the sum \u2013 it\u2019s how easily Rush sailed through every check along the way.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4080,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[162,5722,4552,3852,2119,1815,107,5720,5721,1556,1953,60,3849,46],"class_list":["post-4079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-facts","tag-cia","tag-corruption-scandal","tag-david-rush","tag-embezzlement","tag-intelligence-agencies","tag-scandal","tag-usa","tag-djevid-rash","tag-korrupcionnyj-skandal","tag-skandal","tag-specsluzhby","tag-ssha","tag-hishhenie","tag-cru"],"yoast_head":"\n