Federal investigators arrested David Rush, a senior supervisor in the CIA’s science and technology division, in May on charges of theft of public money, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported the case based on interviews, court papers, and people familiar with the matter. Rush has not been indicted or publicly responded to the charges in court. A lawyer for Rush declined to comment.
Rush operated a highly classified intelligence program that had been approved by Congress to use large quantities of cash to obtain critical information about American adversaries, according to people familiar with the matter, the Journal reported. He held a rank equivalent to an army general within the agency.
The FBI began investigating Rush after the CIA referred allegations that he had filed false time cards, authorities said. He had allegedly requested pay for time when he said he was deployed as a Navy reservist, despite having left the military a decade ago, according to authorities.
Investigators later discovered that Rush appeared to have created a fake classified program, separate from the real national security project he was running, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. The fake program was supposedly related to continuity of government operations, which would allow Washington to continue functioning during a catastrophic emergency. Rush allegedly conducted a fake briefing on the supposed program, which he claimed was run jointly with the Pentagon, and convinced one colleague it required tens of millions of dollars in funding through a contract. The money was then transferred to a military contractor who provided the gold bars, the people said.
The secrecy of such special access programs — known as black programs — helped enable the scheme, people familiar with the matter said. Because the two employees read onto the program were not permitted to discuss it with other staff or supervisors, Rush appears to have been able to move more than 300 two-pound gold bars to his home before anyone noticed, according to the Journal.
In May, an FBI search of Rush’s Virginia home turned up more than 600 pounds of gold bars, over $2 million in cash, and dozens of Rolexes and other luxury watches, authorities said.
Federal investigators also discovered that the CIA, known for its rigorous background checks, had missed that Rush gave the agency contradictory accounts of his graduate degrees, according to court papers cited by the Journal. An FBI affidavit said that in some forms he said his master’s degree was in computer science, while in others he claimed to have completed a program in electrical engineering. The FBI also contacted the Navy and the Federal Aviation Administration, which told the agent that Rush not only was not an elite military test pilot, as he had claimed to the CIA, but held no pilot credentials at all. The college and graduate school he said he had attended told the agent they had never heard of him.
The case has raised concerns among former CIA officials about potential disclosure of sensitive operations. Mark Fowler, a former senior CIA officer who ran spying operations against Iran, told the Journal that “you could start to see things exposed that shouldn’t be discussed, things that are real and truly sensitive.” Darrell Blocker, a former deputy director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, said the agency sometimes works with federal authorities to make charges go away before they become public — a tactic he called the “CIA defense.”
The circumstances echo a 1974 robbery at the office of aerospace businessman Howard Hughes. In that case, burglars broke into a safe, and subsequent reporting revealed the CIA had approached Hughes to build a massive deep-sea drill ship as part of a covert effort to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear-armed submarine. The White House later canceled a second recovery mission, and the revelations led to the CIA’s now-famous “Glomar response,” under which the agency can “neither confirm nor deny” the existence of a program.