The Central Intelligence Agency has employed at least 10 pedophiles who committed sex crimes against kids during the past 14 years, internal agency reports show.
Released to Buzzfeed via the Freedom of Information Act and lawsuits filed during the past decade, the massive trove of documents reveal that one victim was two years old. Another was six. Investigators found images of kids on agency computers.
Even more shocking is what happened to the pedos. Only two were charged with crimes. The rest skated away with little to no punishment relative to the gravity of the offenses, which are felonies.
Confessions, Polygraphs
Though many of the cases against the employees and contractors went nowhere for lack of evidence, for others one would think prosecutors had what they needed to file charges.
“During an investigation that ended in August 2009, an official with a security clearance acknowledged having sexual contact with two girls, ages 2 and 6, and downloading illicit images while working for the CIA,” the website reported:
The inspector general started a broad inquiry and attempted to identify the victims.
The investigators found that he had “extensively” downloaded abuse material, such as 63 videos of children between 8 and 16. The man regularly used government Wi-Fi to download the material, he distributed it to others, and he brought the photos back into the US after he returned from a trip overseas.
Despite the admissions and the evidence that investigators found on his devices, prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia declined to take up a criminal case. They told the inspector general there were “taint issues,” a term that is sometimes used to refer to mishandled evidence. The attorneys also said that the girls in those videos had not been “previously identified child pornography victims,” making it harder to prove they were minors.
Five of the 10 CIA workers who committed the sex crimes were fired or resigned. Four were merely “referred to a personnel board or the Office of Security, which investigates classified leaks and is responsible for the safety of CIA facilities.”
Half of the sex-crime investigations began with confessions. Yet the “documents do not spell out the circumstances surrounding those statements, or whether they emerged during grueling ‘full-scope’ polygraph examinations that can probe every part of CIA employees’ and contractors’ lives,” the website reported.
A former spook told Buzzfeed that the employees confess because they don’t want the polygraph to expose them as liars and jeopardize a job. “Only later,” he explained, do they “realize that their statement might have sunk their chance to work for the agency and even put them in legal jeopardy.”
Those statements go to the agency’s inspector general. But by the time that office starts collecting evidence, the individual can deep six it:
That’s what happened in January 2010, when a CIA contractor logged into a chatroom using an agency IP address and solicited sex from an FBI agent posing as a child. The contractor acknowledged an obsession with child sexual abuse images, but by the time the inspector general obtained a search warrant and seized the man’s computer, someone had “removed the hard drives and thrown them away,” according to the reports.
Another agency pedo confessed to using his taxpayer-purchased laptop to view 1,400 images. He claimed, preposterously enough, that he didn’t know looking at kiddie porn violated agency policy. But “when the inspector general examined the man’s computers, however, no such images were visible.”
Federal prosecutors dropped the case.
The two cases that ended in charges also involved crimes involving classified material, the website reported.
Why No Charges
Former officials say the pedos aren’t charged for myriad reasons. Not least, the CIA worries it “could lose control of sensitive information,” the website explained. If people testify, “they may inadvertently be forced to disclose sources and methods,” one official told the website:
The official, who noted the agency has had a problem with child abuse images stretching back decades, said they understand the need to protect “sensitive and classified equities.” However, “for crimes of a certain class whether it’s an intelligence agency or not, you just have to figure out how to prosecute these people.”
Other agencies have the same pedo problem. The Department of Defense uncovered dozens of them in 2009, as did the National Reconnaissance Office in 2014.
In 2016, a top Pentagon official said that when investigators dig into employee computers, “the amount of child porn I see is just unbelievable.”
