Gold Heist Probe Risks Exposing Secret CIA Program

“Five decades ago, four burglars broke into a billionaire's safe, setting off a chain of events that exposed and foiled one of the CIA's most ambitious operations against the Soviets.

 

Now, Central Intelligence Agency veterans are worried that another seemingly brazen heist -- this time allegedly committed by a CIA official -- could expose another top-secret program, after authorities say the official walked out of his office with $40 million in gold bars.

 

The CIA's David Rush, arrested in May on charges of theft of public money, was a senior supervisor in the agency's science and technology division. That unit designs the spycraft tools agents use to intercept conversations, procure clandestine photographs and communicate. Rush hasn't been indicted nor has he publicly responded to the charges in court.

 

He operated a highly classified intelligence program approved by Congress several years ago to use large quantities of cash to obtain critical information about American adversaries, according to people familiar with the matter, and held a rank that is the CIA's equivalent of an army general.

 

The case has shined a spotlight on the way the agency conducts its business, and some former CIA officials said details of the legitimate clandestine operations he ran would inevitably surface.

 

 The case echoes the circumstances surrounding a 1974 case involving a robbery at eccentric aerospace businessman Howard Hughes' office, which ended up revealing a CIA effort to recover a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine.

 

"You could start to see things exposed that shouldn't be discussed, things that are real and truly sensitive," said Mark Fowler, a former senior CIA officer who ran spying operations against Iran.

 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation began looking into Rush, authorities said, after the CIA referred allegations that he had filed false time cards. He had allegedly requested pay for time as a deployed Navy reservist, when in reality he had left the military a decade earlier, authorities said.

 

Investigators later discovered that, separate from the real national security project Rush was operating, he appears to have created a fake classified program, known as a special access program, people familiar with the matter said. The fake program was supposedly related to the continuity of government operations, the people said, which generally allow Washington to continue functioning in case of a catastrophic emergency.

 

Rush allegedly conducted a fake briefing with two co-workers on the supposed program, which he claimed was run jointly with the Pentagon. He convinced one of them that it required tens of millions of dollars in funding through a contract; that money was then transferred to a military contractor who provided the bars, the people said.

 

Investigators learned that the gold he had fraudulently obtained through the fake program was no longer in secure storage, the people said. In May, an FBI search of Rush's Virginia home uncovered more than 600 pounds of gold bars together with more than $2 million in cash and dozens of Rolexes and other luxury watches.

 

The security precautions of such special access programs, also known as black programs, helped enable the scam, the people said. Since the two who were read-on to the program weren't permitted to discuss it with other employees or supervisors, Rush appeared to have been able to move more than 300 two-pound gold bars to his home before anyone noticed.

 

A Wall Street Journal investigation last year found that the opaque bureaucracy of secret programs had led to paranoia within the Pentagon and allowed some Air Force officials to create a different fake program, one that falsely asserted the government had a secret alien program.

 

Federal investigators discovered that Rush appears to have successfully fooled America's pre-eminent spy agency for decades with a pack of easily discoverable lies.

 

The CIA, legendary for its grueling vetting of potential employees, missed that Rush had given contradictory accounts of graduate degrees he had achieved, according to court papers. In some forms he said his master's degree was in computer science, other times he claimed to have completed a program in electrical engineering, the FBI affidavit said.

 

An FBI agent contacted the Navy and the Federal Aviation Administration, according to the affidavit. The agencies told him that Rush not only wasn't an elite military test pilot, as he had claimed, but he also held no pilot credentials. The college and graduate school he said he had attended told the agent they had never heard of him.

 

When asked about the case, the CIA said both the agency and the FBI "are committed to following the facts, ensuring accountability, and pursuing justice in accordance with the law." A lawyer for Rush declined to comment.

 

Darrell Blocker, a former deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, said the agency becomes so concerned when one of its operatives gets wrapped up in a criminal case it will sometimes work with federal authorities to make the charges go away. "It's what they call the 'CIA defense'," he said, noting defense attorneys are adept at using the CIA fear of disclosure to gain leverage with prosecutors.

 

Such a defense didn't end up helping the agency in 1974, when the CIA saw an opportunity to attempt to recover a 1,750-ton Soviet nuclear-armed submarine that had sunk in the Pacific Ocean six years earlier.

 

The agency approached Hughes, the aerospace businessman, to build a massive deep-sea drill-ship called the Hughes Glomar Explorer, and paid him more than $350 million -- billions in today's money.

 

As the Hughes Glomar Explorer raised the craft on its first mission, part of it broke apart, descending back to the ocean floor. Right before that effort, four burglars forced a security guard to let them into Hughes' office at gunpoint. Once inside, the men used acetylene torches to burn through a safe. The criminals hoped the documents within would contain sensitive secrets they could use to blackmail Hughes, who sometimes spent months without leaving his home.

 

A newspaper reporter looking into the case learned that local police were briefed by federal authorities of the urgency to recover the documents because they revealed the Hughes connection to the CIA. After the paper finally published the story eight months later, the White House decided the second recovery mission was too dangerous, fearing Moscow would disrupt the mission.

 

The revelations and resulting press inquiries to the CIA led to the now famous Glomar Response, in which the agency can "neither confirm nor deny" the existence of a program.” [1]

 

1. Gold Heist Probe Risks Exposing Secret CIA Program. Schectman, Joel.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 17 June 2026: A1.