Court document hints at details behind former CIA officer’s fall from grace
Feds say Dale Bendler abused his position to help DC lobbying firm clients
A court document obtained by The High Side sheds new light on the case of a senior CIA officer convicted last month of charges including illegal lobbying on behalf of two foreigners. It also contains clues to the identity of one of those individuals.
Dale Bendler pleaded guilty April 23 to failing to register as a foreign agent and to mishandling classified material. A 30-year veteran of the agency’s operations directorate, Bendler retired in 2014 as a member of the Senior Intelligence Service, but the charges to which he pleaded guilty concern activities between 2017 and 2020, when he was working as a CIA contractor, according to a Justice Department press release.
A principal charge against Bendler is that starting around July 2017, an unnamed Washington lobbying firm paid him $20,000 a month to “use his position and access at the CIA to influence a foreign government’s embezzlement investigation of one of Bendler’s foreign national clients,” the press release states. The Justice Department, which did not respond to a list of questions submitted by The High Side, has identified neither the individual, whom it refers to as “Foreign Principal 1,” nor the foreign government, but a “statement of facts” filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia and signed by Bendler, his attorney and federal prosecutors, includes some tantalizing details.
For instance, the document (attached below) states that Foreign Principal 1 was based outside the United States, “had previously managed the sovereign wealth fund of a foreign country” and was already under investigation by the government of that country (“Foreign Country 1”) for embezzlement of that country’s state funds. The document also states that Bendler “was familiar with governments on the same continent as Foreign Country 1 from his prior work at the CIA.”
At least one relatively high-profile case appears largely to match these criteria.