The type of people Intelligence agencies need and use to accomplish their goals are also the type of people who tend to do these things.

When it comes to stories involving intelligence agencies I generally assume that I’m not getting the whole or accurate story.

How porous is the approving manager/chain that someone can request 300kg of gold bars and no one knows why and they just approve it any way.

the CIA told him to make that part of his identity and then burned him with it

isn’t it obvious?

not being charged for the forty million dollars in gold and foreign currency missing, no explanation on why they are even looking for something that was rightly paid out as expenses, no explanation on what kind of expenses those could be to begin with to incur this much, no explanation on why the government wasn't using US dollars to pay a government employee expenses. Its a complete red herring because some client state is paying off a debt, CIA just needs this guy burned

It would make such a fantastic set of barbell plates.

The article says "approximately 303 gold bars, each of which weighed approximately one kilogram"

I guess the gold bars aren't uniformly sized, which would agree with your ~280kg number.

~ 617 lbs.

I was just looking for something to watch tonight. Thanks for the recommendation!

Ehh, more like Rush would've been found dead like Abbott after declaring "I'm a patriot" to internal CIA. What's tantalizing about Bourne is something about who we are and capable of, regardless of conditioning... both good and bad.

It is an eternal problem with human intelligence. GRU and FSB spend serious resources on provoking their own agents, aimed at a range of problems including this one.

I imagine watches are more liquid than gold bars

The cover of national security has allowed a certain type of organized crime to proliferate to the point it's breaking society.

There's a book that ties into this sort of thing - Gold Warriors [1]. It about how, post WWII, the US recovered a bunch of Gold looted from China and used it to set up an anti-communist slush fund.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249237.Gold_Warriors

I don't think it's connected to this specific event, but there's a lot of lore about the CIA moving gold in/out of Afghanistan, Iraq and others during war time.

They want globalization to make their jobs easier. In no sense do they "need" it. Whether we want a world where the desires of intelligence and finance are blindly prioritized is an open question. For my part the answer is obviously no.

It’s almost certainly grift. If it were official, the arrest would have been scrubbed.

$40m+ in an expense account based in gold bars is absolutely crazy. CIA agents must have access to untold resources if this is seen as a somewhat regular 4 month spend. Seems it is, given that they seemingly weren't concerned about the $40+ million being taken out, but where it was being held.

I thought this was baseless speculation, but from TFA:

> [he] asked for, and received, “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.

Yeah, this reads like right out of "Burn notice".

I get 24 hour access through my local library. Here, have a gift link https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/us/politics/fbi-arrest-ci...

Many community libraries offer free NYTimes access to their patrons.

If he still has them, it’s probably ‘garden variety’ workplace embezzlement.

Make up some sources, pretend to pay them, cash the payments.

He probably just got sloppy, and it got too obvious.

Its nickname since the 1970s has been Criminals in Action, when they were smuggling heroin out of the Golden Triangle to fund covert actions during the Vietnam War.

Anna Paulina Luna is the only one claiming that the CIA raided the office of the DNI. No other trustworthy sources are reporting this and there's been no independent verification. Anna Paulina Luna is a lunatic who says outlandish things with no regards to truth.

There might be a mix up on the details.

The FBI raided the home of John Bolton who was a former National Security Advisor for the first Trump administration. (not directly part of the NSA and definitely not the director of the NSA). Bolton has become a vocal critic of Trump since he was fired in Sept 2019.

Trump's DOJ has a track record of prosecuting Trump's vocal critics. eg. Former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_John_Bolton

There has been no legal action taken against current NSA director General Joshua M. Rudd or his recent predecessor, William J. Hartman

The DNI, not the NSA.

Because nobody reputable reported on it?

> Who runs this country?

American Thought Control.

Crazy crackpot schizos aren’t the only ones listening to the voices in their heads.

Is it fragmenting? The FBI has always been in charge of investigating other agencies. The article even notes that this particular investigation was initiated when the CIA director made a referral to the FBI.

According to the article, 303 gold bars worth about $40M.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

This is different than that and scant on pertinent details

It says he received it as compensation for expenses, not that it was ever in some government vault. This is additional gold and foreign currency that an agency had, not the reserve.

It then says

> When the C.I.A. conducted a review of where the gold and currency were stashed

Why would they do that if it was compensation for expenses

He wasn't charged for that, and the phrasing doesn't suggest it was supposed to be remitted to the government

if the CIA didn't have a history of being involved in shady shit like this that already explains everything, this would be weird

instead it looks like he's got burned over his necessary use of fibbed identity

None of those points match bitcoin. What you are describing is more like tornado cash or similar stuff which are really really banned when interfacing with banks or similar institutions.

> untraceable, anonymous and yet high value enough to be worth it

Literally none of these is true of Bitcoin.