Former senior CIA official pleads guilty in a $194 million fraud

A man who spent his career inside the Central Intelligence Agency used the agency's secrecy as his cover story, and it worked until it didn't.

David J. Rush, 49, pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia to wire fraud, admitting that he fabricated a "highly classified" program and used the lie to steal roughly $194 million. The money went to Florida luxury property and 303 gold bars worth about $40 million, plus $1.8 million in chartered flights and the rest of the trappings of a fortune built on fiction.

Rush also admitted to giving a foreign official the identity of a U.S. secret source, a detail that moves the case from spectacular fraud into something darker. Money laundering on this scale is a crime. Handing a source's name to a foreign official can be a death sentence, and the court filings do not say what happened to the person whose identity was given away.

He faces up to 20 years in prison, with sentencing set for January 28. Prosecutors have not said whether the gold bars have been recovered, and the Florida properties will presumably be forfeited. The classified program was invented. The gold was real. That is the whole story of modern financial crime in two sentences: the lie needs to be complicated, but the money always ends up somewhere simple.