SAD Story Raises Counterintelligence Questions for Langley
A retired CIA senior official admits to being a foreign agent – but what’s the real story?
It’s not every day that a high-flyer with the Central Intelligence Agency admits to breaking the law on behalf of a foreign country. Yet that’s exactly what happened last week, when 68-year-old Dale Bendler accepted a plea deal with the Department of Justice in which he admitted to acting as an unregistered foreign agent plus removing classified material from authorized locations, in other words taking state secrets home with him.
This is an embarrassing case for CIA, since Bendler spent 31 years with that agency’s Directorate of Operations, rising to its senior ranks. He was a DO star, especially in his own mind, and when he left the agency completely in 2020 – he retired from CIA in 2014 but stayed on for six more years as a fully cleared contractor – Bendler cashed in and told everyone who would listen about his illustrious spooky career in CIA’s Clandestine Service.
Dale liked talking about Dale a lot. His intelligence career was unquestionably interesting. After growing up in New Jersey, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1975, where he became an operator in Force Recon, the Marines’ special operations arm. After leaving the USMC in 1979 and graduating from Rutgers University, Bendler joined the agency in 1983 and rose up the ranks of the DO, particularly in the Special Activities Division, CIA’s paramilitary arm.* Bendler spent years in SAD’s Ground Branch, which was a logical place for a former military special operator to be. Indeed, that covert action division’s workforce always included many military SOF veterans like Bendler.
In recent years, Bendler shared a great deal about his DO career, especially in SAD, with the public. In his telling, he was something close to a one-man clandestine paramilitary army who turned the tide against the Reds in El Salvador, Angola, and Peru in the waning days of the Cold War and the years immediately following the Soviet collapse. SOF groupies seemed to eat up Bendler’s spy-meets-snake-eater tales, regardless of their precise veracity.
Dale’s penchant for self-promotion didn’t diminish his career, quite the contrary. Bendler had bigger dreams than SAD, where the work was fun and exciting, but career prospects could be somewhat limited. Any DO officer who wanted a good shot at rising to the senior ranks, that is the Senior Intelligence Service (equivalent to military general officers), needed to go into the mainstream of the Clandestine Service. That’s what Bendler did, opting to serve in more traditional DO assignments, recruiting foreigners to spy for CIA.
He did this effectively, and unlike most SAD officers, Bendler eventually rose to SIS and became chief of station more than once. He scored the plum assignments of COS in both Brussels and Paris, quite an accomplishment for a paramilitary spook who cut his espionage teeth in the jungle fighting Communists.
In his retirement in Miami, Bendler stayed busy, starting his own private security firm while offering his insights about the intelligence business to anyone who would listen. In Bendler’s description of his business, which sounds like he watched too many movies in the Taken series, his very particular set of skills could save you – and your kids!
He made no effort to hide his admiration for Donald Trump, identifying himself with the MAGA movement, while trash-talking the Left and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion industry which he felt had infected the Intelligence Community. As Bendler explained when President Trump returned to the White House for a second time, CIA was a “disgraceful” mess due to Wokeness. You see, Dale Bendler had been ignored: “Toward the end of my CIA career—37 years—I was despised by the DEI leadership,” adding that a wide array of national security problems, ranging from Afghanistan to Cuba to Russia, could have been ameliorated, had CIA’s top officials only listened to him. Instead, “CIA leadership had all the answers and laughed at me, and worse.”
This read like a self-absorbed plea for a big job at Langley in the new Trump administration, but that was not to be. Bendler’s belief that CIA leadership despised him was accurate, but not due to his boisterous politics. What the onetime SAD star failed to tell his podcast fans was that CIA had booted him in September 2020, cancelling his contract and suspending his security clearances, over Bendler’s breaking of security regulations and worse. As the DoJ press release explains the unfortunate saga:
Starting in 2014, Bendler began working as a full-time contractor at the CIA with a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearance … Beginning in July 2017 and continuing through at least July 2020, while a full-time CIA contractor and TS/SCI clearance holder, Bendler worked with a U.S. lobbying firm and engaged in unauthorized and hidden lobbying and public relations activities on behalf of foreign national clients. As described in the plea agreement, Bendler’s undisclosed lobbying activities included an attempt 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 and a separate attempt to use his position and access at the CIA to influence the U.S. government’s decision as to whether to grant a U.S. visa to another of Bendler’s clients, who was alleged to be associated with terrorism financing. In exchange for his unauthorized outside activities, Bendler was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There’s more:
During the course of Bendler’s unauthorized lobbying and public relations activities, Bendler also abused his access to CIA resources and personnel by, among other things, searching classified CIA systems for any information related to his private lobbying clients, improperly storing and disclosing non-public, sensitive, and classified U.S. government information to people not authorized to receive such information, and lying to the CIA and the FBI about his status as a foreign agent and his unauthorized lobbying and public relations activities. The CIA terminated Bendler’s contract and access in September 2020.
The backstory here is troubling. Some agency co-workers had always considered Bendler a slippery fellow on the make, and he was deemed a security risk as early as 2016, including a suspension with pay. It needs to be ascertained why Bendler was kept “in access” as long as he was, given his known counterintelligence issues. It’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that the “SIS Protection League,” where senior agency officials, active and retired, look out for each other, was at play in this scenario. Moreover, DoJ was remarkably slow to prosecute this case, which rolled along for years without resolution, for unexplained reasons.
DoJ hasn’t identified the foreign country which Bendler was secretly assisting, for large sums of money, but it’s known to be a U.S. ally, not an enemy like Russia or China. Indeed, CIA seems to have gotten wind of Bendler’s mishandling (i.e. theft) of SECRET/NOFORN documents when said documents were noticed by National Security Agency surveillance, which demanded an explanation how our ally got hold of such classified CIA information.
Bendler’s getting off lightly here. He agreed to forfeit $85,000 as part of his plea deal, and Bendler faces a maximum of seven years in prison: two years for acting as an unregistered foreign agent while being a public official plus five years for mishandling classified material. Since this is Bendler’s first conviction, he will probably receive a lighter prison sentence when it’s handed down in mid-July.
Intelligence Community whispers indicate that there’s more to the Bendler scandal than DoJ’s yet brought to public attention. Greedy and dishonest people who think rules don’t apply to them tend not to start committing national security crimes at the end of their intelligence careers. Some veteran counterintelligence hands wonder when exactly Bendler went rogue. Was this truly his first offense?
IC insiders tell me that certain experienced counterspies had considered Bendler a suspicious character for years before he officially went rogue in 2017 for cash. They also know that CIA isn’t eager to peel the onion here. The Bendler scandal, with a retired agency senior officer opting to become a turncoat criminal for cash, is bad enough for the agency’s reputation. The possibility that Bendler did more, and worse, for years, even decades, before he was caught may be too upsetting for leaders at Langley to see exposed. This would hardly be the first time that CIA and other IC agencies shut the counterintelligence door tight, before dark secrets emerged.
That won’t stop asking questions, of course. Last year, Bendler talked quite a bit about Cuba, a country which his spy career brought him into considerable contact with. Shortly before our election, he co-authored an op-ed in which he exhorted a second Trump administration to focus on Cuba, with an aim to fomenting regime change in Havana. A few months before that, in an interview about his agency career, Bendler mentioned Cuba, including thanking Havana for facilitating his marriage to an Angolan woman, whom he met due to CIA sending him to that African country. As he explained, when he was serving as chief of station somewhere in Europe, Bendler encountered Cuba’s ambassador, whom he thanked for his country’s “intervention in Angola – without your intervention, I would not have met my wife of 25 years. And we have three beautiful children.”
That’s a rather odd thing for someone who professes to despise Cuba’s Communist regime to say. Was Dale Bendler sending a message here?
Developing…
*Since 2016, SAD has been known as the Special Activities Center or SAC.