Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Not everyone in intel community is honorable


The Obama administration intelligence community wishes to place themselves above any and all reproach:
















However, not everyone who has served in the government in general, or in the intelligence community in particular, have done so honorably.  A case in point of a dishonorable former intel community member is Mr. John Donald Cody.





















Wanted posters from Nagorka, Carrie, and Hagit Limor. “True Identity of Ohio Con Man 'Bobby Thompson' Revealed as John Cody.” WCPO, 2 Oct. 2012, www.wcpo.com/news/state/true-identity-of-ohio-con-man-bobby-thompson-to-be-revealed.





Narrator: To prove the man arrested for stealing millions is actually John Donald Cody, Elliot needs his finger prints.  When he calls an FBI agent working Cody's old case, he learns that the Bureau has a set of his prints that were never entered into the national data base. 






Elliot: I don't know why they were not in the national system. The bottom line is, if they were in the national system, then we wouldn't have spent five months trying to identify who he was.  

Narrator:  When Elliott receives a copy, he has them triple checked against Mr. X's prints.  Then he pays the Navy Vets scammer a visit in his cell. 

Elliot: I go, "We uncovered who you are, John Donald Cody" And he just looked at me with a smile on his face.  And that was it.

Narrator:  Elliot has figured out the mystery man's true identity.   But how Captain Cody became Commander Thompson is a story that still leaves him guessing.  While many of his classmates protested the Vietnam War, John Donald Cody followed the call of duty.  When he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1972, Cody was a Reserve Army officer with a specialty in military intelligence and a top secret clearance. 






Tammaro : He was intelligent. He had all the opportunity he could want.  It seemed like everything would have been on the up and up for him.


Narrator: Cody's military records show him working civilian jobs at a variety of top notch law firms in the early 1970s.  The also include an offer letter from 1974 for a job with an obscure Defense Department office in Washington DC. Cody, and a person once listed publicly as an employee of the office, say it was a cover for CIA agents.  Cody will later say he worked for the agency starting in 1972.   The CIA declined to comment on his claim.  




DeWine: Whether he ever had any contact with the CIA, I have no clue.  There's just no way for us to know that.  

Narrator: In 1977, Cody's records say that he's in the Philippines attending graduate school. 









Narrator: In 1979, the year he leaves, his employer is listed as "U.S. Government Duties Classified"















Narrator: That same year, he returns to the USA and sets up his own law firm in an unlikely place, Sierra Vista, Arizona. It's a dusty town,   along the Mexican border, and is home to an Army intelligence base where Cody once trained.

















Narrator: In Sierra Vista, he befriends Teri Sorisso who gets to know him as a fiercely liberal Democrat.







Sorisso: He had a picture of Bobby Kennedy on the wall behind his chair in his office.  He wanted equality for people and he was willing to fight for it.  


Narrator:  One of Cody's secretaries is Diane Shaughnessy says this philosophy carries over to the way he treats his clients many of them indigent.   





Shaughnessy: Everybody was important.  One was not better than the other.  And he fought hard for everybody.  

Narrator: Representing clients in both criminal and civil matters, Cody racks up many court room victories.  While Cody has his law office, as a Reservist, records say he also does part time legal duty at the intelligence base in town.  Performance reviews from 1980 call him a "superior officer" with a "high degree of integrity." This is a far cry from the Cody that former prosecutor Dennis Lusk knows around the same time. 



Lusk: Honesty meant nothing to him.  Ethics meant nothing to him.  Candor to the court meant nothing to him, if it meant getting ahead with his clients.   

Narrator: Here, at the Bisbee Court House, Lusk prosecutes many of Cody's clients.  He said Cody viewed him and other prosecutors through a distorted lens.


Lusk: No matter how routine the case was, it was the worse case of prosecutorial misconduct and overstepping. We were trying to "stomp him under the Nazi boot." That was the term he used fairly frequently over the course of time that I knew him. 

Posted by adagioforstrings at 8:25:00 PM
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