The last time I was able to talk with Sam Faddis, we had a wide-ranging discussion filled with his insights on everything geopolitics and some laughs, but when it came to the story of a CIA operator arrested with a king's ransom of gold bars, watches, and other loot worth $40 million found in his home, it was too much for the retired CIA man. His BS detector redlined.
"No way $40 million in gold just walks out the door," he said as he gave that deadpan look of his, the kind intended to give bad guys the shivers.
When I asked if there might have been some mullah or warlord who was being paid off, Sam wasn't convinced.
"We [the CIA] don't pay in gold bars. We just we cut a check or make a wire transfer. I'm sorry, it's very prosaic, but that's the way it works," said the man who ran the CIA operation into Iraq to determine if there were Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)—spoiler alert: Sam didn't find anything we didn't already know about. There was no new WMD.
Then he launched into a discussion of his operation in Iraq and how there was no way, no how, that the now-arrested CIA big shot in the D.C. area was supposed to have that booty.
And then something rare happened. He told me a story. Usually, I'd ask my questions and get cagey answers that sounded like they'd been lawyered. Sam was his own best counsel. But not this time.
The accused CIA agent turned accused thief, David Rush, was given no quarter by Faddis, who had run ops, paid off bad guys, and run a ragtag group of operators in the Wild West sandbox before the Iraq War. He had to account for every penny.
I ran an an operation inside Iraq in advance of the 2003 invasion. We were in there for about a year. So I ran I was the chief of base. So I ran the whole thing and all the money I was therefore on the hook for all the money... We spent $34 million in a year to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Right. That includes every dime we gave to everybody and everything we funded. $34 million and we accounted for it to the penny.
So that's what it cost to run a covert action campaign to overthrow a government. Now you're in that context, you're talking about one guy with $40 million in gold bars sitting in his house. That's some some somebody more
"[S]omebody—more than one somebody—totally dropped the ball here and probably has people who need to be going to jail in addition to this guy," he told me.
But there was more.
When I asked where the money would have come from and under what circumstances that might have been, he answered, "He got the money from CIA. Does CIA have money in gold bars? Yeah." But, he added,
"If I'm dealing with an arms dealer in the middle of nowhere and he's going to give me super secret Russian technical information and he doesn't want anything other than gold bars, well then I got to be able to give him gold bars. So that's fine. It's just they don't say, 'Okay, we'll pull up to the loading dock, and we'll put $40 million worth of gold bars in your station wagon, and you could drive away." That's not the way this works."
There's more, but this gives you a picture of the fount of information he was.
Was.
Sam died Saturday night.
His family surrounded him in a Pennsylvania hospital.
He died from a "post-COVID interstitial lung disease (ILD)/lung fibrosis and pneumonia." He was in line for a lung transplant, according to a post on AND Magazine.
He had to cancel our last interview because he was ill and said that it was no joke. He told me, "I have lung scarring from Covid. Complications still being worked out" but vowed, "I will rebound."
Sam was pissed about COVID. But he was more upset that the Biden-era CIA refused to come clean.
Before the unredacted and declassified documents confirmed that the CIA actually thought COVID was from a lab leak, Sam Faddis had already clocked the situation.
It's also been clear for some time that there were many warning signs of the dangers of the work the Chinese were doing and the terrifyingly sloppy lab practices they utilized.
Biological warfare threats are real have been considered such for many years collection on both state and terrorist biowarfare programs is one of CIA's top priorities. In fact it is what's referred to as a Tier Zero priority which means nothing takes precedent.
I didn't know Sam well, but I liked the trajectory of his professional and post-CIA life. He first came on my radar when I picked up the indispensable Imprimis newsletter from Hillsdale College in 2023, in which he advocated for completely scrapping the CIA and starting over. He based his essay and his speech to a Hillsdale audience on his book Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
Sam wrote three books in all. His last one was Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security, which came in handy in talking about all manner of newsy items. He also wrote about his operation in Iraq in the book The CIA War in Kurdistan: The Untold Story of the Northern Front in the Iraq War. I hadn't read that one yet and just ordered it.
At one point he ran for office, and when his political career didn't materialize, he kept writing. He and his wife and their spooky friends started the Substack publication, AND Magazine.
Good stuff.
I'll miss you, Sam Faddis. Godspeed.
