CIA botched sex assault, harassment reports, House Intelligence Committee finds
WASHINGTON – The House Intelligence Committee found the CIA at fault in its investigation of sexual misconduct in the spy agency after failing to properly address employee allegations of assault and harassment, according to an interim report released Monday.
“Over the course of the investigation, the Committee discovered that CIA failed to handle
allegations of sexual assault and harassment within its workforce in the professional and uniform
manner that such sensitive allegations warrant,” the committee wrote in the eight-page document.
The panel interviewed 26 whistleblowers, received 15 briefings by “a number of diverse components of CIA” and reviewed over 4,000 pages of records produced by The Company.
The committee found that the CIA’s insufficient policies for processing allegations led to an environment that discouraged victims from making reports — both because they felt their cases would not be properly addressed and because there was no way to do so anonymously.
“Victims were aware of little to no accountability or punishment for the perpetrators of the assaults or harassment often because of an inadequate investigatory process,” the report said. “Victims were deterred from coming forward because victims did not have anonymity and were unable to seek confidential assistance.”
When workers did come forward, the CIA’s investigatory mechanism was “inadequate” — while employees had been given “ineffective training … on how to identify and report cases of sexual assault and harassment,” according to the committee.
“There was an inconsistent approach to, or lack of, timely coordination with law enforcement,” the report added.
The issues were apparently widely recognized by individual employees, “who recognized the need to improve CIA’s response to sexual assault and harassment, while maintaining the necessary posture to prepare officers for the dangerous world they are asked to operate in,” according to lawmakers.
The report was released after a series of high-profile sexual assault cases surfaced late last year involving CIA employees.
In October, a woman who was training to become a spy filed a lawsuit accusing the agency of attempting to cover up her sexual assault by “repeatedly … dissuad[ing] her from lodging a criminal complaint — to the point of criminal witness-tampering — and also ordered her to make false statements to law enforcement.”
The following month, ex-CIA officer Brian Jeffrey Raymond pleaded guilty in a case that alleged he had drugged and sexually assaulted dozens of women dating back to 2006 while he was working for the US government in Mexico and Peru.
Raymond was found with nearly 500 videos and photographs he took of nude, unconscious women, including many in which he can be seen opening their eyelids, groping or straddling them, prosecutors said at the time.
The committee proposed legislation last year to address these concerns as part of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which became law in December.
Those efforts include the creation of a new special victim investigator position – staffed by a federal law enforcement officer – to investigate all sexual assault and harassment claims at the CIA.
