The CIA and the Mysterious Case of the Stolen Gold Bars

So far this has all the makings of a really good spy movie, except that it is not fiction.  It is real life.

David Rush, a former CIA officer, is sitting in an Alexandria, Virginia jail, following an FBI raid on his home that discovered he had $40 million dollars in gold bars, as well as $2 million in cash and 35 Rolexes and other pricey watches.

Rush reportedly worked for 17 years at the CIA.  Prosecutors say his is a serial liar and “master manipulator,” one who even successfully faked his resume to get hired by the spy agency.   In addition to lies about his formal educational achievements, they say he lied about being a doctor, a pilot, and about his military background.

The gold, according to accounts, more than 300 one-kilogram gold bars, were provided to him by the CIA for “work-related expenses.”

You don’t suppose there is more to this story than meets the eye, do you?

If there is one thing we presume, it is that we are very unlikely to ever know the truth about this headline-grabbing story.  The CIA is a rogue agency, and history shows that it values deceit above most other things.

Former director Mike Pompeo once bragged about the CIA’s lying, cheating, and stealing. “We had entire training courses!”

Patriots who want to give the CIA the benefit of the doubt in cases of its law-breaking and lying may want to take a second look at the record, because it appears that the primary objective of its lying is to spare itself embarrassment.

From the Washington Post:

Even more astounding, according to former U.S. officials and others familiar with the issue, is that Rush’s duties at the CIA included involvement in one of the government’s most sensitive intelligence-gathering programs, a project so secret that only a handful of U.S. intelligence officials and lawmakers knew of its existence, according to four people familiar with the matter.

In any case, what we can gather from the story has a lot to say about gold in the real world. It underscores our assertion that throughout history gold has been real money. It remains real money today.

Steve Sailor makes the same point by asking satirically why the CIA was relying on gold in the first place. “Did Rush explain in his paperwork that after the Apocalypse, the only currency the Warriors of the Wasteland would take to fight for the President is cold gold?”

John Rubino published an A.I. response from Anthropic’s AI Claude to the question “Why does the CIA have so much gold, or any gold at all..?”

The CIA holds gold for exactly the same reasons central banks are buying gold: it works when everything else doesn’t. It has no counterparty risk. It can’t be frozen by sanctions. It can’t be devalued by a central bank. It operates outside the dollar system.

The fact that the US intelligence community — the most powerful arm of the US government — maintains significant gold reserves for operational purposes is itself a statement about the limitations of the dollar system….

The most sophisticated intelligence agency in history, with access to every digital financial tool ever invented, still uses gold when it really matters. That tells you everything about gold’s enduring role as money — and it’s the same logic driving central banks, BRICS, and your thesis.

While governments appear to go off a gold standard from time to time with their own fiat currency schemes, in the background the real world ultimately reverts to real money.

Gold works when everything else doesn’t!