CIA

Spooky Protection

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Republic Services, owner of the radioactively-contaminated West Lake landfill,  employs a security guard service with historical ties to the CIA, DOE and State Department.  

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The motto emblazoned on its vehicles is “Securing Your World.”  But G4S Security Solutions’ job in Bridgeton, Mo. is a tad more parochial: It guards Republic Services’ polluted property.  The gig sounds like little more than a standard rent-a-cop deal. But there are reasons to suspect otherwise.

As the underground fire continues to burn unimpeded towards the radioactive waste at West Lake, things have heated up on the surface as well.

Vigilance became a corporate imperative following a protest staged by the Earth Defense Coalition  in the early spring of 2017.  In the wake of that demonstration, Republic, the owner of the radioactively-contaminated West Lake Landfill, pledged to prevent future disruptions of its business from occurring, and G4S Security Solutions is responsible for keeping that promise.

The protest shutdown Republic’s trash sorting operations at the location for 12 hours, after environmental activists blocked the entrance of the troubled landfill, demanding the EPA relinquish control of the site and handover the clean up duties to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The security company finds itself in the middle of a battle between private interests and public health. Despite its central role in the controversy,  G4S’s presence has garnered little attention until now.

Patrolling the perimeter of the West Lake Superfund site is the most obvious part of G4S’s job description.  Whether the security company has additional duties related to protecting Republic Services’ interests is unclear. But if the history of the security company’s operations are any indication, G4S’s role at West Lake may involve more than just manning the guardhouse at the front entrance.

That’s because the British corporation inherited the cloak and dagger reputation of Wackenhut Security, after merging with the notorious American espionage firm in the early 2000s.  The cost of that buyout was pegged at $500 million.

Besides offering guard services, Wackenhut specialized in intelligence gathering, and keeping tabs on millions of American citizens suspected of being left-wing subversives or communist sympathizers.

George Wackenhut, a former FBI agent, founded the company in the 1950s during the McCarthy era.  In the intervening years, Wackenhut Security grew in size and influence, scoring hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts from federal agencies, including the Department of Energy and U.S. State Department. By the early 1990s, Wackenhut Security was known as the “shadow CIA,” because of the clandestine services it offered to the intelligence community both at home and abroad.

G4S, Wackenhut’s successor, was founded in 2004, when the British multinational security company Securicor merged with a Danish counterpart, Group 4 Falck.

Today, G4S Security Solutions is inextricably tethered to Wackenhut’s tainted legacy. Its British parent company boasts more than 60,000 employees in 125 nations, and is reputedly among the largest employers in Europe and Africa.  Closer to home, its American operation has the dubious distinction of being the employer of Omar Mateen, the mass murderer who killed 49 people and wounded 53 others at an Orlando nightclub in 2016.

Not surprisingly, G4S Security Solutions denies any culpability for that horrid act.  The Jupiter, Florida-based company, after all, can attribute the mass shooting by its longtime employee as being a random act of violence. It’s not quite as easy to deny the nefarious legacy of Wackenhut Security, however.

G4S now owns it.

By the mid-1960s, Wackenhut was known to be keeping dossiers on more than four million Americans, having acquired the files of a former staffer of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In response to congressional reforms in the post-Watergate era, Wackenhut donated its cache of blacklisted individuals to the virulent anti-communist Church League of America in Wheaton, Illinois, but didn’t give up access to the information. The league cooperated closely with the so-called “red squads” of big city police departments from coast to coast  that spied on suspected communist agitators.

By the early 1990s, Wackenhut was the largest provider of security services to U.S. embassies around the world, including U.S. State Department missions in Chile, Greece and El Salvador, where the CIA was known to have colluded with right-wing death squads.

Wackenhut also guarded nuclear sites in Hanford, Wash. and Savannah River, S.C.  and the Nevada nuclear test site for the Department Energy and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission.

As the company gained more power, it recruited an influential board of directors that included former FBI director Clarence Kelley and Defense Secretary and CIA deputy director Frank Carlucci. William Casey, President Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, served as Wackenhut’s lawyer before joining the Reagan administration.

There is also evidence that during the Iran-Contra era of the 1980s  Wackenhut worked for the CIA to supply the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with dual-use technology that could be utilized to make chemical and nuclear weapons.

It could be argued that G4S Security Solutions’ current services at West Lake are unrelated to its predecessor’s tainted past. But many of the residents of St. Louis whose lives have been impacted by Republic Services’ radioactively-contaminated landfill would likely not agree that history is inconsequential.

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Directive No. 10

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Private intelligence contractors have been gathering scientific data and monitoring the environment in the St. Louis area for years — and not telling anybody.

 

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 During President George W. Bush’s administration, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce announced an inquiry into the National Bio-surveillance Integration System, an intelligence gathering operation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security administered by the Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC).

The House committee was then apparently interested in whether the bidding process was rigged.

In 2013, SAIC spun off a large portion of its classified government work by forming another company, Leidos. Both SAIC and Leidos have received  multi-million-dollar contracts to do clean up work  for the  U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Formerly Utilized Site Remediation Program (FUSRAP) in St. Louis, including the continuing cleanup of Coldwater Creek in North St. Louis County.

In addition to its environmental engineering component, Leidos is the largest private cyber espionage outfit in the nation with estimated government contracts worth $60 billion. The company employs 80 percent of the private-sector work force engaged in contract work for U.S. spy and surveillance agencies, including Homeland Security, the CIA and NSA.

Leidos also has a contract with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources through its  federal facilities management division.

The earlier creation of the National Bio-surveillance Integration by Homeland Security through its contract with SAIC has received little subsequent attention. The program was authorized by President George W. Bush under Presidential Directive 10. Its stated mission was “to provide early detection and situational awareness of biological events of potential national consequence by acquiring, integrating, analyzing, and disseminating existing human, animal, plant, and environmental bio-surveillance system data into a common operating picture,” according to the Department of Homeland Security.

The Department of Homeland Security further describes the classified program as follows: “The National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) integrates, analyzes, and distributes key information about health and disease events to help ensure the nation’s responses are well-informed, save lives, and minimize economic impact.” 

Spurred by the outcries of concerned residents about potential health problems associated with chronic exposure to radioactive waste, the St. Louis County Health Department in conjunction with the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry have taken an active interest in the radioactive waste issue in the St. Louis region.  Whether Homeland’s Bio-Surveillance operation is monitoring conditions in St. Louis independently or with the cooperation of these other government agencies remains unknown.

Other community activists have long advocated taking away the control of the West Lake Landfill Superfund site in Bridgeton, Mo.  from the EPA and putting it under the control of the Corps of Engineers FUSRAP program, which has authority over the other St. Louis area radioactive sites.  But despite bi-partisan support of the St. Louis area congressional delegation, a bill slotted to shift control died in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce last year.

The West Lake Landfill Superfund site is owned by Republic Services Inc., the second-largest waste disposal company in the U.S. The company’s chief spokesman is Russ Knocke, a former top spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.

The presence of a top-secret operation inside an AT&T building near West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton adds another murky hue to an already cloudy picture. The facility is presumed to be controlled by the National Security Agency but may house some other unknown government covert operation.

Hot Property

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A subsidiary of Cerberus Capital Management — a shadowy equity firm with political clout — has quietly tapped into the housing market in North St. Louis County, turning a tidy profit by renting homes to low-income tenants with help from the feds. The problem is some of its properties border radioactively-contaminated Coldwater Creek. 

When North County resident Bob Terry viewed a KMOV-TV news report earlier this year about a New York-based real estate company buying up homes in his old neighborhood, he immediately noticed one glaring omission — the account failed to mention that the properties border on radioactively-contaminated Coldwater Creek.

The Florissant native alerted others to the flub via Facebook, pointing out that the streets featured in the news segment — Mullanphy Road and Aspen Drive —  were next to the stream that is known to have been polluted by nuclear waste dating back to the Manhattan Project, some of which is still being cleaned up by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“Every house on those two streets faces or backs on the creek,” wrote Terry, who grew up in the neighborhood. In his Facebook post, Terry questions why the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development would subsidize low-income rental property in an area known to be contaminated with radioactive waste.

“Folks desperate to get in there have no clue,” says Terry. “The new folks are getting taken advantage of. [Whereas,] the longtime, older residents are stranded with declining property value,” he says. “Many got sick and died there.”

The the absentee landlord and long-distance benefactor of this federal largesse is CSMA-BLT LLC, a Delaware-registered corporation and subsidiary of Cerberus Capital Managment,  the monstrous equity firm based in New York City that is valued at $30 billion.

The privately-owned conglomerate, co-founded by Stephen Feinberg, began acquiring the properties in 2015 during the Obama administration, when it purchased more than 4,000 residential properties in the Midwest and Florida from BLT Homes, including more than 600 in St. Louis County, according to county assessor records.

It didn’t take long for the acquisition to yield taxpayer dollars. By 2016, the Cerberus subsidiary received more than $480,000 in federal funding for its government-subsidized rental properties in St.

Louis County , according to KMOV. Monthly rents for the residences in Florissant average $1,000 or more. Cerberus’ investors include government and private pension funds, non-profit foundations, major universities and insurance companies.

Besides real estate, Cerberus holds a wide range of other assets, including Dyncorp, a huge defense contractor that supplies mercenaries and covert operatives to the military-intelligence establishment. The investment firm divested itself earlier this year of Remington, the arms manufacturer that mass produced the AR-15 assault rifle used in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.

Cerberus was founded in 1992 and is named after the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell in Greek mythology. The firm has longstanding ties to the Republican Party. The boss of its international arm, for example, is former Vice-President Dan Quayle,  who was implicated in the an Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan-Bush era.

As in all administrations, buying presidential influence comes with a hefty price tag: Cerberus CEO Feinberg contributed nearly $1.5 million to a pro-Trump PAC in 2016. As a result, his generosity has garnered him even more access to the corridors of power inside the White House.

Feinberg, who is said to be unusually secretive in both his personal and business affairs, was quoted in Rolling Stone magazine as telling shareholders in 2007: “If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper, … we will do more than fire that person. We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it.”

At this point, he probably could get away with murder.

Last week, President Donald Trump appointed Feinberg to be chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which oversees national security issues and provides advise to the executive branch on matters related to various intelligence agency operations, including those of the CIA.

Spy vs. Spy

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In 2015, the Russian news service landed in North County to cover the troubles at West Lake Landfill and Coldwater Creek. The question now is whether the CIA mounted a counter-intelligence operation here.

KWMU reporter Vérinique La Capra aims a microphone at  Mary Oscko as HBO and RT cameras captured the moment in August  2015 at the Hazelwood Community Center.

This story first appeared June 16, 2017 at Stlreporter.wordpress.com

It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely place for an espionage operation to take place than the Hazelwood Civic Center. But recent revelations by the U.S. intelligence community suggest that it may have been one of the locations in North St. Louis County where a secretive propaganda battle quietly played out in August 2015.

Hundreds of people gathered at the civic center for a community meeting that month had no inkling they were bit actors in this Cold War revival. The overflow crowd that jammed the conference room on August 20 attended  out of concern for the health of their families and the safety of the community. Radioactive contamination leftover from the Manhattan Project and its aftermath still plagued the St. Louis suburbs and residents wanted answers from government officials about the long-delayed clean ups.

Questions were asked, testimonials were given and frustrations were vented at the event, all captured on video by camerapersons, including at least one with ties to RT America, the Russian foreign news service.

In the heat of the moment, those present were not aware that they were pawns in a larger political struggle between the U.S. and Russia. Evidence of the covert chess game didn’t surface until January of this year, long after the meeting had faded in the community’s collective memory.

That’s when the CIA took the unprecedented step of releasing a classified report on alleged Russian interference in American politics. The unusual act by the agency was spurred by the continuing controversy over Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Those allegations remain the focus of  congressional investigations, and a probe by an independent counsel appointed by the Justice Department.

Allegations of the hacking of email accounts of Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton and her campaign staff by Russian operatives prompted the CIA’s release of the report. But the majority of the declassified information in the report is unrelated to the furor over whether Donald Trump and his cronies benefited from the alleged Russian intrusion.

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RT honcho Margarita Simonyan briefs Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in October 2012 in Moscow. (photo courtesy of the CIA’s declassified report)

Instead, the CIA released an intelligence assessment put together in 2012  that details how RT America is allegedly used by the Kremlin as a propaganda tool to cast the U.S.  government in a bad light.

The obvious question this now raises is whether the CIA mounted a domestic counter espionage campaign to offset the perceived damage being inflicted by the negative image that the Russian news service allegedly broadcast not only in America but to a global audience via the Internet.

The CIA report was compiled in 2012 three years before the Russians showed up in North St. Louis County and four years before the U.S. presidential campaign. Though classified, it can be assumed that its contents were shared with the White House and other federal departments and agencies.

It is therefore reasonable to surmise that the CIA and other government agencies were not simply monitoring Russia’s interference in America — but actively combatting it with their own surreptitious operations.

If this is true, it begs the question as to whether American intelligence assets were present at the Hazelwood Civic Center that sultry, late summer evening back in 2015.

Only The Shadow knows.

Correction: Originally, this story identified the meeting as taking place at the Machinist Union Hall in Bridgeton. Instead, the meeting took place at the Hazelwood Community Center. 

Unholy Bond

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When U.S. Reps. Ann Wagner and Lacy Clay testified before Congress to have the West Lake Landfill clean up turned over to the Army Corps of Engineers in 2016, the public had no clue that a scandal-tainted St. Louis County government agency had paid big bucks to former U.S. Sen.Kit Bond’s lobbying firm to do its bidding on Capitol Hill. 

Academy Award Performance:
GOP Rep. Ann Wagner pounding home her message in testimony before the congressional subcommittee, July 13, 2016.

 

July 13, 2016 was just another day on the sound stage that is Capitol Hill. But veteran congressman Lacy Clay couldn’t help noting that his usual role had changed. As the audience filed into the gallery behind him, the Democrat from St. Louis took his seat at the witness table next to Republican Rep. Ann Wagner of St. Louis County.  In the moments preceding their testimony,  a C-Span microphone captured Clay’s candid remark:

“It’s kind of different being on this side,” Clay said.

Clay’s awkward small talk with his conservative counterpart ended when the chairman of the Environment Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee gaveled the hearing into session at 10:03 a.m. By all accounts, what happened next in Room 2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building was a rare display of bipartisanship.

Wagner and Clay — who represent polar ends of the American political spectrum — bonded together that summer morning to send a unified message. The odd couple appealed to their fellow representatives to send House Resolution 4100  to the floor for a vote. If passed, the bill would have mandated the transfer of control of the controversial West Lake Landfill Superfund site in Bridgeton, Mo. to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Corresponding legislation had already been successfully steered through the Senate under the bipartisan guidance of Republican Sen. Roy Blunt and Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

Under the lax management of the EPA, the cleanup of the radioactively contaminated site had languished for decades. Attempting to correct  the agency’s negligence was the shared responsibility of  both congressmen because the dividing line between their respective districts literally runs through the landfill. Angry residents in St. Louis County were demanding change and they made it clear that the Corps was their preferred choice to oversee the long-delayed remedy for addressing leftover nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project. The previous autumn, their protests had been amplified by local and national news coverage and the release of two documentaries on the subject.

Public pressure continued over the intervening months, stoked by monthly community meetings and non-stop social media posts. By summer, the heated issue had reached critical mass. Local activists traveled to Washington, D.C. to show support for their representatives at the congressional hearing. Besides C-Span coverage, Wagner and Clay’s joint testimony blanketed the local St. Louis news.

Unfortunately, despite the concerted effort the measure failed to clear the subcommittee. Similar legislation in the next session was also derailed.  The back-to-back failures occurred even though the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership ,  a local governmental agency, had quietly bankrolled the well-financed federal lobbying campaign for two years.

The details on how the grassroots, community-based movement morphed into a high-powered, Washington, D.C. lobbying project remain fuzzy. Calls and emails made to various private and public officials asking for comment have went unreturned.

Since its inception, no one has been in a hurry to divulge the machinations surrounding the deal, which flew under the radar using public funds without the knowledge of the vast majority of St. Louis area citizens. Organizing the congressional lobbying drive involved considerable time, a bundle of cash and lots of inside wheeling and dealing. To handle a job of this scale, the Development Partnership hired Kit Bond Strategies (KBS), the lobbying firm of former U.S. Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond of Missouri.

In hindsight, the failure of KBS to accomplish its goal set the future course for the West Lake clean up, which is now in the hands of the Trump administration.

Enter stage right: The Superfund Czar

The move to turnover the West Lake clean up to the Corps is now history.  Last month, the final EPA remedy for a partial clean up of the site — a decision that falls short of full removal — was announced by the agency.  If carried out as planned, large quantities of radioactive waste will remain on site and continue to be a threat to human health and the environment.

The long-postponed announcement came after the nascent Trump administration fast tracked the West Lake clean up in early 2017 as part of a campaign by then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to “streamline” the Superfund program. The task force created by Pruitt to accomplish that objective is now the subject of an EPA inspector’s general probe announced last month, which intends to examine the group’s secretive agenda. Pruitt and his top lieutenant Albert “Kell” Kelly both resigned earlier this year under a cloud. The controversial EPA administrator and former Oklahoma attorney general appointed Kelly, a Tulsa banker,  in early 2017 to the newly formed post of EPA Superfund Czar. Kelly’s appointment came shortly after the FDIC had imposed a fine of $125,000 and barred him from banking for life.

Lights, Camera, Action: Rep. Lacy Clay testifying before Congress, July 13, 2016.

With the latest rush of developments, the earlier pleas by Wagner and Clay to transfer the project to the Corps have now been largely forgotten, relegated to a footnote, a curious moment in time when congressional adversaries from opposite sides of the aisle put aside political differences for the common good. For a moment in the summer of 2016, it looked as if a spontaneous consensus had arrived on the scene in the nick of time.  The St. Louis area congressmen gave heroic performances on camera — and the video went straight to YouTube, where Wagner can still be seen vehemently driving home her talking points by pounding on the table. Clay’s oratory was equally impassioned. Their words expressed sincere convictions and righteous outrage, echoing the pleas of their constituents.

St. Louis Economic Development Partnership CEO Sheila Sweeney.

It almost seemed too good  to be true — and it was. In retrospect,  Wagner and Clay now appear to have been reading  from the same script of a made-for-TV movie.

Linda Bond and hubby.

What the public didn’t know back then was that  the director of this staged congressional performance was KBS.  Linda Bond, the former senator’s wife, is  a senior partner in the lobbying firm. She signed the contract with St. Louis Economic Development Partnership CEO Sheila Sweeney in January 2016.

The Development Partnership is a joint government agency of the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County, which wields broad powers and operates largely in the shadows with the benefit of millions of dollars in annual payments from  casino interests raked in by the St. Louis County Port Authority, an agency that shares the same staff as the Development Partnership. The County Port Authority’s purpose has nothing to do with ports. Instead, it acts as a conduit for the casino payments.

 

The 2016 contract between KBS and the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership.

In 2016 and 2017, the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership funneled $230,000 of public funds to Kit Bond Strategies, according to federal lobbying reports. Part of that total went to pay for the failed congressional effort to turn the West Lake Landfill Superfund Site over to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — an agency that expressed serious reservations about assuming the responsibility for taking control of the project in the first place. The exact amount spent specifically on the West Lake lobbying effort is uncertain. A request under the Missouri Sunshine Law for further details is pending.  But this much is known:  the development agency’s contract called for KBS to be paid $10,000 a month for its services. The lobbying records show that the public money was doled out to the lobbyist in quarterly payments. The St. Louis Economic Development Partnership paid the lobbying firm an additional $60,000 in 2018 , but by then the effort to persuade Congress to turn the West Lake clean up over to the Corps had been dropped.

In July, a St. Louis County Council ethics committee announced it was embarking on an investigation of a wide range of questionable activities by the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership involving alleged improprieties related to the agency’s contract procedures and real estate transactions in recent years. Its lobbying contract with KBS is not known to be a part of that investigation.

The announcement followed a series of revelations published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch focusing on the dodgy dealings of the Development Partnership and the County Port Authority under the Democratic administration of St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger  [1, 2, 3]. Among the allegations are those involving unusual  bidding practices by businessman John Rallo, a Stenger supporter and an heir to the Rallo Construction Co. fortune. Rallo has been the beneficiary of a lucrative real estate sale by the Development Partnership and he has also sought advise on two consulting  deals from Development Partnership CEO Sweeney, a Stenger appointee, in advance of submitting his bids, according to the Post-Dispatch.

Sheila Sweeney, Kit Bond, Lacy Clay and Steve Stenger celebrating the opening of STL Partnership’s Wellston Business Center expansion in July.

At the same time, political opponents of Stenger’s on the St. Louis County Council, have alleged that Sweeney is under federal surveillance. Councilman Ernie Trakas, a Republican from South County, and Councilman Sam Page, a North County Democrat, raised the allegations on July 24. The allegations were reported by Post-Dispatch reporter Jeremy Kohler in the newspaper and on Twitter.

The protracted controversy has been roiling for more than a year. But until now,  the ties between the Development Partnership and KBS have been unreported even though Sweeney’s signature is on the bottom line of the lobbying contract with that of KBS partner Linda Bond.

Trouble in River City

The St. Louis Economic Development Partnership is an autonomous county agency that distributes public money for various economic development schemes  with the help of casino revenue that it receives from the St. Louis County Port Authority. The port authority gets its funding from an estimated $5 million in payments paid by the River City Casino in South St. Louis County. Pinnacle Entertainment opened the casino in 2010. It is now operated by Penn National Gaming. The casino property is owned by Gaming and Leisure Properties Inc., a real estate investment trust that was spun off by Penn National, which controls a virtual monopoly on the overall operations and ownership of the St. Louis area gambling industry.

KBS lobbyist Julie Murphy Finn

The South County gambling site, which is located in unincorporated Lemay, is no stranger to controversy. Development of a casino at the location met stiff resistance from local businesses, churches, and residents in the past. Despite the widespread opposition, the St. Louis County Economic Development Council began wooing prospective casino developers there more than 20 years ago. Those initial efforts under the late St. Louis County Executive Buzz Westfall in the 1990s failed.  But they set the precedent for current practices.

Dec. 25, 1995 St. Louis Post-Dispatch story citing then-St. Louis County Port Authority Chairman Sheila Sweeney.

As early as 1995, the St. Louis County Port Authority accepted payments from an earlier casino developer interested in developing  the site. The chairman of the Port Authority at that time was Sweeney, who in 2018 is still pulling strings as head of the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership, the umbrella agency that controls the purse strings of  the  County Port Authority funds.  In 1995, Sweeney was already advocating spending payouts from gambling interests  to support the development of other sites in St. Louis County.

Dec. 25, 1995 St. Louis Post-Dispatch story reports then-County Port Authority Chairman Sheila’s Sweeney’s strident support of spending casino cash for development schemes throughout St. Louis County.

Others involved in past issues tied to  South County politics and the Lemay casino site include former South County Councilman Jeff Wagener, a Democrat who is now policy chief for St. Louis County Executive Stenger; and Wagener’s former assistant Julie Murphy Finn, the  Kit Bond Strategies’ lobbyist who oversaw the congressional lobbying  effort on behalf of the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership in 2016. Wagener also sits on the board of directors of the St.  Louis Economic Development Partnership.

Murphy Finn was aided in her congressional lobbying assignment by fellow KBS lobbyist Kenny Hulshof, a former Republican congressman and gubernatorial candidate from Northeast Missouri.

Cold War Redux

But Hulshof and Murphy Finn were not the bosses of the operation. That distinction goes to KBS senior partner Linda Bond, who signed the sweetheart deal with Sweeney, the head of the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership.  Both women are savvy political operatives. Sweeney has been an inside player in St. Louis County politics for decades under multiple county administrations; whereas, Bond’s career in national politics stretches back to the Reagan era and is rooted deeply in Cold War politics.

Long before she married the senator, Bond worked for the Voice of America, the propaganda arm of the U.S. State Department.  From 1985 to 1991 she served as the director in Germany of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a non-governmental agency with long-established ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.  The late William Casey, the former OSS agent and CIA director during the first term of President Ronald Reagan’s administration, served a stint as the president of the IRC, which aided Eastern Bloc and Soviet defectors.

In this case,  however, there appears to have been no need for cloak and dagger skullduggery.  Instead, the deal between Kit Bond Strategies and the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership was as easy as walking next door and borrowing a cup of sugar. KBS and the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership are neighbors in the Pierre Laclede Center II, a high-rise office tower at 7733 Forsyth Blvd. in Clayton. The development agency calls Suite 2200 home, and KBS lists its address as Suite 2300.

In the end, the motive behind the 2016 lobbying deal seems to have been predicated not on bi-partisan cooperation and concern for the environment as much as it was realpolitik, and cold hard cash.

 

 

 

 

Every Picture Tells a Story

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Leidos oversees the testing of FUSRAP sites in St. Louis for the Army Corps. But its main gig is spying for the U.S. intelligence agencies, with zillions in contracts from the DOD, CIA, NSA and Homeland Security. 

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Ain’t nobody’s business but their own: Leidos hall of mirrors on South Grand in St. Louis.

The FUSRAP worker testing soil near Coldwater Creek in Florissant is employed by Leidos, a defense contractor that receives billions of dollars in federal contracts from intelligence agencies.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch front-page story on Sunday May 16, 2016 dismissed community concerns about radioactive contamination in Coldwater Creek and West Lake Landfill in North St. Louis County.

It took months to prepare the story.  Sources were selected carefully from pro-nuke   “experts.”  There were fancy graphics and a sidebar, which helped fill an additional two  pages inside. The digital version included a link to a sarcastic video that degraded those who took the issue seriously. The gist of the propaganda piece was that there is nothing to worry about. Its banner headline above the fold screamed, “Misplaced Fear?”

The rhetorical question was followed by a photograph of a worker in an orange safety vest and hardhat kneeling along the banks of Coldwater Creek.  The  cutline identifies him as health physics technician Antonio Martinez, but it doesn’t identify his employer.  To figure out who employs Martinez it’s necessary to zoom in and take a closer look at the picture. Martinez’s hardhat is inscribed cryptically with one word: “Leidos.” The name was taken from the middle of “kaleidoscope,” and according to a press release it “reflects the company’s effort to unite solutions from different angles.”  What those angles are is not exactly clear, however.

Judging by his attire and location, Martinez presumably works for the company’s environmental engineering division, which has a contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that oversees the clean up of FUSRAP sites in St. Louis.

But Leidos has a darker side and lots of gray areas, too. Because there is so little light shone on the company’s clandestine activities, there is no way of knowing exactly what the shadowy firm does. A vast amount of its government contract work is classified top secret.  This much is known:

Leidos is the federal government’s largest cyber-intelligence contractor, bigger than Booz Allen Hamilton, the spooky security firm that employed exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden.  In short,  the company spies on people for the U.S. government, including American citizens.

Every picture tells a story: Leidos contract worker Antonio Martinez wearing his Leidos hardhat. (Photo by David Carson of the Post-Dispatch)

Leidos was created in 2013 when Science Applications International Corp. spun off a large portion of its classified government work. Both SAIC and Leidos have received  multi-million-dollar contracts to do clean up work  for the  U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Formerly Utilized Site Remediation Program (FUSRAP) in St. Louis, including the continuing cleanup of Coldwater Creek in North St. Louis County.

Leidos’ St. Louis offices are located on South Grand Boulevard in a renovated automobile repair garage. The building’s newly installed mirrored windows reflect the secretive nature of its government business, which is estimated to be valued at $60 billion. The company employs 80 percent of the private-sector work force engaged in contract work for U.S. spy and surveillance agencies, including the Department of Defense,  Homeland Security, CIA and NSA.

Leidos also has a contract worth more than $300,000  with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources through its  federal facilities management division. So the company is performing work for both the state and federal government with little or no public oversight.

Instead of “Misplaced Fears?,”perhaps a more appropriate headline for the Post-Dispatch’s hit job should have been “Misled and Smeared.”

Taking Care of Business

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When the DNR declared an emergency at the smoldering Bridgeton Landfill in 2013, the state agency skirted its formal bidding process, an out-of-state firm scored a sweet deal and the public was left none the wiser.

first published at STLReporter, Feb. 3, 2015

On March 18, 2013, environmental specialist Dan Norris and his boss Brenda Ardrey of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources quietly submitted a memorandum to Procurement of Services File RFP 3445-001. The memo shows that the department did not receive any bids that complied with the agency’s standards for air sampling services at the Bridgeton Landfill, where an underground fire has been burning near radioactive waste since 2010.

Nevertheless, a six-figure contract was awarded to SWAPE, an environmental firm from Santa Monica, Calif. The acronym stands for Soil Water Air Protection Enterprise. SWAPE, acting as a middle man, then hired a St. Louis-based subcontractor.  The paper trail indicates no complete bids were received even after the DNR extended the deadlines by more than two weeks. The DNR guidelines normally require a minimum of three competitive bids. Two companies ultimately proposed deficient offers. By its own admission, the DNR awarded the plum to one of those companies based on an incomplete proposal. The DNR was able to skirt its normal protocols by invoking an emergency clause in its procurement process.

“Essentially, there was a response to the bid, it just wasn’t complete,” says Norris, who recently left his job with the state regulatory agency.  “It was missing a couple things as far as the response to the actual form. DNR had not dealt with an event quite like this before. It’s not like there was just a playbook to go off of for sampling air around a smoldering landfill, at least not a playbook that Missouri had. “We were told to waste no time whatsoever on getting a contractor and getting boots on the ground out there to begin the air sampling. It was not the kind of thing that we wanted to hold up for administrative purposes. That’s why in early 2013 it was contracted out.”

Finding an environmental company then willing to challenge the interests of waste industry behemoth Republic Services, the landfill owner, appears to have been a difficult task for the DNR, according to public records obtained by StLReporter.  So the agency turned to a trusted consultant to act as its de facto headhunter. The consultant contacted industry sources and ultimately recommended SWAPE. After getting the nod, SWAPE quickly lined up a subcontractor in St. Louis to do part of the work.  Nobody involved in the deal will talk about it openly, citing contractual obligations.

When asked how the DNR first became aware of an environmental firm on the West Coast, Norris says: “I can’t comment on how we came to know SWAPE.” The two-year-old memo he co-signed indicates the firm was recommended by another contractor. Speaking from an undisclosed location by phone he also refused to talk about the price tag of the emergency air-monitoring contract. “I can’t comment on payment or billing or anything like that.”

Following an-age-old American custom, Norris has moved out West. He now lives in the Rocky Mountain Time Zone. He prefers not to divulge exactly where. Norris has exited Jeff City. But questions swirling around his leave-taking still plague his former agency like a bad case of the winter flu.

A Letter from Dan

Dan Norris - DNR State ID card

Dan Norris – MDNR State ID card

Early last month, Norris wrote a broadside, condemning the agency for its cozy relationship with Republic Services,  the company responsible for the site in North St. Louis County that is the location of a pair defunct landfills: one that’s smoldering and the other that contains radioactive waste dating back to the Manhattan Project.  The two adjacent dumps are both part of a long-delayed  Environmental Protection Agency Superfund clean-up site. In his parting shot, the former DNR staffer alleged that politics unduly influences regulatory decisions within the state agency, and that DNR employees are under the gun not to talk about it. The revelations have caused a stir inside and outside of the DNR.

Activists and community members familiar with the situation tend to agree with the whistleblower’s assessment, seeing Republic–the second largest waste hauler in the United States — as their foe. They point to Bill Gates’ stake in the company as evidence of the power that it wields. They allude to the company’s checkered environmental record elsewhere, including another smoldering landfill fire in Ohio. They also agree with Norris’ contention that Republic’s generous campaign contributions have swayed state lawmakers.                           

In that sense, it is not what Norris revealed that is relevant so much as the act itself. He broke the code of silence inside a department that in recent years has operated more like the CIA than a state environmental regulatory agency. Unfortunately, Norris’ criticisms of the DNR  are vague, and his complaints raise more questions than answers. His account of agency wrongdoing is sketchy. He lays blame but buttons up when asked for details.

Under prevailing rules, DNR has been assigned the responsibility of containing an underground fire and reducing the noxious odors at the Bridgeton Landfill. The state maintains that Republic is liable for the expense of the emergency air sampling costs, but it’s unclear whether the company has ponied up. Reached at his office in Washington, D.C., Republic spokesman Russ Knocke was unaware of the contract and said he would have to do some homework to determine whether the state has been reimbursed.

The radioactively-contaminated West Lake Landfill next door is the bailiwick of the federal EPA. As the two bureaucracies advance their separate agendas at a glacial pace, the fire is heading in the direction of the nuclear materials.

In Norris’ absence, the status of the clean up has become more uncertain than ever. The building of a state mandated barrier to stop the fire from advancing has been indefinitely delayed.  In the interim, doubts mount, finger pointing increases, and nobody seems in control. Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster recently expedited the state’s case against Republic for violations filed two years ago, but there is no sign of a settlement. If anything, the company shows indications of being even more resistant to DNR’s appeals. Meanwhile, the activists are stepping up their calls for Gov. Jay Nixon to take action.

From outside DNR’s closed doors, the scenario seems bleak. There would appear to be no winners. However, department documents and correspondence show how one group consistently benefits from the intractable predicament — outside contractors.

A Quiet State of Emergency

Norris says he met DNR contractor Todd Thalhamer in 2008 at a training seminar. For the last several years, Thalhamer has given talks on landfill fires sponsored by Stark Consultants Inc., which is owned by Tim Stark, another DNR contractor. Thalhamer moonlights as a consultant, too, and owns Hammer Consulting Service in El Dorado, Calif. He works full-time as an environmental engineer for the state of California and is a firefighter in the El Dorado Volunteer Fire Department. Thalhamer received a bachelor’s degree in environmental resources engineering from Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif. in 1992. His five-page resume indicates he worked on his first landfill fire in Sacramento County the same year he graduated from college.  He has been under contract as a landfill fire expert for the DNR for the last four years.

Reached by phone in California, Thalhamer says the reason the DNR retains his services is because he has a unique skill set. “The only other individual that I’m aware of that has my expertise is a colleague of mine in British Columbia, and he’s outside the United States,” says Thalhamer. “I have a very unique background. I’m a fireman [and] a registered civil engineer. I do environmental emergency response in California and with EPA,” he says. “I’m one of the guys who trains the landfill owners and operators throughout the United States. My name is known in the industry.”

“Once DNR got Todd Thalhamer on contract,” says Norris, “Todd was able to inform us about certain things that we needed to be watching as far as the gas extraction well field, [and] additional data that we should be tracking.” Besides Norris, the team included two other DNR staffers, consultants Thalhamer and Stark and, a graduate student. “We tracked the landfill gas data from that well field from month to month. We started plotting it on maps to see what the overall condition was. At some point, we started to see signs that the event was spreading and intensifying.”

Then the odors at the landfill increased.

“By 2012, I was making a push that we really needed to collect some air-monitoring data to get a better handle on what the potential risks were from the landfill smoldering event, as well as just what risk that might be as far as exposing the community,” Norris says.

The increased odors coming off the Bridgeton Landfill in 2012 gave DNR cause for concern as public complaints mounted over the stench. This set the stage for the events that would lead to the emergency procurement contract in early 2013 in which Thalhamer would play a pivotal role.

By this point, the California consultant had the DNR’s ear, and his suggestions  extended beyond the technical aspects of  fighting landfill fires. When odor complaints jumped in early 2013, Thalhamer told the DNR to openly request EPA air testing as a way of calming residents fears.  “We need to ensure the public that the odor is just that — an odor and not a health risk,” advised Thalhamer.  “The quickest way to reduce the environmental worry in the community is to request the US EPA perform community and facility air sampling. Contractor data should be as valid as US EPA but we need to show the community we are concerned enough to make this request.”

A few months earlier in December 2012,  the DNR had held a one-day training session presented by Thalhamer at Republic Service’s headquarters on St. Charles Rock Road. Those in attendance included, DNR staffers, representatives of the Pattonville and Robertson Fire Protection Districts, and officials from the St. Louis County Health Department. Brenda Ardrey of the DNR arranged the meeting and Republic, picked up the lunch tab for the sandwiches from a nearby Jimmy John’s restaurant.

Thalhamer charged $150 an hour for his services. Including various conferences calls, planning and travel expenses, the bill totaled $6,695.49.

His performance impressed Ardrey so much that she arranged for Thalhamer to speak the next summer at the Missouri Waste Control Coalition’s annual conference at the posh Tan-Tar-A resort on the Lake of the Ozarks. The 400-member coalition is comprised of private waste companies, government regulators and consultants.

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The conference setting had the trappings of a country club, including a golf course, where the MWCC held its annual tournament over the same weekend. The clubby atmosphere between business and government regulators goes beyond  the 18th hole, however.  Ardrey’s boss Chris Nagel, director of DNR’s Solid Waste Management Program, sits on the advisory board of the waste coalition, and Larry Lehman, DNR’s chief enforcement officer, is on its board of directors. Besides Lehman, other board members include Randy Tourville of Republic Services and Lisa Messinger of EPA Region VII.

After DNR decided to fund air sampling at Bridgeton Landfill in early 2013,  Thalhamer put SWAPE on DNR’s radar. Thalhamer and one of the owners of SWAPE had both worked on a case related to another Republic landfill fire in Ohio years earlier. Within a week, SWAPE had secured the DNR’s air-sampling contract without going through the regular bidding process.

That’s because a month earlier, DNR had quietly invoked an emergency clause in the state statutes and allocated more than a half a million dollars for the job. Internal DNR emails show officials carefully researched the matter to make sure the agency followed the letter of the law in declaring the emergency.

Few outside the DNR knew about the emergency. No sirens went off. The governor didn’t issue an evacuation order. Residents were not kept fully in the loop. Instead, agency insiders kept the situation hushed. The only other company that expressed interest in the contract submitted a proposal that was less acceptable than SWAPE’s.

Unlike others wary of consequences, SWAPE showed no fear of rousing the ire of Republic because it had already had a falling out with the waste giant in the past. On March 21, within 48 hours of receiving the contract, Paul Rosenfeld of SWAPE flew to St. Louis for a one-day meeting with DNR officials.

A subcontractor identified in an invoice only as JB also attended the talks. John Blank is the the owner of American Environmental Laboratories, a St. Louis-based firm that SWAPE hired as a subcontractor.  Blank says the terms of his company’s involvement remain confidential, but he does reveal that SWAPE issued the requirements for conducting the air sampling — “the what and the how” — and the St. Louis lab reported the results back to SWAPE and the DNR.

The meeting between SWAPE and the DNR lasted 11 hours, according to public records. Rosenfeld charged $195 an hour. The subcontractor charged $120. SWAPE billed DNR a total of  $5,821.86 for the day.

The terms of the emergency air-monitoring contract approved by DNR on Feb. 15, 2013 stipulated a 60-to-90 day deal valued at $600,000. SWAPE’s incomplete proposal submitted on March 29 totaled $594,060. After the contract was signed, invoices and purchase orders were issued in quick succession.

  • On March 29, 2013, SWAPE submitted an itemized invoice of $15,198.32 for services rendered.
  • On April 2, 2013 the state paid the company another $6,000 for expert testimony.
  • A state purchase order for SWAPE’s products and services dated April 3, 2013, shows a bottom of line of $349,000.

Whereas, SWAPE submitted detailed, line-item accounting of services rendered, the state purchase order only lists itemized expenses as “environmental, ecological and agricultural services: miscel [miscellaneous].”  SWAPE continued its emergency air sampling under the initial arrangement through August 2013.

Ardrey referred all questions about the Bridgeton Landfill to the DNR information officer Gena Terlizzi.  Voice and email messages left for Terlizzi went  unreturned. When contacted, Beth Glickman, office manager for SWAPE, said: “We typically don’t talk to the press. We are still under contract with them (the DNR) and won’t be able to answer any questions.”

When asked  about his role in the process, Thalhamer says: “As you probably know, I’m under contract with DNR so I can’t speak to  issues surrounding that. … I understand your plight. I work for a government agency and I fight the same thing that you’re asking me for. But I also know contract law and know I’d be in jeopardy of breeching the contract.” Toward the end of the conversation, Thalhamer suggests digging deeper, and offers journalistic advise, including filing a state Freedom of Information request.  Speaking about the SWAPE contract, he says: “There’s some interesting information there if you can get that Rubik’s Cube figured out.”

Less enigmatically, Norris concedes that there may be an appearance of  something amiss in the state’s handling of the emergency air-monitoring contract, but he has no doubt that the public’s interest was best served by the decision.

“SWAPE had the expertise, the history of sampling around landfill fires elsewhere” says Norris. “I think that they were probably in the best position at that point and time to do the air sampling whether it was done by them or a subcontractor that was progressing in a fashion that was protective of public health,” Norris says.

“There was additional concerns from the community living around the site in large part due to the increase in odors, Norris says.  Benzene and certain others [chemicals] were elevated in the landfill gas. There were certain chemical compounds that appeared to be elevated downwind versus upwind of the landfill at least slightly.”

Air sampling at the site measured  dioxins, furans, benzene, aldehydes, reduced sulfur compounds and volatile organic compounds, all of which can cause serious health effects through long-term exposure. But  test results at the Bridgeton Landfill analyzed by the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services found chemicals of concern to be below the threshold of concern for human health over the time frame of the emergency air sampling contract.

Norris doesn’t argue with those findings, but he does assert that politics is influencing science. “Politics seems to be invading the technical work to a greater extent than when I first started that’s for sure, [but] we were able to accomplish quite a bit even within the political confines during this event, especially in 2013,” he says.

Norris makes clear that his resignation and subsequent letter are unrelated to the SWAPE memo or the hiring of outside contractors in general.  “It was really kind of broader issues at the department,” he says. He mentions bureaucratic inefficiencies, the role of politics and lax enforcement as reasons for his discontent and departure, but stops short of placing the onus on anything specific, leaving the listener to turn Rubik’s Cube for himself.

Unit A at 205 Riverview Drive is vacant. A stack of native limestone blocks stands by the entrance, the only vestige remaining of the apartment’s last tenant. A for-rent sign is posted in the front yard and a sodden edition of the Jefferson City News-Tribune lies in the gutter. The brick duplex is located on a residential street in the sleepy Missouri capital, where on a mild January day a woman washes her shiny SUV in a nearby driveway. With a dog barking in the backyard and dinner on the stove in the kitchen, the occupant of Unit B leans against his front door jamb, warily answering questions about Dan Norris’ whereabouts. He is tight-lipped when it comes to the details, but says his neighbor of eight years moved out about three weeks ago and didn’t leave a forwarding address. — C.D. Stelzer

Secret Agent Man

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Former EPA official John C. Beale alleged he was a CIA agent for years, attributing his absences to covert missions, and charging the environmental agency nearly $900,000 in travel costs, bonuses and overtime pay. After confessing, he went to prison. His boss — Gina McCarthy — received a promotion.  

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When self-professed CIA agent John C. Beale left the halfway house in Philadelphia on June 1, his unheralded release marked the end of a bizarre saga that began quietly in 2000. For the next 13 years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, Beale told his EPA colleagues that he worked for the CIA.  Finally, when confronted about his alleged covert activities in 2013, Beale claimed he had fabricated his espionage career to get out of work. By this point he had reportedly fleeced the government out of $866,168 in travel expenses, bonuses and compensation. He pleaded guilty of felony theft charges, promptly paid a seven-figure fine and was sentenced to 32-months in federal prison.

Beale served only 18 months before he walked, a veritable slap on the wrist for the crime to which he confessed.  But his boss, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy,  to whom Beale reported, survived the scandal unscathed and was actually promoted to head the agency in the wake of the controversy.

The press had a field day with the Beale affair. C-Span covered the resulting congressional hearings. NBC and the Washington Post reported the story,  as did various online publications and the Associated Press. Wire service coverage appeared in nearly 100 newspapers coast-to-coast. Newspapers that reported the story included the Albuquerque Journal, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Iowa City Press-Citizen, Great Falls Tribune, Baxter Bulletin and the Poughkeepsie Journal.

In St. Louis, however, the whole sordid affair went unreported because the The St. Louis-Post-Dispatch failed to mention Beale’s misdeeds.

A significant story involving corruption at the highest levels of a federal agency  were overlooked. An entire metropolitan region  left uninformed by its only major daily newspaper, hundreds of thousands of readers kept in the dark.

For St. Louisans, it was as if the Beale affair never happened.

The lack of coverage by the Post-Dispatch was even more egregious because of the EPA’s mishandling of the West Lake Landfill clean up in St. Louis County.

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Radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project and Cold War era had been illegally dumped at the West Lake Landfill in 1973. The EPA had taken over the Superfund site in 1990. But by 2013, the agency had yet to clean up the mess, and the natives were getting restless. Thanks to social media,  a community group dedicated to the issue, STL Just Moms, grew by leaps and bounds. Among its primary goals:  the protection of human health and the removal of the waste from the Missouri River floodplain. Another of the organization’s main objectives is to ditch the EPA altogether and hand over the clean up to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

While the local outrage ramped up here, corruption charges were being leveled against top EPA officials implicated in the  Beale affair.  But in St. Louis few people knew about the agency’s troubles in Washington because of the local news blackout.

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In the nation’s capital, it was a big story. The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives took a keen interest in the Beale’s shenanigans and lambasted EPA administrator McCarthy for her involvement.  On October 1, 2013,  for example, Beale himself  was grilled  before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform for hours. His written statement is 263-pages long.

Nevertheless, a blanket of censorship remained in place in St. Louis.

“The name is Beale, John Beale.”

Beale had started working at the EPA in 1988 and was soon elevated to the position of policy analyst. His areas of expertise included the Clean Air Act and climate change. In 2000, he began taking days off of work to allegedly attend CIA meetings. Over the course of the next decade his absences increased. By 2008, his days off increased dramatically, when he requested and received a six month hiatus to ostensibly take part in a CIA covert operation. After the Obama administration came into power in 2009, McCarthy became Beale’s boss in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, and his role as the EPA’s secret agent continued uninterrupted. She didn’t question his alleged CIA ties. If anything, she accepted the idea without reservation.

In September 2011, Beale and two other EPA officials threw a retirement party for themselves on a yacht in the Potomac River. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy attended the shindig. She considered Beale to be one of her most competent managers. At the same time, she  was also aware of his alleged dual role as a CIA agent, but, nevertheless, lamented Beale’s  departure from the EPA. None of this raised any red flags for a long, long time.

But the saga gets weirder. Beale officially retired in early 2012 but he inexplicably continued to receive his full salary after his retirement. By this time, Beale’s paycheck, which included bogus bonuses, exceeded McCarthy’s  salary. He was the highest paid employee at the EPA and he wasn’t even showing up for work. Beale was pulling down a full-time salary of $206,000 from the EPA — after he had retired.

under the guise of national security

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When the EPA Office of Inspector General began investigating Beale, its probe was upended by a little-known subunit within EPA administrator Gina McCarthy’s inner sanctum. McCarthy’s chief of staff was in charge of the obscure detachment, which calls itself the EPA Office of Homeland Security.

This  questionable operation is not part of the Department of Homeland Security and was run without oversight, after being set up in 2003 to deal with possible terrorism threats against sensitive environmental sites. Its intended purpose was to coordinate protocol with the FBI. It has no statutory authority to conduct internal investigations. But that’s exactly what it did in John C. Beale’s case, much to consternation of the EPA Office of Inspector General.

Testifying before the same congressional panel that Beale appeared before, Assistant EPA Inspector General Patrick Sullivan said that the investigation of John Beale had been  obstructed because Beale had been tipped off that he was a subject of interest by McCarthy’s sketchy security apparatus run out her office and headed by Gwendolyn Keyes Fleming, the administrator’s handpicked chief of staff.

“The OHS’ actions, which included several interviews with Mr. Beale, damaged the OIG’s subsequent investigation,” Sullivan told Congress.

McCarthy was far from the only one who believed Beale was a CIA agent. Some of Beale’s colleagues at the EPA still remain convinced that he was a covert operative. Moreover, Beale’s wife was under the assumption that her husband worked clandestinely for the CIA since 1994.

Nancy Kete, Beale’s spouse, met him when she was employed by the EPA. She took a sabbatical from her EPA duties in the early 1990s to work in Paris as an environmental advisor for the Office of Economic Cooperation and Development, an organization that grew out of the Marshall Plan, the United States government’s efforts to rebuild Europe after World War II. By the time the scandal broke in 2012, Kete had made a career change and was the managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation, a position she held until this April.

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Kete’s credentials suggest that her professional ties may connect her more to the shadowy world of espionage than her husband’s career path. She reputedly was embarrassed by the exposure that her husband’s escapades received.

Under existing federal law, the CIA must inform other U.S. government agencies if any of its employees also work for the agency. When contacted, the CIA denied any association with Beale.

For his part, Beale expressed contrition for his lies, paid his fine of more than $1.3 million and served his time. In the wake of the scandal, Gina McCarthy was promoted to head the EPA.  The story that wasn’t reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has now been largely forgotten by the rest of America, too.

No progress has been made in cleaning up the  EPA’s West Lake Landfill Superfund site, as a change in presidential administrations nears. The stonewalling and the foot dragging  will likely continue into the next year.

Meanwhile, community activists in St. Louis are continuing to expose the shameful betrayal perpetrated by the U.S. government against its citizens despite lax coverage by the local news media.

Casual readers of spy thrillers are aware that it is standard operating procedure for the CIA to deny involvement when any of its covert actions are publicly exposed. It appears that the EPA operates on the same principle.

John C. Beale may now be long gone, but the game goes on.

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Tom Slick’s Legacy

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When the EPA trumpeted the findings of the Southwest Research Institute earlier this year,  it didn’t mention the founder’s quest for Yeti or his ties to the CIA. 

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In July, EPA Region VII announced that the prestigious Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio had analyzed soil samples from West Lake Landfill and found that heating  dirt from the radioactively-contaminated dump in a laboratory setting had not increased dangerous radon levels.

Community activists were not assured by the pronouncement, however. They are still demanding an expedited cleanup of the long neglected site in North St. Louis County and continue to question attempts by the press and the EPA to downplay the problem posed by the nuclear weapons waste.

For its part, the EPA  has cast the debate as one that pits the dismissive opinions of its so-called scientific experts against the public’s perception of risk, which they contend is based on rumors and misinformation.

A good argument could be made, however, that rumors and misinformation is the stuff from which the Southwest Research Institute spawned.

The late Tom Slick Jr.,  founder of the Southwest Research Institute, believed in the existence of the Yeti, aka, the abominable snowman; and he spent a considerable amount of time and money attempting to prove the creature was a reality.

You read correctly: One of the top government-approved research facilities in the country, with a revenue exceeding $500 million in 2015, was established by a bonafide cryptozoologist, a true believer, who spent years chasing after the abominable snowman, the subject of derision among generations of serious scientists who scoff at the idea and label it nothing more than pure science fiction.

It’s enough to give pause, when the EPA asserts that its contractors hold a monopoly on  irrefutable scientific facts.

But there’s more.

When he wasn’t chasing Bigfoot or giant Alpine salamanders, Slick operated a CIA air cargo company in his spare time, while managing his oil and cattle empire.

Apparently, the same curiosity and fervid imagination that fueled his search for monsters drove him to start up the research center in 1947. He subsequently bankrolled two expeditions to the Himalayan Mountains of Tibet in search of the legendary, hirsute biped.

The Tom Slick Foundation still helps support the Southwest Research Institute.

Slick also endowed the Tom Slick Professorship of World Peace at the University of Texas, where former EPA Region 7 administrator Karl Brooks now teaches.

Slick also went on a trek to the Canadian Northwest in search of the Yeti’s North American cousin, Bigfoot. Before either of these quests, Slick, while still in college at Yale,  journeyed to Scotland to investigate the legendary Loch Ness monster.

Slick inherited his wealth from his father, a wildcatter who struck black gold during the Oklahoma oil rush of the 1920s.

In the 1950s, Slick and his brother operated Slick Airways, a CIA air cargo company that operated in Asia before the notorious Air America of the Vietnam era.

There is speculation that Slick’s Tibetan expeditions were covers for covert CIA operations to gather intelligence on Chinese hegemony in the region.

His friends and associates included eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes and Hollywood actor Jimmy Stewart.

Slick, an avid pilot, died when his small plane crashed on a return flight from a Canadian hunting trip. He was 46 years old.

A planned feature film, Tom Slick, Mystery Hunter, starring Nicholas Cage was shelved in the 1990s.