Practically anyone who owns a TV has heard of NCIS, the long running CBS drama featuring some very attractive military detectives in a fictional unit of the Navy’s Criminal Investigative Service. Of course, these khaki-clad sleuths triumph over bureaucratic roadblocks, blind alleys and evil geniuses to nail the bad guys most every week, making it the most-watched non-sports program on television, drawing nearly 12 million viewers each week, according to the Nielson ratings.
The real NCIS figures big in Washington Post investigative reporter Craig Whitlock’s new book, Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy—but not in a flattering way. His account of how the Maylasian con man corrupted top U.S.Navy officers paints a far different portrait of the fabled NCIS than the hugely popular TV version.
“What I was able to find out in the book was that NCIS had actually opened 27 different criminal investigations and inquiries into Francis’s company over a decade and closed every single one of them without taking action, until the very end, when the last couple of cases finally caught up to him,” Whitlock tells me in the latest edition of the SpyTalk podcast. “But so essentially for 10 years, NCIS had gotten all sorts of tips and requests and people begging them to investigate Leonard Francis for fraud and it just would close up the cases. It would do a perfunctory inquiry, and that was it, and Leonard would frankly just run circles around [them].”
He even had a mole in the NCIS.
All that’s astonishing, not to mention disturbing, considering that the NCIS is not just responsible for crime, but stopping foreign intelligence agencies from penetrating the U.S. Navy with spies. Leonard, who provided port services for the navy, bribed scores of senior naval officers into giving him advance information on ship movements in the Pacific—the kind of information Chinese intelligence in particular would die for, especially if war broke out over Taiwan.
Whitlock, a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for his national security reporting, was of course curious about this, too. Was there any evidence Leonard traded such valuable information with China, North Korea or Russia? Did the NCIS do a thorough counterintelligence investigation?
“If they did, they’ve never disclosed it,” Whitlock told me. “And, you know, when I asked in my interviews, I [could] never get a straight answer. I came across no evidence that they had done this, except to sort of conduct interviews, talk to Leonard, and, I think, frankly, cross their fingers and hold their breath and hope that the Chinese didn’t get it.”
“But if there was any sort of damage assessment done,” Whitlock adds, “they kept it under wraps.”
Listen to the whole jolting interview here, or on Apple, or wherever you like to get your podcasts. And do leave us a comment.
