John Millis

John Millis (Spook,CIA/Drug trafficking/Premature death)
File:No image available (photo).jpg
Born	1953
Died	4 June 2000
Cause of death	"suicide"
Nationality	US
Spouse	Linda Millis
Exposed	John Deutch
Interests	Porter Goss
Executive Director of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) who died in a year 2000 "suicide" after releasing a report on its links to cocaine trafficking.

John I. Millis was a former CIA case officer and Executive Director of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) who died in a year 2000 "suicide". Millis' death occurred the day after he forced the CIA to release a report he had authored on the CIA's links to cocaine trafficking by Nicaraguan drug rings who were connected with criminal groups in Los Angeles. The report cleared the CIA of wrongdoing, however, according to Wayne Madsen, "informed observers believed that Millis, a Republican, wrote a different version of the report that was more critical of the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking and that he may have been silenced because he knew too much".

Career

Millis worked as a case officer for the CIA for nearly 13 years. In that period, he lived in Pakistan, working to provide covert aid to Afghan rebels who were fighting the Soviet army.

In 1996 and 1997 he was staff director of a special Congressional committee that investigated the Clinton administration's approval of arms shipments from Iran to Muslim forces in Bosnia. He was named staff director of the House Intelligence Committee, the top staff position, in 1997.

Activities

Seymour Hersh told in 1999 in the New Yorker how

The N.S.A.'s strongest supporters—the members and staffs of the Senate and House intelligence committees - are also its most vocal critics. The agency is now facing the most caustic congressional scrutiny in its history, amid much pessimism that it can right itself without major changes in its management. Staff members of the intelligence-oversight committees traditionally prefer not to be quoted by name, but John Millis, a former C.I.A. officer who is staff director of the House intelligence committee, openly discussed the N.S.A.'s problems in the fall of 1998 at a luncheon meeting with a group of retired C.I.A. officers. “Signals intelligence is in a crisis,” Millis told his former colleagues, who reprinted the speech in a newsletter. “We have been living in the glory days of sigint over the last fifty years, since World War II.” He went on, “Technology has been the friend of the N.S.A., but in the last four or five years technology has moved from being the friend to being the enemy.” Millis also made it clear that any significant increase in the agency's budget was made more difficult by the fact that “there is no management of the intelligence community. There is no one in a position to make the tradeoffs within the intelligence community that will make a coherent, efficient organization that will function as a whole. So we end up doing it on Capitol Hill. And I've got to tell you, if you are depending on Capitol Hill to do something as important as this, you're in trouble."...Millis, in his private talk to the retired C.I.A. agents, complained that the United States was spending “incredible amounts of money” on satellite collection. “It threatens to overwhelm the intelligence budget.” Using satellites to sweep up communications indiscriminately, he said, “doesn't make a lot of sense. . . . You shouldn't be spending one more dollar than we do to try and intercept communications from space.” Millis's point was that the data collected from sate lites, like the data collected from the Internet, cannot be sorted or analyzed in any meaningful way.

NYT reporter James Risen told how

one incident left me questioning whether I should continue as a national security reporter. In 2000, John Millis, a former CIA officer who had become staff director of the House Intelligence Committee, summoned me to his small office on Capitol Hill. After he closed the door, he took out a classified report by the CIA's inspector general and read it aloud, slowly, as I sat next to him. He repeated passages when I asked, allowing me to transcribe the report verbatim. The report concluded that top CIA officials had impeded an internal investigation into evidence that former CIA Director John Deutch had mishandled large volumes of classified material, placing it on personal computers in his home. The story was explosive, and it angered top CIA officials. Several months later, Millis killed himself. His death shook me badly. I didn't believe that my story had played a role, but as I watched a crowd of current and former CIA officials stream into the church in suburban Virginia where his funeral was held, I wondered whether I was caught up in a game that was turning deadly.

In February 2000, Millis held a speech at the Smithsonian Institution critical of John Deutch, former CIA director. In the speech, Millis said Deutch had done enormous damage to American intelligence capability through his incompetence.

In March, U.S. News & World Report said that Millis had called Deutch the "first-, second-, and third-worst" CIA director.

Wayne Madsen wrote that

There is also some reason to believe that Millis was unhappy with Goss' reluctance to investigate the CIA's handling or mishandling of alleged Mossad penetration of the White House communications system, and its failure to investigate the identity of Israel's allegedhigh-level U.S. government mole, the so-called "Mega."

Death

"A spokesman for the Fairfax City police said officers were called to a motel about 8 p.m. on Sunday because a man was threatening suicide. Officer Jeff Morrison said that when the police arrived they found Mr. Millis dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound."

In July 2000, the Tampa Bay Times reported that "no details of the circumstances surrounding the investigation have come out."

Disinformation piece

The magazine Insight, owned by Washington Times, again owned the South Korean Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a known CIA asset, reported two months after his death, in August 2000, that its CIA sources reported that Millis killed himself after his wife, Linda, discovered he was involved in a homosexual relationship.

Related deaths

Charles Ruff was reportedly briefed on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's findings on the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking by Millis. His body was found by his wife outside a shower in his home. Police ruled the death as resulting from natural causes and not foul play.

A few weeks after Ruff's death, HPSCI ranking member Representative Julian Dixon, who was also briefed on the HPSCI cocaine report, died suddenly from an apparent heart attack, on December 8,2000.

Gary Webb in 2004.

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