Wippl on CIA Accounting: “It’s the Public’s Money”

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Joseph Wippl, Director of Graduate Studies at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, said that inaccurate accounting was a paramount problem in instances of security scandal.

Wippl made his comments in a March 2 article in The Daily Beast entitled, “Spy: CIA Kept Me From My Soulmate.” It tells the story of ‘Mack Charles,’ the assumed named of a CIA operative who is suing the agency for $25 million, after he claimed to be a victim of a smear campaign.

From the text of the story:

“You see, even spooks aren’t beyond the reach of the bean counters. “I tell my students, incompetence may not get you in trouble, but money will,” Joseph Wippl, a CIA veteran who spent more than 30 years in the clandestine service and now teaches intelligence studies at Boston University, told The Daily Beast. “It’s contingent upon any operations officer to do good accounting. I was a manager in about six different places, and boy, you really watch accounting and make sure things are done correctly. It’s the public’s money,” said Wippl, who served as the chief of the CIA’s Europe Division.”

You can read the entire article here.

Wippl spent a 30 year career as an operations officer in the National Clandestine Service (NCS). Wippl has served overseas as an operations officer and operations manager in Bonn, West Germany; Guatemala City; Luxembourg; Madrid, Spain; Mexico City; Vienna, Austria; and Berlin, Germany. On assignments in CIA headquarters, he served as the Deputy Chief of Human Resources, as the Senior NCS representative to the Aldrich Ames Damage Assessment Team, as Chief of Europe Division and as the CIA’s Director of Congressional Affairs. Wippl has coordinated extensively with other members of the U.S. intelligence community.