John Beale, a former EPA senior policy adviser who defrauded taxpayers out of nearly $1 million by pretending to be a CIA agent was sentenced last month to 2 and 1/2 years in prison. Beale already has paid $886,000 in restitution, and was expected to pay another half-million dollars to the Justice Department.
Beale was not a low-level bureaucrat, rather was one EPA’s most senior, most highly paid officials, who had been entrusted with developing EPA’s most controversial policies From 1989 until 2013, Beale worked in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation (OAR), developing policies and regulations related to air pollution and climate change. OAR is regarded as the most powerful office in one of Washington’s most powerful agencies, given the costs it can impose on American business and consumers. And for much of his time Beale was senior policy adviser. His specific duties included assisting the head of OAR “in planning, policy implementation, direction, and control of EPA programs.” From 2009 until 2013, the head of OAR was Gina McCarthy.
Beale got paid by the EPA for a spy job he never had. Beale’s deception began more than a decade ago and was largely a scheme to collect unearned pay and travel benefits over roughly 13 years — essentially by saying he needed to take off one workday a week to conduct secret missions for the CIA. In 2008, he took off six months, telling EPA management he was working on the research project at CIA headquarters in Langley. During this period he billed the government $57,000 for five trips to California for personal reasons to visit his parents. In June 2011 he told EPA that his work for the spy agency would require him to be out of the office for extended period and didn’t come back to work at the EPA for the next 18 months while continuing to draw a paycheck. At one point he told McCarthy and other agency officials he had to go to Pakistan because the Taliban was torturing his CIA replacement. “Due to recent events that you have probably read about, I am in Pakistan,” he wrote McCarthy in a Dec. 18, 2010 email. “Got the call Thurs and left Fri. Hope to be back for Christmas ….Ho, ho, ho.”
The truth is that Beale had no relationship with the CIA. He spent the time he was purportedly working for the CIA at his Northern Virginia home riding bikes, doing housework and reading books, or at a vacation house on Cape Cod. Beale got caught after retiring very publicly but continued to draw his large salary for another 18 months. Top EPA officials, including McCarthy, attended a September 2011 retirement party for Beale and two colleagues aboard a Potomac yacht. Six months later, McCarthy learned he was still on the payroll. He was able to get away with the fraud because of “an absence of even basic internal controls at the EPA,” said Inspector General Arthur Elkins, whose office unraveled Beale’s long-running deception.