Cunningham, again (UPDATED)

Listen carefully and you may hear the sound of Duke Cunningham singing:

According to the FBI summary, Cunningham admits to being provided with prostitutes, misleading congressional ethics officials, making others buy gifts for his daughters, personally devising the schemes to launder his bribes, lying to his staff, and putting unrelenting pressure on government officials who thought the defense contracts he pushed with congressional earmarks were wasteful.

Insisted there were no prostitutes at Wilkes' Washington poker games, but said Wilkes hired prostitutes for him during a Hawaii vacation. Cunningham was miffed that Wilkes got the “younger and cuter” prostitute and said he was “somewhat embarrassed on this occasion because he had some difficulty in completing intercourse.” On the next night, Cunningham again had a prostitute but said he “did not have sex” with her “because he felt guilty about his behavior.”

Obvious question: Did the DC Madam's escort service provide these girls? We are told that the numbers trace back to hotels, which makes sense. The Watergate...? That's where the poker games were held.

Meanwhile, what about Silvestre Reyes? He's the intel committee chairman, and I took a great interest in the process that led to his getting the job. At first, he seemed a decent choice -- until he revealed that he thought Al Qaeda was Shi'ite, not Sunni.

Now we learn something even more disturbing:

Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Tex., chairman of the House intelligence committee, did not respond today to questions from the Blotter on ABCNews.com about why he refuses to release a report on the abuses of power by former committee member Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

It gets worse:

Indeed, some have suggested the report was not meant to delve deeply into the worst bribery scandal in the history of Congress, which unfolded over several years within the committee's chambers. The chief investigator on the report, Michael Stern, has noted that he was barred from asking questions about whether other lawmakers knew of Cunningham's crimes, or had any hand in them.

Reyes' position is in stark contrast to that taken last year by the committee's former top Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman, Calif., who pressed Republican then-chairman Hoekstra to release the report.

So the question is: Is Reyes protecting a fellow congressperson -- or the intelligence community?

Update: The transcript of an FBI interview with Cunningham is here. An FBI investigation report is here.

The investigation outlines in brief the origin of MZM but does not explain the company's early identification of its line of work as either legal services or business consultancy. It also supposedly provided aid to refugees.

We learn important new details of Wade's pre-MZM background. He had previously been described as a "bureaucrat" working in the Pentagon, but the truth turns out to be -- as you might have guessed -- rather spookier:

According to information provided by Mitchell Wade, after graduating college, he was hired (in approximately 1984) as a civilian employee at the DoD. While employed at DoD, Wade was actively involved in command and control projects, including ones relating to the counter-narcotics programs.(*) He worked very closely with the Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”) on these projects and was actively involved in human intelligence programs.(**)

* Beginning in approximately March 1987, Wade served as a Commissioned Intelligence Officer in the U.S. Naval Reserves. In the 1990s, he received an Honorable Discharge as a Lieutenant Commander.

** According to recent interviews conducted by investigators with current and former DoD employees, Wade was also employed with a DoD entity known as the Defense Testing and Evaluation Support Activity (DTESA). At DTESA, Wade supported several classified programs.

All of which tends to support my original thesis that MZM began life as an intelligence front involved in support activities. Wade (I proposed) was the new Ed Wilson -- and Wilson, we often forget, had moved from CIA to Naval Intelligence.

What is DTESA? According to a squib here, the group was involved with shipping MiGs to various U.S. bases for testing in the late 1980s. We learn here that DTESA was run out of Kirtland Air Force Base. (As some of you know, there were some odd, odd rumors coming out of Kirtland in the late 1980s -- too odd for even this blog to detail.) Apparently, the organization was well-known to an ultra-small community of Eastern-bloc aircraft "buffs" -- and was unknown to pretty much everyone else outside the DoD.

Wade's career definitely followed an interesting trajectory. Counter-narcotics and acquiring Eastern-bloc aircraft...?

The investigation also gives much more info about the most mysterious of the the Cunningham bribers, Thomas Kontogiannis. More later...