Former CIA Paris chief of station sentenced to one year and one day in prison for mishandling classified information
Dale Bendler was sentenced to two concurrent 12 month and 1 day sentences on Thursday afternoon, for mishandling classified information and surreptitiously working on behalf of foreign clients.
Dale Britt Bendler (center) entering the Eastern District of Virginia’s Alexandria courthouse at 1:10 p.m. ET on Thursday with his lawyers, including Jesse Binnall (right). Credit: Jack Poulson
Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. on Thursday sentenced the 69-year-old former CIA chief of station in Paris, Dale Britt Bendler, to two concurrent one-year-and-one-day terms in prison, for mishandling classified information and for “surreptitiously” working on behalf of foreign clients to influence U.S. policy.
Despite appeals in September from two of Bendler’s two former CIA supervisors, former Paris deputy chief of station John M. Feeney and former counterterrorism chief of operations Robert Dannenberg, Judge Alston’s decision was modeled after that of former U.S. Air Force contractor Isaak Vincent Kemp. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio in September 2021 sentenced Kemp to “one year and one day in prison for illegally taking approximately 2,500 pages of classified documents.”
Bendler’s primary counsel, the self-described “America First” lawyer Jesse Binnall, took pains to refute Judge Alston’s comparison of Bendler’s case to that of former FBI counterintelligence agent Robert P. Hanssen. “Dale Bendler and Robert Hanssen are two very different people and there is an ocean between them of culpable conduct,” Binnall argued, prior to providing the classified portion of his argument in a nearby Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF).
Judge Alston had opened the hearing by admonishing Mr. Binnall — whom he described as one of his former students — for submitting a psychological evaluation that Mr. Bendler suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) the previous day at 4:45 p.m., though the evidence was accepted shortly before sentencing.
The court’s decision was delivered just before 4 p.m. on Thursday, on the tenth floor of the Eastern District of Virginia’s Alexandria courthouse. Many of the twelve members of the public audience were employees of the U.S. Government, and Judge Alston noted that the “greatest shame” of Bendler’s punishment was having to face other trusted servants of the U.S. Government who were in the room. Much of Judge Alston’s deliberation related to how to provide a “general deterrence” preventing other active members of the U.S. Intelligence Community from secretly selling their classified information access to lobbying firms.
Out of what was described as sympathy for Mr. Bendler’s wife and business partner, Sandra Rosa Bendler, Judge Alston provided the former Paris chief of station the ability to spend the holidays with his family and to report for imprisonment by January 5 at 2 p.m. The location was recommended by Mr. Binnall — without objection — to be a camp in Miami whose name he could not recall at the time.
Bendler expressed what he described as “contrition” prior to the judgement. After noting that he had queried ChatGPT the previous night for an example allocution for his offenses, Bendler promised to save the court time by providing a shorter statement. “I was stupid,” Bendler stated, after noting that “FARA isn’t that complicated,” in reference to the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) which he admitted to violating through his surreptitious work for foreign clients.
Bendler originally pled guilty to the charges in April.
Bendler’s retroactive FARA filings document him having simultaneously worked for foreign principals related to the governments of France, Angola, Venezuela, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bendler noted during his allocution that he has spoken to “twenty guys and gals,” whom he advised to “don’t be me.” “You think you’re smart,” Bendler warned his colleagues, in relation to his being caught selling access to his classified information access to foreign actors through the lobbying firm Barbour, Griffith & Rogers (BGR), but “those eggs can get mixed and become scrambled,” he continued.
Bendler’s ties to the tangled web of Venezuelan covert action
The details of Bendler’s registration of having worked for the Venezuelan media executive Armando Capriles through BGR beginning in 2019 remain contentious, as Bendler’s filing claimed that he was attempting to recruit Capriles as an asset of an “Other Government Agency” — common parlance for the CIA — with the carrot of leniency from U.S. Treasury sanctions in exchange for the Venezuelan’s cooperation in his capacity as the CEO of media company Cadena Capriles. But Cadena Capriles was widely reported in late 2013 to have been divested from the Capriles family to an investor consortium whose public face was the British heir Robert William Hanson, and the company soon after renamed to Ultimas Noticias Group, after its flagship newspaper.
Ultimas Noticias Group did not respond to a request for comment.
Bendler’s work with Armando Capriles, registered to have begun in March 2019 by way of BGR, overlapped with BGR’s public registration in April 2019 of providing pro bono support to the Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s Ambassador to the Organization of American States, Carlos Vecchio. Mr. Binnall’s firm has coincidentally recently represented the documentary maker Jennifer Gatien in withdrawing her Manhattan apartment — which she purchased from actor Anthony Rapp for $2.05 million in late 2021 — as bond collateral for former 10th Special Forces Group soldier Jordan Goudreau as part of the U.S. Government’s prosecution for arms trafficking of his role in the infamously botched “Operation Gideon” coup attempt against Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro on May 3, 2020 — which had been briefly contracted the previous year by the Guaidó administration.
Mr. Bendler’s wife, Sandra Rosa Bendler, was also revealed by an August FARA registration to have pitched GreenMet CEO and former 3rd Special Forces Group soldier Andrew Luxton Horn to become a potential intermediary for the couple’s in-progress rare earth mineral extraction deal with Angolan politician and former general Francisco Higino Lopes Carneiro, focusing on “Neodymium, Praseodymium, Samarium, Dyprosium, Yitrium, and Terbium.” Mr. Horn, along with former Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operator Jason Beardsley, was at the center of Mr. Goudreau’s allegations of U.S. Government support for 2020’s Operation Giden coup attempt, which was recently extensively interrogated with previously unreported discovery documents by The Grayzone.
‘His own personal Google’
As previously reported, the U.S. Government contended that, “between July 2017 and September 2020, Defendant [Dale Bendler] earned approximately $360,000 in private client fees while also working as a full-time CIA contractor with daily access to highly classified material that he searched like it was his own personal Google.” The ‘Google’ catchphrase was repeated throughout Thursday’s hearing, seemingly to significant effect.
In addition to Mr. Bendler’s two concurrent 12-month-and-one-day sentences, he was further fined $25,000 and an additional $200 in special assessments, as well as given two years probation.
Senior trial attorney Heather M. Schmidt noted repeatedly during the hearing that neither Mr. Bendler nor the D.C.-based lobbying firm which organized his foreign contracts, BGR, had registered the work through FARA. Neither BGR nor its advisor, former CIA Moscow chief of station Daniel N. Hoffman, responded to requests for comment.
Bendler’s counsel had argued during the case that his punishment should follow that of former U.S. national security advisor Sandy Berger and former CIA director David Petraeus, who were each sentenced to two years of probation — in 2005 and 2015, respectively — for their own mishandling of classified information. The specific U.S. law behind the charge, 18 U.S. Code § 1924, was noted by Ms. Schmidt to have been upgraded from a misdemeanor to a felony since the prosecution of the two senior officials. Judge Alston further argued that Mr. Bendler’s handling of classified information was more analogous to a drug dealer than a drug user, due to Bendler exceeding beyond the retention of classified information into actively selling it to foreign actors.
Prior to leading the CIA’s Paris station during a period reported to be 2011 to 2014, Dale Bendler worked under deputy chief of station John M. Feeney around the turn of the century. When Mr. Feeney was reached for comment regarding his September 27 letter of support, he stated that, “If [Dale] ends up going to jail for even six months it would be atrocious in my opinion, because he’s such a patriotic individual.”
I laughed out loud at Feeney describing Bendler as 'such a patriotic individual'. Thank you.