Elayne Riggs' Journal (for Leah)

Friday, November 21, 2003

Our Version of David Kelly?

Via Cyndy Roy at Mousemusings, naturally: John J. Kokal, a 58-year-old official of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research Near East and South Asian division (INR/NESA), "was found dead in the late afternoon of November 7. Police indicated he may have jumped from the roof of the State Department." It gets stranger:
...a colleague of Kokal's told this writer that the Iraq analyst was despondent over "problems" with his security clearance. Kokal reportedly climbed out of a window and threw himself out in such a manner so that he would "land on his head." At the time Kokal fell from either the roof or a window, his wife Pamela, a public affairs specialist in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, was waiting for him in the parking garage. Mrs. Kokal had previously worked in Consular Affairs where she was involved in the stricter vetting of visa applicants from mainly Muslim countries after the Sept. 11 attacks.
And stranger still:
A former INR employee revealed that some one-third to one-half of INR officials are either former intelligence agents with the CIA or are detailed from the agency. He also revealed it would have been impossible for Kokal to have gained entry to the roof on his own. INR occupies both a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) on the sixth floor that has no windows and a windowless structure on the roof that has neither windows nor access to the roof, according to the former official. The other windows at the State Department have been engineered to be shatter proof from terrorist bomb attacks and cannot be opened.
There has been almost no coverage of this incident in the media, not even an obituary notice! Update: Natalie Davis explores this further.

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