(CN) — From the dragonfly-shaped drone to the lithium-ion battery, CIA technology had once been storied and cutting-edge, but one former officer keeps suing to pull his old employer's dusty Freedom of Information Act policies out of the paper age.
Jeffrey Scudder spent more than two decades in the intelligence community before his hunt for government records "destroyed [his] entire career," as he told the Washington Post for a profile two years ago.
Back then, Scudder hopped the globe on CIA assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq. He said that he entered into the agency's career trainee program after he graduated college, "right out of the Reagan build-up."
"When the Cold War was over, the agency was cutting back," Scudder told Courthouse News in a phone interview.
With the dot-com industry booming, Scudder hopped from government intelligence to business intelligence with the Washington-based giant MicroStrategy, before the FBI recruited him as a project manager. Still, Scudder said he longed to return to the CIA, and he got that opportunity through the agency's CIO office, where he could put his information-technology experience to work abroad in war zones.
"I enjoyed this," he said. "I took a lot of pride in what we did there. Those were my last times overseas."
Then, Scudder says, his historical curiosity got the better of him once he caught a glimpse of the CIA's files on John F. Kennedy.
"There was a requirement that the officers turn in everything that they have on the JFK assassination," he said. "I thought, 'Wow, this is really interesting.'"
The FOIA requests that Scudder eventually filed have aimed to uncover not the juicy details of any specific historical event, but the annals of the agency's internal scholarly magazine, Studies in Intelligence.
"It was a cornucopia of tidbits about the intelligence community," he explained.
These seemingly arcane requests, Scudder says, plunged him into a world of government paranoia worthy of a John le Carré novel, beginning with an early-morning raid of his home.
"Suddenly, at six in the morning, there's a bang on the door, 'FBI, open up!'" he recalled.
Scudder said that agents also woke up his wife and daughter, then a sixth-grade student, before rummaging through his house. He remembered feeling offended that a government he served for decades had so strongly turned on him for placing a FOIA request.
"I'm someone who's risked his life for this government," he said. "You'd think it'd warrant this kind of, 'We trust you.'"
He said that the insult held an additional sting because he believed he had done everything by the books.
"Literally, I was following the agency's regulations, and immediately, they looked at me like a leper and said, 'Why are you doing this?'" he recalled.
Shortly after Scudder sued his employer for the records in 2012, he says, the CIA gave him an ultimatum: retire now and receive 11 months more of his salary, or lose a special pension that he worked decades to attain.
For Scudder, the choice was sad but obvious: He said he took the first option, and the agency immediately rescinded his security clearance. The Department of Justice and the FBI did not prosecute him.