By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The U.S. Navy Investigation

Shortly after he was promoted and entrusted with one of the Pentagon’s most sensitive jobs — director of naval intelligence — Vice Adm. Ted “Twig” Branch received an urgent request from the Justice Department. Prosecutors wanted to speak with him about an investigation into leaks of classified material to a 350-pound Malaysian defense contractor known as “Fat Leonard.”

The businessman, Leonard Glenn Francis, and his company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, held $200 million in contracts to resupply U.S. Navy ships and provide port security in Asia. But Francis had recently been arrested in San Diego on fraud and bribery charges. Federal agents were shocked to discover while carrying out search warrants that he had obtained reams of classified information from corrupt Navy officers about the itineraries of U.S. warships and submarines throughout the Western Pacific.

As a foreigner without a security clearance, Francis was prohibited from possessing U.S. military secrets. Investigators were frantic that he might have sold or shared the classified ship schedules to a hostile power such as China, placing U.S. Navy vessels and crews at risk of attack.

Justice Department officials needed to gauge the seriousness of the security breach and asked Branch, as chief collector of the Navy’s secrets, to help them understand the national security implications.

Branch, then 56, wasn’t eager to speak with prosecutors. But given his job, he had little choice. On Nov. 5, 2013, he arrived at the designated meeting place: a conference room at Joint Base Andrews, the suburban Maryland airfield that houses planes used by government VIPs, such as Air Force One.

The three-star admiral was greeted by three investigators led by Mark Pletcher, an assistant U.S. attorney who had traveled cross-country from San Diego. Pletcher explained that his team was “talking to several people” about the classified leaks to Glenn Defense.

What he didn’t say was that the prosecution team was surreptitiously recording the meeting because, days earlier, Francis had provided incriminating evidence against Branch and another senior intelligence officer, Rear Adm. Bruce Loveless, who worked at the Pentagon.

In a bid to strike a plea deal, Francis had met secretly with prosecutors and federal agents and bragged that, over several years, he had lavished Branch and Loveless with expensive meals, cigars, prostitutes, and other illicit gifts.

Given the allegations, investigators needed to determine whether the two leaders of the Navy’s intelligence directorate — key figures in the U.S. intelligence community who collaborated with the CIA and other spy agencies — had committed a crime or were vulnerable to blackmail.

During the meeting with prosecutors, Branch denied criminal wrongdoing or accepting prostitutes from Francis. But he acknowledged that he had known the Malaysian businessman for 13 years and had dined at his expense during port calls in Asia. He also admitted taking gifts from Francis, including an exotic pewter letter opener. “It’s like a Malaysian sword. It’s a curvy, saber-looking thing,” he told the investigators, according to a transcript.

And yes, he added, Francis gave wine and cigars as presents to Navy officers.

“He was very generous,” Branch said.

In the end, federal agents found no evidence that Branch or Loveless gave away classified information, and both denied doing so. But the investigation into the two admirals and their connections to Francis paralyzed the Office of Naval Intelligence for years and left lasting scars at the highest levels of the Pentagon.

Rear Adm. Ted Branch addresses sailors during an awards ceremony in May 2012. He was promoted a year later to vice admiral and director of naval intelligence.

The law-enforcement files also describe how Francis, a high school dropout with a prior felony record, penetrated the Navy’s elaborate counterintelligence defenses with astonishing ease — and far more extensively than the Pentagon has publicly acknowledged — by bribing other officers for classified material.

For seven years, according to the documents, Navy counterintelligence officials failed to detect hemorrhaging leaks of military secrets to Francis while he exploited the information for his company’s bottom line.

Subsequently, since 2015, 10 Navy officers have admitted to leaking classified material to Francis and his firm in exchange for prostitutes, cash, and other favors, the records show, making the Malaysian defense contractor among the most prolific espionage agents in modern history.

After a lengthy investigation and the suspension of both admirals’ access to classified information, the Navy determined that the Branch violated federal ethics rules and committed official misconduct by accepting meals and other gifts from Francis.

Rear Adm. Bruce Loveless, shown in 2013, served for several years as an intelligence officer in the Pacific, where he got to know Leonard Francis. (U.S. Navy)

Loveless was indicted and tried on bribery charges, though prosecutors dropped the case against him after a jury was unable to reach a verdict. During the trial, his attorney acknowledged that Loveless accepted gifts from Francis but said he was not guilty of bribery because he did not provide Francis with any benefits in return.

Francis later pleaded guilty to fraud, bribery, and conspiracy charges. He is expected to be sentenced this summer.

But more than 10 years after his arrest, the Navy has yet to issue a full public accounting of the damage that his corruption of Navy leaders inflicted on national security. A senior Navy spokesman declined to comment on the case.

Vice Adm. Ted "Twig" Branch departs a Navy installation in Virginia in September 2013. The Navy suspended Branch's access to classified information two months later when he was placed under federal investigation.

Few Navy officers could claim a more sterling, or colorful, career than Branch. The son of a fabled college football player from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, he was raised in small towns outside New Orleans before winning admission to the Naval Academy in 1975. Despite the school’s punishing academic workload, he demonstrated a knack for maximizing its limited social opportunities.

“Growing up 58 minutes away from Bourbon Street has got to have its effect on a person and Ted was no exception to the rule,” observed the Academy yearbook, The Lucky Bag. “By the time he was 14, he knew what to order when he went to the bar — ‘J.D. on the rocks, please.’”

After graduation, Branch returned to the Gulf Coast to attend flight school in Pensacola, Fla. In a tongue-in-cheek military ritual, squadrons assigned junior pilots a call sign or nickname, for radio identification purposes and to build esprit de corps among the swaggering brotherhood of aviators. Given Branch’s slight, scrawny frame — he stood maybe five-foot-five with blow-dried hair — his squadron christened him “Twig.”

Branch winced when he learned his call sign and pleaded with the squadron’s commanding officer to reconsider, according to a description of the episode that Branch later shared with a senior Navy official.

He explained that his father, Frank, already had been immortalized as “Twig” Branch decades earlier when he starred as quarterback for Mississippi State University despite weighing only 125 pounds.

The squadron commander looked down at the young officer. You don’t like the name, huh?

No sir, Branch said.

Good, the commander replied. Then it’s settled. Twig it is.

Truth was, the call sign fit Branch to a T. With his squeaky twang, he sounded like another bantamweight Naval Academy alumnus — Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot — and told stories with the same homespun flair. “It’s like Sunday in Mississippi,” he told shipmates while training at sea in 2005, according to an interview he gave at the time. “You get up, go to church, eat some chicken, and shoot some guns. So enjoy it.”

As a pilot, he thrived aboard a succession of aircraft carriers and flew A- 7 Corsairs and F/A- 18 Hornets in combat over Grenada, Lebanon, Bosnia and Iraq. As commanding officer of the USS Nimitz, he starred in Carrier, a PBS documentary about life aboard a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that aired to acclaim in 2008. As commanding officer of the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group, he led a humanitarian relief mission to Haiti in 2010 when an earthquake killed more than 200,000 people.

By the time he was promoted to director of naval intelligence in 2013, Pentagon insiders believed he stood a good chance of becoming a four-star admiral. But his high-flying career hit severe turbulence that November when Justice Department officials asked to speak with him about the investigation into Francis.

When the admiral arrived at Joint Base Andrews, already waiting in a VIP conference room were Pletcher, the assistant U.S. attorney; Brian Young, a Justice Department trial lawyer; and Eric Maddox, a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) who specialized in counterintelligence.

Pletcher asked Branch to sign a boilerplate NCIS form waiving his rights to remain silent and have an attorney present, according to a transcript of the interview. The prosecutor implied that the document was just a formality.

The document stated plainly that Branch was a suspect in a military criminal investigation. The admiral signed anyway. He volunteered that he’d met Francis in 2000 when he was executive officer of the USS John C. Stennis, an aircraft carrier, and saw him again five years later when he was the skipper of the Nimitz.

That prompted more uncomfortable questions from the prosecutors. Did he ever attend social events with Francis?

Yes, Branch said. The Glenn Defense owner would host dinners “from time to time” for the senior ship staff during port visits in Asia, usually at a restaurant or hotel.

Did the officers chip in money for dinner? No, Branch said, not in his experience. He didn’t know how much the meals cost.

Shortly after he was promoted and entrusted with one of the Pentagon’s most sensitive jobs — director of naval intelligence — Vice Adm. Ted “Twig” Branch received an urgent request from the Justice Department. Prosecutors wanted to speak with him about an investigation into leaks of classified material to a 350-pound Malaysian defense contractor known as “Fat Leonard.”

The businessman, Leonard Glenn Francis, and his company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, held $200 million in contracts to resupply U.S. Navy ships and provide port security in Asia. But Francis had recently been arrested in San Diego on fraud and bribery charges. Federal agents were shocked to discover while carrying out search warrants that he had obtained reams of classified information from corrupt Navy officers about the itineraries of U.S. warships and submarines throughout the Western Pacific.

As a foreigner without a security clearance, Francis was prohibited from possessing U.S. military secrets. Investigators were frantic that he might have sold or shared the classified ship schedules to a hostile power such as China, placing U.S. Navy vessels and crews at risk of attack.

Justice Department officials needed to gauge the seriousness of the security breach and asked Branch, as chief collector of the Navy’s secrets, to help them understand the national security implications.

Branch, then 56, wasn’t eager to speak with prosecutors. But given his job, he had little choice. On Nov. 5, 2013, he arrived at the designated meeting place: a conference room at Joint Base Andrews, the suburban Maryland airfield that houses planes used by government VIPs, such as Air Force One.

The three-star admiral was greeted by three investigators led by Mark Pletcher, an assistant U.S. attorney who had traveled cross-country from San Diego. Pletcher explained that his team was “talking to several people” about the classified leaks to Glenn Defense.

What he didn’t say was that the prosecution team was surreptitiously recording the meeting because, days earlier, Francis had provided incriminating evidence against Branch and another senior intelligence officer, Rear Adm. Bruce Loveless, who worked at the Pentagon.

In a bid to strike a plea deal, Francis had met secretly with prosecutors and federal agents and bragged that, over several years, he had lavished Branch and Loveless with expensive meals, cigars, prostitutes, and other illicit gifts.

Given the allegations, investigators needed to determine whether the two leaders of the Navy’s intelligence directorate — key figures in the U.S. intelligence community who collaborated with the CIA and other spy agencies — had committed a crime or were vulnerable to blackmail.

During the meeting with prosecutors, Branch denied criminal wrongdoing or accepting prostitutes from Francis. But he acknowledged that he had known the Malaysian businessman for 13 years and had dined at his expense during port calls in Asia. He also admitted taking gifts from Francis, including an exotic pewter letter opener. “It’s like a Malaysian sword. It’s a curvy, saber-looking thing,” he told the investigators, according to a transcript.

And yes, he added, Francis gave wine and cigars as presents to Navy officers.

“He was very generous,” Branch said.

In the end, federal agents found no evidence that Branch or Loveless gave away classified information, and both denied doing so. But the investigation into the two admirals and their connections to Francis paralyzed the Office of Naval Intelligence for years and left lasting scars at the highest levels of the Pentagon.

 

 

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