Keith Bass, President-elect Trump’s pick to run the Pentagon’s sprawling health care systems, was effectively fired by the CIA in 2021 for his poor management of the spy agency’s Office of Medical Services.
Bass was “pushed out,” two authoritative sources told SpyTalk, after fumbling the agency’s handling of Havana Syndrome, which the government calls Anomalous Health Incidents, or AHI. One of the sources familiar with Bass’s removal, speaking on terms of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue, said the retired former naval officer “was removed” by CIA Director Bill Burns, “not for misconduct,” but because “OMS was being poorly run, and AHI just flushed it out." Numerous media reports in 2021 said the OMS chief was “pushed out” without identifying Bass by name.
Late last month, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report that blasted the CIA’s handling of AHI, the mysterious set of illnesses that have stricken scores of CIA, State Department and other government employees and their dependents, mostly overseas. The first cases were reported by officers stationed in Havana in 2016.
“Many individuals faced obstacles to timely and sufficient care," the report said, among many other missteps. Bass “offloaded" the handling of AHI to his deputies, one of the sources told SpyTalk.
"There was definitely dissatisfaction" with how he was running the OMS, but the problems "pre-dated Bass,” one of the sources said. Still, under his leadership, the OMS also badly handled the surge of Covid-19 cases afflicting the agency’s rank-and-file, the source added. Bass’s management was “messy” and compounded by “poor communications” and he “definitely poorly handled things.”
"Whatever you think about AHI,” the source said, acknowledging the deep and often bitter divide between victims and the intelligence agencies on the causes of the devastating illnesses, “it was poorly handled.” On Friday, the U.S. intelligence community reaffirmed its previous conclusion that it is “very unlikely” that a foreign adversary was responsible for AHI cases, although two of the agencies and some White House officials left open the possibility.
In any event, things got so bad at the OMS under Bass that Congress inserted a little-noticed provision into the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 2022 mandating a complete overhaul of the OMS, which included stricter oversight and a new medical advisory board composed of 13 experts nominated by the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees and the director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines. A veteran counterterrorism officer was brought in to oversee the agency’s AHI cases.
As SpyTalk reported in May 2022, CIA victims of AHI deemed the OMS overhaul way overdue.
“There were some individual doctors who were very good, but the Office of Medical Services is utterly broken and has been forever,” former senior CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos told us at the time. During a trip to Moscow in December 2017, Polymeropoulos “woke up with an incredible case of vertigo, tinnitus, which is ringing in the ears, and a splitting headache,” he told MSN in June 2021. His complaints, which worsened and still plague him today, got short shrift at headquarters, he and several others have said.
One of the knocks on Bass was that he had no medical degree, which caused friction with the doctors under his command, especially as the twin crises of Havana Syndrome and Covid-19 surged.
Bass’s Linkedin profile cites no medical training. He lists undated masters degrees in Business Administration and Healthcare Administration from “Texas W. University,” which probably stands for Texas Wesleyan University, a small church-connected school with health care courses in Ft. Worth, plus three degrees from the University of Arkansas: bachelor degrees in Psychology and Rehabilitation Science and a masters in Rehabilitation Counselling.
Not listed on his LinkedIn profile is his employment by the VA’s West Texas Health Care System, headquartered in Big Springs, which lists him as its Medical Center Director since June 4, 2023. SpyTalk called the number listed on its website to seek comment from Bass but got a recording saying the phone had been “changed, disconnected or is no longer in service.”
Bass first joined the CIA in 2011 as chief of its Medical Services Division. In 2013 he moved to the White House as chief of its Medical Unit. In 2019 he moved back to the CIA, where he was OMS director until his removal in March 2022. At the agency, he “led (a) multidisciplinary team of about 300 physicians, nurses, physician assistants, and clinical psychologists providing comprehensive health and wellness services for a 30,000 global workforce and managed a more than $80 million annual budget,” according to the West Texas Health Care page.
That’s impressive, but the Pentagon’s Office of Healthcare Systems employs many thousands times that—48,000 people, according to DoD figures—who are charged with administering health care for some 26,000 civilian employees, 3,000 military personnel and over 19,000 contract workers. Its FY 2022 budget request to care for “nearly 9.7 million beneficiaries in DOD hospital;s and clinics” was $54 billion.
When Trump announced his picks for top Pentagon jobs last month, he said Bass would “ensure our Troops are healthy, and receiving the best Medical Care possible.” Bass’s nomination was overshadowed by Trump’s choice of former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of date rape and a history of drunkenness, to be Secretary of Defense. Hegseth has said the sex was “consensual” and promised he wouldn’t drink if he won the job.
Hegseth’s confirmation hearing is set for this Tuesday, Jan. 14. No date has been set yet for Bass.
-- This article first appeared on Spytalk.co.
