CIA officer who sexually assaulted dozens of women given 30-year sentence

A longtime CIA officer who drugged, photographed and sexually assaulted more than two dozen women in postings around the world has been sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.

Brian Jeffrey Raymond, with a greying beard and wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, sat dejectedly as he heard his punishment on Wednesday for one of the most egregious misconduct cases in the CIA’s history.

It was chronicled in his own library of more than 500 images that showed him in some cases straddling and groping his nude, unconscious victims.

“It’s safe to say he’s a sexual predator,” United States Senior Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said in imposing the full sentence prosecutors had requested. “You are going to have a period of time to think about this.”

Prosecutors said the 48-year-old Raymond’s assaults date to 2006 and tracked his career with the intelligence agency in Mexico, Peru and other countries, all following a similar pattern.

He would lure women he met on Tinder and other dating apps to his government-leased apartment and drug them while serving wine and snacks. Once they were unconscious, he spent hours posing their naked bodies before photographing and assaulting them.

One by one, about a dozen of Raymond’s victims who were identified only by numbers in court recounted how the longtime spy upended their lives. Some said they only learned what happened after the FBI showed them the photos of being assaulted while unconscious.

“My body looks like a corpse on his bed,” one victim said of the photos. “Now I have these nightmares of seeing myself dead.”

One described suffering a nervous breakdown. Another spoke of a recurring trance that caused her to run red lights while driving. Many testified of how their confidence and trust in others had been shattered.

“I hope he is haunted by the consequences of his actions for the rest of his life,” said one of the women who like others stared Raymond down as she walked away from the podium.

Reading from a statement, Raymond told the judge that he has spent countless hours contemplating his “downward spiral”.

“It betrayed everything I stand for, and I know no apology will ever be enough,” he said. “There are no words to describe how sorry I am. That’s not who I am, and yet it’s who I became.”

Raymond’s sentencing comes amid a reckoning on sexual misconduct at the CIA. The Associated Press reported last week that another veteran CIA officer faces state charges in Virginia for allegedly reaching up a co-worker’s skirt and forcibly kissing her during a drunken party at the office.

Still another former CIA employee — an officer trainee — is scheduled to face a jury trial next month on charges he assaulted a woman with a scarf in a stairwell at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters. That case emboldened about two dozen women to come forward to authorities and Congress with accounts of their own sexual assaults, unwanted touching and what they contend are the CIA’s efforts to silence them.

And yet the full extent of sexual misconduct at the CIA remains a classified secret in the name of national security, including a recent 648-page internal watchdog report that found systemic shortcomings in the agency’s handling of such complaints.

The CIA has publicly condemned Raymond’s crimes and implemented sweeping reforms intended to keep women safe, streamline claims and more quickly discipline offenders.

“There is absolutely no excuse for Mr Raymond’s reprehensible, appalling behaviour,” the agency said on Wednesday. “As this case shows, we are committed to engaging with law enforcement.”

But a veil of secrecy still surrounds the Raymond case nearly four years after his arrest. Even after Raymond pleaded guilty late last year, prosecutors have tiptoed around the exact nature of his work and declined to disclose a complete list of the countries where he assaulted women.

Still, they offered an unbridled account of Raymond’s conduct, describing him as a “serial offender” whose assaults increased over time and became “almost frenetic” during his final CIA posting in Mexico City, where he was discovered in 2020 after a naked woman screamed for help from his apartment balcony.

A “perfect gentleman”

US officials scoured Raymond’s electronic devices and began identifying the victims he had listed by name and physical characteristics, all of whom described experiencing some form of memory loss during their time with him.