HARRY DUNN DEATH DRIVER ‘PROMOTED BY THE CIA’
THE family of Harry Dunn hit out last night over claims that the woman who is alleged to have killed him has been promoted by the CIA.
Insiders said American Anne Sacoolas, a fluent Russian speaker, is now in charge of a 100-strong overseas section based at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, which monitors foreign activity.
The promotion was said to have had been “in the pipeline” but was accelerated by her enforced departure from Britain.
So valued is she that President Donald Trump even reportedly held a small ceremony to praise her for her intelligence gathering. And it was only because she was already at the White House that Harry’s parents were issued a last-minute invitation to meet her, sources say.
The allegations were last night branded as “inhumane and disgusting” by Charlotte Charles.
Her son Harry, 19, was killed in August last year when his motorbike was hit by the Volvo driven by Mrs Sacoolas, 42, near RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire.
Ms Charles said: “It’s clear that, as parents, we are just pawns in a diplomatic and espionage game and no one in authority in Washington or London really cares about how we feel.”
During police questioning on the evening of the crash, Mrs Sacoolas admitted driving on the wrong side of the road. She and her family were then whisked back to the US, after an executive jet was sent from the American Ramstein base in Germany to collect them.
Though she described herself as the wife of a US diplomat stationed at the surveillance base, it has been claimed she is a senior CIA operations officer who outranks her husband Jonathan, who was also stationed at Croughton as a CIA intelligence officer.
She was listed as a diplomat at the Northamptonshire school their children attended. But a source said: “Anne Sacoolas held a much more senior rank than her husband and has since been promoted.”
He also claimed she was already at the White House on October 17 last year, when President Trump invited Harry’s parents to meet her.
Rather than being summoned for that meeting, Mrs Sacoolas had allegedly been scheduled to attend a “small ceremony” of six people, including Mr Trump and National Security Adviser Robert O’brien, to congratulate her on her work in Europe. The idea of inviting the grieving Dunn family is said to have come from O’brien, who later told the couple that Mrs Sacoolas would “never return” to face court in the UK.
The source said: “Sacoolas was already there, being congratulated. The President had been aware that Harry Dunn’s family was in the US. He, and especially O’brien, wanted to put the whole thing away.”
Recalling that meeting, former US attorney Radd Seiger, who acts as the Dunns’ spokesman, said:
“I suddenly got a call from the Foreign Office asking if we would attend a meeting at the White House that afternoon.
“It wasn’t until we got there that we learned we were meeting the President. He was very warm with Charlotte and Tim for the first couple of minutes.
“Then he sprang it on us that Sacoolas was next door and would we like to meet her?
“That wasn’t why Charlotte and Tim had come. They sensed this would just be a photo opportunity. And when O’brien snapped that Sacoolas would never go back to the UK, Charlotte and Tim declined the offer.”
Last night, Ms Charles, 45, said: “We respect the work the Americans do at RAF Croughton.
‘We’re pawns in an espionage game’ ‘This is inhumane and disgusting’
We know they keep us and people all around the world safe. But to hear that Anne Sacoolas was already in the White House apparently being feted, and we were just invited as an afterthought, confirms this has never been about us.
“It’s all been about Trump and Anne Sacoolas herself. It is just inhumane, disgusting treatment.”
The family continues to seek her extradition so that she faces a British court on the charge of causing death by dangerous driving.
Last night, the Dunns’ solicitor Mark Stephens spoke of the dispute over her diplomatic immunity, saying: “The US’S argument as regards her status just doesn’t hold, legally.”
Authorities in the US last night declined to comment.