Harass fail for CIA: pols

WASHINGTON — The House Intelligence Committee found the CIA at fault in its investigation of sexual misconduct in the spy agency after failing to properly address employee allegations of assault and harassment, according to an interim report released Monday.

“Over the course of the investigation, the Committee discovered that CIA failed to handle allegations of sexual assault and harassment within its workforce in the professional and uniform manner that such sensitive allegations warrant,” the committee wrote in the eight-page document.

The panel interviewed 26 whistleblowers, received 15 briefings by “a number of diverse components of CIA” and reviewed over 4,000 pages of records.

The committee found that the CIA’s insufficient policies for processing allegations led to an environment that discouraged victims from making reports, both because they felt their cases would not be properly addressed and because there was no way to do so anonymously.

When workers did come forward, the CIA’s investigatory mechanism was “inadequate,” while employees had been given “ineffective training . . . on how to identify and report cases of sexual assault and harassment,” according to the committee.

The issues were apparently widely recognized by individual employees, according to lawmakers.

The report was released after a series of high-profile sexual-assault cases surfaced late last year involving CIA employees.