In a story that has seen suspiciously little reporting, one of the nation’s highest-ranking intelligence officials died by suicide at his home in the Washington, D.C., area a few months ago, but the U.S. intelligence community has remained publicly silent about the incident even as the CIA has conducted a secret investigation of his death.
52-year-old Anthony Schinella, a U.S. national intelligence officer, shot himself on June 14 in the front yard of his Arlington home. A Virginia medical examiner’s report lists Schinella’s cause of death as suicide from a gunshot wound to the head. His Sara Corcoran, who had just married him weeks earlier, said that she was in her car in the driveway, trying to distance herself from Schinella during a domestic dispute when she witnessed his suicide. At the time of his suicide, Schinella was only weeks away from retirement.
Soon after his death, an FBI liaison to the CIA entered Schinella’s house and removed his passports, his secure phone, and searched through his belongings, according to his wife, Sara Corcoran, a Washington journalist. The CIA has declined to comment on the incident.
As NIO for military issues, Schinella was the highest-ranking military affairs analyst in the U.S. intelligence community, and was also a member of the powerful National Intelligence Council, which is responsible for producing the intelligence community’s most important analytical reports that go to the president and other top policymakers.
The National Intelligence Council is now under the control of the Director of National Intelligence, and has recently gained greater public prominence as its analytical work has been caught up in political controversies surrounding the Trump administration, including this summer’s public firestorm over intelligence reports about Russian bounties to kill American troops.
On June 26, the New York Times reported that Russia paid bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, and President Donald Trump quickly faced criticism for having failed to do anything in response to protect American troops. Within days, the National Intelligence Council produced a memo that claimed that the intelligence about the bounties wasn’t conclusive. While the memo was not made public, it was quickly picked up in the press and seemed designed to placate Trump by raising doubts about the original news story about the Russian bounties. The NIC memo appears to have been generated at the urging of John Ratcliffe, the former Republican Texas congressman and Trump supporter who became director of national intelligence in May.
But at the time that the memo became public, there was no mention of the fact that the one member of the NIC who should have had the most input into the analysis concerning military operations in Afghanistan — had killed himself just days earlier. In fact, Schinella was considered an expert on the Taliban and its military capabilities. Though he was an analyst, Schinella had deployed to four different war zones during his career.
After his death, Schinella’s wife discovered a large collection of bondage and S&M gear that had been hidden in his house, along with 24 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. His wife said that one of Schinella’s CIA colleagues contacted her recently and said the CIA has completed an investigation into Schinella’s death, but didn’t provide her with any details.
Schinella's wife, Sara Corcoran is a Washington D.C.-based journalist, author of a column called DC Dispatch for City Watch, and publisher for National Courts Monitor. In an interview, Corcoran said that she thought her husband may have killed himself because he didn't want to retire, even though some of his colleagues may have believed he was looking forward to it. “I would say, maybe he was sad about leaving the agency," she said. "Somebody [else] would say, ‘Wait, he was so happy, he was going to do his own consulting business, join the board of a private equity firm, and be head of research British think tank’ … I don’t know.”
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