More than 15 years ago, the Ashburn Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department in Northern Virginia welcomed a new recruit whom many members would come to admire: a military man named David Rush.

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He wasn’t just highly intelligent. He was also capable, calm under pressure and a physical specimen, according to interviews with a half-dozen former Ashburn volunteer firefighters.

“The David Rush I remember, he was chiseled,” said Jeff Bellmer, a retired lieutenant at the department. “Big back, skinny waist, fit.”

Despite his intellectual and physical gifts, Rush didn’t act like a big shot, his former fire department colleagues said. He was reserved and humble. But when he did get to talking about his military career, the stories he told were just amazing — how he had graduated first in his class at Top Gun, the legendary Navy fighter pilot school, and flown F-14 Tomcat fighter jets over Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Rush told me he had ejected and bailed out of two F-14s, and the third one he landed over there at Andrews with the cockpit on fire,” Bellmer said.

“He was just such a neat guy for me at the time,” Bellmer added. “The first real naval aviator that I had come across.”

Rush made a similar impression on Lloyd Harting, another former Ashburn volunteer firefighter.

“He told me he was a former fighter pilot, and I had no reason to doubt him,” Harting said. “He was completely believable. He looked the part. He talked the part.”

But now Bellmer and Harting don’t know what to believe after prosecutors accused Rush, 49, of being a serial fabulist who spun an elaborate fiction for years. He was arrested late last month in a federal case that has rocked the CIA and generated a series of sensational headlines.

Inside his modest home in Ashburn, about 40 miles west of downtown Washington, federal agents discovered 303 gold bars worth more than $40 million, according to federal prosecutors. They also seized $2 million in cash and 35 luxury watches, most of them Rolexes.

Why he had all that gold and cash is now the subject of a federal investigation. Rush, a CIA officer for about 17 years, is accused of creating a fake top secret intelligence program to receive government funds for his personal enrichment, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.

Rush is also accused of fabricating his academic and military record when he applied to the spy agency in the early 2000s.

Among the fabrications, federal prosecutors say, was that he was a Navy pilot. Rush did serve in the Navy — from 1997 to 2015 — but he was an information systems technician. And according to federal prosecutors, he didn’t even have a pilot’s license.

Rush’s lawyer declined to comment.

So far he has been charged only with stealing public money by filling out fraudulent time sheets. Prosecutors say he pocketed $77,000 in military leave pay after he falsely claimed he was a member of the Navy Reserve beyond 2015.

A judge ordered Rush to remain behind bars last week, raising concern that he is a possible flight risk, and a prosecutor branded him a “master manipulator” and a “tremendous fraud.”

A key question being mulled over by lawmakers on Capitol Hill with oversight of the intelligence community, as well as in Ashburn volunteer firefighter group chats: If the allegations are true, how did he manage to slip through government background checks, survive a polygraph exam and dupe an agency entrusted with the country’s most sensitive secrets?

“That’s the $64,000 question,” said Harting, the former Ashburn firefighter. “How did he pull this off? I can’t believe it.”

Call sign ‘Dumpster’

Rush, a native of New York, had been in the Navy for 11 years when he joined the Ashburn volunteer fire department in 2008. It’s a proud organization, established in 1945, whose members receive the same training as career firefighters and work overnight shifts responding to emergencies.

To become a member, one must pass a criminal history check, work at least one 12-hour shift a week and complete an intensive fire academy training program at a facility in nearby Leesburg. Rush graduated from the program in 2009, the year he joined the CIA.

“He was definitely one of the top guys in the class,” said Danny Prouty, who attended fire school with Rush. “Both academically and physically, he was very capable.”

Rush’s reputation as a fighter pilot spread around the department, Prouty said, but he didn’t go out of his way to talk about his military career or otherwise seek attention.

“The way people bulls— at the firehouse, you kind of always have your bulls— detector on — it’s frequently not hard to pick out people like that,” Prouty said. “But I don’t think anyone would have honestly ever guessed his whole entire backstory was completely fabricated.”

He wasn’t the only person in the department with military experience. One of the others, an Army veteran, said that they talked extensively and that he never got even the slightest inkling that Rush may have been lying about his Navy career.

“He was very nonchalant about it,” said the Army veteran, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of his current work. “At one point he said to me: ‘Being a fighter pilot is the easiest job in the world. You push the stick forward, the ground gets bigger. You pull the stick back, the ground gets further away.’”

Rush told the Army veteran that his Navy call sign was Dumpster. There was, naturally, a story to go with the name.

“He said that he was drunk somewhere and ended up in a dumpster, and that’s how he got his call sign,” the Army veteran said.

Rush’s lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment on the Army veteran’s recollection that Rush told him his call sign and the origin of it.

Rush worked for the department for 10 years, until 2018, according to its current chief, Melvin Byrne. Byrne said Rush passed a background check with no issues.

“It was the state police that did it, and there was nothing other than a speeding ticket, and that was only 10 miles per hour over,” Byrne said.

Rush was a senior CIA officer until his time with the agency came to an end under still-unknown circumstances before his arrest on May 19.

From November to March, Rush made several requests for “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses,” court documents say. He apparently did so after he created a fictional program that was supposed to involve contingency plans to keep the government operating in the event of a nuclear war or other dire emergency, NBC News has reported, according to the two people familiar with the investigation.

Rush had worked in the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology and was a liaison to the Defense Department for a sensitive nuclear submarine program. He was given the assignment at the request of Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, with whom he had a close professional relationship over the years, NBC News has reported.

Feinberg hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing, and Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell has denied that Rush and Feinberg had a “close relationship of any kind.”

According to his military service record, Rush enlisted in the Navy in 1997. Four years later, he tried to qualify for the Navy SEALs, the elite special operations force, but didn’t make it. He went into the Navy Reserve the following year, in 2002, and became a cryptologic warfare officer. He was honorably discharged in 2015.

His record indicates that he saw no combat, but he did complete a rigorous program to earn a designation of “enlisted aviation warfare specialist,” which would require deep knowledge of military aircraft.

Bellmer, the retired lieutenant, said he loved talking to Rush about fighter jets. Bellmer’s father was in the Air Force and imparted his passion for planes, so the fellow firefighters had common interests.

“We talked planes. We talked jets,” Bellmer said. “He knew all the talk. He knew all the dialogue. A very believable guy.”

Bellmer said he even told his friends about Rush — that there was this guy at the fire department who won Top Gun and ejected from not one but two F-14s.

“If this whole thing is a fraud, he played the part to a T,” Bellmer said. “That’s like Leonard DiCaprio in ‘Catch Me If You Can.’”

“I told the guys I want to go see him,” Bellmer added. “I want to look him in the face and go, ‘Rush, WTF, man!’”