Former DEA Public Affairs Officer Pleads Guilty to Fraud Scheme Claiming to be CIA Operative
A former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) public affairs officer has pleaded guilty to defrauding at least a dozen companies of over $4.4 million by falsely posing as a covert officer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Garrison Kenneth Courtney of Tampa, Florida claimed to be part of a task force involving various components of the United States Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense.
According to the Department of Justice release, Courtney claimed to be a covert officer of the CIA involved in a highly-classified program or “task force” which sought to enhance the intelligence gathering capabilities of the United States government.
Courtney approached private companies with variations of this false story and claimed that the companies needed to hire and pay him to mask his supposed affiliation with the CIA. Courtney fraudulently claimed that the companies would be reimbursed for these salary payments, sometimes with lucrative contracts from the United States government in connection with the supposedly classified program.
To sell the story of this covert task force on which Courtney claimed to be an operative, he falsely claimed that his identity and large portions of his conduct were classified; directed victims and witnesses to sign fake nondisclosure agreements that purported to be from the U.S. government and that forbade anyone involved from speaking openly about the supposedly classified program; told victims and witnesses that they were under surveillance by hostile foreign intelligence services; made a show of searching people for electronic devices as part of his supposed counterintelligence methods; demanded that his victims meet in sensitive compartmented information facilities to create the illusion that they were participating in a classified intelligence operation; and repeatedly threatened anyone who questioned his legitimacy with revocation of their security clearance and criminal prosecution if they “leaked” or continued to look into the supposedly classified information. Courtney further created fake letters, purporting to have been issued by the Attorney General of the United States, which claimed to grant blanket immunity to those who participated in the supposedly classified program.
Courtney also claimed he served in the U.S. Army during the Gulf War, had hundreds of confirmed kills while in combat, sustained lung injuries from smoke caused by fires set to Iraq’s oil fields, and that a hostile foreign intelligence service had attempted to assassinate him by poisoning him with ricin. None of these claims were true.
Courtney successfully convinced several real government officials that he was participating in this “task force,” explained that they had been selected to participate in the program, and then used those officials as unwitting props to falsely burnish his legitimacy. He also successfully gained a position working as a private contractor for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC), a branch of the NIH that provides acquisition support services to federal agencies.
This case was investigated by CIA Office of Inspector General (OIG); Intelligence Community OIG; National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency OIG; Air Force Office of Special Investigations; U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command’s Major Procurement Fraud Unit; Defense Criminal Investigative Service’s Mid-Atlantic Field Office; Department of Justice OIG; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services OIG; and Naval Criminal Investigative Service Washington Field Office.