Spy Game
The Spy Who Loved Money
For a lot of young men, “international spy” seems like a cool job. Most people, however, do not become spies, even though society churns out an endless number of movies and books about them. One guy named Garrison Courtney decided that if he couldn’t be a spy, he could pretend to be one, and steal millions of dollars from government contractors:
Around 2010, Courtney struck out on his own with Optimized Performance, lining up contractors doing business with Uncle Sam as clients. Barely two years later, he admitted in court documents, he embarked on his high-stakes shell game.
Leveraging his government know-how and contacts, Courtney approached executives at more than a dozen defense companies and convinced them he was part of a hush-hush task force.
Courtney had spent years working first as a local weatherman and then as a spokesman for several government agencies. He was not was a decorated military veteran and international spy. However, Courtney was able to convince dozens of defense contractors and government officials he was, and played them off each other to spin a complex web of fake government contracts and secret task forces.
What made Courtney’s plan so audacious was that he’d convince government agencies he was working on behalf of the CIA, swear them to secrecy, and then rope them into his schemes to get money out of companies seeking government contracts.
Courtney would approach defense contractors and tell them he was a CIA asset and he needed a “cover” job to continue his top secret mission. If the companies hired him, Courtney would keep his cover intact, and potentially steer lucrative government work their way. He created NDAs and secret agreements, all forgeries. He told tales of his life as a super spy, on the run from hostile foreign powers.
Over time, as the deals for his employers failed to materialize, Courtney became more and more desperate, eventually having to declare bankruptcy despite having stolen millions of dollars. This didn’t stop him from keeping his ruse going, and he devised more outlandish schemes:
According to the civil suit, Courtney began to negotiate a loan from Capefirst Funding, a Virginia-based finance company, by claiming that the U.S. government was about to seize Blue Canopy for alleged criminal violations by senior executives at the company.
Blue Canopy, of course, was the firm tied to Gen. Lee, who had brushed off K.B.’s warnings that Courtney was a bad actor. Now, after Blue Canopy had defended him, he was smearing it so that he could get his hands on a massive sum through a convoluted financial transaction, the lawsuit alleges.
He allegedly told CapeFirst that the seizure couldn’t take place until the feds paid the company $1.95 million for its work on Alpha-214. If Capefirst settled the outstanding bill, he explained, the federal government would subsequently pay the firm $2.5 million via a government contract awarded to a third party, Westfields Holdings LLC.
To sell this idea, Courtney needed to look like he really was a secret agent working on a top-level project. The lawsuit says that he and Keith—along with a government official identified in civil court documents as Eileen Preisser, the Air Force liaison to the NGA—held meetings with Westfields and the finance executives inside an NGA SCIF in Springfield, Virginia.
Somehow Courtney talked his way into a SCIF, the most secure location in a government building. The company paid the money to Courtney, because sure, why not. Unfortunately for him, the government had finally started to take notice after multiple people had blown the whistle on Courtney’s schemes. Five years later, in June of this year, Courtney was charged and plead guilty to fraud.
However, the story doesn’t end there! This absolute madman continued to do fraud while he was out on bail! I love it:
When he was charged, Courtney told the court he was working for Huntington Ingalls Industries, the country’s largest military shipbuilder, in Tampa, Florida. This was true. However, as prosecutors charged in a motion filed this month, he left out that he was employed under the alias “Baer Pierson.”
As it turns out, the feds say, Courtney had given Huntington Ingalls the same line about being deep undercover for the CIA. He was a “burned Agency asset,” Courtney insisted, and his cover had inadvertently been blown during a botched FBI investigation, prosecutors wrote.
Burned Agency asset, indeed. Courtney wasn’t done yet:
Once Courtney’s plea agreement made headlines, a senior executive at Huntington Ingalls became alarmed by additional details revealed in the filing. The exec called General Service Administration officials to demand a classified briefing—inside a SCIF—to assess the legitimacy of the secret program Courtney said he had been part of.
That weekend, a Huntington Ingalls attorney’s cell phone rang. The man on the other end identified himself as Devon Azzamoria from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
Azzamoria said he was calling to arrange a meeting for company executives to be “read in” to a classified program. Don’t forget about the NDAs, Azzamoria reminded the lawyer—not a word of this was to be uttered to anyone. The covert gathering would take place “in McLean,” the caller said, using insider shorthand for CIA headquarters.
It didn’t take investigators long to figure out that “Azzamoria” probably wasn’t who he said he was. No one by that name works at ODNI, for starters, and the call didn’t come from a number associated with ODNI. Instead, investigators say, the number was traced back to an internet address assigned to Garrison Courtney’s Florida home.
Incredible. Dude was looking at years in federal prison and was still trying to smooth things over with his employer by impersonating high-level government intelligence officials from his home computer.
So, how the hell did this guy get away with such blatant falsehoods at the top levels of the defense industry for so long? It turns out the “intelligence” industry is just about as dumb as any other business:
“Federal agencies don't talk to each other,” said McElrath, the former federal investigator, who now works as an adviser to the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight.
“In the off-chance they did, he backstopped that—he had so-and-so who, if someone called, they would say that yes, he’s part of this task force. And that person thought he was part of the task force because he presented them with a fake document that said he was.”
It’s a shame, really, because Courtney probably could have been a good spy if he put his mind to it:
Cedric Leighton, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who helped develop plausible cover identities for covert operators during his military career, said Courtney’s fraud was remarkable for the large sums involved and the depth of the deception.
“It’s the first case I’m familiar with of a person actually going to such lengths to manipulate companies in this way,” he said.
I say it often, but perpetrating large scale frauds is difficult not because people aren’t gullible, but because it takes extreme attention to detail to keep all your lies straight. That, combined with the manic tendencies a lot of con men exhibit, makes it difficult to keep the ruse going. Courtney lasted longer than most, and even tried to keep it going while under house arrest, so he deserves credit for perseverance, if nothing else.
Earlier in the summer, Facebook announced a “historic” campaign to boost voter registration and turnout ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Quoth Mark Zuckerberg:
…I believe platforms like Facebook can play a positive role in this election by helping Americans use their voice where it matters most — by voting. We're announcing on Wednesday the largest voting information campaign in American history.
Seems good, right? Well, some people didn’t think so:
“Facebook has scored every American’s political ideology. They know precisely where you stand,” the Trump campaign’s digital director, Gary Coby, tweeted on June 17, commenting on Zuckerberg’s op-ed. “They will register more of Biden’s voters than Trump’s. They will heavy up on Biden registrations in swing states.”
The Trump campaign hasn’t made a secret of their desire to restrict voting as much as possible. There are also questions about how much influence they have over Facebook, in light of revelations the platform has given special treatment to conservative outlets, even when they disseminate hate speech and misinformation. Facebook’s policy team is so gunshy they couldn’t ban dangerous QAnon conspiracy groups without banning “antifa” along with them.
So, as the Tech Transparency Project finds, the Trump campaign immediately pushed back on Facebook’s attempts to register and turn out voters, and got results:
Facebook had initially planned to push register-to-vote reminders to users on July 3 and July 4, across Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger, the emails obtained by TTP show.
[…]
But on June 30, a Facebook government outreach manager, Eva Guidarini, told state election officials the effort would be limited to July 3 and “just run on Facebook.” She did not explain why.
Facebook has also refused to include information about mail-in voting, even when asked by state officials:
On June 23, a public information officer for the Illinois State Board of Elections asked Rachel Holland, a Facebook government outreach manager, if Facebook could add a line to the July register-to-vote reminder telling Illinois residents they can request a mail-in ballot if they’re concerned about Covid-19.
But Holland appeared to reject the idea. Citing unspecified “feedback,” she said Facebook had “opted to generalize the language” of the reminder to make it “apply to as many states as possible.” She said Illinois was welcome to include information about mail-in voting on its own website.
Makes sense that the company earning tens of billions of dollars a year micro-targeting ads wouldn’t be able to craft a custom message for an entire US state. Totally checks out. As for the rest of Facebook’s promised effort, it’s over a month behind and still not receiving the visibility the company promised:
Still, Facebook took its time rolling out the Voting Information Center, which Zuckerberg first promised on June 16. The company only recently announced its launch on August 13, nearly two months later. And TTP has not seen it running at the top of Facebook or Instagram feeds—something Zuckerberg promised. Facebook also hasn’t specified its voter registration plans for Facebook Messenger, which the company has said will be part of the effort.
Facebook has somehow evaded responsibility for its lax oversight, enabling of genocide and attacks on democracy worldwide, so we shouldn’t be surprised they’ve decided to once again kowtow to made-up accusations of political bias from the right. Conservative pages are consistently the most shared on the platform, driving millions of free eyeballs a day, and one of the movement’s prominent voices has been gaming Facebook’s algorithms for years now. Zuckerberg’s near total capitulation to the Trump campaign and the right wing of American politics have already had deleterious effects on society, and it appears they’re going to turn a blind eye to their attempts to hijack another election.
The Post Office
As the president tries to delegitimize vote by mail - something the US has done since the Civil War - we’ve suddenly become interested in the people in charge of this massive government service. The US postal system is the biggest in the world, and is the most popular government agency in the country with near universal support. Seems good! So, who’s in charge? A bunch of career postal workers with decades’ worth of experience and the trust of the agency’s vast union workforce? Haha, no, a bunch of white businessmen with political ties, of course:
Most members of the U.S. Postal Service’s board of governors, who were responsible for selecting Louis DeJoy as postmaster general, have numerous ties to the Republican Party as well as to President Donald Trump’s associates and administration.
According to a CNBC review of public documents and disclosures, five of the six members of the board, including Chairman Robert Duncan, are linked to GOP and Trump circles through various campaign, legal and financial connections.
One is a director for not one but two GOP super PACs, which seems right. Most of these directors were approved within the last year, with two coming in June, right around the time the USPS started removing mail sorting machines and cutting delivery services, moves they explained as cost cutting measures.
The USPS has been at the center of a long-raging debate over government spending. In 2006, a bi-partisan vote in Congress forced the agency to pre-fund its pension plan - something no other branch of government or private company is expected to do - putting it deep into the red. However, the postal service is a service and not a business, so why does it need to make money? The FBI is not expected to turn a profit, nor is FEMA or any of the other government agencies that provide services for the good of the public. The answer, as usual, is that the “debate” over the postal service comes in the form of bad faith attacks from conservatives, who’ve wanted to privatize it for decades.
So, if we can agree that the USPS should be considered a public service, and an incredible jobs program - the agency employs over 630,000 people - why are the people in charge of it a bunch of private sector businessmen with heavy political ties? There’s no good explanation I can think of, it’s just another example of the rot capitalism has injected into the system. Anyhow, Congress is coming back from vacation to try to give the postal service some more money and hold a few hearings, but the problem is clearly much larger, and needs to be addressed structurally. The last couple weeks have reminded America that in addition to ballots, people get things like life-saving medicine and paychecks via the mail, and a few white GOP donors shouldn’t be preventing that from happening.
In late breaking news, the USPS has upped its cool quotient by arresting Steve Bannon on a yacht off the coast of Connecticut, so stay tuned for important updates on that asshole in a future newsletter.
Lottery Lawyer
I love writing about shady lawyers with ridiculous monikers. They’re almost always up to no good. Jason Kurland, aka the “Lottery Lawyer” was definitely up to no good:
Prosecutors say Kurland instead steered his clients toward businesses and entities owned by three other men indicted in the scheme and, in return, received kickbacks disguised as interest payments.
The money was used by all four men to fund private jets, yachts, and luxury vacations, prosecutors said.
It doesn’t stop there, we’ve also his accomplices auditioning for Uncut Gems 2 for some reason?
In another part of the scheme, prosecutors say Russo and Smookler invested some of the lottery winners' money into a jewelry merchant named Gregory Altieri, whom they also extended a $250,000 street loan, which they expected to be repaid as $400,000.
In trying to collect the loan, Russo threatened Altieri by saying they had guns, and compared himself to a mob-affiliated character in the 2019 film "Uncut Gems," which ends with a diamond merchant being killed.
Prosecutors said in one call Russo told Altieri: "They're gonna pop your head off in front of your f------ kids. This guy has no clue what he's getting into."
Very normal stuff. It wouldn’t be newspaper headline bait without a corny quote from an FBI agent:
"The FBI New York discovered how these victims were persuaded to put large chunks of their cash into investments that benefited the defendants. Rather than try their luck at the lottery, these men resorted to defrauding the victims to get rich, but their gamble didn't pay off."
Groan. The feds have seized bank accounts and the Lottery Lawyer and his Uncut Goons are being charged with a whole variety of crimes. Don’t trust lawyers with nicknames!
Short Cons
The Daily Beast - “No longer content to promulgate nutjob conspiracy theories about famous politicians and government officials who kill and eat children, a group of QAnon believers are now actively encouraging parents estranged from their children to steal those children back from child protective services.”
The Register - “A two-day-old decentralized cryptocurrency called YAM collapsed on Wednesday after its creators revealed that a software bug had effectively vetoed human governance.”
NY Times - “Josh Powell, one of the group’s highest-ranking former executives, is poised to release “Inside the NRA: A Tell-All Account of Corruption, Greed and Paranoia Within the Most Powerful Political Group in America.””
WSJ - “Why pick Kodak, a struggling photography company? Many of the answers point back to Mr. Navarro, who spearheaded the idea and then used his sway within the administration to help Kodak navigate the bureaucracy to be first in line for the potential contract, including tapping an obscure government agency to help push the loan through the final stages.”
Tips, comments, top secret CIA contracts to scammerdarkly@gmail.com