The Fake CIA Spy 36:33

Garrison Courtney had every reason to feel confident as he strode into a meeting with Lieutenant General Robert Otto, the Air Force's top intelligence officer. It was the fall of 2015, and by that point, 39-year-old Courtney had practiced and polished his spiel over the course of dozens of meetings just like this one. He had successfully convinced many high-level government officials and defense contractors to work with him, and he was hoping to add the general to the growing ranks of his business partners.

After entering a secure facility and patting down the general to check for covert listening devices, Courtney made his pitch. He told the general that he was an off-the-books operative for the CIA, and he had a proposition. Courtney and his organization were going undercover at various defense contractor companies to prevent potential intel leaks before they happened, and he wanted the Air Force to get on board.

Courtney listed names of other powerful people who were already on board. It was all designed to showcase how legitimate the operation was. But the General felt something was "off." "Fishy" is the word he used. After the meeting concluded, General Otto made some calls to find out if this Garrison Courtney guy was really who he said he was. The next time the General met with Courtney, he was wearing a wire, as part of an FBI investigation.

This is Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called Garrison Courtney: Fake CIA Spy. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. On this episode, we'll do a deep dive on Garrison Courtney, a one-time rising star in the secretive Washington, D.C. national security world who saw an opportunity to make a killing in the defense contractor industry by duping dozens of government officials into believing he was an undercover CIA operative in charge of a top-secret task force.

Looking back through Garrison Courtney's past, it seems that he was a charmer from a young age. According to his ex-wife, he confided that he had a, quote, very rough upbringing, unquote, in Great Falls, Montana. And his struggles as a youth may have contributed to a drive to make himself seem as likable as possible. At least that's what reporter Justin Roerlich thinks after researching Courtney for the Daily Beast story. Fake CIA spy almost scams his way into immunity. Apparently was...

You know, a bit of a cover for, you know, what may have been some personal insecurities that he had. Courtney seems to have blossomed in high school, excelling in the theater. You know, his high school drama teacher told me that Garrison had the ability to sort of do anything. And that she told him that she hoped he would use his powers for good and not evil.

So there was an inkling that some people had early on that he just had some sort of magnetic attraction to others or the intelligence. Later, his drama teacher would express concern about cultivating Courtney's natural talent, saying, quote, unquote. But there were other factors in Courtney's life that prepared him to play the biggest role of his career.

After high school, he went on to serve in the Army and National Guard. His military background gave him a certain comfort navigating the hallowed halls of government. He knew how to carry himself. He knew the lingo. And with his broad shoulders and confident smile, he just looked the part. By all accounts, he also had a winning personality. Courtney's antics earned him a cult following, and people were attracted to his magnetism. What I heard from people who knew Garrison was that he was...

a great guy, the kind of person that everyone wanted to be around. He was funny. He was a talented mimic stand-up comedian. Women loved him. Guys loved him. He was just, you know, the kind of person that really made people like him.

According to Bill Foley, his roommate at the University of Montana, Courtney had a great sense of humor and could do hundreds of impressions with spot-on accuracy. Foley said, quote, Every night I got back from class or working at the school paper, I would notice my outgoing answering machine message was changed. It was a different character every day, anything from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Kermit the Frog, unquote. Foley described rooming with Courtney like, quote, Living with Robin Williams during a Letterman set, he never turned it off. Never. Unquote.

But the thing about never turning it off is that it makes it hard to know what's real and what's a bit. If you're always on, always performing, where's the line between your character and who you really are? The college roommate put it this way, quote, I think he really liked to BS people. It's easy to see how people could believe him because he was really good at, you know, thinking on his feet, unquote.

Courtney was so good at BSing that it quickly became almost impossible to separate his tall tales from reality.

I mean, his college roommate told me that he was teaching a karate class to women. And he had taught karate at a rape crisis center and teaching self-defense to people. So, you know, really well-intentioned things. But Bill Foley, the roommate who's now a sports writer in Butte, Montana...

He said that he wasn't sure that Garrison ever was a black belt in karate, that he had enough karate knowledge to kind of make it look legitimate. But he never really had any proof that he was – I think he said he was a third-degree black belt. He told a lot of different kinds of stories that he was joining the football team there, which wasn't really true because you don't just –

walk on to the football team at the University of Montana. And when he didn't make the team, he said that it was because he had had some medical issues and he was turned down by the team doctor. You know, on the other hand, he then told Bill Foley that he was asked to join the cheerleading squad, which he thought was definitely not true. But the next time he showed up at a game, Garrison was down on the field, you

you know, as a cheerleader and part of the squad. So, you know, these, he sort of had a penchant for telling stories and, you know, enough of them turned out to be true or partially true that people trusted him. - After college, Courtney parlayed his boyish charm and penchant for performance into a gig as a local weatherman in Montana. What he lacked in meteorology experience, he made up for with his charming personality

So much so that he was selected as the best weatherman in Missoula. But Courtney had set his sights on much higher accolades than that. In 2005, he moved to Washington, D.C., where a captivating guy with a military background could make a bigger name for himself. With his previous on-camera experience, Courtney was able to get a job as a government spokesperson for the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, a stepping stone to the Pentagon or the White House.

Working for a major government agency gave him a certain understanding of bureaucracy that he would later use to exploit blind spots. We spoke to Colin Scholes, a journalist and blogger who focuses on frauds and scams and is familiar with his case. Yeah, I mean, I think there's nothing government loves more than layers of bureaucracy and official channels and things that if you know how to

somewhat accurately depict or describe yourself as part of that process, that it does sound believable, you know, because there are so many, so many layers of things between the person doing the thing and, you know, the 17 layers of people who need to approve the thing or be involved somehow in the process.

After several years at the DEA, Courtney eventually believed the real opportunity in a post-9/11 world was to pursue a career in intelligence contracting. After all, it was a multi-billion industry and, by its very nature, was subject to little oversight. In a bold move, Courtney struck out on his own, transitioning from public service to the private sector. This is where the story starts to get a little technical, but bear with me.

Basically, his goal was to do PR work for a group of lawyers that were vying for the release of a group of prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. He promised his new clients that he would get their arguments on the front pages of top-tier media like the New York Times and Washington Post, and said that he'd connect with key legislators and the high-ups in the Obama administration to get the prisoners released. But he promised more than he could deliver. It was a swing and a miss. And he was quickly fired.

This turn marked a rough patch for Courtney and his personal life as well as his career. He divorced from his first wife, the mother of his two sons. Down on his luck and looking for a way to turn things around, he started to... embellish a little. Courtney began to burnish his bona fides. He told people that he had extensive combat experience in the military with hundreds of kills in the Gulf War. The truth was that he had served in the National Guard but not in a combat role and not during the Gulf War.

He also claimed he'd damaged his lungs inhaling fumes from oil fires in Kuwait.

The truth? He had asthma and sustained lung damage fighting fires back in Montana. His lies grew bigger and bolder. He spun a hospital stay into a murder attempt at the hands of a hostile foreign intelligence service that poisoned him with ricin. Then, the biggest lie. He said that he had been recruited by the CIA after his military service and was now an undercover operative. The truth? He'd never worked in the CIA or had any security clearances.

But in an ironic turn, he did almost work for the CIA. Apparently, he applied for a job at the CIA while he was at the DEA, which he was conditionally accepted for and never took. Ironically, you know, considering where his where his life ended up, he did want to be in the CIA, but didn't take them up on the opportunity when it presented itself.

That's one of the many ironies of Garrison Courtney's story. There was a fine line between the man he actually was and the man he presented himself as. But it seemed he just couldn't help but build himself up, try to make himself seem more important or impressive than he really was, even though he was already in a pretty good position. In his case, it seems like it was sort of laid out in front of him. I mean, maybe he wasn't ever going to be a wildly successful actor.

CIA go-between, but he could have probably run a nice little consulting business for making a reasonable amount of money for the rest of his life. Either he didn't have the patience for it or thought he was owed something greater, or again, just something happened, something shifted in him that he decided that he was going to take this completely different path.

There may have been some issues with that, with substances. I know that he was having some money problems. He has five children. He's got an ex-wife. And I think just the combination of whatever personality quirk he had that made him want to appear more successful than he was, combined with some real-world issues that he was facing,

enduring financial issues, I think specifically, probably helped push him in this direction. Going in this new direction meant crossing over to the other side of the law and finding a backdoor to power and money. Over the next few years, Courtney honed this idea. After getting fired from a job for faking an email about a DEA contract, Courtney landed at a cybersecurity firm called Blue Canopy. And there, his inspiration struck.

He would use his undercover CIA operative persona to create a secret task force and put himself on the payroll. Coming up, Garrison Courtney sets up a top secret task force and uses it to defraud companies out of millions of dollars. Now, back to the story. In 2013, Garrison Courtney was floundering. He'd just gone through a divorce and been let go from a high-stakes job in the private sector. But that's when he had an audacious idea to completely turn things around.

On his own merit, Courtney had a fairly impressive background in the armed forces and public service positions. But he decided to embellish his particulars past the point of recognition. No longer a humble ex-military man in the private sector, he now styled himself as an undercover CIA operative. A man who had single-handedly killed hundreds of enemies on the battlefield, whose lungs were scarred from the black smoke of the Kuwaiti oil fires.

who was so important to national security that a hostile foreign power tried to poison him with ricin garrison himself was a national guard veteran but he overstated his exploits there you know he he really didn't have to i mean he like i said he he

was successful in his own right. But as in many of these cases, you know, what he had wasn't enough and he wanted to have more. I mean, I think that there is a tendency among con men historically to over inflate their resumes to an almost ridiculous degree, but they're able to skate past it due to, you know, again, that charisma or

you know, people thinking to themselves, well, this story is too fantastic to make up, you know, or not fantastic, but sorry, too, too intricate, you know, for somebody to make all this stuff up. I think people with his type of characteristics are just, you know, obsessed with,

massively inflating their personas and becoming these sort of larger-than-life figures that maybe they think they deserve to be and weren't for whatever reason, you know what I mean? Like, maybe they feel wronged by the world and they missed an opportunity to, you know, to this greatness, or they just want to take a shortcut, right? This larger-than-life character that Courtney created was the perfect casting for a leader of the secret task force. So Courtney decided it was time to put the character up on its feet.

Courtney approached a defense contractor company called Riverside Research with a proposition. Well, really more of a demand. He claimed that he was an off-the-book CIA operative running a top-secret task force. He even came up with a catchy name for it: Alpha-214. As Courtney told it, the task force had been formed to prevent intelligence leaks like the one that whistleblower Edward Snowden had recently perpetrated.

Invoking Snowden was a stroke of genius. In the wake of his colossal release of information, many in the government saw him as a traitor. From this perspective, they were eager to help prevent further unauthorized leaks.

Courtney continued to make his big ask. While he did his noble top secret work, he needed Riverside to put him on their payroll. This arrangement was a real practice called commercial cover and a way to give a cover story to secret agents. The only wrinkle? Courtney was not a secret agent, but Riverside Research didn't know that. Courtney appealed to the company's patriotism. They would be helping cover an important CIA operative to protect national security, but he also appealed to the bottom line.

in return for paying him a $10,000 monthly paycheck. He would make sure that Riverside received lucrative government contracts. The gamble worked. Soon after approaching the company, Riverside hired him and began paying his six-figure salary, even though he wasn't doing any kind of actual work for them.

In addition to the substantial salary, Courtney's affiliation with Riverside Research also gave him an air of legitimacy. He had access to email, business cards, and a secure facility to meet in, which he would use to great effect. The next stage of Courtney's scheme was a bit of brilliance. He had promised Riverside that lucrative contracts would be sent their way in exchange for putting him on the payroll. But if too much time passed and those contracts didn't materialize, the jig would be up. So, he needed a way to make sure those contracts came through.

To do that, Courtney approached government officials at a little-known agency called the NIH Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center, or NITAC. This under-the-radar department was in charge of administering contracts for the government's IT solutions to the tune of about $90 billion a year. That made them a prime target for Courtney. He wanted to get his hands on that money.

So Courtney gave them the same performance he gave to Riverside. He said that he was a CIA operative in charge of his secret task force and that NITAC had been selected to facilitate the program's contracting. For that reason, he argued, he would need to be put on their payroll so that he could direct contracts to companies on the task force. Unbelievably, this bluff worked. NITAC hired him.

So now, not only was he on the payroll, but he was perfectly positioned to guide money to companies like Riverside that were giving him commercial cover. Courtney soon did just that, directing a contract right back to Riverside. It was kind of brilliant. One hand washed the other, and Courtney got paid on both ends.

It was really an audacious con. He was able to get a job with the federal government and a position in which he was approving contracts. So he really completed the circle and was able to approve his own phony contracts from the inside. And it really showed his understanding of the way government works. And, you know, someone from the inside like he was, he had the reputation to back it up and he had the knowledge to make it work.

Courtney wasted no time taking a show on the road. He approached dozens of other defense and intelligence contractors with the same phony story and request for commercial cover. It might sound unbelievable, like the type of thing a real official or intelligence officer would see straight through, but actually the mystery and cloak and dagger of the Alpha 214 was a feature, not a bug. There really are classified intelligence programs like Alpha 214 that the government spends tens of billions of dollars on every year,

These funds are called the black budget and contractors throughout DC are eager to get their hands on a piece of it through lucrative contracts. All of this is legal and technically above board. It's also very secretive by law. It's illegal to reveal how much money is spent on these classified programs if doing so would undermine national security. And that's such a broad concept that it can apply to almost anything in the field. So a top secret task force like Alpha 214 fits right into this system, like a shady hand in a shady glove.

And Courtney went above and beyond to make sure his schemes seemed credible and critical to national security. To start, he made sure to hold his meetings in special secure rooms called Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIFs. This was a powerful signal that everything he was about to tell them was top secret and of utmost importance. Before he began, he also made a show of patting people down to search for concealed electronic recording devices.

Furthermore, he told his marks that Alpha-214 had been created by the highest levels of the U.S. government. He said that the program was so important that they might be surveilled and targeted by the nation's enemies. Courtney's stagecraft was strong enough to get legitimate government officials involved with the fake task force. He was so wily that some of these officials didn't even realize they were propping up Alpha-214.

They thought they were just participating in generic briefings. He was a pro at isolating people and keeping them from knowing what everyone else in the room knew. For example, Courtney would meet with an employee at a defense contractor and pitch them on Alpha 214. Then he'd tell them to reach out to one of these actual government officials to confirm the details. But here's the catch: he would tell the officials exactly what to say when they got the call. So the Mark thought they were getting independent confirmation, but really all they were hearing was what Courtney wanted them to hear.

And he had so many moving parts going that it was really a hell of an undertaking to be able to, you know, make everything look legitimate, which he did. He was having meetings in skiffs. He was having meetings with high-level government officials coming in to speak with other people. And both sides didn't know that this was all phony.

The cherry on top was that Courtney asserted that everything about his identity and Alpha 214 was classified at the highest level, which was a good way of deterring people from asking too many questions since they thought it might cost them their job. And as an added bonus, it made his scheme very difficult to investigate. Almost impossible, but not quite. Up next, Garrison Courtney's house of classified cards comes crashing down. Now, back to the story.

By pretending to be an undercover CIA agent, Garrison Courtney had managed to install himself as the head of a phony top-secret task force of his own invention called Alpha 214. The task force was fake, but the money coming in from various defense and intelligence contractors that had him on payroll, that was very real.

However, it was basically a full-time job to keep all the plates spinning. Honestly, a full-time job might have been easier, less stressful, probably a smaller chance of going to prison. And it was only a matter of time before the plates started to fall.

As part of his arrangement for commercial cover with various government contractors, Courtney had promised these companies that they would receive lucrative contracts from the government. But years had gone by and executives at some intelligence and defense companies began to get upset that they hadn't been reimbursed.

After months of working with Courtney on this so-called task force, one of these executives began to suspect something was afoot. By October of 2015, he'd had enough and wrote a strongly worded email resigning from the program and accusing Courtney of being a fraud. Courtney threatened the man with legal consequences for illegally identifying him as a CIA officer in a covert operation.

He was neither of these things. And, in case that wasn't enough to keep him quiet, Kourtney retaliated by accusing him of being an "Iranian spy." Blue Canopy was another company that had done business with Kourtney, but had yet to receive payment. In May of 2015, they hired a legal team to go after what they were owed, which, at that point, was nearly $2 million.

Unphased, Courtney continued with his scam. He invited Blue Canopy's lawyers to secure a SCIF where he had prominent military and government officials in attendance to bolster his legitimacy. Then he did the whole dog and pony show that he'd been perfecting for years.

He assured the company's lawyer that the government was going to make them whole and that their payment, quote, would be forthcoming, unquote. But the payment would not be forthcoming unless Courtney found a way to make it come forth. And miraculously, that's exactly what he did. Courtney locked onto a man named Matthew Milstead, an investor in the DC companies, and he approached him with a very important, very sensitive proposition.

Courtney confided to Milstead that the government was trying to seize control of Blue Canopy, the company he owed $2 million to, due to instances of malfeasance. But, Courtney said, Blue Canopy was exploiting a payment dispute with the government to block the proceedings. An outstanding bill of $1.9 million had to be paid before the government could take control. That was where Milstead came in. Courtney asked him to front the $1.9 million to Blue Canopy.

Once he did that, Courtney promised that the government would pay his investment firm back with extra $2.5 million for a cool profit of $600,000. Again, Courtney served up a powerful cocktail of patriotism and greed. And again, it went down easy. Milstead signed on the dotted line and Courtney got Blue Canopy their $2 million. He had successfully robbed Peter to pay Paul. And the whole scheme continued to sail along.

but it wasn't smooth sailing by any means. Soon, Blue Canopy was coming after Courtney for their next seven-figure payment. One of the company's lawyers reached out to some contacts in the Justice Department to see if they had any background on Courtney. In May of 2016, the lawyer received shocking news from the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Intelligence. The government was investigating Courtney's entire program. But as it turned out, it was very difficult to investigate a top-secret task force.

That was by design. Courtney's scam was so convincing that several companies refused to cooperate with the law enforcement because they believed it was classified and to speak about it to anyone would compromise national security. Folks in the intelligence world would take the word classified very seriously. And it's notoriously difficult to investigate a crime if the victims refuse to speak about it or even acknowledge it exists. So it took a surprisingly long time before things really hit the fan.

Despite these various sources spending years trying to take this guy down, the sort of long trail of people he had screwed over and ripped off, it took a solid three, four years, five years for him to finally get caught in a series of lies that he couldn't unravel. The U.S. attorney in charge of prosecuting the case said, quote, this is literally an almost nearly impossible case to investigate, unquote.

All in all, it took no less than 10 federal agencies to get to the bottom of what happened. After years of successfully fleecing government contractors, Courtney wasn't going to let the scam go down without a fight. And by this point, he had put together a powerful team of allies who wholeheartedly believed in him and his task force. And Courtney used every lifeline, phoned every friend that he had. He arranged for a prominent public official to meet with the FBI agents on the case and try to convince them to stop the investigation.

When that didn't work, the official even threatened the FBI that they themselves would be prosecuted if they kept looking into Alpha 214. And an increasingly desperate move, Courtney plotted to give the FBI a list of people he claimed were foreign spies. These people were all innocent. Courtney just threw them under the bus in the hopes that the FBI would get distracted investigating them and ease up on Alpha 214. Courtney also falsely told people who questioned him that the FBI was going to arrest them for leaking classified information.

Maybe at that point, he was just saying anything he could think of to stay ahead of law enforcement. Or maybe like a method actor, he was so far in that he believed his own lies. Actors are a great example of people that can tell a story with their behavior, can inhabit another person's personality. Whereas it sounds like, you know, Courtney became his own audience, right? Like he believed it so much or believed in it so much that he just couldn't stop when it was obvious that he should have stopped.

He had many chances to bail out and didn't, and just kept doubling down and doubling down. And I think in some way, a certain type of person that takes on these alternate personas can slip into it too much, can buy their own BS. And it feels to me like at that point, he was just kind of clinging to

But even as the walls closed in around Courtney, he chased the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card, immunity.

With the FBI on his tail, Courtney pressured public officials to issue a classification guide for Alpha-214. If he got that paperwork signed, it would have made his task force legitimate under national security law. That would have given him legal cover and made it impossible to bring him to justice. Let's just unpack that for a minute. Courtney starts out as a legitimate government employee. Then he starts a fake government task force.

Then he manages to get so many people to buy into it that he almost makes his fake task force legit. You can't make this stuff up. Well, unless your name's Garrison Courtney. In 2016, the FBI finally came knocking on the door of Courtney's Virginia home. They conducted a raid but didn't have enough evidence to arrest him. Yet. Courtney went on with his life, moved his wife and sons to Tampa. But investigators weren't done with him. They were just getting started.

After three years of painstaking detective work, in 2019, they turned up on his doorstep again. This time, they let him know the information they had on him. They had outlined his scheme and had him dead to rights. So Courtney agreed to turn himself in.

Courtney's attorney tried to make it look like his client's crimes were small potatoes. He said that his client had only pocketed $1 million and, quote, unquote.

However, at the time that law enforcement intervened, Courtney was actively seeking to influence over $3.7 billion. So, in 2020, Courtney made a deal and pled guilty to one count of wire fraud. But incredibly, he still wasn't done impersonating government officials. While he was awaiting sentencing, he picked up the phone and got back to his old tricks.

he kept at it despite, you know, throughout the trial and even pre-sentencing, you know, he was still trying to work himself out of it. I mean, I feel like a lot of these

People get to a point of desperation, especially when they're either caught or about to be caught, where they engage in more and more outrageous behavior. Trying to scam government officials with fake phone numbers and stuff while you're awaiting sentencing for pleading guilty to scamming government officials is definitely a level of brazenness that I hadn't seen before. You know, I mean, I guess I commend his commitment to the bit.

In the end, the government revoked his bond and Courtney was sentenced to seven years in prison. His lawyer said the last pre-sentencing stunt alone might have added two to three years. It seemed like there was definitely a risk Mr. Courtney would re-offend. Everyone has their own journey and some of them are more interesting than others. And I guess Courtney's was...

You know, he burned bright for a brief time there. And, you know, I mean, I would say that I hope that his is a cautionary tale and that it helps, you know, or that it improves the security processes around the whole government. I mean, but come on, like, it's not going to do that. If there's one takeaway from the case of Garrison Courtney, it's probably where there's a will, there's a way.

Thank you for tuning in to The Opportunist. Among the many sources we use for our research, we found the article, Fake CIA Spy Almost Scammed His Way Into Immunity by Justin Roerlich extremely helpful. This episode was written by Nani Okwulagu and executive produced by Connor Powell. We'll be back in a few weeks with new stories about people seeing an opportunity to get ahead and taking it. Until next time.