A former spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration pretended to be a CIA agent under deep cover to defraud a dozen companies of more than $4 million.
Garrison Courtney, 44, pleaded guilty Thursday to wire fraud, admitting he tricked companies and public officials into believing he worked for the CIA.
Courtney, who was a DEA spokesman from 2005 until 2009, told companies he was involved in a highly classified program that “sought to enhance the intelligence gathering capabilities of the United States government,” according to the Justice Department.
He approached private companies with the false story, telling them that they needed to hire him and pay his salary so that he could operate under “commercial cover,” which would hide his affiliation with the CIA.
In reality, Courtney was never employed by the CIA, and the highly classified program he described did not exist, according to prosecutors.
Courtney told the companies they would be reimbursed for his salary payments, sometimes through government contracts. Through the scheme, he was hired as a private contractor for a branch of the National Institutes of Health, gaining access to sensitive information that allowed him to direct contracts to the companies in which he was supposedly working under “commercial cover.”
He took extraordinary steps to convince his victims he was working undercover for the CIA, including having them sign nondisclosure agreements, telling them they were under surveillance by foreign intelligence services, meeting with them in sensitive compartmented information facilities, or SCIFS, and threatened to revoke their security clearances if they looked into the program.
He also convinced several government officials that he was participating in the program and then had them speak with victims to bolster his story.
“Courtney thereby created the false appearance to the victims that the government officials had independently validated his story, when in fact the officials merely were echoing the false information fed to them by Courtney,” according to the Justice Department.
On top of that, Courtney claimed he had served in the Army during the Gulf War, had hundreds of confirmed kills, and that a foreign intelligence service had tried to assassinate him with ricin.
“All of these claims were false,” the Justice Department said.
Courtney faces up to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced Oct. 23.
