A former Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman was sentenced Wednesday to seven years in prison for a $4.4 million fraud scheme.
The United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia announced that Garrison Courtney, 44, “falsely claimed to be a covert officer of the CIA involved in a highly-classified program or ‘task force’ involving various components of the United States Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense.”
Courtney, who was a DEA spokesman from 2005 to 2009, pleaded guilty to charges of wire fraud in June 2020. He told companies that he was involved with a top-secret program that “sought to enhance the intelligence gathering capabilities of the United States government,” according to the Justice Department. He said the companies would have to hire him and pay him a salary so that he could operate under “commercial cover” in order to hide his alleged affiliation with the CIA.
The former DEA spokesman told the companies that the government would reimburse them for the cost of his salary. He made companies agree to fake nondisclosure agreements and told them they were under surveillance by “hostile foreign intelligence services.” He also managed to convince government officials to believe his scheme and used them to bolster his credibility.
“Courtney, along with his five aliases, will now spend the next seven years in federal prison for his deceitful and felonious criminal conduct,” said G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. “I want to commend the trial team and their extraordinary efforts in untangling this complex fraud and thank our many law enforcement partners who helped bring Courtney to justice.”
Courtney created an elaborate backstory as part of the scheme. He claimed that he was a Gulf War veteran with hundreds of confirmed kills while in combat. He claimed that his lungs were injured by smoke from setting Iraqi oil fields on fire and that a hostile foreign intelligence service attempted to assassinate him with ricin, according to the Department of Justice. All the claims were false.
“Courtney wove an expansive web of lies by posing as a covert CIA officer working on a classified program. Courtney’s brazen scheme and manipulation was fueled by his own greed, all while invoking the secrecy of ‘national security’ to hide his lies,” said Steven M. D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office.
At one point in his scheme, Courtney gained a position as a private contractor for the National Institutes of Health’s Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center. There, he gained access to secret information and attempted to corrupt the procurement process “by steering the award of contracts to companies where he was then also on the payroll, and used the false pretext of national security concerns to warp the process by preventing full and open competition.”
The judge who sentenced Courtney said his scheme was “diabolical” and that he was concerned Courtney needed to address “serious mental health issues.”
Courtney apologized to the court and his family during the sentencing.
“I’m here because of my actions. I’m here because of the things I did,” Courtney said. “I know that I’ve hurt a lot of people. I’ve hurt a lot of friendships. I’ve broken trust. I’m gonna live my life forward with everyone thinking I’m a con man, a cheat, possibly to my kids. And that’s tough. But it’s a position I put myself in.”
