A few questions about the FBI's pension plan
Welcome to my first Weekly Rant!
Welcome to my very first substack newsletter! Rant! with Alex Finley is a place for impassioned discussion about national security, democracy, and corruption, but with humor (because otherwise just kill me, please). Every Friday, I’ll be sending you original content, along with The Week’s Links, a roundup of stories that tie into those same themes, with the occasional random story thrown in just because it amuses me.
I am also offering a course for paid subscribers about foreign influence operations, which will explore the nexus of national security, democracy, and corruption much more deeply. The course grew out of research for my novel Victor in Trouble, which is a satire of Russian influence operations. You can get all the juicy details about the course on my ABOUT page and on the course introduction page.
For those of you who don’t know me so well, I’ve put my bio below so you can be duly impressed. Also, I am required by law to inform you within the first few paragraphs of this newsletter that I was recently invited to speak at Harvard. I don’t know who made that law (after all, I wasn’t educated at Harvard), but my understanding is I am supposed to let everyone know this fact often.
A quick aside for those of you who previously signed up for my newsletter through my web site: I’ve migrated to a new platform, which is why you’re getting this. I hope you’ll stay subscribed!
Alright, here we go…
ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT
The FBI’s pension plan isn’t all that great, apparently. That’s my only conclusion after reading this week about Charles McGonigal.
Here’s the story: McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York field office, was arrested on January 23 on charges of money laundering, violating Russian sanctions, and taking off-the-books money from a former intelligence official. McGonigal had spent his career investigating, among other things, Russian organized crime.
According to a federal indictment out of Washington, DC, McGonigal accepted payments from a former Albanian intelligence official, traveled with the same guy to Albania and other places in Europe, and hid all of this from the FBI, even when asked about it. Although not mentioned in the indictment, it has since come to light that in 2007, McGonigal opened a security company in Albania with that same former Albanian intelligence official, while McGonigal was still employed by FBI.
Here's a question: what the fuck?
As we will go into in depth in the foreign influence course I am offering (in fact, in the very first class!), this type of behavior triggers all kinds of red flags, particularly coming as it does from someone who was a top counterintelligence official at the FBI. McGonigal exhibited a willingness to lie to his employer—the FBI—about his foreign travel, foreign contacts, and receipt of outside money.
According to a second indictment (yes, there were two! This one out of the Southern District of New York), McGonigal helped Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska evade sanctions.
Here's a little background on Deripaska. When the US Treasury announced sanctions on him in April 2018, the agency noted he had been “investigated for money laundering, and has been accused of threatening the lives of business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official, and taking part in extortion and racketeering. There are also allegations that Deripaska bribed a government official, ordered the murder of a businessman, and had links to a Russian organized crime group.”
Seems like a nice guy, right? Someone a top FBI counterintelligence officer who spent years investigating Russian organized crime should definitely do business with, especially considering what McGonigal was hired to do: investigate a rival oligarch (did you read that part above that said Deripaska has been accused of threatening the lives of business rivals?).
Maybe McGonigal didn’t know Deripaska was a bad dude, or that he was under sanctions? Ok, except that McGonigal, when he was head of counterintelligence at the New York FBI office, read the classified intelligence explaining why Deripaska was to be sanctioned in the first place.
Deripaska also played a big role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election (which we will look at in depth in the course, so seriously, get yourself a paid subscription!), something McGonigal also was certainly aware of but brushed aside for some cash to augment his pension, it seems. I mean, he chose to work for the very same guy he had investigated.
This case is a good reminder that whether or not we believe the West is at war with Russia, Vladimir Putin most certainly believes he is at war with us, and he has directed (and continues to direct) several tools of statecraft to weaken us, including using Russian oligarchs to carry out his dirty business (another theme we will dive into in the course, so, you know, you really should consider a paid subscription).
Let me pause here to give a shout out to all the people in the US intelligence community who now have to carry out damage assessments to see what operations might have been compromised and which sources might have been killed because of this guy. A shout out as well to federal employees who will have to deal with increased internal scrutiny, which was already terrible after several past debacles. Let’s look at a few of those assholes:
Aldrich Ames is a former CIA counterintelligence officer who is currently serving a life sentence in an Indiana federal prison after handing over reams of information to the USSR and later Russia, leading to the compromise—and in some cases death—of CIA assets.
Harold Nicholson is a former CIA operations officer who gifted Russia with information about CIA sources and his own CIA colleagues. Once in prison, he got his son to continue meeting the Russians in an effort to collect past payments (maybe the CIA’s pension plan sucks as much as the FBI’s?). Nicholson is currently in the federal supermax prison in Colorado, but is set to be released this year. Hooray?
Robert Hanssen is Nicholson’s neighbor in the Colorado supermax, but he is serving 15 consecutive life sentences, so maybe he’ll throw a goodbye party for Nicholson upon his release. Hanssen was an FBI agent who spied for the USSR and Russia from 1979 until his arrest in 2001. At one point, he was put in charge of finding a mole in the FBI; that is, he was tasked with finding himself (not in some spiritual way, but in a very real holy shit people are dying let’s figure out who’s giving everyone away way). He betrayed his country for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds.
Unlike those three traitors, McGonigal has not been charged with espionage. No one is accusing him of handing over secrets. Rather, it looks (so far) like he accepted money for his connections and pull. The guy is corrupt but not a traitor. So, yay?
The Week’s Links
A roundup of stories you should be reading
(Note: I reserve the right to rant in depth about any of these at a future date)
RUSSIA AND CORRUPTION
Wagner Inc: a Russian warlord and his lawyers (FT)
Yevgeny Prigozhin: the hotdog seller who rose to the top of Putin’s war machine (The Guardian)
Don’t Fear Putin’s Demise (Foreign Affairs)
AFRICA AND CORRUPTION
Mauritanian Ex-President Heads into Historic Trial (RFI)
Nigeria Elections 2023: How influencers are secretly paid by political parties (BBC)
RUSSIA AND AFRICA AND CORRUPTION
How the Wagner Group is Aggravating the Jihadi Threat in the Sahel (West Point)
US to Designate Wagner as Transnational Criminal Group (DW)
US Cable: Russian paramilitary group set to get cash infusion from expanded African mine (Politico)
STATE SURVEILLANCE
Biden has never been under more pressure from Congress to ban TikTok (Bloomberg)
INFORMATION LITERACY
New Jersey becomes first state to mandate K-12 students learn information literacy (Politico)
YOUR FEEL-GOOD STORY OF THE WEEK:
Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?
Glad the raccoon was saved and wish I had confidence that someone/something could save the U.S. from the GOP... another group (like Wagner) that a deserves terrorist designation. 💔