Scam


How a Fake CIA Spy Fooled Everyone and Swindled Millions

Garrison Courtney talked a great game.

In his real life, he was a middle-aged former government flack with a broken marriage and a pile of unpaid bills. But when he tried to work his smooth-talk magic on an unsuspecting company executive, he was someone else altogether.

Then, he was a Gulf War veteran with hundreds of kills under his belt who could vividly recall choking on the thick black smoke of Iraq’s oil fields. He was a CIA operative who might just let you in on the secret that a foreign government had tried to poison him.

He was a patriot who needed help. He wanted these companies to put him on their payroll and give him “cover,” so he would look like an ordinary citizen and not a globe-trotting spy. The companies, of course, would be rewarded for their help, with fat government contracts.

He couldn’t give them too much information about his work; it was highly classified, after all. But there were secret task forces with shadowy sounding names—Alpha-214 and FirstNet—that were maybe supporting special ops in Africa.