https://newspress.com/mcgoni-gate/
Earlier this week Charles F. McGonigal, 54, formerly Special Agent in Charge of the Counterintelligence Division at the FBI’s large New York City field office, was indicted by the Department of Justice for conspiracy to commit money laundering, making multiple false statements, concealing material facts, falsifying records and helping a Russian oligarch avoid sanctions.
This 22-year Bureau-veteran’s position was very senior and extremely sensitive because New York City, which plays host to the United Nations, is the main recruiting ground in the USA for the Russian intelligence services.
The sad part is I knew Charlie around 2003-5 when he was a counterintelligence supervisor at headquarters in Washington DC.
As intelligence chief to Prince Albert of Monaco—and acting as the prince’s emissary—I, in February 2003, presented to the most senior national security bigwigs at the FBI evidence that a former U.S. Air Force/Defense Intelligence Agency colonel was spying for the Russians in addition to having laundered Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout’s ill-gotten gains through a Monaco-based company called Pastor International.
The FBI did their usual checks and formally opened an investigation… and assigned it to Charlie McGonigal.
Two years later, after much incriminating activity by our target (which I witnessed myself while monitoring him) and just after it seemed FBI special agents were making substantial progress, Mr. McGonigal inexplicably closed the Bureau’s investigation, telling me that even though we seemingly had a clearcut case of espionage he would hand it over to the IRS so that they could instead pursue our target’s “financial irregularities.”
This made no sense to me back then and makes no sense now. Because even if FBI special agents at the Los Angeles Field Office (from which the case was run) had educed the investigation into a money laundering case (easier to prosecute than espionage), it would still remain within the Bureau’s purview for investigation and deliverance to U.S. Attorneys for assessing the merits of prosecution.
So, to my thinking, one must consider the possibility that Mr. McGonigal may have been compromised by the Russians way back then and, at their behest, derailed an investigation of Russia’s high-level spy.
We had reason to believe our target had been personally recruited by Vladimir Putin in Germany during the timeframe 1986-90 when Mad Vlad was a KGB officer based in Dresden, in what was then East Germany. Our target was at that time posted to the USAF base at Ramstein, West Germany, 200 miles from where Lt. Colonel Putin operated and whose job it was to recruit U.S. military personnel who had access to top secret intelligence. At Ramstein, our target supervised super-secret U-2 and SR-71 reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union
Additional context: When we passed our dossier to the FBI, we had reason to believe that our target who, although retired from the military but extremely wealthy (millions of dollars in real estate and Ming Dynasty antiques paid for with funds that could not be explained), was spying on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Board (known by the acronym PFIAB), which assembled annually in Washington DC to provide advice to the U.S. President on intelligence collection, analysis and estimates.
https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/eo12863.htm
We tracked our target to Washington every December three years running as he positioned himself in luxury hotels near where PFIAB met, in the Old Executive Office Building. And Mr. McGonigal hypothesized that our target knew a PFIAB board or staff member from when he was a “chart-flapper” himself at PFIAB meetings; that he would wine and dine this individual and glean all he could about whatever was discussed at PFIAB and report back to the Russians, maybe to Putin himself. (Our target professed an ongoing personal relationship with the Russian president.)
NOW BACK TO CHARLES MCGONIGAL
So: Did Mr. McGonigal truly transfer the investigation of our target to the IRS—or did Charlie deep-six it?
Certainly, he made no offer to introduce me to whomever he dealt with at the IRS to liaise with them as I had liaised with the Bureau. From that point on, nothing happened, it went cold. As if killed.
Consider this: In addition to four counts of laundering money, Mr. McGonigal is charged with having received $225,000 from “an individual who was an employee of a foreign intelligence service before his retirement”—a relationship he unlawfully concealed from the Bureau during the period 2016-18 while still working for them, thereby demonstrating that he was quite content to operate secretly in his own best interests while still employed by USG.
Thus it becomes plausible that a very senior counterintelligence official of the FBI has been on Moscow’s payroll for almost 20 years, which, if true, would raise him to the level of CIA traitor Aldrich Ames and FBI traitor Robert Hanssen in terms of how much intelligence has been compromised. And that would mean that the FBI (and, by extension, the CIA, with whose officers Mr. McGonigal regularly liaised) have a much more serious problem than they know—one that requires much damage assessment.
Or maybe the Bureau would prefer to cover it up with charges less serious than treason (a capital offense punishable by the death penalty) due to the embarrassment and political ramifications it would suffer following such a revelation on the heels of other recent embarrassments.
However, if the FBI believed Charlie had been recruited by a Russian intelligence service, prosecutors would have insisted he be held in custody and not bailed (as he was, on a $500,000 bond) out of concern that the Russians might try to exfiltrate him out of the country to safety in Moscow.
Which means maybe they don’t know and maybe they don’t want to know.
THE EVER REVOLVING DOOR & BROOKFIELD PROPERTIES
If accepted at face value, Mr. McGonigal’s alleged criminal actions have shed a spotlight on how the “revolving door” operates in Washington DC: While working for the FBI, Charlie supervised an investigation of Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who was sanctioned by the U.S. Government after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. And then, after leaving the Bureau, Charlie went to work for… Oleg Deripaska, for whom he investigated a rival oligarch in addition to trying to get his client removed from the sanction list.
Our data check on Mr. McGonigal connects him through an e-mail address to Brookfield Properties of Brookfield Place, New York City, a global property company that offers “an incredible collection of real estate,” states their website, “everywhere you want to be.”
We know from past intelligence investigations that high-end real estate is one of the ways in which Russian oligarchs launder dirty money.
Oddly, Brookfield also links to Jared Kushner, who worked in the White House for his father-in-law Donald Trump. In October 2022, the (UK) Guardian reported, “A financial firm [Brookfield] that operates billions of dollars in real estate properties around the world is facing questions from the powerful chairman of the Senate finance committee about whether Qatar was secretly involved in the $1.2 billion rescue of a Fifth Avenue property owned by Jared Kushner’s family while Kushner was serving in the White House.”
At the risk of telling the Department of Treasury how to do their jobs, if I were investigating the transactions of sanctioned Russian oligarchs with a view to confiscating their holdings, I would put Brookfield—based on Mr. McGonigal’s connection to the sanctioned Oleg Deripaska—under a microscope.
Indicted for his alleged crimes in two jurisdictions, Charlie is looking at four counts of money laundering and violating sanctions, totaling 80-plus years in prison, probably at ADX Florence in Colorado alongside Robert Hanssen, Unabomber Ted Kaszynski and Mexican drug lord El Chapo.
CROSSFIRE HURRICANE
While not trying to turn this into a political matter, we would be remiss if we did not point out Mr. McGonigal’s deep involvement in Crossfire Hurricane, which led to the now disgraced Mueller special counsel Investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and which attempted to frame President Donald Trump as a Russian stooge based on misleading information later discovered to have been fabricated by the Hillary Clinton Campaign.
It was Charlie’s willingness to launch Crossfire Hurricane that propelled him, with then-FBI Director James Comey’s blessing, from headquarters to a top job in New York City.
It is certainly ironic that that a senior FBI counterintelligence official charged with investigating Mr. Trump for collusion with Russia is now charged criminally for colluding with a sanctioned Russian oligarch.
LUXEMBOURG
Charlie McGonigal’s case is the second instance in which an intelligence official I encountered while directing Monaco intelligence is facing serious criminal charges. The first was Frank Schneider, foreign intelligence chief of the Luxembourg service (SREL) who, after retiring at a young age due to a domestic political wire-tapping scandal, associated himself with One Coin, a cryptocurrency outfit that turned out to be a sham.
In 2021 Mr. Schneider was indicted by New York Southern District Court following a grand jury investigation into fraud and money laundering. He remains under house arrest in France, which last year ordered his extradition to the USA and from where he is trying to change the venue of his prosecution to Luxembourg, though the prime minister of his native country says there are no legal grounds for such circumvention.
Frank is looking at 40 years (if/when tried in the USA) for his complicity with Ruja Ignatova, a Bulgarian known as “CryptoQueen” who founded the $4 billion One Coin Ponzi scheme—and then, when the jig was up, disappeared without a trace.
I quite liked Frank, I still do, believing he got caught up in something way over his head while allowing greed to get the better of him. And I feel great sadness for his family.
https://newspress.com/monaco-spy-story-columbus-group/
https://newspress.com/the-columbus-group-part-2-of-a-spy-story/
Clearly, there is something about intelligence work that brings out the funambulist in some of its practitioners.
https://newspress.com/author/reringer/
