DAILY MAIL: "TOP FBI BOSSES IN FRENZY, TRAWLING THROUGH 22 YEARS OF HIGH-LEVEL INVESTIGATIONS"...

...Run by Ex-FBI Official Charlie McGonigal

Well, well, well.

Somebody is paying attention.

A year ago I published a column in the Santa Barbara News-Press on Charles F. McGonigal, former Special Agent in Charge of the Counterintelligence Division at the FBI’s large New York City field office.

McGonigal had just been 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.

Since I knew Charlie, and worked with him on an FBI investigation in 2003-05, I posited in my column that the Bureau should take a close look at all of the cases McGonigal had worked on during the course of his career.

I had good reason for suggesting such scrutiny.

As intelligence chief to Prince Albert of Monaco—and acting as the prince’s emissary—in February 2003 I presented the most senior national security bigwigs at the FBI with 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.

The FBI did their usual checks and formally opened an investigation. They assigned it to Charlie McGonigal, who at that time had a supervisory role at headquarters.

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, 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 should seriously consider the possibility that McGonigal may have been compromised by the Russians way back then and, at their behest, derailed an investigation of Russia’s high-level spy. 

Some Context is Necessary

We had reason to believe our target had been personally recruited by Vladimir Putin in Germany during the timeframe 1986-90 when Putin 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 our target (whose extreme wealth could not be explained) was spying on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which assembled annually in Washington, D.C. to provide advice to the U.S. President on intelligence collection, analysis and estimates.

We tracked our target to Washington every December three years running as he positioned himself in luxury hotels (The Willard, The Hay-Adams) near to where PFIAB met, in the Old Executive Office Building.

And McGonigal himself hypothesized that our target knew a PFIAB board or staff member from when he had been a “chart-flapper” 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 personally. (Our target professed an ongoing personal relationship with the Russian president.)

So: Did McGonigal truly transfer the investigation of our target to the IRS?

Or did Charlie deep-six it?

Certainly, McGonigal made no offer to introduce me to whomever he purportedly dealt with at the IRS to liaise with them as I had liaised with the Bureau for going on three years.

From that point on, nothing happened.

From my perspective, the case went cold.

As if killed.