Ex-Tampa DEA Spokesman Pleads Guilty Of Posing As CIA Operative

TAMPA, FL — A former Drug Enforcement Administration public affairs officer has pleaded guilty to an elaborate ruse in which he posed as a covert CIA operative and convinced at least a dozen companies to pay him salaries totaling $4.4 million.

On Thursday, Garrison Kenneth Courtney, 44, of Tampa, pleaded guilty to the charges in U.S. District Court. Sentencing has been scheduled for Oct. 23.

According to court documents, Courtney claimed to be a covert operative of the CIA involved in a highly classified task force involving the United States Intelligence Community and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Investigators said Courtney approached numerous private companies with some variation of this fake story, and claimed that the companies needed to hire and pay him to create what Courtney described as “commercial cover” to mask his affiliation with the CIA.

Courtney told the companies they would be reimbursed for his salary and, in some cases, promised lucrative contracts from the United States government as a reward for their participation.

Courtney claimed the classified task force was intended to enhance the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the United States government. In truth, Courtney was never employed by the CIA, and the task force that he described did not exist.

Court documents said Courtney went to extraordinary lengths to perpetuate the illusion that he was a deep-cover operative. Among other things, he claimed his true identity and large portions of his conduct were classified; directed victims and witnesses to sign fake U.S. government nondisclosure agreements; told victims and witnesses that they were under surveillance by hostile foreign intelligence services; made a show of searching people for electronic devices as part of his "counterintelligence" methods; demanded that his victims meet at secret sites to create the illusion that they were participating in a classified intelligence operation; and repeatedly threatened anyone who questioned his legitimacy with revocation of their security clearance and criminal prosecution if they “leaked” or continued to look into the classified information.

Courtney also created fake letters issued by the Attorney General of the United States, which claimed to grant blanket immunity to those who participated in the classified program.

He claimed that he had served in the U.S. Army during the Gulf War, had hundreds of confirmed kills while in combat, sustained lung injuries from smoke caused by fires set to Iraqi oil fields, and said a hostile foreign intelligence service attempted to assassinate him by poisoning him with ricin. All these claims were false.

Court documents said Courtney also convinced several real government officials that he was a member of this secret CIA task force. He told them that they had been selected to participate in the program, and then he used those officials as unwitting props to burnish his legitimacy.

He referred the businesses he scammed to these public officials to verify his claims, and told the government officials what to say if they were contacted.

At times, Courtney also convinced those officials to meet with the business people he defrauded inside secure government facilities to further enhance his authenticity.

Using this scheme, Courtney was able to obtain a position working as a private contractor for the National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center, a branch of NIH that provides acquisition support services to federal agencies. Once he had installed himself at the NITAAC, Courtney gained access to sensitive, nonpublic information about procurements of federal agencies supported by NITAAC.

Court documents said he used that information to attempt to corrupt the procurement process by steering the award of contracts to companies that were paying him, and used the false pretext of national security concerns to subvert the process by preventing full and open competition.

The case was investigated by the CIA Office of Inspector General; Intelligence Community OIG; National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency OIG; Air Force Office of Special Investigations; U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command’s Major Procurement Fraud Unit; Defense Criminal Investigative Service’s Mid-Atlantic Field Office; Department of Justice OIG; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services OIG; and Naval Criminal Investigative Service Washington Field Office.