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On 23 January 2023, the news broke that a former FBI agent in charge of counterintelligence, Charlie McGonigal, had been charged with accepting payments from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to investigate a rival oligarch - in violation of Russian sanctions and money laundering.
McGonigal - the former head of the New York Field Office’s Counterintelligence unit - allegedly took $225,000 in cash from a former foreign agent while still working for the FBI.
According to a 2023 NBC report:
Federal prosecutors say the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York office laundered money, violated sanctions against Russia while working with a Russian oligarch and while still at the FBI took hundreds of thousands of dollars from a foreign national and former foreign intelligence official.
Charles McGonigal, 55, was arrested on Saturday after arriving at JFK airport in New York on a flight from the Middle East.
According to prosecutors, McGonigal, Shestakov and the third person tried to conceal Deripaska’s involvement through shell companies, forged signatures and other means.
As my colleague Wes Clark Jr. noted at the time of McGonigal’s arrest: “FBI is apparently a great place to train for a future career serving Russian oligarchs. Almost unbelievable McGonigal was previously in charge of counterintelligence. Almost.”
As Bette readers learned in my report on Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer who proved to be one of the most deadly double agents in American history, Ames took millions of dollars from the Russians and sold out more than two dozen agents. He had been the chief of counterintelligence in the Soviet Division.
American Kompromat author Craig Unger once told me in an interview for Byline Times, “I was interviewing an American businessman who was doing business in Russia in the early days after the fall of the Soviet Union and one of his clients wanted to bribe Tom Foley, who was then Speaker of the House. He told his Russian friend, ‘No, no, no, you get a lobbying firm on K Street.’ And he explained the whole business and said, ‘You give a million dollars to a political action committee.’ And after figuring out what all this meant, the guy said, ‘Wow, you’ve legalized bribery. That’s wonderful!’”
As American brutes mug for headlines with promises of live-streamed violence and crime boss oil deals, while imposing new sanctions on the International Criminal Court just hours after a former ICC judge was awarded the Nobel Prize, prosecutions for treason just keep on happening.
In Estonia, a court on Monday upheld a ruling denying convicted traitor Deniss Metsavas conditional early release from prison. Metsavas, a former Estonian Defence Forces major, was convicted of treason and sentenced to 15 years and six months in prison in 2019. His espionage activities on behalf of Russia's GRU military intelligence service covered a period of more than a decade, during which he passed classified and other internal information to Russian intelligence. His father, Pjotr Volin, was also found guilty of treason.
And in January, an Estonian court sentenced pro-Russian politicians to prison terms for high treason. One of the leaders of the pro-Russian party Koos, Aivo Peterson, was sentenced to 14 years in prison, while Dmitry Rootsi and Russian citizen Andrei Andronov received 11 years. Peterson and Rootsi were found guilty of high treason, while Andronov was convicted of participating in non-violent activities against Estonia.
According to DW Russian, “the court found it proven that Peterson and Rootsi maintained contact with Russian authorities, discussed political cooperation and the creation of a party capable of changing Estonia’s political course. This could have given Russia the opportunity to covertly influence Estonian politics in the future, the court decision states. In addition, Andrei Andronov was involved in organizing press tours to territories of Ukraine occupied by Russia, while Peterson participated in trips and the creation of propaganda materials aimed, in particular, at weakening support for Ukraine in Estonia.”
And in Germany, a bombshell dropped this week when the country’s former spy chief was arrested for treason.
German prosecutors said August Hanning — Germany’s former foreign intelligence chief — had active contact with two foreign intelligence services. Hanning, 80, was detained on Tuesday on treason charges “in what appears to be one of the biggest national security breaches in modern German history, according to FT, which added that the Hanning arrest “sent shockwaves throughout western intelligence services and raised questions over the largely unchecked commercial work former spies do after leaving public office.”
Hanning retired in 2009 after having served as head of the German foreign intelligence service (BND) and as state secretary in the interior ministry. Prosecutors have accused him of purchasing thousands of highly classified documents from a BND official over a period of 16 years.
According to FT: “The espionage case has triggered a fierce political debate in Germany, where parliament is debating a sweeping new intelligence law to govern the activities of the BND. On Wednesday, leading members of the parliamentary committee overseeing the BND called for changes to the rules governing the commercial work of former spies. The existing rules were not enough, the committee’s chair, Marc Henrichmann, said on Tuesday.”
With Trump’s regime collaborating with Russians in plain daylight, it’s important to understand how we got to this point, where collaborating with war criminals and publicly self-enrichming is normalized.
What follows are a handful of examples of former intelligence agents and politicians who betrayed their oath to America by taking money from the Russian mob to whitewash their corruption, and in so doing, infected America with rot from the inside.
Former FBI director William Sessions worked as an attorney for Semion Mogilevich - the head of Russia’s bratva, organized crime syndicate.
Bob Dole took $560,000 from Oleg Deripaska to help him obtain a visa, when intelligence agents knew Deripaska was part of Russian organized crime.
Haley Barbour’s firm, Barbour Griffith & Rogers, took two million in lobbying fees from Alfa, which was under US investigation for money laundering at the time.
Trump’s pro bono campaign manager, Paul Manafort took $75 million in service to the Russian mob. As Craig Unger noted, “Doesn’t that make him a spy of some sort?”
Mike Flynn was paid tens of thousands of dollars for appearances in Russian, including Kremlin-state media, and $530,000 for Turkey lobbying. Currently, he is a registered foreign agent for the Republic of Srpska, which is in the news due to Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles’ daughter working for a Srpska lobbying firm.
Former FBI director Louis Freeh was paid by Russian real estate firm Prevezon to negotiate a settlement with the US over money laundering and a tax fraud scheme.
Reviewing my original thread from five years ago documenting the above ties seems pokey compared to the extreme, capital “C” corruption of the current administration.
I often reflect on the words of Charlie Chaplin, who first spoke to the world from the screen in the Great Dictator - such was the urgency in 1940 that he broke his silence.
He said, “Do not despair. The misery that is upon us is but the passing of greed.”
As disinformation analyst Alex Alvarova told Bette Dangerous: “They changed the meanings of our holy words: Homeland, truth, faith, freedom. Now it‘s time to take our words back. Let the first word be ‘treason.’”
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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There always seems to be an underworld. We have a lot of work to do.
The top echelons of the US government?