2/Allison Guerriero still remembers when her ex-boyfriend, Charlie McGonigal, bought a 2nd 📱FBI had just ordered its staff to delete WhatsApp from their bureau-issued📱& he was panicking. No longer cld he, 1 of the FBI's top NY dons, send encrypted messages to whomever he was 💬
3/That was a prob. Guerriero didn't know exactly what McGonigal was using WhatsApp for — he never used it to communicate w her — but he was on there a lot. So McGonigal went out & bought a 2nd iPhone to use on the side. He used it almost exclusively for WhatsApp.
4/He took the 2📱with him everywhere. Guerriero would tease McGonigal about it. "What are you, a drug dealer now? With a burner📱?" she said. But she never found out who McGonigal was messaging.
"He said he needed the iPhone to contact his sources," Guerriero said.
"He said he needed the iPhone to contact his sources," Guerriero said.
5/ "For some reason he couldn't do it thru his FBI📱."
At the time, Guerriero thought she was McGonigal's biggest secret. The 2 of them would often spend the night at his 1-room garden apt in Brooklyn's tony Park Slope neighborhood. He still had a family back in suburban MD,…
At the time, Guerriero thought she was McGonigal's biggest secret. The 2 of them would often spend the night at his 1-room garden apt in Brooklyn's tony Park Slope neighborhood. He still had a family back in suburban MD,…
6/but he'd bn spending almost all his time in NYC since Oct 2016, when he was promoted to head up counterintel at the FBI's field office. McGonigal had promised Guerriero his marriage wld soon be over.
The iPhone wasn't the only curious thing she saw during her time w McGonigal
The iPhone wasn't the only curious thing she saw during her time w McGonigal
7/There were the sealed ✉️ he'd be handed when they had 🥘 w a friend, a man named Sergey Shestakov. Shestakov had once bn a sr Soviet diplomat in NY, stationed at the UN. Guerriero wasn't sure exactly how they had met, but she said they acted like they had known ea other 4 yrs
8/Shestakov was a naturalized US citizen who worked as an interpreter for the federal courts. Guerriero & McGonigal wld sometimes join Shestakov & his wife at pro🏒 games. They wld party w a grp in a priv box. Guerriero didn't know whose box it was, or who was picking up the bill
9/She never saw McGonigal pay. On other nights, Shestakov wld take McGonigal & Guerriero out to 🥘. The 2 men wld make sm talk abt traffic & the weather. Shestakov wld ask McGonigal abt his kids. Then, in the middle of the 🥘, Shestakov wld casually hand McGonigal a manila ✉️.
10/It happened three or four times while Guerriero and McGonigal dated, from mid-2017 to late 2018. The envelopes always passed from Shestakov to McGonigal, not the other way around. And Shestakov, Guerriero recalls, would always pick up the bill.
11/What was inside the ✉️? Guerriero never saw. "I just assumed that it was something Sergey had translated from 🇷🇺 in court," she said. "Or something from a source. It cld have bn totally legitimate." Or it cld have bn something else. McGonigal is now facing 2 fed indictments
12/He is charged with lying to the FBI on his official paperwork & illicitly taking 💰to work for Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned 🇷🇺oligarch. The indictments are the culmination of a grand-jury investigation that Insider exclusively reported on last yr, & they lay out breathtaking
13/allegations of subterfuge & corruption. Prosecutors accuse McGonigal of cultivating a relationship w Deripaska while still working for the FBI, by doing a favor 4 the daughter of 1 of Deripaska's subordinates. "McGonigal traveled to meet Deripaska & others at Deripaska's
14/residence in London, & in Vienna," one indictment says, tho it does not specify when. Shestakov is said to have introduced McGonigal to Deripaska's circle. He is also alleged to have violated US sanctions by partnering w McGonigal on a project to investigate 1 of Deripaska's
15/rivals, a contract that pd $41,790/month. In 🇦🇱 & elsewhere, McGonigal is accused of engaging in the classic Beltway exchange of 💰 for favors, leaning on his relationships w US officials & the Albanian PM to deliver the results his patrons wanted.
16/Much of this under-the-table lobbying activity, the government says, occurred while he was still at the FBI.
18/But the question of what McGonigal was accepting in a manila ✉️ from a former Soviet diplomat raises concerns that go beyond the indictments & is 1 of the strangest twists yet in the unfolding scandal. The FBI is racing to discover how deep the alleged deceits by an ex-agent..
19/who'd held 1 of its most sensitive posts might run. Was McGonigal working for the 🇷🇺 while he was still running the bureau's NY counterintel efforts? Or did the FBI succeed in putting a stop to Deripaska's courtship of McGonigal while it was still in its early stages?
20/"The access u get in that job is extraordinary," 1 senior law-enforcement insider said. "It's almost bottomless. If you're running FBI counterintel in NY, U can get ur hands on almost anything u want — & u don't always have to make excuses for why you're asking for it."
21/The Trump-aligned rt has used the McGonigal allegations as ammunition for its campaign to discredit the dossier-wielding, Mar-a-Lago-raiding FBI. Prominent voices on the left have theorized that McGonigal was a double agent, pd off by 🇷🇺 to throw the FBI off the Trump-🇷🇺 trail
22/Still others speculate that McGonigal just got greedy, as top-level officials sometimes do, accepting💰in return for favors & access & being just a little sloppier abt it than most. But to write McGonigal off as a case of greed & not espionage is to misunderstand how foreign..
23/influence works. It doesn't have to be greed or espionage. It can be both.
NYC, the senior law-enforcement insider said, is "a global center for espionage & counterespionage." "U have visits from foreign business elites," they added. "U have the UN. U have ethnic populations"
NYC, the senior law-enforcement insider said, is "a global center for espionage & counterespionage." "U have visits from foreign business elites," they added. "U have the UN. U have ethnic populations"
24/On this contested urban terrain, where foreign intel servs quietly battle to surveil, recruit, & control, McGonigal was 🇺🇸's head defensive coach. But a former FBI exec said that under almost no circumstances wld an FBI official of McGonigal's rank be the 1 to go out on …
25/the field & play the game himself. As the special agent in charge of the NY field office's counterintel div, McGonigal had roughly 150 agents to manage. He was in charge of ppl who were in charge of other ppl who were in charge of squads of agents who did the block-&-tackle
26/work of tracking and flipping players for the other teams. McGonigal was supposed to be sitting at his desk in lower Manhattan, calling the plays.
27/Guerriero was unaware of such bureaucratic intricacies. She figured McGonigal was a hands-on agent, just like the ones you see in the 🎥. He was often out at night "running an op," as he'd put it. That might explain the ✉️ from Shestakov, as well as the plastic bag full of 💰
28/she saw 1 night on the floor by the futon at McGonigal's apt in Brooklyn. McGonigal said he'd won it betting on a baseball game. Guerriero was skeptical, but she figured it was "buy 💰" for a sting op, or a payoff for an informant. It was all part of McGonigal's work.
29/So was the time he spent hanging out w a mysterious man named Agron, whom Guerriero never met. Agron Neza had immigrated to NJ from 🇦🇱, where, 1 indictment says, "he had been an employee of an Albanian intel agency several decades earlier."
30/A fed indictment against McGonigal says Neza gave him $225,000 in💰, incl $80,000 pymt that coincided w the date when Guerriero says she saw the 💼 full of bundled 💵 in McGonigal's apt. Neza, who is identified n an indictment only as Person A, hasnt bn chrgd of any wrongdoing
31/McGonigal & Shestakov are alleged to have bn part of an effort by Deripaska to reverse sanctions imposed in 2018 by the Treasury Dept, which found that Deripaska had acted as an agent of the Kremlin. Deripaska's name appears in Mueller's report 63 times.
32/A bipartisan report by the Senate Intel Committee found that Deripaska conducted "influence operations" & that he took direction on some of those ops from the Russian gov.
33/Deripaska denied ever hiring McGonigal (or Shestakov) for either business or personal purposes." McGonigal's early career as sp agent in NY gave him exposure to some storied cases. He investigated crash of TWA ✈️ 800, the "illegals program" that rounded up 🇷🇺 sleeper agents
34/& the September 11 attacks. In DC, he ran the FBI's WikiLeaks task force that tracked down & convicted Chelsea Manning, as well as a joint CIA-FBI secret task force dedicated to hunting for Chinese moles inside US intel agencies.
35/In NY, he was beginning to establish himself on the foreign-policy luncheon circuit, appearing on panels about Russian election meddling and links between Russia's intelligence agencies and its oligarchs, like the one he now stands accused of going to work for.
36/"In a 22-year career w the FBI, I had quite the opportunity to work w — & against, in some situations — the FSB," McGonigal said in a remote panel hosted by the Atlantic Council in October 2020.
37/He described the FSB as 🇷🇺's "preeminent security service" & said its ties to oligarchs made it "an agency for hire."
38/The number of big investigations McGonigal was involved with, combined w the lack of clarity around how far back his relationship w Deripaska might go, is part of the reason his indictment is a nightmare for the FBI.
39/While the indictments do not allege that McGonigal was disloyal while he was still at the FBI, McGonigal's lifestyle could have made him an appealing target for recruitment.
40/For someone with McGonigal's level of access, having an extramarital affair is not a private matter. It is exactly the kind of vulnerability that McGonigal's foreign counterparts, the people he was supposed to be working against, might pounce on & exploit.
41/"Ppl having extramarital relationships are typically involved in some kind of deception," said Michael German, a former FBI special agent who is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. "The FBI polygraphs job applicants to uncover exactly that kind of personal foible
42/in order to disqualify them from becoming the lowest-level agent in the office." The McGonigal case is already a bad look for those charged w protecting US secrets; there is a chance it cld get much worse. McGonigal was not charged w espionage, & altho there is currently no …
43/evidence that McGonigal committed espionage, an FBI source told Insider that the investigation is ongoing. A 2nd person familiar w the investigation said the FBI's counterintel division appeared confident that the McGonigal case is abt corruption & nothing more.
44/The fact that prosecutors agreed to release McGonigal on a $500,000 bond also suggests the gov doesn't think he engaged in espionage, which would make him a ✈️ risk.
[uh, wasnt he arrested at JFK???]
[uh, wasnt he arrested at JFK???]
45/But ruling out the worst-case scenario — that McGonigal was sharing US secrets w his foreign contacts — could take mos or yrs. And Guerriero's recollections — the bag of 💰, the late nights, the mysterious friends, the free 🥘, the 2nd📱— only raise more concerns abt the scale
46/of the fallout from McGonigal's double life.
47/[I skipped a few paragraphs]
If the allegations in the indictments are true, it's possible that 🇷🇺 interests were still cultivating McGonigal, gradually pushing his limits. To the extent that the FBI can demonstrate that it nipped this process in the bud, it deserves credit.
If the allegations in the indictments are true, it's possible that 🇷🇺 interests were still cultivating McGonigal, gradually pushing his limits. To the extent that the FBI can demonstrate that it nipped this process in the bud, it deserves credit.
48/Three sources familiar with the investigation told Insider that the bureau had already been looking into McGonigal by Nov 2019, which is when Guerriero says she wrote an angry 📧 to William Sweeney, McGonigal's boss.
49/According to Guerriero, that 📧, which Insider was unable to obtain or confirm, told Sweeney to look into McGonigal's 🇦🇱 work & his personal life.
50/there’s more to the article. Please read it urself
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