Emily Chan
In 2020, a 44-year-old man named Garrison Kenneth Courtney was sentenced to seven years in prison for an elaborate ruse during which he defrauded at least 12 companies of over $4.4 million by pretending to be a spy. He went to great lengths to maintain the lie that he was an undercover spy.
Courtney grew up in a broken household in Great Falls, Montana, and had had a rough childhood, according to his ex-wife, Andree Pierson.
He was in the Armed Forces before attending the University of Montana. Later, he landed a job as a weatherman. By 2005, he took a job as a DEA spokesperson in Washington, D.C.
Eventually, he decided to move on to defense and intelligence contracting. He got a job with a high-stakes project that involved working to release Kuwaiti prisoners who were being held in Guantanamo Bay.
He made promises he couldn’t keep, such as reaching out to President Obama to get the prisoners freed. As a result, he was fired.
In 2012, he began setting up his scheme. He approached several private companies with a fabricated story, saying that he had a lot of combat experience in the military during the Gulf War. He earned hundreds of confirmed kills and damaged his lungs after inhaling toxic fumes from oil fires in Kuwait.
According to court documents, Courtney falsely claimed to be a covert CIA officer involved in a top-secret program that aimed to improve the United States government’s methods of gathering intelligence.
He declared that once the companies hired him, they would need to pay him for “commercial cover.” The salary payments would obscure his association with the CIA. He also told the companies that they would be reimbursed by the United States government for their payments to him in the future through lucrative contracts. So he was able to collect salaries from multiple companies at a time.
To pull off the scam, Courtney made the companies sign fake non-disclosure agreements from the United States government, prohibiting anyone from the companies from talking about the program he was involved with.
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