The Albanian shakedown: A new twist in the FBI’s Charles McGonigal scandal
John Schindler
The FBI has never endured a scandal quite like the one that’s enveloped Charles McGonigal.
The former FBI official was indicted on federal charges last month. According to the Department of Justice indictment, after his retirement from the FBI in 2018 after a 22-year career mostly in counterintelligence, McGonigal violated U.S. sanctions on Russia by becoming a fixer for Oleg Deripaska, a top Kremlin oligarch, a man well known to Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as Russia’s security agencies.
Given Deripaska’s footprints around Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, McGonigal’s arrest sent Twitter liberals into spasms. Here, at last, was the proof they sought for years that the FBI was secretly helping the Trump campaign while sinking Hillary Clinton. Some on the Right came to opposite conclusions: This, finally, was proof that the FBI in 2016 was conspiring against Trump, framing him with the “Russia hoax.” Was it just a coincidence that McGonigal’s Russian super-oligarch employer had also employed the former British spy Christopher Steele, author of that famous dossier? This is speculation, on all sides. McGonigal is charged with sanctions-busting: corruption, not espionage. Moreover, his unwise dalliance with Deripaska came after McGonigal retired from the FBI. That, at least, is how the FBI is spinning this embarrassing scandal.
There are many counterintelligence questions here, particularly because McGonigal was regarded as a master fixer in the FBI on such matters, and he ended his career as the special agent in charge of counterintelligence at the New York Field Office, one of the top jobs in the whole FBI. In that position, McGonigal had access to a vast array of espionage secrets from across the intelligence community. For those of a conspiratorial bent, was it merely a coincidence that, just one month after McGonigal took over FBI spy operations in New York, a senior Russian spy assigned to Moscow’s U.N. Embassy there, died under highly mysterious circumstances, on Election Day 2016, no less?
But take a closer look at the Albanian connection.
McGonigal has also been indicted by the Justice Department on charges of taking, and failing to report, a $225,000 payment from a former Albanian intelligence officer named Agron Neza in the summer of 2017. At the time, McGonigal was still in the FBI’s employ. For reasons that remain unclear, McGonigal, who needed money to pay for his double life — wife and children in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, plus a suspicious mistress in New York — became a player in Albanian politics for money.
McGonigal, while still serving as a senior FBI official, became a fixer for Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama and his ruling Socialist Party. Albania is a staunch U.S. ally and NATO member, but since Rama took over in Tirana a decade ago, that small country has become a hotbed of corruption, plus Europe’s leading narcostate, with deep connections to Latin American drug cartels. Why the Biden administration turns a blind eye to all this remains a troubling question. Buying senior American officials such as McGonigal is part of how Rama keeps pulling it off. The Albanian opposition is up in arms over this scandal, featuring a top U.S. intelligence official serving as the fixer for the ruling Socialists.
McGonigal made several trips to Albania to help Rama, including in September 2017, when the accused was still a top FBI official. While this trip had an official FBI purpose, its unofficial purpose was helping out Rama by bullying his opponents in Albania. A new report by the Washington Post reveals some of this sordid visit:
“McGonigal, who was still working for the FBI at the time, gave the prime minister Bureau ‘paraphernalia’ and warned him against awarding lucrative drilling licenses to companies that were fronts for Russian interests. While McGonigal appeared to be acting in his role as a counterintelligence officer against Russian influence, prosecutors allege that, in fact, Neza and another Albanian man working with McGonigal, identified by prosecutors as an informal Rama adviser, had their own financial interests in the oil fields.”
The truth is worse than that. It’s bad enough that a top FBI official got involved unpleasantly, for cash, in the internal politics of an American ally. This column can report that what McGonigal did on that fateful trip to Albania was considerably worse than the federal authorities or media have admitted. High-level Albanian sources who witnessed McGonigal’s appalling conduct while he was in that country recount that the FBI senior official worked a shakedown operation on wealthy Albanians for personal profit.
McGonigal told successful Albanians, not all of whom were in the good graces of the Rama government, that they were facing imminent U.S. sanctions, which would destroy their businesses, seize their bank accounts, and end their foreign travel. However, McGonigal could fix this problem for a modest fee of a few million dollars. The message was clear: Pay me or I will destroy your life. The worried Albanians took this threat seriously, given McGonigal’s FBI position, and many of them paid up. Some paid “only” 3 million euros. Others paid much more.
Sources tell me that McGonigal shook down Shefqet Kastrati, Albania’s top oil magnate, for 12 million euros, worth nearly $15 million in 2017. Apparently, McGonigal also attempted to get bribes from Samir Mane, a leading Albanian businessman, in a similar fashion. Balkan sources say that McGonigal’s haul from this shakedown was on the order of 30 million Euros, though that presumably was split with his Albanian partners.
Where did the money go? This was unlikely to have been a cash operation, given its sensitivity, and Balkan intelligence sources tell me that cryptocurrency, including bitcoin, was involved. Those sources say that McGonigal attempted similar shakedown operations in Albania’s neighbors, Macedonia and Montenegro, both of which contain significant ethnic Albanian minorities.
Details are murky and need thorough investigation, but Albanians in a position to know insist that they witnessed this unprecedented activity by Charles McGonigal when he was one of the FBI’s top officials. This is the worst scandal in the FBI’s long history. It demands immediate congressional investigation. What the DOJ has indicted McGonigal for looks like the small tip of an astonishingly corrupt Balkan iceberg.
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John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.