Charles McGonigal, a former FBI counterintelligence officer, was charged on Monday on two separate indictments. The first one relates to working after his retirement with a Russian oligarch facing sanctions and the second one concerns the concealment of money received from an officer in the Albanian intelligence from back when McGonigal was in the bureau.
The former FBI veteran was arrested at the John F. Kennedy airport on Saturday while he was returning from international travel, the CNN reports. McGonigal will be appearing in a federal court in Manhattan, New York, next Monday, and according to his attorney, he will plead not guilty in the charges against him.
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Who is Charles McGonigal?
Charles McGonigal is a former counterintelligence officer who worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for 22 years.
He began his career with the FBI in 1996 joining the New York office where he investigated Russian counterintelligence issues and organized crime cases. Among the key cases that he worked on during his time in New York were the TWA Flight 800 case, Department of Energy Scientist Wen Ho Lee’s espionage case and was deployed as a member of the NYO Rapid Deployment Team to Dar Es Salam to investigate the 1198 US Embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya.
He joined the FBI’s Cleveland division in 2002 where he worked on white-collar crime and investigations related to violent crimes. Among the notable cases he dealt with, there were the Terence Jones investigation and the Kristin Jackson kidnapping and murder.
He rapidly rose up the ranks in the FBI thereafter, becoming a supervisor of the Counterintelligence Division in 2003, and two years later, he became the unit chief of a Global Counterintelligence Unit at the FBI headquarters. He was responsible for managing counterintelligence operations related to threats from South Asia and the Pacific Rim.
After working successfully in a number of high-profile cases, he was made the Section Chief of the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section of FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.
He retired from FBI in 2018, after 22 years of service.
