COULDN’T HAPPEN TO A NICER GUY: In last week’s Dead Drop we told you about Matthew Marshall, a Whitefish, Montana man who pleaded guilty to defrauding someone of $2.3 million by pretending he needed the money for CIA “off-the-books” rescue operations. Among the mysteries in that story was the identity of the fine citizen who put up his own money to save others. The Department of Justice did not identify the victim at the time – but we may now have a clue. The New York Post suggests that the victim is Michael Goguen, a Silicon Valley billionaire who took up residence in Whitefish. A civil complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Montana alleges a whole lot of things about Goguen that he hasn’t yet responded to, including an allegation that he may have some safe houses of his own. Normally, a civil suit like this wouldn’t make The Dead Drop, but the N.Y. Post, (which apparently reached out to Goguen’s lawyer for comment but didn’t get one before the piece was published) says Matthew Marshall (who just pled guilty to fraud) is the lead plaintiff in the civil suit filed against Goguen. But it also says Goguen is the guy Marshall defrauded. The whole story is (almost) too wacky to believe.
THIS CENTURY IN CONSPIRACY THEORIES: Every late-November, you can count on a flood of stories about the JFK assassination. This year is no different. Among them is a piece in Rolling Stone by journalist Tim Weiner, “This is Where Oliver Stone Got His Looney JFK Conspiracy Theories From” which suggests that the Soviet’s active disinformation campaign might have had a lot to do with the looniness. Meanwhile, Jefferson Morley, editor of the JFK Facts blog, had an OPED published in the Miami Herald sharing his frustration about the Biden White House announcing that the last of the JFK documents will not be released to the public until December 2022, “at the earliest”. He also pointed to what he called the CIA’s “six-decade long history of deception, deceit and delay about assassination records” suggesting embarrassment or malfeasance might be the reason for the delay.
0 for 7: Nahal Toosi, who covers the State Department for Politico, tweeted recently that Foggy Bottom officials told her she should use the Freedom of Information Act to formally request documents she’s like to get her hands on - but she says after covering the beat for about seven years, she has yet to receive a single document requested under FOIA. Not one. It’s unclear how many documents she has requested, but “zero” success is a very low number. Toosi’s tweet asked that interested State Department officials just send her the stuff she should see. If she thinks FOIA is toothless – wait until she sees how weak — twitter leak requests —turn out to be.
NOW THAT WE HAVE THE INFRASTRUCTURE FIXED…. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has proposed a bi-partisan proposal to create an Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office. It would be a military and intelligence program to help determine what (or who) was behind UFO sightings by Navy and Air Force pilots that couldn’t easily be explained. The senator told Politico: “If it is technology possessed by adversaries or any other entity, we need to know” adding “burying our heads in the sand is neither a strategy nor an acceptable approach.”
GENERALLY SPEAKING: It’s not unusual for media outlets to get confused by military ranks and such – but we were surprised to see a savvy outfit like Defense News post a headline this week, “China is too far away from NATO to be called an adversary, says top alliance general.” The surprise was that in the second paragraph of the story, we find out that the “top alliance general” is actually an admiral, “Adm. Rob Bauer, of the Royal Netherlands Navy.” We checked four days after the story originally posted, figuring they would surely correct the headline. Wrong again.
NOT SO CURRENT INTELLIGENCE: The British website, The Bookseller reports that History Press has purchased the rights to publish “Current Intelligence: How the CIA’s Top-Secret Presidential Briefing Shaped History” by David Charlwood a “contributing historian for BBC radio.” We (correctly) guessed that History Press is UK-based after we read the first line of the synopsis, "Every day, the President of the United States receives a bespoke, top-secret briefing document from the Central Intelligence Agency…” The book is not slated to come out until January 2023. Every former PDB official is now putting the word “bespoke” in their résumé.
POCKET LITTER: Dead Droplets and bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
APPARENTLY, JAIL IS NO FUN: Former CIA officer Josh Schulte, who is in a federal lockup in New York awaiting a retrial on charges of giving massive amounts of Agency data to Wikileaks, is apparently really mad. Schulte was recently shuffled from a Manhattan federal jail which is closing, (at least temporarily) to another jail in Brooklyn. The New York Daily News says Schulte wrote a letter to the Manhattan Federal Court saying he is “being virtually starved, blasted with bright lights 24 hours a day, and not allowed adequate time to prepare for his retrial” (he is defending himself.) But what really has Schulte steamed is his charge that the Metropolitan Detention Center “…deliberately and arbitrarily remove(d) our basketball goal and all the balls for no other purpose except to be ruthless, soulless a—holes.” He said he and four other inmates plan to go on a hunger strike this week, which is an interesting way to protest being starved.
HEADS UP, TOY HALL OF FAME: OK, maybe the boardgame Battleship’s nomination for the Toy Hall of Fame has sunk, but there is another surefire candidate. The makers of Barbie have come out with a new doll dressed as Natasha “Phoenix” Trace, the newest pilot at the Top Gun flight school. They say she is “dressed for action in true-to-the-movie” details inspired by the Tom Cruise sequel which is (finally) scheduled to hit theaters May 27, 2022. Natasha, the plastic pilot, is said to come with a flight suit, helmet, aviator sunglasses and a “certificate of authenticity” (presumably to differentiate her from fake female fighter pilot dolls you might come across.)
GOAT RODEO: A team of West Point cadets reportedly violated long-standing Military Academy rules and travelled to a farm near Annapolis to attempt to kidnap the Naval Academy’s goat mascot as a prank. It did not go well. The New York Times said the effort was “more of a Bay of Pigs-style embarrassment.” The noisy assault team reportedly managed to spook the farm animals and then grabbed the wrong goat. The animal they snatched was not the intended target, Bill the 37th in the line of Navy mascots. Instead they apparently grabbed Bill number 34, “an arthritic, 14-year-old retiree with only one horn.” Naval Academy alum (and Cipher Brief expert) retired Admiral James Stavridis tweeted “Come on, West Point. This is exactly why they sent NAVY SEALs to get Bin Laden.”
WANT TO GET SOMEONE’S GOAT? Send news tips to The Dead Drop at TheDeadDrop@theCipherBrief.com.
Read more expert-inspired national security insights and perspectives in The Cipher Brief
