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Ex-FBI Official Speaks Out: McGonigal Jeopardizes Major Investigations
Tracy Walder, former CIA officer and special agent of the FBI, has spoken about the file of her former colleague Charles McGonigal.
Walder spoke to Scripps News about what could be described as one of the most serious cases of an FBI official undermining the bureau. McGonigal was Walder's colleague and the one who led her counterintelligence work in China, a role the former official continued until his retirement in 2018.
"My response to Charlie McGonigal's accusation was shock, anger and then concern ," Walder said.
The US government says that while still at the FBI, McGonigal allegedly worked with a former Albanian intelligence officer and an Albanian employed by a Chinese energy conglomerate. He also had an ongoing relationship with Prime Minister Edi Rama and forced the FBI to investigate an American citizen who lobbied against the Prime Minister's political party.
After retiring, according to federal prosecutors, McGonigal allegedly worked on behalf of sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, despite having been investigated by the FBI.
Asked how deep Russia's infiltration of the US intelligence community might go, Walder said: “I believe Russia's infiltration of the intelligence community goes extremely deep. I feel the same way about China and some other foreign intelligence organizations.”
She was surprised by McGonigal as during the time they worked together, according to her, he had not shown any suspicious behavior.
"I think at the time, nothing stood out to me. You know, as a person who is bought, basically, by Russian oligarchs, none of that stood out to me. Was he a kind person? No. . Was it difficult? Yes. But that didn't strike me as unusual in itself ," Walder said.
But he ended up overseeing an investigation into whether a mole was behind a devastating string of incidents in which CIA informants were jailed or killed in China.
"Charlie worked one of the biggest and most sensitive counterintelligence cases that the CIA had. So around 2010, the CIA noticed that some of their human assets in China were either disappearing, being killed, withering away, and they suspected that there was a spy within their agency. And so the FBI was called in to conduct that investigation," she said. "And that went on for about two years. And the person they found was a CIA operative named Jerry Lee. He was giving the Chinese government the names of CIA sources in China, and Charlie was the person in charge of finding him that."
Walder says a damage assessment, a classified review of McGonigal's long career, could take months or even years. This could put Jerry Lee's conviction in jeopardy. Lee was found guilty in 2019 of conspiracy to spy for China.