John Minchillo/AP
- An FBI spy chief's secret meeting with a Russian contact was detected by UK officials.
- Charles McGonigal, the ex-FBI official, is charged with taking money from Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska.
- McGonigal should have realized that the London meeting would be noticed, one source said.
In 2018, Charles McGonigal, the FBI's former New York spy chief, traveled to London where he met with a Russian contact who was under surveillance by British authorities, two US intelligence sources told Insider.
The British were alarmed enough by the meeting to alert the FBI's legal attaché, who was stationed at the US Embassy. The FBI then used the surreptitious meeting as part of their basis to open an investigation into McGonigal, one of the two sources said.
The two sources, both former officials in the US intelligence community, did not specify the identity of the Russian who McGonigal met with.
McGonigal, the former head of the FBI's counterintelligence division in New York, stands accused of taking money from Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch, in violation of US sanctions, in exchange for investigating one of Deripaska's Russian rivals. McGonigal "traveled to meet Deripaska and others at Deripaska's residence in London, and in Vienna," according to one of the federal indictments lodged last month. The indictments do not say precisely when those alleged meetings took place, or how prosecutors came to believe they occurred.
"Your sources sound well-informed," said a third source, who worked for the US intelligence community in 2018 and was aware of communications between British intelligence officials and the US Embassy in London. They declined to confirm or deny that the meeting occurred.
During his years in New York, McGonigal oversaw 150 FBI agents tasked with shadowing foreign operatives and turning them into spies for the US. He would have had intimate knowledge of surveillance penetration in world capitals, which makes the London meeting all the more mystifying.
"What the fuck was he thinking?" said a fourth source, who said they had reason to believe that the meeting "apparently did occur," but declined to confirm it. Years of experience running counterintelligence, the fourth source said, should have clued in McGonigal to the possibility that the London encounter would attract notice.
Insider was able to determine the year but not the month of the meeting. The fourth source noted that regardless of whether the meeting occurred before or after McGonigal retired from the FBI in September 2018, it suggested a serious and extended relationship. "A meeting like this doesn't just happen on a Tuesday," they said, noting that whomever McGonigal met with, they were important enough to be under surveillance by the British and merit alerting the US Embassy. "There's a long lead time."
The FBI's national press office and its New York field office both declined to comment.
Neither the State Department, an attorney representing McGonigal, the United Kingdom's Home Office, nor the United Kingdom's Foreign Office immediately responded to requests for comment sent late on Wednesday.
Ruben Bunyatyan, a spokesperson for Deripaska, declined to comment on any alleged meetings between Deripaska and McGonigal, and denied claims made by the Treasury Department and others that Deripaska is close to the Kremlin, and that he is an oligarch. "To insinuate some sort of special links or treatment is simply wrong," Bunyatyan said, by email. Deripaska "had ordinary links," he continued, "just as any other industrialist of his scale would have in any country around the world."
In 2014, the FBI tried to recruit Deripaska as an informant. McGonigal had investigated Russian operatives earlier in his career, but it is unclear whether he was involved with the FBI's Deripaska recruitment effort. He was stationed in Washington at that time.
The McGonigal indictments state that in 2018, McGonigal had access to a classified list of Russian oligarchs who were under consideration for US sanctions due to their "close ties to the Kremlin." The Treasury Department sanctioned Deripaska in April 2018. In 2021, the FBI raided two homes linked to Deripaska in Washington and New York. Then, last year, Deripaska himself was indicted for having violated the 2018 sanctions when he allegedly arranged for his girlfriend to travel to the US so she could give birth in a US hospital and obtain US citizenship for her newborn child.
The McGonigal investigation was first reported by Insider in September. Subsequent reporting detailed first-hand accounts of McGonigal's extramarital relationship, a bag of cash in his Brooklyn apartment, and manila envelopes McGonigal received at dinners from a former Soviet diplomat.
Bethany Dawson contributed reporting.
Mattathias Schwartz is a senior correspondent at Insider and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. He can be reached at mschwartz@insider.com and schwartz79@protonmail.com.