Quote:
Six hours after Torres was arrested, Detective John Vickery of the Fairfax County police got a call on his cell phone from an unfamiliar number with an Oregon area code. It was Theo. “Where is he? What have you done with him?” he demanded. “You can’t make people disappear—only we can.”
Theo told Vickery he was a federal agent working with the Central Intelligence Agency. He requested a meeting with Vickery and his supervisors, whose names he knew, promising to explain the operation. He used law enforcement terminology and familiar acronyms and appeared to understand security clearances. But his demands for the meeting, such as not wanting to go through the police department’s metal detector, didn’t make sense to Vickery, a 20-year veteran of the force. “When we do deal with the CIA, we usually go to them,” he said. “We didn’t know whether we were dealing with a federal agent or a nut.”
Theo started calling Washington-area lawyers asking them to defend Torres. He told criminal defense attorneys David Dischley and Michael Robinson that he worked for the CIA’s national resources division, which recruits citizens and foreigners to assist the U.S. abroad. He explained that Torres had been arrested during a government training operation gone bad. Torres, he said, was being tested for an eventual mission in El Salvador to infiltrate the criminal gang MS-13. Theo offered Dischley and Robinson $45,000 in cash to take the case.
The lawyers asked Theo why his agency couldn’t use its own authority to get Torres out of jail. Theo said the CIA wasn’t allowed to conduct operations in the U.S. “Everything I asked, he had an answer for,” Robinson said. Dischley, an ex-Marine who said he has an intelligence background, said the whole thing sounded absurd, “but the logic behind it made a little bit of sense.” And the CIA lingo “just rattled off his tongue.” Still, the lawyers asked for proof. Theo e-mailed the same DIA document that he’d sent Torres. They took the case.
The lawyers had trouble pinning down Theo for the money. He failed to show up at Robinson’s office and a planned meeting at a Red Robin hamburger restaurant. At Fairfax County police headquarters, Theo was a no-show for the meeting Vickery assembled with his boss and Torres’s defense team. He would instead meet investigators at the courthouse during Torres’s arraignment hearing on June 15, he said; he’d be wearing an American flag pin on his black suit.
José Torres, Geo’s 25-year-old brother, was also looking for Theo at the courthouse that day. Since his brother’s arrest, José had been speaking frequently with Theo, who assured José he had everything under control. During some of those calls, José remained on the line, listening while Theo called the police, judges, and even members of Congress seeking information on the case or to rant about Torres’s arrest. As José looked around for Theo that morning, he instead ran into Dischley and Vickery—both of whom had become more suspicious of Theo in recent days. The three had a lot to talk about. “I want to know what the f-*-*- is going on because this is weird,” José demanded. After comparing notes, Vickery helped arrange Torres’s release on bail while he continued his investigation.
Later that day, Vickery took Villegas out for pizza. She tried to stay silent at first but finally opened up: She had met Theo that spring through the website sugardaddyforme.com, which offers “direct dating between sugar babys, sugar daddies gay or anyone else who likes dating online for free.” Within days the two were talking on the phone and texting regularly, and Theo had convinced her he was a military intelligence officer running Operation Downstrike. If she succeeded in recruiting others to join the mission, he said, she could get a government job. If she refused, he threatened to put her fiancé on the no-fly list and “cause issues” for her mother and grandmother, according to court documents. Villegas had believed him, although she had never met him in person, but now she was beginning to waver. She gave Theo’s cell phone number to Vickery.
Theo had used an Internet program to conceal his number—the number Torres, police, and lawyers had was not his real one—but Villegas had figured a way around it. Investigators quickly traced the number to a 26-year-old named Joshua Brady living in Matoaca, Va., a quiet town of 2,400 more than 100 miles south of Washington.
Brady was sleeping on Aug. 17 when federal agents entered the dingy ranch-style home he shared with his mother, grandmother, and 10-year-old brother. Investigators seized computers and found several books about the CIA. Prosecutors charged Brady with impersonating a government official and three counts of attempted bank robbery. Each crime carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
With crooked teeth and an acned face, Brady doesn’t look like a confidence man. Yet his voice—mild, almost monotonous, with a hint of Virginia drawl—conveys professionalism, experience, and sincerity. In an October 2012 jailhouse interview, Brady appeared calm, insisting he was an intelligence agent. He claimed he was being penalized for trying to blow the whistle on the CIA for letting Torres take the fall. “This was not the kind of operation I wanted to work on,” he said from behind a glass partition in the Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Va.
Brady said he ran an information technology consultancy from home, “keeping you free from hackers.” As a boy, he said he suffered from a digestive tract disorder and was bullied in high school, which he left at 16, earning his diploma online. Brady was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He claims he joined the CIA before turning 20, providing “technical services” and training civilians. “I can’t go into great detail on initial contact or my background,” he said.
The purpose of Operation Downstrike, he said, was to train Torres for clandestine work. “When they pull the alarm, then you have a short time to get out of there,” he said. “You need to be able to escape, and that’s going to be stressful. If you crack under stress, then you’re useless to the agency.”
The rules of the operation dictated no weapons, according to Brady. Stolen money was to be turned over to the government. Brady refused to identify anyone else involved in the operation, saying disclosure was barred by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Documents on his encrypted hard drive—seized by the government—could prove all of this, he insisted. Other operations would follow, he said. “This is real.”
According to federal prosecutors, Brady was awaiting trial for using a forged federal judge’s signature at the time of his arrest. In the past, Brady had posed as a computer security consultant, a hacker, and a University of Virginia law student, federal prosecutors said in court papers. Court filings in Virginia sketch a repeat offender whose father was in and out of prison. Since 2005, Brady had been accused of posing as an entrepreneur seeking multimillion-dollar deals for computer hardware, stealing $1,100 from a woman to whom he promised an Xbox 360, and writing bad checks. In the past seven years he was charged in three criminal cases: He was found guilty in one, pled no contest in another, and pled guilty in the third. He was released in 2012 after a year in prison for violating the terms of his sentence in the Xbox case.
Dan Christman, who works at a general store about a mile from Brady’s home, said he used to spend a lot of time with Brady playing EverQuest, an online game involving wizards, warriors, and dragons. About eight years ago Brady was caught by game administrators stealing virtual money, Christman said. “Josh is a really smart guy,” Christman said. “He has a lot of energy in that department but nowhere to funnel it.”
After Brady’s arrest, some of his Operation Downstrike tricks were revealed. The letter that Brady sent Villegas and the defense lawyers bore a close resemblance to one posted on a fired CIA agent’s blog. Vickery’s cell phone number is available on the Internet.
Neither Villegas nor any of the other robbery participants were ever charged. In October state prosecutors dropped the case against Torres without explanation. Vickery said it was because police were convinced Torres was tricked. The CIA and federal prosecutors in Virginia declined to comment. Torres agreed to be called as a witness against Brady, though he may not get to testify. On Jan. 29, Brady reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors. Under the agreement, he pled guilty to one count of using a forged federal judge’s signature. The government agreed in exchange to drop the bank robbery and impersonation charges. His lawyers argued he suffered from mental illnesses that made him unable to form the intent to commit the crimes he was charged with. Brady has PTSD, paranoid schizophrenia, and schizotypal personality disorder, according to the doctor hired by his lawyers. After conducting an additional mental exam, the government’s doctor diagnosed Brady with a delusional disorder that could have posed problems during the bank robbery trial.
Brady could have faced up to five years in prison for forgery, but the government is recommending he be sentenced instead to three years of supervision in his mother’s home. He’s agreed to seek mental health treatment, and he’s back in Matoaca. He may even get his seized computers and the encrypted Operation Downstrike documents back.
