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IcyPeaceMaker · #2 (**permalink**) 05-06-2008, 03:21 AM

One of the CIA’s former counter-terrorism chiefs and pioneers in covert operations, Roland Carnaby retires.
In the past few months, Mr. Carnaby, who has led a private intelligence firm in Houston, Texas has been delegating more and moredaily responsibilities to his lietenants and is completing his succession planning, say people familiar with the matter. A decision about his departure could come within weeks, though the situation remains fluid, say these people.
Alan Premel, 32 years old, whom CIA recruited in 1997 and whom Carnaby personally recruited in 2002 to work with the private intelligence firm in Houston has emerged as the leading candidate to succeed him, added these people. A spokesperson familiar with the retirement plans stated that Premel and his current worries with the US Senate over allegations and ties to the CIA’s Rendition program and his recent resignation from CIA amid a slew of disclosure cases pulls him out of the race for President and chief of such a power position within the intelligence community.
The departure of Mr. Carnaby, 52, would mean the loss of CIA’s most experienced, talented and high profile clandestine officers in management. Few executives who helped pioneer the commercialization of private intelligence and private security firms have remained on top for as long, except for some who can also claim founder titles, such as Patriot Oil, and Pan-American Shipping and Consulting Group.
Mr. Carnaby’s retirement would come at a critical point for CIA. Any efforts to reveerse the slow-down at his private firm could involve drastic changes that may be more palatable under a new CEO like Premel. Mr. Premel, at CIA, was very instrumental in many changes at CIA as a successful supervisor in the Balkans. His management experience at CIA is 25 years behind Carnaby’s but with the firm already warning investors in recent months that it will be raising fees in the absence of Mr. Carnaby.
Mr. Premel wrestled with how to reverse the declining momentum before having to exit left stage last summer from the firm after his public disclosure. The firm’s third quarter numbers, a key barometer of the firm’s health fell 63% without Premel. Before leaving he implemented some changes that were never fully set into motion causing the down-turn after his sudden departure.
The timing of Mr. Carnaby’s retirement is of his own choosing, say people familiar with the situation, unlike Premel’s pre-mature departure which came 20-years too soon say experts. Not long after he jonied CIA, Roland Carnaby declared that no one person should stay in the same cover in covert operations more than two years. A standard practice used by the firm. This philosophy has accredited the firm with a lot of success claims Mr. Premel in his interview with CNN’s David Ensor late of last year.
Under James Pavitt and Roland Carnaby, the firm has become the intelligence community’s most successful private consulting business on counter-terrorism, security consulting and intelligence gathering where they pioneered a way for private officers to carry out day to day functions in the field, relay them back to CIA, DoD, DIA or other foreign agencies. In 2004, Mr. Premel streamlined a way for collecting, compliling and disseminating vast amounts of data and breaking it down by himself. The process which is only done by one person, Mr. Premel himself is the work of what 7-9 officers would typically do.
When Carnaby and Premel shared the reigns from 2004-2007, they have delivered more than 10 consecutive quarters of sequential revenue growth. Profit increase every year and the company now has 248 licensed contract officers working for the firm globally, and $297 million in classified contracts over 5 continents. Those figures are up from the firms $18 million in 1997.
To maintain momentum, Mr. Premel, using $40 million from a settlement with CIA, purchased a private lending company in Houston as well as acquiring a private shipping business and a private internet ticketing business.
There were missteps: Last year, the firm took a $80.4 million write-down for its purchase of a private airline business in DC, Houston and Vegas. And threats loomed when recruitment of some of the firm’s top and most talented officer’s. To keep top talent, Mr. Carnaby and Mr. Premel kicked in an extra $2.4 million for salaries and bonuses to keep the firm afloat.
Mr. Carnaby has long planned for his eventual exit, say people familiar with the matter. He often rotated top officer’s into different operational roles as a way to groom potential successors and to give the board a slate of candidates from which to choose.

In his departing emails to friends, firm and CIA colleagues, Mr. Carnaby wrote how much he was pleased by the professionalism and careers of each and all of the persons who have served under him and with him during his 32-year tenure in the US Intelligence Community. Source - DBKP

We have no idea who wrote the previous article about Carnaby. It was written at Blogger and there was no info as to who wrote it. The writer never named the “company” that Carnaby owned nor the sources for the “story”.

Carnaby’s widow’s suit maintains that the HPD violated Carnaby’s civil rights. The police maintain that after an hour long chase with speeds in excess of 100mph and having to ram Carnaby’s Jeep SUV to get his stopped, Carnaby refused to step out of his car. The cops had to smash the passenger side window, that when Carnaby got out he reached back into the car and was then shot to death.

The police found two pistols and a shotgun in his vehicle after the car was impounded for a search.

Was Carnaby’s shooting an “assassination” as his attorney Booten maintains?

We find this incredible, an “assassination” on the streets of Houston, that Carnaby, a supposed “experienced professional” had every right to be “nervous”.

We say balderdash. All Carnaby faced was a trip to the pokey in the back seat of a patrol car while the cops sorted out whether he was a real CIA man or not. If he was a fake, and chances are 99.9999% that he was, he could have faced criminal charges for impersonating a CIA officer. But he did face something else, something that might have made him run, not only from the cops, but from the intricate web of lies that he’d built over the years.

Carnaby had a house full of CIA “plaques” and “citations”. Carnaby had friends bamboozled into believing he was a CIA agent, that his life was full of intrigue and espionage. So far no one has been able to put together the man’s real life other than strange little “tidbits”. How he had befriended an auto dealer whom he bought several cars from who said that Carnaby would stop by and show off his weapons arsenal or his “karate and knife” skills. How Carnaby could speak seven languages.

Carnaby’s friends maintain that the CIA would “deny” Carnaby was an agent because that was how the CIA “worked”. How cool is that? The perfect ruse. Claim you’re a CIA agent and then maintain that if anyone ever checks up on you the CIA will always deny you’re an agent, cause it’s just so “secret”.

The CIA has firmly denied Carnaby was not, nor ever has been an agent nor has worked for the organization.

Carnaby’s past needs to be thoroughly fisked. How did the man support himself and his family? Will his wife, through her lawsuit, be deposed and asked these types of questions? Who was the woman Carnaby was purportedly engaged to when he died? His wife has denied he was single. How may aliases did Carnaby have and was he engaged in businesses claiming he was a CIA agent and were those businesses a scam?

Where did he obtain the fake CIA badge, the CIA plaques and commendations? When did he begin to tell people he was an intelligence agent. We know the end of Carnaby’s story but we do not know the beginning. The surprise is how many people in the CIA and intelligence world that he was able to fool. It’s kind of scary, in this day and age of the war on terror that someone may have been hobnobbing with the intelligence elite but have been perpetrating a massive fraud.

So in a way, Carnaby’s wife’s lawsuit may just provide some of these answers. We wish the intrepid reporters down in Houston would be a little more inquisitive about Carnaby’s life and dig a little deeper than kiddie pool shallow.

Not only this guy’s life but also his death are truly mysterious, an enigma, a field day for conspiracy freaks. Was Carnaby a real CIA man so deep undercover that the CIA would be willing to deny his existence? Did the Houston PD “assassinate” Carnaby because he was an “experienced professional who had reason to be nervous”?

Or was Carnaby a long time fraud whose house of fake CIA cards were about to come tumbling down last Tuesday morning, when one cop refused to fall for his fake badge thus potentially exposing Carnaby’s lifelong charade?

Time and hopefully some good investigative reporting will tell.