Ex-Fox News analyst gets 33 months in prison

Wayne Simmons was a professional football player, a drug trafficker, a nightclub doorman, a Fox News guest analyst and an intelligence adviser in Afghanistan.

What Simmons, 62, was not, according to all available evidence, was a CIA agent. In federal court in Virginia on Friday, just before he was sentenced to 33 months in prison, he apologised for lying about his security clearance, his criminal history and his finances.

“There is not a day that goes by that I am not haunted by these mistakes,” Simmons said. “I stand before you a shameful and broken man.”

But Simmons, who wore a blue suit and an American flag lapel pin, did not back down on his claims that he spent 27 years as an agency operative doing work so dangerous and secretive that it went entirely unrecorded. He said on Friday that he lied his way into military contractor work to make use of a “special skill set” he implied was acquired undercover.

He said that, like the many people Simmons fooled, he was initially impressed by the defendant’s charisma and “fascinated” to see what proof Simmons would offer — only to get none. Simmons’s supposed CIA career, he concluded, was “not just implausible but beyond incredible”.

Over the years, Simmons’s claims were convincing enough to get him a regular spot as an unpaid commentator on Fox News; a post on a 2013 civilian panel investigating the attacks in Benghazi, Libya; and two jobs with defence contractors working in Afghanistan.

Authorities first began investigating Simmons in the fall of 2013 when a woman he had a romantic relationship with came to the FBI saying he had taken her money in a real estate scam. The probe ended up going much deeper.

Authorities excavated Simmons’s life and career, starting with his claim that he was recruited to the CIA out of the Navy in 1973. In fact, according to prosecutors, Simmons was discharged from the Navy for medical reasons just a couple weeks after he enlisted. And former CIA officials told the government that they did not recruit agents out of basic training. Simmons went on to briefly work on a pipeline in Alaska and then played football for several years with the semi-pro Baltimore Eagles and the National Football League’s New Orleans Saints. Again, his career was cut short due to medical problems, according to the records provided by the government.