Seed Money

How One Billionaire WITH A Savior Complex And a Voracious Sexual Appetite Got Conned By His Best Friend, Who Saw Him As The Perfect Mark.

- KEN SILVERSTEIN

One morning in March 2021, I got a call from a former CIA officer named John Maguire. Maguire had once been an important person at the Agency. He was the man the Bush administration called on the day after 9/11 to take command of a team that operated clandestinely in Iraq. Since his retirement in 2005, he’d provided me with solid information on topics ranging from money laundering to gunrunning—he was a clearinghouse for information about criminal activity and geopolitical hot spots worldwide.

On the phone that day, Maguire told me an incredible story about a billionaire venture capitalist in Whitefish, Montana, named Michael Goguen. In 2013, he said, Goguen and another CIA veteran, Matthew Marshall, had founded a private security firm later named Amyntor. It was the start of a collaboration that would eventually lead to plans for a kind of wildcat mercenary force that would help right wrongs around the globe: taking on drug cartels in Mexico, the Islamic State in Syria, and anti-American political movements in Africa.

Marshall in turn recruited Maguire, and in 2015 Maguire packed up his home in Virginia and moved out to Whitefish. He still had good contacts at the CIA and other three-letter agencies, which he could leverage to help Amyntor become a major defense and intelligence contractor. Once the flow of federal money started, the company could potentially be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Maguire was still in Montana when he called me, but the plan that brought him there had fallen apart. Goguen seemed at first like a billionaire do-gooder, ready to spend his fortune in service of America’s interests at home and abroad. But instead, Maguire said, Marshall had discovered that Goguen was a dangerous man.