Wayne Simmons, frequent Fox News commentator and supposed 27-year CIA veteran of “outside paramilitary operations,” was arrested by the Department of Justice on October 15th, charged with misrepresenting himself, wire fraud, weapons violations, and essentially inventing his entire CIA background from whole cloth.

While the mainstream media has reported on Simmons’s arrest extensively, including Fox News throwing him under the bus, the press was all over his involvement with far-right personalities like Michelle Bachman and Allen West. However, they completely missed Simmons’s connections to a slew of shady characters, including retired generals—one of whom is General McInerney, who has been profiled here on SOFREP before.

Who is Wayne Simmons?

“I had the opportunity to meet Wayne Simmons at a conference called ‘The Intelligence Summit’ in Washington, D.C.,” author JT Patten told SOFREP, having attended the conference in February of 2006. “The summit included a number of the who’s who in the intelligence and special operations communities who were part of the advisory council and key speakers. It was advised by Paul Valley, Gordon Cucullu, CDR Richard Marcinko, and Wayne Simmons, among others.”

The Intelligence Summit provided a high-end networking event for various members of the intelligence community. Run by John Loftus, the Intelligence Summit website (recently taken down, probably due to the attention drawn to it by SOFREP) featured names as big as former CIA director James Woolsey. The website also came to feature loads of anti-Catholic, anti-Islam Illuminati conspiracy material. Some have speculated that this material was actually placed on the Intel Summit webpage to beta-test a “payload” or a baited message as a part of an influence operation.