'Maya' from 'Zero Dark Thirty' consulted with investor behind militarized Gaza aid organization within days of retiring
Michael Anne Casey, a controversial former CIA official who also led the agency's technology espionage, agreed to give a confidential talk to McNally Capital at its October annual meeting.
Eleven days after the Los Angeles premier of the late 2012 film “Zero Dark Thirty,” then-acting CIA director Michael J. Morell criticized the film’s lionization of torture in an email sent to the agency’s employees. The film “creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Laden,” wrote Morell, according to reporting in The New York Times the following day. “That impression is false,” Morell concluded.
One year prior to Morell’s critical email, while he served as deputy during the transition from director Leon Panetta to David Petraeus, the CIA threatened journalists John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski with prosecution under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in order to prevent publication of the names of two female CIA counterterrorism analysts later be reported to be the composite inspirations for Zero Dark Thirty’s controversial heroine, Maya.
Their names were, at the time, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, a former deputy chief of the CIA Counterterrorism Center’s Bin Laden Issue Station once dubbed by The New Yorker as the CIA’s ‘Queen of Torture,’ and Michael Anne Casey, who was widely reported to have prevented the CIA from sharing a critical counterterrorism cable with the FBI while working as a direct report to Bikowsky in the months leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. (Bikowsky in 2014 married her former boss, Bin Laden Issue Station founder Michael Scheuer, and took his last name; Casey similarly appears to have incorporated the last name of her spouse, now going by Casey-Tyler.)
“Hugs to my CTC [CIA Counterterrorism Center] family, wherever you are,” wrote Casey-Tyler on LinkedIn, in response to the 15-year anniversary of the December 2009 suicide bombing of the CIA’s Khowst base in Afghanistan, which was then run by Casey-Tyler’s former Bin Laden Station colleague Jennifer L. Matthews.
Roughly eight years after condemning Zero Dark Thirty’s lionization of torture to CIA employees, Morell disclosed his role as chairman of the Virginia-based intelligence contractor Orbis Operations as part of his biography as a congressional witness. But chairmanship of the firm would subsequently pass to Ward McNally, partial heir to the fortune of the mapping company Rand McNally, as a result of his Chicago-based private equity firm acquiring Orbis in April 2021.
(Leaked details of the license agreements between Orbis’s Discovery product and controversial surveillance companies such as Anomaly Six, Premise Data, Fivecast, and Ntrepid were exclusively revealed by this publication last January.)
Michael Anne Casey-Tyler took charge of the Biden administration’s new center for technology-focused espionage, the CIA’s Transnational and Technology Mission Center (T2MC), just months later — roughly four months prior to its public announcement that October, according to her LinkedIn profile. Casey-Tyler described her T2MC role as working “with tech industry leaders and world-class research institutions to protect their intellectual property from industrial espionage/theft,” as well as engaging “in global activities to protect U.S. interests and allies in the ‘great power’ geopolitical competition.”
It is not clear how Casey-Tyler’s proclaimed leadership of T2MC fits with Sheetal T. Patel’s widely published leadership role with the center, beginning in January 2022.
Three years later, in October 2024, Casey-Tyler both announced her retirement from the CIA and agreed to provide an “in-depth” confidential presentation on national security at McNally Capital’s annual meeting. The presentation was scheduled for Tuesday, October 22, at The Ivy Room in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, according to documents being exclusively reported by this publication.
(Casey-Tyler’s public post-retirement roles include running the Maryland-based “discreet intelligence collection” company Outrider Solutions LLC and serving as an advisor to the British cybersecurity company Iothic and as a board member of the special operations-focused nonprofit Operator Relief Fund.)
Michael Anne Casey-Tyler and McNally Capital did not respond to requests for comment regarding the October 22, 2024 annual meeting.
The next month, former CIA counterterrorism operations and special activities chief Philip Francis Reilly, as part of his work with McNally’s Orbis, led the legal formation of both the militarized aid distribution organization known as the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” and its private security and logistics partner, Safe Reach Solutions. McNally Capital subsequently confirmed its “economic interest” in Safe Reach Solutions, which United Nations aid chief Tom Fletcher described in May as part of “a fig leaf for further violence and displacement” of Palestinians.
As a condition of an amended ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, Safe Reach Solutions and the North Carolina-based private military contractor UG Solutions in late January of this year began operating a vehicle inspection checkpoint along Gaza’s Netzarim corridor, which splits southern and northern Gaza just south of Gaza City. By late May, the vehicle inspection site morphed into the Wadi Gaza location of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, known as Safe Distribution Site 4.
On Wednesday, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation confirmed that at least twenty Palestinians had been killed that morning at its Khan Younis location, known as Safe Distribution Site 3. Reuters characterized witnesses as stating that “guards at the site sprayed pepper gas at them after they had locked the gates to the centre, trapping them between the gates and the outer wire-fence,” while GHF blamed the deaths on Hamas agitation and misinformation.
Wednesday’s deaths come on top of the United Nations human rights office in Geneva recently concluding that at least 615 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid from Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites since their opening in late May.