Gaza checkpoint shell company outs itself as led by former CIA paramilitary chief
Or, how access journalism is used by the U.S. intelligence community to divert narratives away from their covert activity.
Last updated January 27, 2025 at 9:38 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
The shell company credited by Axios with having “drafted the operational plan” for a newly opened vehicle inspection checkpoint along the Netzarim corridor in Gaza, Safe Reach Solutions, is led by the former head of the CIA’s paramilitary arm, then known as the Special Activities Division but renamed to the Special Activities Center circa 2015. The checkpoint was scheduled to let passengers through on Saturday but was delayed until roughly 9 a.m. Monday morning due to a temporary breakdown in negotiations, as reported by The Guardian.
In addition to his role leading Safe Reach Solutions, Mr. Philip F. Reilly was also the CIA’s Afghanistan station chief circa 2008 to 2009, as well as chief of operations of the agency’s Counterterrorism Mission Center, which led the agency’s highly controversial drone strike program during the Global War on Terror.
According to the closing statement of a story planted in The Washington Post yesterday evening in response to a pair of investigations from this publication into the paramilitary ties of the two American companies running the checkpoint, Mr. Reilly is simply “a former CIA senior intelligence officer with extensive overseas service.”
Mr. Reilly was also previously senior vice president of special activities of the private military contractor Constellis, the owner of the company formerly known as Blackwater, which became publicly equated with American mercenaries thanks to a series of investigations spearheaded by journalist Jeremy Scahill. (The Constellis-partnered Global Delivery Company (GDC), which includes former senior Israeli military intelligence officials in its management, has proposed deploying mercenaries into Gaza.)
More recently, this publication exposed several accidentally published data brokerage agreements between the Orbis Discovery product of the private intelligence firm Orbis Operations — a company Mr. Reilly joined as senior vice president by January 2020 — and surveillance companies such as the commercial cellphone location tracking firm Anomaly Six, the covert human intelligence collection platform Premise Data, and the social media monitoring firm Fivecast, whose license agreement involved the creation of ‘sockpuppet’ accounts. After publication of the investigation, Orbis had the Wayback Machine, the de facto standard nonprofit archive of webpages, retroactively delete all copies of their license agreements webpage and exclude any future caches.
Mr. Reilly was also listed as a board member of the social media surveillance firm Circinus in 2016. The company was purchased by the convicted undeclared foreign agent and President Trump-associate Elliott B. Broidy roughly two years prior and, according to reporting by The New York Times in 2018, signed contracts with the government of the United Arab Emirates “worth several hundred million dollars.”
Prior to joining the paramilitary arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. Reilly was a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces, which was originally formed in 1952 as a post-World War II guerrilla warfare unit and, like the Special Activities Center, traces its lineage to the behind-the-lines operations of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Reilly specifically served as a non-commissioned officer with the 7th Special Forces Group in the early 1980s, which came to focus on counter-narcotics missions in Latin America. (According to Mr. Reilly’s LinkedIn profile, he transitioned to the CIA immediately after serving in the Green Berets from August 1982 to August 1985.)
As part of its mission in the area of operations defined by U.S. Southern Command, 7th Group is the U.S. Army’s go-to unit for special operations in Nicaragua, where the founder of fellow American checkpoint contractor UG Solutions, Jameson Govoni, noted that he operated “undercover” as part of counter-sex trafficking operations. Mr. Govoni publicly disclosed his time in 7th Group through a press release published under an anonymous byline by “US Reporter,” a content mill owned by Matrix Global LLC which excludes its website from the Wayback Machine. The nominal publication date was September 12, 2023.
A spokesperson who phoned the author at 10:36 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Friday spent the majority of a more than 90 minute discussion attempting to pursuade this publication to stop digging into who was running the Safe Reach Solutions shell company: “I'm not trying to run you off a story, you can do whatever you want. Someone else is going to break that one,” the spokesperson continued, in an apparent reference to their process of burying the detail into a story at The Washington Post. “The next story to write if I'm you, is a piece about the humanitarian [aid] and hostages.”
A far more transparent American conflict zone contractor, Fogbow, is similarly run by Michael P. “Mick” Mulroy, who left his role as chief of department in the CIA’s Special Activities Center circa November 2017 to become U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.
After initially feigning ignorance as to the existence of Fogbow, the UG Solutions spokesperson pivoted to harshly criticizing the company, arguing that they produced useful papers but lacked the manpower to actually operate a checkpoint, stating: “Mike’s a nice enough guy, super smart, but call that guy up [and ask] ‘Hey man, how many people work for you that you could get on an airplane today?’ Just wait and see if he answers.”
The UG Solutions spokesperson was then reminded that they too had refused to answer how large their staff was, or roughly how many of their people were being deployed to man the Gaza checkpoint.
Update, January 27, 2025, at 9:38 a.m.: A note was added on vehicles finally being allowed through the Netzarim corridor.
Update, January 26, 2025, at 12:25 p.m. Eastern Standard Time: Because the Wayback Machine retroactively deleted the author’s previous cache of Orbis Operations’ surveillance data brokerage agreements after they were cited in an investigation, the author’s full direct cache of the page is being included here directly.
