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A collage featuring Rear Adm. Robert Gilbeau, Navy paperwork, and the Navy seal

As a commanding officer in Afghanistan, Rear Adm. Robert Gilbeau led a joint logistics unit in the war zone. But after federal authorities announced the arrest of two Navy officials in California on bribery charges in 2013, the admiral grew paranoid, hoarding junk in his office and mumbling incoherently about his escapades with<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2016/05/27/the-man-who-seduced-the-7th-fleet/" target=_blank> a defense contractor known as “Fat Leonard.”</a>

Aides to Gilbeau, then 52, complained that he stayed up all night in his quarters in Kabul binge-watching episodes of “Californication,” a show about a brooding novelist addicted to sex and booze. The staffers didn’t know what to do. They had never seen a senior officer go to pieces like this.

One day, Gilbeau whispered conspiratorially to his chief of staff, Navy Capt. Jack Moreau, that he was on a secret mission as an undercover operative for the CIA. “And I’m like, okay, you’re in crazytown,” Moreau recalled in an interview with federal agents.

This story is adapted from a chapter of the forthcoming book <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fat-Leonard/Craig-Whitlock/9781982131630" target=_blank>“Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy,”</a> by Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock. The book will be published May 14 by Simon &amp; Schuster.

On Nov. 7, 2013, Moreau organized an intervention. He entered Gilbeau’s cluttered office and begged him to hand over his sidearm before anyone got hurt. Gilbeau stared back blankly, and after a long pause surrendered his pistol. Moreau said that he and a few colleagues urged the admiral to get psychiatric help. Gilbeau broke down sobbing. He said he couldn’t sleep and conceded he might be a danger to himself.

Medics flew Gilbeau by helicopter from Kabul to the hospital at Bagram Air Base, where he told doctors that long-repressed memories from a deployment to Iraq six years earlier had resurfaced to torment him, documents show. The doctors diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder, hooked him to an intravenous drip, and put him on the next flight to a U.S. military hospital in Germany.

Several of Gilbeau’s subordinates, however, told investigators that they suspected he was faking the whole thing. He had a long-standing reputation as a manipulator who spun fanciful stories to avoid getting in trouble. He also had received a Purple Heart medal for combat wounds suffered in Iraq in 2007, but in his retellings, the story often changed. Sometimes he said he had sustained a traumatic brain injury. Other times, it was shrapnel in his leg or in his lungs.

Lenny Ignelzi

Gilbeau’s staffers noted his mental health had seemed fine until September 2013, when news reached Kabul that Fat Leonard — a 350-pound Malaysian defense contractor named Leonard Glenn Francis — had been arrested in an international sting operation in San Diego along with two Navy officials on bribery charges. Pretending to be crazy so he could avoid being tarred by the scandal was just the kind of stunt they thought Gilbeau might try to pull.

This account of Gilbeau’s behavior in Afghanistan, based on thousands of pages of confidential law-enforcement documents, is among multiple revelations in <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fat-Leonard/Craig-Whitlock/9781982131630" target=_blank>a new book examining the most extensive scandal in U.S. military history</a> — in which an admitted con artist corrupted Navy officers with extravagant meals and prostitutes while he gouged the U.S. government for food, fuel, tugboats and port security.

A charismatic maritime tycoon, Francis and his company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, resupplied U.S. Navy ships in Pacific ports and held federal contracts worth $200 million. But the law-enforcement files shed new light on the depravity of the corruption and the unparalleled reach of the decade-long federal investigation into Francis and the Navy. The records show that 91 admirals — dozens more than previously reported — were investigated or questioned. All told, nearly 1,000 people came under scrutiny.

Francis is expected to be sentenced by a federal judge this summer, nine years after he pleaded guilty to fraud and bribery charges.

The documents also detail how Francis spent more than 500 hours in secret debriefings with federal agents to provide evidence against hundreds of Navy officials. Over seven years, he supplied an avalanche of incriminating material — photographs, emails, receipts, even thank-you notes — to back up his accounts of how he bribed Navy personnel with prostitutes, Dom Pérignon champagne, Cuban cigars, five-star hotel suites and envelopes of cash.

Obtained by The Washington Post

Yet by the time the federal investigation reached a conclusion, few high-ranking figures were held accountable for their actions. The Justice Department brought criminal charges against 29 Navy officials, but Gilbeau was the only admiral to spend time behind bars.

The investigative files tell the inside story of how Francis wooed Gilbeau, who became the only Navy admiral in history to be found guilty of committing a federal crime while on active-duty. The files also reveal that an internal review later discredited Gilbeau’s Purple Heart medal but that the Navy kept the embarrassing findings a secret.

In an interview, Gilbeau publicly offered his version of key events for the first time. He denied faking his mental breakdown in Afghanistan, saying that he still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and mild traumatic brain injury. “It was not an act,” he said. He also defended his Purple Heart medal as “legitimate.”

A senior Navy spokesman declined to comment on Gilbeau’s case or answer questions about the service’s response to other aspects of the scandal.

A native of Fremont, Calif., Gilbeau’s military career had once seemed full of promise. As he told a federal judge, he grew up in a family with “a strong moral compass,” became an Eagle Scout and won a senatorial nomination to attend the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

After graduation, he joined the Navy’s Supply Corps and impressed his shipmates with his keen intellect but also became known for his irreverent high jinks and willingness to flout regulations. He traveled on the government’s dime to questionable destinations, racked up dubious expenses, and partied a lot. Some officers nicknamed him “Gilbeau the Clown.”

“Bob is just, he’s always kind of living on the edge,” David Pimpo, another admiral in the Supply Corps, told federal agents. “He’s always kind of out there and having a good time and I know sometimes I just scratch my head.”

Jim Maus, a retired Navy captain and mentor, thought Gilbeau was “brilliant” but craved unnecessary risks. “He loved pressure. He loved anxiety,” Maus said in an interview. “It was his adrenaline rush. He was like a fly near a flame. It’s what turned him on.”

Such traits made Gilbeau a perfect companion for Francis, a charismatic maritime tycoon whose Singapore-based company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, had resupplied Navy ships in Pacific ports for a quarter century. Francis perfected <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/contractor-bilked-navy-in-excess-of-20million-prosecutors-say-in-court-filing/2013/12/04/b3f0f86a-56b2-11e3-835d-e7173847c7cc_story.html" target=_blank>a wildly successful but fraudulent business model:</a> He lavished Navy officers with meals, booze and prostitutes so they would look the other way while he overcharged the U.S. government millions of dollars for food, fuel, tugboats and port security.

Francis met Gilbeau during a 1997 visit by the USS Boxer to Bali, Indonesia and later told federal agents that he found him “wild” and entertaining. Even better, he said that Gilbeau was the kind of supply officer who “would sign anything” during a port call if he received a share of the spoils.

In 2003, Francis said he persuaded Gilbeau to buy $200,000 worth of flat-screen televisions for the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz that were marked up in price by 40 to 50 percent. Glenn Defense further gouged the Nimitz during a port visit to Singapore by falsely claiming it had pumped 450,000 gallons of wastewater from the ship, more than twice the usual amount.

According to Francis, Gilbeau agreed to pay the fraudulent wastewater invoice in exchange for a $40,000 cash bribe and two prostitutes. “He doubled it up just so that he could get a kickback from me and get laid, of course,” Francis <a href="https://fatleonardpodcast.com/" target=_blank>recalled in a podcast</a>.

Jo Adail Stephenson

In an interview for this story, Gilbeau said the captain of the Nimitz told him to buy the televisions and that it was “all above board.” He confirmed that he approved the wastewater bill but said he didn’t realize it was inflated and denied taking the $40,000 in cash. “I never accepted a bribe from Leonard Francis,” he said.

After an earthquake devastated Southeast Asia in 2004, Gilbeau deployed to Singapore to lead a disaster-relief team for several months. With his family living far away in California, he heartily accepted Francis’s dinner invitations. Francis said they also partied with prostitutes at karaoke bars.

During that time, according to an account that Francis provided to federal agents, Gilbeau became enamored of a European woman living in Singapore. To enhance his allure, the pudgy-faced, middle-aged supply officer invented a cover story that he was an F/A-18 Hornet fighter pilot and persuaded Francis to lend him his green Jaguar for a romantic night out. The gambit worked and the woman fell for him, Francis said.

After a while, according to Francis, Gilbeau tired of the relationship but didn’t have the spine to end it himself. Instead, he had a Navy friend email the woman with the tragic news that her pilot boyfriend had been shot down over Iraq and captured as a prisoner of war. Francis thought the saga was hilarious and began calling his buddy “Crazy Bob.”

In an interview, Gilbeau said the story was “not true.” He acknowledged that he was friends with the woman and stayed at her home to babysit her children, but added, “I wouldn’t come close to classifying it as dating.”

For a decade, whenever Gilbeau passed through Singapore, Francis was happy to entertain him. But their final meeting ended awkwardly.

Over dinner at Singapore’s Grand Hyatt hotel in September 2012, Francis revealed that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) was investigating Glenn Defense for suspected fraud. But the 47-year-old contracting kingpin boasted that he had moles inside the Navy who “let me know what’s going on.”

Gilbeau stayed quiet. The talk of NCIS spooked him, he said in an interview. He needed to cover his tracks.

A few weeks later, he submitted a “Foreign Contact Questionnaire” to NCIS. Service members were supposed to fill out the counterintelligence form if they had an unofficial, prolonged encounter with a foreigner. Most sailors saw the requirement as a hassle and often ignored it.

But Gilbeau took the initiative to disclose his dinner with Francis — under “physical description,” he typed “very large Malaysian man.” He reported that they had been friends for years and this time Francis said something NCIS might want to know: that he had an informant on the Navy’s logistics staff who leaked him confidential information.

That much was true. But as Gilbeau later admitted in court, he lied on another part of the form by declaring that he had never accepted gifts from Francis and that they split their dinner bill “50/50 as always.”

The scheme was clever. By preemptively disclosing his relationship with Francis, Gilbeau made a show of obeying the rules while simultaneously protecting himself in case NCIS dug into his past.

Six months after he saw Francis for the last time, Gilbeau arrived in Afghanistan in 2013 to take command of a logistics unit.

The admiral was hard to work for. Staffers later described him to federal agents as a “pathological liar” with a “God complex” who thought “laws don’t apply to him,” documents show.

Heather Failla, a civilian who had known Gilbeau for three years, called him a “passive-aggressive” leader with “controlling behavior” whose primary missions were self-enjoyment and self-promotion. “It was all about making himself look good,” she wrote in a statement to investigators. Instead of tending to his duties in Kabul, he traveled around Afghanistan to shop for gemstones and carpets.

After news spread of Francis’s arrest, however, Gilbeau’s oddball behavior reached new heights, according to his staff. He destroyed documents, deleted computer files, and bought a burner phone. He talked about having visions of severed heads and “little blue men in little blue suits” doing construction projects in his bathroom, he acknowledged in an interview.

By the time he told Capt. Moreau that he was a secret agent for the CIA, his chief of staff couldn’t tell whether he had truly lost touch with reality or was pretending to appear insane.

“Maybe he is in the freaking CIA, I don’t know. I don’t freaking care,” Moreau recalled thinking when he was interviewed by federal agents. “If you’re in the freaking CIA, all right, good on you man.” He added: “I knew he was an idiot. I knew he was a freaking idiot. But I didn’t know what he was doing, why he was doing it.”

Other staffers warned Moreau not to fall for the bonkers act, suspecting Gilbeau was creating a smokescreen to avoid culpability for his history with Fat Leonard.

In an interview, Gilbeau said he was genuinely suicidal at the time and wanted to die on the field of battle. “I was getting concerned that, hey, I’m not getting killed in action, if that makes any sense,” he said. “I mean, it’s not logical, right? I understand that to a sane person, that’s not logical.”

Regarding his purported work for the CIA, he said: “I had a relationship with agencies that was highly classified. That’s the only thing I was allowed to say.”

Two days after his evacuation from Afghanistan in November 2013, Gilbeau was relaxing in a massage chair at the USO Warrior Center, adjacent to the U.S. military’s medical center in Landstuhl, Germany.

Two agents from the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) — a Pentagon law-enforcement agency — had been surveilling him since lunch. They walked up to him in the recliner, introduced themselves and asked whether he was okay.

“I don’t think I’m okay,” Gilbeau replied, chuckling nervously. “Something is wrong with my brain.”

DCIS and NCIS had been investigating Gilbeau from a distance for the past three weeks. Shortly after Francis’s arrest, the defense contractor met with federal agents and prosecutors in San Diego to discuss a possible plea bargain in exchange for his cooperation. During several confidential sessions, Francis spilled the names of 11 admirals he alleged he had bribed, including Gilbeau.

In Germany, the two DCIS agents, Victor Sanguanboon and Tim Robertson, escorted Gilbeau into a conference room and read him his legal rights. They didn’t tell him they were recording the interview.

“We’ll cut to the chase,” Sanguanboon said, according to a transcript. “We know that you have a relationship with Leonard Francis.”

Gilbeau apologized for his foggy mental state but agreed to talk.

“Forgive me because I took one of my anti-anxiety drugs here a little while ago. So it makes my brain go slow, but that’s probably good,” he said. “For lack of a better term, I said I went crazy, but they said it’s PTSD.”

He admitted Francis was a friend but added, “I didn’t really trust Leonard Francis, if that makes sense.” He reassured the agents that he paid for his half of the tab whenever they had dinner and had filed a Foreign Contact Questionnaire.

The agents let Gilbeau ramble before telling him they suspected he was putting on a show.

“You have some issues with the PTSD going on right now,” Sanguanboon said sarcastically. “I want to venture to guess that a lot of this pressure comes [from] an association with Francis.”

Gilbeau acknowledged that news about the Glenn Defense case had been “causing me anxiety.”

“I have holes in my recollection right now,” he said. “My brain is getting that knob feeling again. . . . I’ve had it all morning, and I’m going to take another lorazepam and lie down.”

Sanguanboon told the admiral that instead of popping another pill, he’d feel better if he unburdened himself. The agents pressed him to name Navy officers whom Francis had bribed with prostitutes.

“Unfortunately, I can’t even remember the name of my doctor right now,” Gilbeau replied.

“Okay, well, what about you?” Sanguanboon asked. Had he slept with any prostitutes?

Gilbeau hesitated. He said he was uncomfortable talking about it but for a different reason than the agents might expect.

“So here is my personal problem and I would like this to stay as personal and private as possible,” the admiral explained. “I have a pretty significant case of erectile dysfunction, so it would be a pretty big waste of money if I were to buy a prostitute.”

It was exactly the kind of story that inspired Francis to dub him “Crazy Bob.” But it didn’t stop there.

Gilbeau acknowledged that Francis had “arranged” for two “Thai ladies” to give him a massage a year earlier in Singapore. But he insisted it was not sexual and that he paid for the rubdown himself.

He also said he drank too much while singing karaoke with the Thai masseuses and caught a stomach bug, which put a further damper on the evening.

“This will be embarrassing if people read this, but I then remember something about bad diarrhea. I think I had bad diarrhea or something, and I just was like, ‘Oh my God, I really need to lie down.’ ” he said.

The interview dragged on for five surreal hours. Whenever the agents tried to nail Gilbeau with a hard question, his memory grew fuzzy.

“Would you mind if I went and got one of my pills?” he asked. “It’s just that I get these hallucinations.”

“I’m having difficulty realizing what is reality and what is truth and what isn’t,” he added. “The docs evidently say it’s PTSD, it’s not craziness. I think it’s craziness but that’s been going on for a long time.”

The agents ended the interrogation when Gilbeau said he was starting to feel “very paranoid.”

“There is no one out here to get you,” Sanguanboon said. “I hope you feel safe here with us because we’re not out to do anything bad.”

“I feel — I feel very safe here and the medicine is helping me,” Gilbeau replied.

As the interview wound down, the admiral mentioned again that he had been wounded in Iraq years before and his doctors believed that caused his PTSD.

“They think that’s the root of all this bullshit,” he said wearily. “So anyways, that’s my little wah-wah-wah.”

As investigators kept digging, they heard from several witnesses who conveyed serious doubts about his PTSD diagnosis and his Purple Heart.

Agents interviewed veterans who had served with Gilbeau in Iraq when he was wounded on Thanksgiving 2007 in the heavily guarded Green Zone in Baghdad.

Shortly before dinner, sirens warned of a mortar attack by insurgents. Troops took shelter but after the all-clear was given, Gilbeau couldn’t be found.

Spc. Sara Wakai

His unit was about to launch a search when he showed up, limping. He said he had been caught outside during the shelling, saw a servicemember in distress and dragged him to a bunker. While performing the rescue, however, Gilbeau said metal shrapnel struck him in the knee.

Three officers who were present when Gilbeau re-emerged told investigators his story didn’t add up. For starters, nobody could find the person he had supposedly rescued. Gilbeau’s right pants leg was badly torn, but there were no visible injuries — all they could see was a light scratch below his knee that wasn’t bleeding.

Navy Cmdr. Kenneth Broomer said the consensus in the unit was that Gilbeau’s story was dubious. Broomer, who admitted to federal agents that he disliked Gilbeau and thought he was the “worst” naval officer he had ever worked with, said he suspected Gilbeau had ripped his pants and inflicted the scratch intentionally.

Federal agents tracked down Gilbeau’s medical records, which showed he had sought treatment after the mortar attack for ringing in his ears. According to the records, he sustained a scratch on his right knee that “does not ooze, does not bleed and is not swollen.” A medic applied a Band-Aid.

Investigators determined that the paperwork for his Purple Heart was also suspicious. Navy officials at the Pentagon conducted a review and concluded in a memo that “there are several administrative errors in the award entry that call into question its authenticity.” Among other issues, the serial number and awarding authority appeared to have been falsified.

If the findings had been made public, they would have given the Navy another black eye on top of the avalanche of humiliating news coverage about the Fat Leonard scandal. The review of Gilbeau’s Purple Heart remained secret, and he was allowed to keep the award.

In an interview, Gilbeau said he was never told about the review. He acknowledged that the leg wound he sustained in Iraq “was not that serious.” He said his commanding officer, a two-star general, had to prod him to seek medical treatment and recommended that he receive the Purple Heart over his objections.

In a follow-up email, he defended the award as “legitimate” and said he had surgery several months after the mortar attack to remove a small piece of shrapnel from his leg that was 1.1 centimeters long, about the size of the metal tip on a ballpoint pen.

After his medical evacuation from Afghanistan in 2013, the criminal inquiry into Gilbeau progressed slowly while he received treatment for post-traumatic stress. In 2015, however, a Navy Physical Evaluation Board determined that Gilbeau was medically fit to continue service. The board concluded his symptoms were “situationally driven” and “temporally correlated to anxiety over his legal situation.”

As part of a deal with prosecutors, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/navy-admiral-to-plead-guilty-in-fat-leonard-corruption-scandal/2016/06/09/6955e5ec-2e4e-11e6-9de3-6e6e7a14000c_story.html" target=_blank>Gilbeau pleaded guilty in 2016 </a>to lying to federal officials about his relationship with Francis. But he continued to insist he was unwell.

He submitted medical reports to the court showing he was suffering from traumatic brain injury, shrapnel in his knee, crushed discs in his spine, “major depressive disorder . . . with psychotic features,” chronic post-traumatic stress, “residual paranoia,” loss of hearing and “survivor guilt.”

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy

Duke University, AB in history

Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter who covers national security. He is the author of "Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy," (Simon & Schuster, May 2024), and the #1 NYT bestselling book, "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War" (Simon & Schuster, 2021). He joined The Post in 1998.

Craig Whitlock

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The Navy admiral who had a mental breakdown over ‘Fat Leonard’

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Washington Post illustration; Conga Line image obtained by The Washington Post; Jo AdailStephenson/Defense Department photo; iStock

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