File this one under "you can't make this up." Federal prosecutors have charged an illegal alien with impersonating a CIA official, and this was more than letters on a business card. Charging documents say he built an entire fake intelligence agency and used it to recruit people, as if he were running a real station out of Langley.

The arrest came in September. The suspect has no legal status in this country. Prosecutors say he presented himself as a CIA officer and tried to recruit targets into the phony outfit. Investigators describe a fabricated agency with the trappings of legitimacy, which puts him a step above the average visa fraud guy working out of a strip mall.

The full details are laid out in the MSN report on the charges.

Impersonating a federal officer is a felony under 18 U.S.C. 912, up to three years per count. Stack the immigration violations on top and this gentleman is looking at charges that should end with him on a removal flight instead of a recruiting table. Twenty-six years in the Border Patrol and I never once saw somebody fake his way INTO federal law enforcement. Plenty tried to fake their way out of it. This is a new one.

What ought to bother people is how long a scheme like this can run before somebody catches it. A real agency has badges, paperwork, and a chain of command you can verify with a phone call. A scam agency has a smooth talker and a target who wants to believe him. That formula works on the gullible every time, and it works better when the man running it has already shown he'll break the law just to be here.

The charging documents don't say yet how many people he approached or whether anyone actually signed up for his make-believe spy shop. That number matters. One mark is a scam. A dozen is an operation.

Now he goes through the system the right way, in handcuffs, with a docket number. The count picks up one more.

Scoreboard: one fake spymaster, zero actual credentials, and a federal case that writes its own punchline.