A FOX TALKING HEAD’S ROAD TO NOWHERE
For over a decade, Wayne Simmons appeared on Fox News as a counterterrorism expert. He claimed to have spent 27 years as a covert operative for the CIA, leading high-stakes missions all over the globe: fighting narcoterrorists in South America; surveilling Persian defectors in the suburbs of Prince George’s County, Maryland; interrogating bad guys at Agency black sites. But when Simmons’s former mistress accused him of stealing her life savings, the FBI started digging and uncovered an incredible truth: Wayne Simmons was an impostor.
In 2016, The New York Times Magazine published “The Plot to Take Down a Fox News Analyst,” an investigation by Feature Well co-founder Alex French. The piece exposed how Simmons—armed with no more than a fake résumé, post-9/11 bluster, and a military haircut—conned his way into right-wing media. And from there, he used his bogus credentials and his primetime fame to cozy up with DC elites and score lucrative defense contracts. Simmons was later convicted of fraud and sentenced to 33 months in prison.
The story didn’t stop there. Shortly after publication, Alex was approached about adapting the article into a podcast. Gretta Cohn and Transmitter Media took the lead, pairing Alex with Lacy Jane Roberts and Shoshi Shmuluvitz—a murderer’s row of reporting and storytelling talent. With the case no longer in court, the trio convinced key players to open up. They uncovered a shadowy cabal of retired military officials with hawkish foreign policy goals who fueled Simmons’s ascent. They also discovered what Simmons had been up to for all of those years while he claimed to be doing the Agency’s dirty work.
The result was the hit podcast The Commander, Season 1 of Spotify’s "Imposters" series, which was released in 2021. For Alex, it was a career milestone: his first story to be developed as IP, his first foray into podcasting, and the start of creative partnerships with some of the best in the business. Today, Greta leads audio at Pushkin Industries, Shoshi is the Managing Producer at Campside Media, and Lacy produces ambitious hit series, such as The Big Dig, which won a Peabody in 2024.
“It was a serious piece of reporting on a serious topic,” Alex says. “My collaborations first with the New York Times and later with Greta, Shoshi, and Lacy showed me how far it was possible to push a story. They taught me lessons about storytelling and teamwork that are front and center every day at Feature Well.”
Read the original piece HERE.
Listen to the podcast HERE.
