Texas A&M official faked SEAL background - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Texas A&M official faked SEAL background

A university administrator in Texas who resigned his post in June after falsely claiming he had earned a prestigious doctorate degree had made another eye-raising claim: He was a Navy SEAL.

But an investigation by a central Texas newspaper found that Alexander Kemos had never served in the military.

Kemos joined Texas A&M University last year, taking the job as associate executive vice president for operations before moving up to senior vice president for administration. But in mid-June, The Eagle, a newspaper serving Bryan-College Station, Texas, began to question his résumé. Kemos soon resigned from the university’s No. 3 post, a job that paid $300,000 a year.

The newspaper reported that Kemos wrote on his curriculum vitae that he graduated with Class 93 of the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL course and served as a platoon leader and operations officer with SEAL Team 2 from January 1982 to May 1987. He claimed deployments to the Middle East and North Africa, including service with the U.N. force in Lebanon in 1984.

Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, Calif., got a call from the newspaper asking about Kemos’ SEAL background and sent the command a copy of his résumé. But a check of its database found no one named Kemos, said Cmdr. Greg Geisen, a command spokesman.

“His name is not in the database. He never attended BUD/S,” Geisen said, noting that Kemos also wasn’t old enough to be a UDT graduate.

Geisen said his office typically gets several calls each week to confirm someone’s claim about being a SEAL. About 95 percent of requests “are not in the database,” he said, but what happens to those individuals is up to the U.S. attorneys’ offices.

“It may or may not be looked at, and that is kind of the frustrating part for us in the military,” Geisen said. “It really infuriates us who’ve served.”

Kemos reportedly was sought out by A&M students who were thinking about joining the Navy and becoming SEALs, the newspaper reported.

It’s not clear whether he will be charged with a federal crime and prosecuted for violating the Stolen Valor Act, which targets individuals who falsely claim military service or awards.