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Vanity Fair
An Inconvenient Patriot
By David Rose
08/15/05 "Vanity Fair"
- September 2005 Issue -- -- Love of country led Sibel Edmonds to
become a translator for the F.B.I. following 9/11. But everything
changed when she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity
involving Turkish nationals. Fired after sounding the alarm, she’s now
fighting for the ideals that made her an American, and threatening some
very powerful people.
In Washington,
D.C., and its suburbs, December 2, 2001 was fine but cool, the start of
the slide into winter after a spell of unseasonable warmth. At 10
o’clock that morning, Sibel and Matthew Edmonds were still in their
pajamas, sipping coffee in the kitchen of their waterfront town house
in Alexandria, Virginia, and looking forward to a well-deserved lazy
Sunday.
Since mid-September, nine days after the 9/11 attacks, Sibel had been
exploiting her fluency in Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani as a
translator at the F.B.I. It was arduous, demanding work, and
Edmonds—who had two bachelor’s degrees, was about to begin studying for
her master’s, and had plans for a doctorate—could have been considered
overqualified. But as a naturalized Turkish-American, she saw the job
as her patriotic duty.
The Edmondses’ thoughts were turning to brunch when Matthew answered
the telephone. The caller was a woman he barely knew—Melek Can
Dickerson, who worked with Sibel at the F.B.I. “I’m in the area with my
husband and I’d love you to meet him,” Dickerson said. “Is it O.K. if
we come by?” Taken by surprise, Sibel and Matthew hurried to shower and
dress. Their guests arrived 30 minutes later. Matthew, a big man with a
fuzz of gray beard, who at 60 was nearly twice the age of his petite,
vivacious wife, showed them into the kitchen. They sat at a round,
faux-marble table while Sibel brewed tea.
Melek’s husband, Douglas, a U.S. Air Force major who had spent several
years as a military attaché in the Turkish capital of Ankara, did most
of the talking, Matthew recalls. “He was pretty outspoken, pretty
outgoing about meeting his wife in Turkey, and about his job. He was in
weapons procurement.” Like Matthew, he was older than his wife, who had
been born about a year before Sibel.
According to Sibel, Douglas asked if she and Matthew were involved with
the local Turkish community, and whether they were members of two of
its organized groups—the American-Turkish Council (A.T.C.) and the
Assembly of Turkish American Associations (A.T.A.A.). “He said the
A.T.C. was a good organization to belong to,” Matthew says. “It could
help to ensure that we could retire early and live well, which was just
what he and his wife planned to do. I said I was aware of the
organization, but I thought you had to be in a relevant business in
order to join.
“Then he pointed at Sibel and said, ‘All you have to do is tell them
who you work for and what you do and you will get in very quickly.’”
Matthew could see that his wife was far from comfortable: “She tried to
change the conversation to the weather and such-like.” But the
Dickersons, says Matthew, steered it back to what they called their
“network of high-level friends.” Some, they said, worked at the Turkish
Embassy in Washington. “They said they even went shopping weekly for
[one of them] at a Mediterranean market,” Matthew says. “They used to
take him special Turkish bread.”
Before long, the Dickersons left. At the time, Matthew says, he found
it “a strange conversation for the first time you meet a couple. Why
would someone I’d never met say such things?”
Only Sibel knew just how strange. A large part of her work at the
F.B.I. involved listening to the wiretapped conversations of people who
were the targets of counter-intelligence investigations. As she would
later tell investigators from the Justice Department’s Office of the
Inspector General (O.I.G.) and the U.S. Congress, some of those targets
were Turkish officials the Dickersons had described as high-level
friends. In Sibel’s view, the Dickersons had asked the Edmondses to
befriend F.B.I. suspects. (In August 2002, Melek Can Dickerson called
Sibel’s allegations “preposterous, ludicrous and slanderous.”)
Sibel also recalled hearing wiretaps indicating that Turkish Embassy
targets frequently spoke to staff members at the A.T.C., one of the
organizations that Turkish Embassy targets frequently spoke to staff
members at the A.T.C., one of the organizations that the Dickersons
allegedly wanted her and her husband to join. Sibel later told the
O.I.G. she assumed that the A.T.C.’s board—which is chaired by Brent
Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national-security advisor—knew
nothing of the use to which it was being put. But the wiretaps
suggested to her that the Washington office of the A.T.C. was being
used as a front for criminal activity.
Sibel and Matthew stood at the window of their oak-paneled hallway and
watched the Dickersons leave. Sibel’s Sunday has been ruined.
Immediately and in the weeks that followed, Sibel Edmonds tried to
persuade her bosses to investigate the Dickersons. There was more to
her suspicions than their peculiar Sunday visit. According to the
documents filed by Edmonds’s lawyers, Sibel believed Melek Can
Dickerson had leaked information to one or more targets of an F.B.I.
investigation, and had tried to prevent Edmonds from listening to
wiretaps of F.B.I. targets herself. But instead of carrying out a
thorough investigation of her allegations, at the end of March 2002 the
F.B.I. fired Edmonds.
Edmonds is not the first avowed national security whistle-blower to
suffer retaliation at the hands of a government bureaucracy that feels
threatened or embarrassed. But being fired is one thing. Edmonds has
also been prevented from proceeding with her court challenge or even
speaking with complete freedom about the case.
On top of the usual prohibition against disclosing classified
information, the Bush administration has smothered her case beneath the
all-encompassing blanket of the “state-secrets privilege”—a Draconian
and rarely used legal weapon that allows the government, merely by
asserting a risk to national security, to prevent the lawsuits Edmonds
has filed contesting her treatment from being heard in court at all.
According to the Department of Justice, to allow Edmonds her day in
court, even at a closed hearing attended only by personnel with full
security clearance, “could reasonably be expected to cause serious
damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United
States.”
Using the state-secrets privilege in this fashion is unusual, says
Edmonds’s attorney Ann Beeson, of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“It also begs the question: Just what in the world is the government
trying to hide?”
It may be more than another embarrassing security scandal. One
counter-intelligence official familiar with Edmonds’s case has told
Vanity Fair that the F.B.I. opened an investigation into covert
activities by Turkish nationals in the late 1990’s. That inquiry found
evidence, mainly via wiretaps, of attempts to corrupt senior American
politicians in at least two major cities—Washington and Chicago. Toward
the end of 2001, Edmonds was asked to translate some of the thousands
of calls that had been recorded by this operation, some dating back to
1997.
Edmonds has given confidential testimony inside a secure Sensitive
Compartmented Information facility on several occasions: to
congressional staffers, to investigators from the O.I.G., and to the
staff from the 9/11 commission. Sources familiar with this testimony
say that, in addition to her allegations about the Dickersons, she
reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast that they had a covert
relationship with a very senior politician indeed—Dennis Hastert,
Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House since
1999. The targets reportedly discussed giving Hastert tens of thousands
of dollars in surreptitious payments in exchange for political favors
and information. “The Dickersons,” says one official familiar with the
case, “are only the tip of the iceberg.”
It’s safe to say that Edmonds inherited her fearless obstinacy from her
father, Rasim Deniz, who died in 2000. Born in the Tabriz region of
northwestern Iran, many of whose natives speak Farsi (Persian),
Turkish, and Azerbaijani, he was one of the Middle East’s leading
reconstructive surgeons, but his forthright liberal and secular
opinions brought him into a series of conflicts with the local regimes.
One of Sibel’s earliest memories is of a search of her family’s house
in Tehran by members of SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, who were
looking for left-wing books. Later, in 1981, came a terrifying evening
after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamist revolution, when Sibel was 11.
She was waiting in the car while her father went into a restaurant for
takeout. By the time Deniz returned, his vehicle had been boxed in by
government S.U.V.’s and Sibel was surrounded by black-clad
revolutionary guards, who announced they were taking her to jail
because her headscarf was insufficiently modest.
“My father showed his ID and asked them, ‘Do you know who I am?,’”
Sibel says. “He had been doing pro bono work in the slums of south
Tehran for years, and now it was the height of the Iran-Iraq war. He
told them, ‘I have treated so many of your brothers. If you take my
daughter, next time I have one in my operating room who needs an
amputation at the wrist, I will cut his arm off at the shoulder.’ They
let me go.”
It was time to get out. As soon as he could, Deniz abandoned his
property and his post as head of the burn center at one of Tehran’s
most prestigious hospitals, and the family fled to Turkey.
When Sibel was 17, she wrote a paper for a high-school competition. Her
chosen subject was Turkey’s censorship laws, and why it was wrong to
ban books and jail dissident writers. Her principal was outraged, she
says, and asked her father to get her to write something else. Denis
refused, but the incident caused a family crisis. “My uncle was mayor
of Istanbul, and suddenly my essay was being discussed in an emergency
meeting of the whole Deniz tribe. My dad was the only one who supported
what I’d done. That was the last straw for me. I decided to take a
break and go to the United States. I came here and fell in love with a
lot of things—freedom. Now I wonder: was it just an illusion?”
Sibel enrolled at a college in Maryland, where she studied English and
hotel management; later, she received bachelor’s degrees at George
Washington University in criminal justice and psychology, and worked
with juvenile offenders. In 1992, at age 22, she had married Matthew
Edmonds, a divorced retail-technology consultant who had lived in
Virginia all his life.
For a long time, they lived an idyllic, carefree life. They bought
their house in Alexandria, and Sibel transformed it into an airy
spacious haven, with marble floors, a library, and breathtaking views
across the Potomac River to Washington. Matthew had always wanted to
visit Russia, and at Sibel’s suggestion they spent three months in St.
Petersburg, working with a children’s hospital charity run by the
cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Sibel’s family visited America often,
and she and Matthew spent their summers at a cottage they had bought in
Bodrum, Turkey, on the Aegean coast.
“People said we wouldn’t last two years,” Sibel says, “And here we
still are, nearly 13 years on. A lot of people who go through the kind
of experiences I’ve had find they put a huge strain on their marriage.
Matthew is my rock. I couldn’t have done it without him.”
In 1978, when Sibel was eight and the Islamists’ violent prelude to the
Iranian revolution was just beginning, a bomb went off in a movie
theater next to her elementary school. “I can remember sitting in the
car, seeing the rescuers pulling charred bodies and stumps out of the
fire. Then, on September 11, to see this thing happening here, across
the ocean—it brought it all back. They put out a call for translators,
and I thought, Maybe I can stop this from happening again.”
The translation department Edmonds joined was housed in a huge,
L-shaped room in the F.B.I.’s Washington field office. Some 200 to 300
translators sat in this vast, open space, listening with headphones to
digitally recorded wiretaps. The job carried heavy responsibilities.
“You are the front line,” Edmonds says. “You are the filter fro every
piece of intelligence which comes in foreign languages. It’s down to
you to decide what’s important—’pertinent,’ as the F.B.I. calls it, and
what’s not. You decide what requires verbatim translation, what can be
summarized, and what should be marked ‘not pertinent’ and left alone.
By the time this material reaches the agents and analysts, you’ve
already decided what they’re going to get.” To get this right requires
a broad background of cultural and political knowledge: “If you’re
simply a linguist, you won’t be able to discern these
differences.”
She was surprised to discover that until her arrival the F.B.I. had
employed no Turkish-language specialists at all. In early October she
was joined by a second Turkish translator, who had been hired despite
his having failed language-proficiency tests. Several weeks later, a
third Turkish speaker joined the department: Melek Can Dickerson. In
her application for the job, she wrote that she had not previously
worked in America. In fact, however, she had spent two years as an
intern at an organization that figured in many of the wiretaps—the
American-Turkish Council.
Much later, after Edmonds was fired, the F.B.I. gave briefings to the
House and Senate. One source who was present says bureau officials
admitted that Dickerson had concealed her history with the A.T.C., not
only in writing but also when interviewed as part of her background
security check. In addition, the officials conceded that Dickerson
began a friendship at the A.T.C. with one of the F.B.I.’s targets.
“They confirmed that when she was supposed to be listening to his
calls,” says one congressional source. “To me, that was like asking a
friend of a mobster to listen to him ordering hits. She might have an
allegiance problem. But they seemed not to get it…They blew off their
friendship as ‘just a social thing.’ They told us ‘They had been
colleagues at work, after all.’”
Shortly after the house visit from the Dickersons, Sibel conveyed her
version of the event to her supervisor, Mike Feghali—first orally and
then in writing. The “supervisory language specialist” responsible for
linguists working in several Middle Eastern languages, Feghali is a
Lebanese-American who had previously been an F.B.I. Arabic translator
for many years. Edmonds says he told her not to worry.
To monitor every call on every line at a large institution such as the
Turkish Embassy in Washington would not be feasible. Inevitably, the
F.B.I. listens more carefully to phones used by its targets, such as
the Dickersons’ purported friend. In the past, the assignment of lines
to each translator has always been random: Edmonds might have found
herself listening to a potentially significant conversation by a
counter-intelligence target one minute and an innocuous discussion
about some diplomatic party the next. Now, however, according to
Edmonds, Dickerson suggested changing this system, so that each Turkish
speaker would be permanently responsible for certain lines. She
produced a list of names and numbers, together with her proposals for
dividing them up. As Edmonds would later tell her F.B.I. bosses and
congressional investigators, Dickerson had assigned the
American-Turkish Council and three other “high-value” diplomatic
targets, including her friend, to herself.
Edmonds found this arrangement very questionable. But she says that
Dickerson spent a large part of that afternoon talking with Feghali
inside his office. The next day he announced in an e-mail that he had
decided to assign the Turkish wiretaps on exactly the basis recommended
by Dickerson.
Like all his translators, Edmonds was effectively working with two,
parallel lines of management: Feghali and the senior
translation-department bosses above him, on one hand, and, on the
other, the investigators and agents who actually used the material she
translated. Early in the new year, 2002, Edmonds says, she discovered
that Dennis Saccher, the F.B.I.’s special agent in charge of Turkish
counter-intelligence, had developed his own, quite separate concerns
about Dickerson.
On the morning of January 14, Sibel says, Saccher asked Edmonds to come
into his cramped cubicle on the fifth floor. On his desk were printouts
from the F.B.I. language-department database. They showed that on
numerous occasions Dickerson had marked calls involving her friend and
other counter-intelligence targets as “not pertinent,” or had submitted
only brief summaries stating that they contained nothing of interest.
Some of these calls had a duration of more than 15 minutes. Saccher
asked Edmonds why she was no longer working on these targets’
conversations. She explained the new division of labor, and went on to
tell him about the Dickersons’ visit the previous month. Saccher was
appalled, Edmonds says, telling her, “It sounds like espionage to
me.”
Saccher asked Edmonds and a colleague, Kevin Taskasen, to go back into
the F.B.I.’s digital wiretap archive and listen to some of the calls
that Dickerson had marked “not pertinent,” and to re-translate as many
as they could. Saccher suggested that they all meet with Feghali in a
conference room on Friday, February 1. First, however, Edmonds and
Taskasen should go to Saccher’s office for a short pre-meeting—to
review their findings and to discuss how to handle Feghali.
Edmonds had time to listen to numerous calls before the Friday meeting,
and some of them sounded important. According to her later secure
testimony, in one conversation, recorded shortly after Dickerson
reserved the targets’ calls for herself, a Turkish official spoke
directly to a U.S. State Department staffer. They suggested that the
State Department staffer would send a representative at an appointed
time to the American-Turkish Council office, at 1111 14th St. NW, where
he would be given $7,000 in cash. “She told us she’d heard mention of
exchanges of information, dead drops—that kind of thing,” a
congressional source says. “It was mostly money in exchange for
secrets.” (A spokesperson for the A.T.C. denies that the organization
has ever been involved in espionage or illegal payments. And a
spokesperson for the Assembly of Turkish American Associations said
that to suggest the group was involved with espionage or illegal
payments is “ridiculous.”)
Another call allegedly discussed a payment to a Pentagon official, who
seemed to be involved in weapons-procurement negotiations. Yet another
implied that Turkish groups had been installing doctoral students at
U.S. research institutions in order to acquire information about black
market nuclear weapons. In fact, much of what Edmonds reportedly heard
seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity. There was
talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of large-scale
drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the
highest bidder.
Before entering the F.B.I. building for their Friday meeting with
Saccher, Edmonds and Taskasen stood for a while on the sidewalk,
smoking cigarettes. “Afterwards, we went directly to Saccher’s office,”
Edmonds says. “We talked for a little while, and he said he’d see us
downstairs for the meeting with Feghali a few minutes later, at nine
A.M.” They were barely out of the elevator when Feghali intercepted
them. He didn’t know they had just come from Saccher’s office.
“Come on, we’re going to start the meeting,” he said. “By the way,
Dennis Saccher can’t be there, He’s been sent out somewhere in the
field.” Later, Edmonds says, she called Saccher on the internal phone.
“Why the hell did you cancel?” she asked. Bewildered, he told her that
immediately after she and Taskasen had left his office Feghali phoned
him, saying that the conference room was already in use, and that the
meeting would have to be postponed.
Edmonds says Saccher also told her that he had been ordered not to
touch the case by his own superiors, who called it a “can of worms.”
Despite his role as special agent in charge of Turkish
counter-intelligence, he had even been forbidden to obtain copies of
her translations. Saccher had two small children and a settled life in
Washington. If he dared to complain, Edmonds says, he risked being
assigned “to some fucked-up office in the land of tornadoes.”
Instead, Edmonds was ushered into the windowless office of Feghali’s
colleague, translation-department supervisor Stephanie Bryan.
Investigating possible espionage was not a task for which Bryan had
been trained or equipped.
Bryan heard Edmonds out and told her to set down her allegations in a
confidential memo. Edmonds says that Bryan approved of her writing it
at home. Edmonds gave the document to Bryan on Monday, February 11.
Early the following afternoon, the supervisor summoned Edmonds. Waiting
in a nearby office were two other people, Feghali and Melek Can
Dickerson. In front of them were Edmonds’s translations of the wiretaps
and her memo.
“Stephanie said that she’d taken my memo to the supervisory special
agent, Tom Frields,” Edmonds says. “He apparently wouldn’t even look at
it until Mike Feghali and Dickerson and seen it and been given a chance
to comment. Stephanie said that, working for the government, there were
certain things you didn’t do, and criticizing your colleagues’ work was
one of them. She told me, ‘Do you realize what this means? If you were
right, the people who did the background checks would have to be
investigated. The whole translation department could be shaken up!’
Meanwhile, I was going to be investigated for a possible security
breach—for putting classified information on my home computer. I was
told to go the security department at three P.M.”
Before Edmonds left, Dickerson had time to sidle over to her desk.
According to Edmonds, she made what sounded like a threat: “Why are you
doing this, Sibel? Why don’t you just drop it? You know there could be
serious consequences. Why put your family in Turkey in danger over
this?”
Edmonds says the F.B.I.’s response to her was beginning to shift from
indifference to outright retaliation. On February 13, the day after her
interview with the bureau security office, three agents came to her
home and seized the computer she shared with her husband. “I hadn’t had
time to back up the data, and I told them that most of my business was
on that computer, Matthew Edmonds says.
“An agent called the next morning,” Matthew says. “He told me,
‘Everything on your computer is destroyed, and we didn’t back it up.’
They were playing games. When I got the computer back, they had wiped
out everything. Four days later, I got a CD-ROM with it all backed up.”
A lifelong conservative Republican, Matthew was being shocked into
changing his worldview. I was so naïve. I mean, what do you do if you
think your colleague might be a spy? You go to the F.B.I.! I thought if
Sibel’s supervisor wasn’t fixing this problem she should go to his
superior, and so on up the chain. Someone would eventually fix it. I
was never a cynical person. I am now.”
While the agents were examining the Edmondses’ computer, Mike Feghali
was writing a memo for his own managers, stating “there was no basis”
for Sibel’s allegations. A day earlier, an F.B.I. security officer had
interviewed Dickerson. A report issued by the O.I.G. in January 2005
states, “The Security Officer did not challenge the co-worker
[Dickerson] with respect to any information the co-worker provided,
although that information was not consistent with F.B.I. records. In
addition…he did not review other crucial F.B.I. records, which would
have supported some of Edmonds’ allegations.” Instead, he treated her
claims as “performance issues,” and “seemed not to appreciate or
investigate the allegation that a co-worker may have been committing
espionage.
According to a congressional source, the fact that Edmonds was a mere
contract linguist, rather than an agent, made her claims less
palatable. “They seemed to be saying, ‘We don’t need someone like this
making trouble,’” the source says. “Yet, to her credit, she really did
go up through the chain of command: to her boss, his boss, and so
on.”
Edmonds reached the top of the language-section management on February
22, when she met with supervisory special agent Tom Frields, a
gray-haired veteran who was approaching the end of a long bureau
career. At first it seemed he was trying to set her mind at rest: “He
told me, I just want to assure you that everything is fine, and as far
as you’re concerned, your work on this matter is done,’” Edmonds says.
“I told him, ‘No, it’s not fine. My family is worried about possible
threats to their safety in Turkey.’ His face went through a
transformation. He warned me that these issues were classified at the
highest level and must not be disclosed to anyone. He started to
interrogate me: Who had I told? He said if it was anyone unauthorized
he could have me arrested.”
Edmonds’s meeting with Frields on the 22nd was probably her last chance
to save her job. The inspector general’s 2005 report disclosed,
“Immediately after the meeting, [Frields] began to explore whether the
F.B.I. had the option to cease using Edmonds as a contract
linguist.”
Four days later the bureau’s contracting unit told him, “If it was
determined that [she] was unsuitable, the F.B.I. would have sufficient
reason to terminate her contract.” Stymied by Frields, Edmonds tried to
go still higher, and on March 7 she was granted an audience with James
Caruso, the F.B.I.’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism and
counter-intelligence. Edmonds says he listened politely for more than
an hour but took no notes and asked no questions. Afterward, Matthew
picked her up and they drove to the Capital Grille for an early lunch.
It was only 11:30 and the restaurant was still empty, but as the
Edmondses began to study their menus, they saw two men in suits pull up
outside in an F.B.I.-issue S.U.V. They came inside and sat down at the
next table.
“They just sat and stared at Sibel,” Matthew says. “They took out their
cell phones, opened them, and put them on the table. They didn’t eat or
drink—just sat, staring at Sibel, the whole time we were there.”
Modified cell phones, Sibel knew, are commonly used by bureau agents as
a means of making covert recordings.
That afternoon, Sibel wrote to two official bodies with powers to
investigate the F.B.I.—the Justice Department’s internal affairs
division, known as the Office of Professional Responsibility, and its
independent watchdog, the O.IG. She went on to send faxes to the Senate
Intelligence Committee and Senators Charles Grassley, Republican from
Iowa, and Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont, both of whom sit on the
Senate Judiciary Committee, to say that she had found evidence of
possible national-security breaches.
On March 8, Sibel appeared at a dingy little office in Washington’s
China Town, where she was polygraphed. According to the 2005 inspector
general’s report, the purpose of this examination was to discover
whether she had made unauthorized disclosures of classified
information. “She was not deceptive in her answers,” the O.I.G.
reported.
Dickerson was polygraphed two weeks later, on March 21, and she too was
deemed to have passed. But, according to an official cited in the
report, the questions she was asked were vague and unspecific. “The
polygraph unit chief admitted that questions directly on point could
have been asked but were not.” Nevertheless, then and for a long time
afterward, “the FBI continued to rely on the [Dickerson] polygraph as
support for its position that Edmonds’ allegations were
unfounded.”
Dickerson’s polygraph test, however unsatisfactory, seems to have
sealed Edmonds’ fate at the FBI. The following afternoon, she was asked
to wait in Stephanie Bryan’s office. “Feghali saw me sitting there and
leaned across the doorway,” Edmonds says. “He tapped his watch and
said, ‘In less than an hour you will be fired, you whore.’” A few
minutes later, she was summoned to a meeting with Frields. They were
joined by Bryan and George Stukenbroeker, the chief of personal
security and the man in charge of investigating her case. Edmonds had
violated every security rule in the book, Stukenbroeker said.
A hulking security guard arrived to help escort her from the building.
Edmonds asked if she could return to her desk to retrieve some photos,
including shots of her late father of which she had no copies. Bryan
refused, saying, “You’ll never set foot in the FBI again.”
Bryan promised to forward them, says Edmonds, who never got the photos
back. Edmonds looked at Frields. “You are only making your wrongdoing
worse, and my case stronger. I will see you very soon,” she told him.
According to Edmonds, Frields replied, “Soon maybe, but it will be in
jail. I’ll see you in jail.” (When interviewed by the O.I.G., Frields
and another witness denied making this comment.)
Matthew was waiting outside. “I’m not a crybaby,” Sibel says. “But as I
got into my husband’s car that afternoon, I was in floods,
shaking.
As soon as she returned home from the February meeting where Dickerson
allegedly cautioned her not to endanger her family in Turkey, Sibel
called her mother and sister in Istanbul, even though it was the middle
of the night there. Sibel is the oldest of three sisters. The youngest
was studying in America and living with the Edmondses in Alexandria,
but the middle sister – whose name Edmonds wishes to protect – was
enjoying a successful career at an international travel company based
in Istanbul. The 29-year-old was also engaged to be married. Within
days of receiving Sibel’s call, she flew with her mother to
Washington.
Early in April, Sibel and Matthew were having lunch in their favorite
Thai restaurant in Old Town Alexandria – a precious chance, with their
house now fully occupied with Sibel’s family, to share a private moment
together. “My phone rang,” Sibel says. “It was my middle sister. She
said something really bad had happened and I must come back at
once.”
The sister’s Istanbul neighbor had just phoned, saying that two
policemen had knocked on her door, asking for the sister’s whereabouts.
They would not disclose the reason, saying only that it was an
“intelligence matter.” They also left a document. Sent by Tevfik Asici
of the Atakoy Branch Police Station and dated April 11, it was
addressed to Sibel’s sister and read, “For an important issue your
deposition/interrogation is required. If you do not report to the
station within 5 days, between 09:00 and 17:00, as is required by
Turkish law CMK.132, you will be taken/arrested by force.”
In July 2002, with a written recommendation from Senator Grassley,
Sibel’s sister requested political asylum in the United States. Her
application statement cited the threat allegedly made by Dickerson,
adding that Sibel would be considered “a spy and a traitor to Turkey
under Turkish law, and the Turkish police will use me to get at her.
Turkish police are known for using cruelty and torture during
interrogation; subjects are kept without advice to family members and
often disappear with no trace.” Estranged from Sibel, the sister
remains in America, unable to go home.
Edmonds did what numerous avowed whistleblowers had done before: she
appealed to congress, and she got a lawyer – David Colapinto of the
Washington firm of Kohn, Kohn and Calapinto, which advertises itself on
its Web site as specializing in cases of this kind. He filed suit under
the Freedom of Information Act for full disclosure of what happened
inside the bureau, and submitted a claim for damages for the violation
of Edmonds’s constitutional rights. By August he was ready to depose
Douglas Can Dickerson. But before their scheduled deposition, the
couple abruptly left the country. Douglas had been assigned to an
air-force job in Belgium. Virgil Magee, a U.S. Air Force spokesman in
Belgium, confirms that Dickerson remains on active duty in Europe, but
refuses to say exactly where.
That fall, Attorney General John Ashcroft tried to wipe out Edmonds’s
legal action by invoking the state secrets privilege. This recourse,
derived form English common law, has never been the subject of any
congressional vote or statute. Normally, says Ann Beeson of the
A.C.L.U., it is used be the government when it wants to resist the
legal “discovery” in court of a specific piece of evidence that it
fears might harm national security if publicized. But in Edmonds case
Ashcroft argued that the very subject of her lawsuit was a state
secret. To air her claims in front of federal judges would jeopardize
national security.
This, Beeson says, had distinct advantages for the F.B.I. and the
Department of Justice: it meant they did not have to contest the merits
of her claims. Moreover, the substance of the arguments they used to
justify this level of secrecy was and is secret itself. The full
version of Ashcroft’s declaration invoking the privilege, filed on
October 18, 2002, was classified, and in the public case for blocking
Edmonds’s action rested on the mere assertion that it would be damaging
to proceed. Later, in 2004, the law firm of Motley Rice sought to
depose her for a pending case on behalf of the families of 9/11
victims. Immediately, Ashcroft asserted the privilege again. Motley
Rice submitted a list of questions it wanted to ask Edmonds, almost all
of which were prohibited. Among them: “When and where were you born?,”
“What languages do you speak?,” and “Where did you go to school?”
Edmonds still wanted to fight, and to challenge Ashcroft in court. But
over the next few months, the relationship with her lawyers began to
suffer. “Let’s face it, taking on the D.O.J. is no joke, especially in
Washington,” Edmonds says.
It was the absolute low point. I tried to find another firm,” she says,
“but as soon as I mentioned the state-secrets privilege, it was like,
‘Turn around, go back, and by the way the clock is running at $450 an
hour.’ I must have been turned away by 20 firms.”
The Dickersons, the Justice Department, and the F.B.I. and its relevant
personnel declined to comment for this article. In August 2002, Melek
Can Dickerson told the Chicago Tribune, “both the F.B.I. and the
Department of Justice have conducted separate investigations of
[Edmonds’s] claims…. They fired her and, interestingly, they continued
my contract.”
In September 2002, Colonel James Worth of the Office of the Air Force
Inspector General said that, in response to a letter from Edmonds,
there had been a “complete and thorough review of Major [Douglas]
Dickerson’s relationship with the American-Turkish Council” that found
“no evidence of any deviation from the scope of his duties.” Edmonds
says she was not interviewed by those conducting the review.
Edmonds’ treatment by the F.B.I. seems to fit two baleful patterns: the
first is the bureau’s refusal to address potentially disastrous
internal-security flaws; the second is a general tendency among
national-security agencies to retaliate against whistle-blowers.
Amid the lush greenery of his parents’ garden in Plattsmouth, Nebraska;
former F.B.I. senior intelligence-operations specialist John Cole
describes how these institutional inclinations combined to destroy his
career. Now 44, Cole joined the F.B.I. in 1985. By the late 1990’s, he
was running undercover operations in the Washington area, focusing on
counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence. Later, while playing a key
role in the 9/11 investigation, he became the F.B.I.’s national
counter-intelligence program manager for India, Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
Early in the fall of 2001, Cole was asked to assess whether a woman who
had applied to work as a translator of Urdu, Pakistan’s national
language, might pose a risk to security. “The personnel security
officer said she thought there was something that didn’t seem right,”
Cole says. “I went through the file, and it stuck out a mile: she was
the daughter of a retired Pakistani general who had been their military
attaché in Washington.” He adds that, to his knowledge, “Every single
military attaché they’ve ever assigned has been a known intelligence
officer.”
After September 11, this association looked especially risky. The
Pakistani intelligence service had trained and supported the Taliban in
Afghanistan, and still contained elements who were far from happy with
President Pervez Musharraf’s pro-American policies. Cole gave his
findings to the security officer. “Well done,” she said. “You’ve found
it.”
A week later, she called Cole again, to say that the woman had started
work that morning with a top-secret security clearance. F.B.I. director
Robert Mueller had promised Congress that the bureau would hire lots of
new Middle Eastern linguists, and normal procedures had been
short-circuited as a result. As of July 2005, the woman was still a
bureau translator. Sibel Edmonds said she remembers her well – as the
leader of a group that pressed for separate restrooms for Muslims.
Cole says the incident was only one of several that caused him to doubt
the quality and security of the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts, and,
like Edmonds, he says he tried to fix the problems he saw by going up
the chain of command. Getting rid of an agent of his stature was a lot
more difficult than firing a contract linguist. Cole says the
retaliation began when, after years of glowing reports, his annual
appraisal found his work in one area to be “minimally acceptable.”
Next, he was placed under investigation by the Office of Professional
Responsibility, first on a charge that he lied on a routine background
check, and then, after he had disclosed classified information without
authorization. Finally, he was demoted to menial roles: “They literally
had me doing the Xeroxing” Bitterly disillusioned, he says, he resigned
in March 2004.
“According to the terms of our employment, whistle-blowing is an
obligation,” Cole says, “We sign a piece of paper every year saying we
will report any mismanagement or evidence of a possible crime. But the
management’s schtick is that if you draw attention to the bureau’s
shortcomings you’re disgracing it.
Cole is one of about 50 current and former members of the FBI, C.I.A.,
National Security Agency, and other bodies who have made contact
recently with Sibel Edmonds. Another is Mike German, one of the bravest
and most successful counterterrorism agents in the bureau’s history,
who penetrated a neo-Nazi gang in Los Angeles and a militia group in
Seattle and brought them to justice.
German made his bed of nails in 2002 when he was asked to get involved
in an investigation into a suspected cell of Islamist terrorists. “I
came down and reviewed the case, and it was a complete mess,” he says.
“There were violations of FBI policy and violations of the law. As
someone who had been through successful terrorism prosecutions, I knew
you couldn’t afford to make mistakes.”
Like Cole, German says he thought himself obliged to report what was
going wrong, not to penalize other agents but in the hope of putting it
right. “I though the bureau would do the right thing: that the case
would get back on track, and we’d get the opportunity to take action
against the bad guys involved.” Instead, he says, he faced the familiar
litany of escalating retaliation – including an internal investigation
of his own work on the terrorist cell case. “Bear in mind that only a
handful of people have ever infiltrated terrorist groups,” German says.
“You’d think that after 9/11 they might have been interested in that.
But word came back to me that I’d never get a counterterrorism case
again.” He resigned from the bureau in June 2004.
As I talked to whistle-blowers, I had the impression that those treated
the worst were among the brightest and best. There could be no clearer
example than Russ Tice, and 18-year intelligence veteran who has worked
for the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.) and American’s
eavesdroppers, the National Security Agency. “I dealt with
super-sensitive stuff,” he says. “I obviously can’t talk about it, but
I had operational roles in both Afghanistan and Iraq.”
It was at D.I.A. in the spring of 2001 that he wrote a report setting
down his suspicions about a junior collage, a Chinese-American who Tice
says was living a lavish lifestyle beyond her apparent means. Although
she was supposed to be working on a doctorate, he noticed her
repeatedly in the office, late at night, reading classified material on
an agency computer. “It’s not like I obsessed over the issue,” Tice
says. “I did my job, and then 9/11 happened, and I was a very busy
boy.”
He moved to the N.S.A. toward the end of 2002. The trigger for his
downfall the following April was the arrest of Katrina Leung; the
F.B.I. informant accused of spying for China while having an affair
with a bureau agent. It prompted Tice to send a classified e-mail to
the D.I.A. security section, commenting that the Leung case showed that
the F.B.I. was “incompetent.” The implication was that the D.I.A. could
prove it’s competence by fully investigating the junior colleague.
Tice, a big, powerful man with a forthright manner, has to pause to
control his emotions when he describes what happened as a consequence.
“I was sent for an emergency psychiatric evaluation. I took all the
computer tests and passed them with flying colors. But then the shrink
says he believes I’m unbalanced. Later he said I’m suffering from
“paranoid ideation.” He was examined by an independent psychiatrist,
who “found no evidence of mental disorder.” But he had already been
denied access to secure places at N.S.A. As a result, this highly
commended technical-espionage expert was put to work in the N.S.A.’s
motor pool, “wiping snow off cars, vacuuming them, and driving people
around. People looked at me like I had bubonic plague.” (The D.I.A. did
not respond to a request for comment, and an agency spokesperson said
the agency does not discuss personnel matters.)
After about eight months of this purgatory, apparently an attempt to
persuade him to resign, he was placed on “administrative leave.” Like
other whistle-blowers, he tried to redress his treatment. In August
2004, Tice wrote letters to members of the House and Senate. Six days
later, the N.S.A. began the formal process which would lead to his
getting fired, and to having his clearance revoked permanently. “What
happened to me was total Stalin-era tactics,” he says. “Everyone I know
or ever worked with says I’m perfectly sane. Yet I just don’t know what
to do next. I’ve been in intelligence all my life, but without a
security clearance, I can’t practice my trade.”
Echoing Cole and German, one of the congressional staffers who heard
Edmonds’s secure testimony likens the FBI to a family, “and you don’t
take your problems outside it. They think they’re the best law
enforcement agency in the world, that they’re beyond criticism and
beyond reproach.” To an outside observer that ethos alone might explain
the use of the state secrets privilege against Edmonds. But, the
staffer adds, some of the wiretaps she said she translated “mentioned
government officials.” Here may lie an entirely different dimension to
her case. Vanity Fair has established that around the time the
Dickersons visited the Edmondses, in December 2001, Joel Robertz, an
F.B.I. special agent in Chicago, contacted Sibel and asked her to
review some wiretaps. Some were several years old, others more recent;
all had been generated by a counter-intelligence that had its start in
1997. “It began in D.C.,” says an F.B.I. counter-intelligence official
who is familiar with the case file. “It became apparent that Chicago
was actually the center of what was going on.”
Its subject was explosive; what sounded like attempts to bribe elected
members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican. “There was pressure
within the bureau for a special prosecutor to be appointed and take the
case on, “the official says. Instead, his colleagues were told to alter
the thrust of their investigation – away from elected politicians and
toward appointed officials. “This is the reason why Ashcroft reacted to
Sibel in such an extreme fashion,” he says “It was to keep this from
coming out.”
In her secure testimony, Edmonds disclosed some of what she recalled
hearing. In all, says a source who was present, she managed to listen
to more than 40 of the Chicago recordings supplied by Robertz. Many
involved an F.B.I. target at the city’s large Turkish Consulate, as
well as members of the American-Turkish Consulate, as well as members
of the American-Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American
Associates.
Some of the calls reportedly contained what sounded like references to
large scale drug shipments and other crimes. To a person who knew
nothing about their context, the details were confusing and it wasn’t
always clear what might be significant. One name, however, apparently
stood out – a man the Turkish callers often referred to by the nickname
“Denny boy.” It was the Republican congressman from Illinois and
Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert. According to some of the
wiretaps, the F.B.I.’s targets had arranged for tens of thousands of
dollars to be paid to Hastert’s campaign funds in small checks. Under
Federal Election Commission rules, donations of less than $200 are not
required to be itemized in public filings.
Hastert himself was never heard in the recordings, Edmonds told
investigators, and it is possible that the claims of covert payments
were hollow boasts. Nevertheless, an examination of Hastert’s federal
filings shows that the level of un-itemized payments his campaigns
received over many years was relatively high. Between April 1996 and
December 2002, un-itemized personal donations to the Hastert for
Congress Committee amounted to $483,000. In contrast, un-itemized
contributions in the same period to the committee run on behalf of the
House majority leader, Tom Delay, Republican of Texas, were only
$99,000. An analysis of the filings of four other senior Republicans
shows that only one, Clay Shaw of Florida, declared a higher total in
un-itemized donations than Hastert over the same period: $552,000. The
other three declared far less. Energy and Commerce Committee chairman
Joe Barton, of Texas, claimed $265,000; Armed Services Committee
chairman Duncan Hunter, of California, got $212,000; and Ways and Means
Committee chairman Bill Thomas, of California, recorded $110,000.
Edmonds reportedly added that the recordings also contained repeated
references to Hastert’s flip-flop, in the fall of 2000, over an issue
which remains of intense concern to the Turkish government – the
continuing campaign to have Congress designate the killings of
Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1923 a genocide. For many years,
attempts had been made to get the house to pass a genocide resolution,
but they never got anywhere until August 2000, when Hastert, as
Speaker, announced that he would give it his backing and see that it
received a full house vote. He had a clear political reason, as
analysts noted at the time: a California Republican incumbent, locked
in a tight congressional race, was looking to win over his district’s
large Armenian community. Thanks to Hastert, the resolution, vehemently
opposed by the Turks, passed the International Relations Committee by a
large majority. Then, on October 19, minutes before the full House
vote, Hastert withdrew it.
At the time, he explained his decision by saying that he had received a
letter from President Clinton arguing that the genocide resolution, if
passed, would harm U.S. interests. Again, the reported content of the
Chicago wiretaps may well have been sheer bravado, and there is no
evidence that any payment was ever made to Hastert or his campaign.
Nevertheless, a senior official at the Turkish Consulate is said to
have claimed in one recording that the price for Hastert to withdraw
the resolution would have been at least $500,000.
Hastert’s spokesman says the congressman withdrew the genocide
resolution only because of the approach from Clinton, “and to insinuate
anything else just doesn’t make any sense.” He adds that Hastert has no
affiliation with the A.T.C. or other groups reportedly mentioned in the
wiretaps: “He does not know these organizations.” Hastert is “unaware
of Turkish interests making donations,” the spokesman says, and his
staff has “not seen any pattern of donors with foreign names.”
For more than years after Edmonds was fired, the Office of the
Inspector General’s inquiry ground on. At last, in July 2004, its
report was completed – and promptly labeled classified at the behest of
the F.B.I. It took months of further pressure before a redacted,
unclassified version was finally issued, in January 2005. It seemed to
provide stunning vindication of Edmond’s credibility.
“Many of Edmonds’ core allegations relating to the co-worker [Melek Can
Dickerson] were supported by either documentary evidence or witnesses,”
the report said. “We believe that the F.B.I. should have investigated
the allegations more thoroughly.”
The F.B.I. had justified firing Edmonds on the grounds that she had a
“disruptive effect,” the report went on. However, “this disruption
related primarily to Edmonds’ aggressive pursuit of her allegations of
misconduct, which the F.B.I. did not believe were supported and which
it did not adequately investigate. In fact, as we described throughout
our report, many of her allegations had basis in fact,” the report
read. “We believe … that the F.B.I. did not take them seriously enough,
and that her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in
the F.B.I.’s decision to terminate her services.”
Meanwhile, Edmonds had new lawyers: the A.C.L.U.’s Ann Beeson, who is
leading the challenge to the state-secrets privilege, and Mark Zaid, a
private attorney who specializes in national-security issues. Zaid has
filed a $10 million tort suit, citing the threats to Edmonds’s family,
her inability to look after her real-estate and business interests in
Turkey, and a series of articles in the Turkish press that have
vilified her.
In July 2004, a federal district court had ruled in favor of the
government’s use of the state-secrets privilege. Like Ashcroft’s
declaration, its opinion contained no specific facts. Next came a
bizarre hearing in the D.C. appeals court in April 2005. The room was
cleared of reporters while Beeson spoke for 15 minutes. Then Beeson and
Edmonds were also expelled to make way for the Department of Justice
lawyers, who addressed the judges in secret. Two weeks later, the court
rejected Edmond’s appeal, without expanding on the district court’s
opinion. At press time, she was set to file a brief with the U.S.
Supreme Court. If the court agrees to take the case, the government’s
reasons for its actions may finally be forced into the open; legal
experts say the Supreme Court has never allowed secret arguments.
A week after the April appeal hearing, Edmonds gathered more than 30
whistle-blowers from the F.B.I., C.I.A., National Security Agency,
Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies to brief staffers
from the House and Senate. Among the whistle-blowers were Daniel
Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971,
and Coleen Rowley, the F.B.I. agent from Minneapolis who complained
that Washington ignored local agents who in August 2001 had raised
concerns about a flight student named Zacharias Moussoui, who has since
admitted being an al-Qaeda terrorist.
Many of those present had unearthed apparent breaches of national
security; many aid their careers had been wrecked as a result. At a
press conference after the briefings, Congressman Edward Markey,
Democrat of Massachusetts, praised Edmonds and her colleagues as
“national heroes,” pledging that he would introduce a bill to make it a
crime for any agency manager to retaliate against such individuals.
Afterward, the whistle-blowers mingled over hors d’oeuvres and explored
their common ground and experiences. By July, they are working to
formalize their not-for-profit campaign group, the National Security
Whistleblowers Coalition. “When they took on Sibel,” says Mike German,
who is now the coalition’s congressional liaison, “they made the wrong
woman mad.”
“I’m going to keep pushing this as long as I can, but I’m not going to
get obsessional,” Edmonds says. “There are other things I want to do
with my life. But the day the Iranians tried to arrest me, my father
told me, “Sibel, you only live your life once. How do you choose to
live? According to your principles, or in fear?” I have never forgotten
those words.”
Copyright: Vanity Fair
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