AN
INCOVENIENT PATRIOT
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.
By David
Rose
Vanity Fair
September 2005 [Page 264-282]
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 for 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 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."
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