The World Bank is a place where whistle-blowers are shunned, persecuted and booted-not always in that order. Consider John Kim, a top staffer in the bank's IT department, who in 2007 leaked damaging documents ... after he determined that there were no internal institutional avenues to honestly deal with wrongdoing. Sometimes you have to betray your country in order to save it," Kim says. In return bank investigators probed his phone records and e-mails, and allegedly hacked into his personal AOL account. After determining he was behind the leaks the bank put him on administrative leave for two years before firing him on Christmas Eve 2010. With nowhere to turn Kim was guided into the offices of the Washington, D.C.-based Government Accountability Project-the only game in town for public-sector leakers. [They] helped Kim file an internal case for wrongful termination (World Bank staffers have no recourse to U.S. courts) and in a landmark ruling a five-judge tribunal eventually ordered the bank to reinstate him last May. Despite the decision, the bank retired him in September after 29 years of service.