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  • An Incovenient Patriot

    AN INCOVENIENT PATRIOT
    By David Rose

    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 attache 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 attache in Washington." He adds that, to his knowledge,
    "Every single military attache 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."

    http://www.majority.com/news/davidrose.htm

    --Boundary_(ID_Ln/YiTYPgwI+JGmyqreqeA)--
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