Office of Special Counsel's War On Whistleblowers

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Case Studies

Hung Out to Dry
Joseph Darby
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Fellow soldiers at Abu Ghraib
ALLEGATION: Torture
REWARD: Death threats
UPSHOT: Still fears for his life

For weeks after turning over graphic pictures depicting the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to military investigators, Army Specialist Joseph Darby slept with a cocked pistol under his pillow, fearing what might happen if his fellow soldiers caught wind of what he'd done. His name surfaced in Seymour Hersh's April 30, 2004, New Yorker exposé on Abu Ghraib but troops in Iraq didn't notice. A week later, as Darby sat in the mess hall watching a congressional hearing about Abu Ghraib, he heard Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld publicly thank "Specialist Joseph Darby, who alerted the appropriate authorities that abuses were occurring." Darby was quickly dispatched back to the United States; upon his arrival, the Army warned him not to return to his hometown of Cumberland, Maryland, where many regarded him as a traitor. He and his wife now live in an undisclosed location. In a rare interview with 60 Minutes in December, Darby said he still fears for his safety. "I worry about the one guy who wants to get even with me," he said.

Rumsfeld "nailed [Darby] to the cross," a senior Pentagon official told me. "How can you go home and get a job selling cars in Maryland when you've just been revealed to be the guy who narc'd on all your people from Maryland who were from the same unit?" He added, "That case was completely blown. That guy's life has been ruined."

Code Talker
Russ Tice
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Defense Intelligence Agency
ALLEGATION: Agency infiltrated by spies
REWARD: Fired
UPSHOT: Went on to expose nsa domestic spying

A veteran intelligence official involved with the nation's most secretive special-access (or "black") programs, Russ Tice was subjected to emergency psychological testing, trailed by the fbi, stripped of his security clearance, and then exiled to the National Security Agency motor pool to gas up cars and chauffeur government officials—all after he reported his suspicion that a colleague at the Defense Intelligence Agency might be spying for China. It hardly seemed like a coincidence when, days after his May 2005 appearance at a press conference on Capitol Hill to advocate for stronger whistleblower protections, the nsa fired him.

Seven months later, Tice made headlines as a source for the New York Times' exposé on warrantless eavesdropping by the nsa. The Bush administration quickly launched a grand jury investigation—into the leaks, not the eavesdropping—and Tice was served with a subpoena, a move he says was meant to intimidate fellow whistleblowers. Tice insists that he didn't provide the paper with any classified material, and says he has much more information about "probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts" at the nsa and the dia. But thus far he has been prevented from sharing this information with Congress because, the nsa maintains, no one on Capitol Hill has the security clearance to hear what he has to say

Red Team Alert
Bogdan Dzakovic
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Federal Aviation Administration
ALLEGATION: Lousy airport security (pre-9/11)
REWARD: Demotion
UPSHOT: Still sidelined

Wanna know how to get a bomb onto a plane? A submachine gun? Ask Bogdan Dzakovic, who for seven years led an faa "red team" that probed airport vulnerabilities and managed to breach security 90 percent of the time. Instead of taking action, the faa attempted to whitewash Dzakovic's findings. "We were ordered not to write up our findings in some cases and not to retest airports where we found particularly egregious vulnerabilities to see if the problems had been fixed," he later told the 9/11 Commission. "Finally, the agency started providing advance notification of when we would be conducting our 'undercover' tests and what we would be checking."

After his worst fears came true on 9/11, Dzakovic filed a disclosure with the Office of Special Counsel. Overnight, he went from commanding an elite security force to "punching holes in paper and putting orientation binders together" for the Transportation Security Administration. The osc ordered the Transportation Department to investigate. In 2003, the probe substantiated Dzakovic's key concerns; four years later, Dzakovic is still hole-punching at the tsa.

Life as a State Secret
Sibel Edmonds
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: FBI
ALLEGATION: Bureau infiltrated by spy
REWARD: Fired
UPSHOT: $285,000 legal bill

Fluent in Turkish, Farsi, and Azeri, Sibel Edmonds was hired in the fbi's translation unit shortly after 9/11. Just six months later, after reporting her suspicions that her department had been infiltrated by a Turkish intelligence operation, she was abruptly fired.

The department's inspector general later found many of her allegations to be well founded and concluded that the fbi displayed "an unwarranted reluctance to vigorously investigate these serious allegations." The report offered eight recommendations for improving the fbi's translation service. None were implemented. Edmonds sued the Justice Department for unfair dismissal; former Attorney General John Ashcroft mounted an unprecedented defense, invoking the State Secrets Privilege to essentially classify any information regarding the case and even barring Edmonds and her lawyer from hearing the government's arguments to the judge. The suit was dismissed and Edmonds was left with a $285,000 legal bill. "Five years of fight, and it's like, 'Why do we even blow the whistle?'" she says. "It didn't fix the system."

Banished to the Basement
Richard Levernier
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Department of Energy
ALLEGATION: Nuclear weapons sites wide open to terror attacks
REWARD: Security clearance pulled, demoted
UPSHOT: Retired from dead-end job

Until August 2000, Richard Levernier, a 26-year Department of Energy employee, organized terrorist attacks against U.S. nuclear weapons sites—mock raids designed to expose weaknesses in the doe's security procedures. More than half the time, his pretend attacks succeeded. "The reason for this abysmal record was ingrained bureaucratic negligence to a terrifying degree," Levernier told Congress last year. Alarmed by doe's refusal to reform security procedures, in 2000 Levernier provided the media with an unclassified, but damning, report by the agency's inspector general. That got his bosses' attention—but instead of fixing the problem, they yanked Levernier's security clearance and transferred him to a windowless basement to oversee the department's foreign-travel program. Levernier took his case to the Office of Special Counsel, which eventually sided with him. But the office didn't have the power to restore his clearance, only to order doe to investigate his allegations. That report took 18 months to complete, and as Levernier noted in congressional testimony last year, it "insisted that all of the problems that I had identified had been fixed, despite the fact that there were at least a dozen reports...that said exactly the opposite." After five years of administrative purgatory, Levernier finally decided to retire last year—rather, he told Congress, "than being paid not to contribute to the national security."

Murder, He Wrote
Sandalio Gonzalez
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement
ALLEGATION: Informant implicated in multiple murders while on payroll
REWARD: Ultimatum: Leave, or be downgraded
UPSHOT: Retired, won financial settlement

By the time Sandalio Gonzalez fired off a letter to the Office of Special Counsel on June 30, 2004, he'd tried everything else. For months, the longtime dea agent, then head of the agency's El Paso field office, had been trying to jump-start an official inquiry into the "House of Death" murders, in which a paid informant for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement was implicated in a series of brutal drug-related killings in Juarez, Mexico. In one case, the informant bought the duct tape used to bind a victim, restrained him as he was immobilized, and provided quicklime to dissolve the remains. Worse, ice officials, who had the informant wear a wire and monitored his phone conversations, may have had foreknowledge of some of the killings (the code "carne asada" was frequently used to indicate an impending murder), yet refused to intervene, so intent were they on building a case against a particular high-level drug smuggler.

Gonzalez knew that blowing the whistle was unlikely to earn him friends within the agency. Years earlier, when he was the second in command of the dea's high-profile Miami field office, he had raised concerns about the suspicious disappearance of 10 kilos of cocaine from a raid, and for his trouble he had been transferred to the agency's much smaller field office in El Paso. This time, the agency had confronted him with an ultimatum: Retire quietly, or accept a downgrade on a crucial performance review.

Nevertheless, Gonzalez went ahead and alerted the osc. Days later, the whistleblower agency informed him that it "receives a large number of matters concerning disclosures of information" and that "cases are generally processed in the order in which they are received." Facing the end of a 32-year career in law enforcement, he wrote back again in September, this time filing a whistleblower reprisal complaint. When asked to describe the nature of his original disclosure, he wrote in neat capital letters: "MURDER."

By November, Gonzalez had received his response: The case was being closed without investigation. Two months later he retired from the dea, after 26 years of service.

Unlike many whistleblowers, Gonzalez did get a taste of vindication: He won an undisclosed financial settlement from the dea when he filed a retaliation suit in connection with the "House of Death" case; then, last December, a federal jury found that his transfer had also been an act of retaliation and awarded him $85,000. Now 56, Gonzalez lives near Miami and works for a defense contractor. Despite his settlement, he remains bitter. "This stuff consumes you," he says. "The whole thing is so unfair. And then you come to the realization that your government is a farce. That's what really hits you. I have no confidence in this government whatsoever, because I've seen it from the inside."

Beyond a "joint assessment" by the dea and ice, whose final report still has not been made public, the "House of Death" murders have never been investigated. Nor has Congress responded to Gonzalez's entreaties for a congressional inquiry.

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Illustration by: Steve Brodner

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