Bravehearts Page 9

  Which is what a free and independent press is supposed to do. The press’s responsibility within America’s constitutional system is to inform the public and cast a probing eye on what the government of the day is doing, even when—especially when—that government may not appreciate it.

  “It’s Ruined My Life”

  Interviewing the whistle-blowers I met through the Vanity Fair exposé and other journalistic investigations has given me some insights into what makes whistle-blowers tick. Whistle-blowers come in various personality types, but virtually all of them are compelled by a powerful sense of individual responsibility. They often see life as a series of moral choices, and their consciences will not allow them to cut corners, despite the evident risks. Thus Snowden, Wigand, and numerous other whistle-blowers reject descriptions of them as heroes, insisting that they are ordinary people who simply had a responsibility and fulfilled it.

  “I have values that just won’t let me participate in illegal things,” one whistle-blower at the federal General Services Administration told GAP’s Devine. “There is nothing extraordinary about me at all. I’m no hero. But you’ve got to live with yourself. If I didn’t [speak out], how could I live with that face in the mirror every morning?”

  “There are different kinds of whistle-blowers,” said Edwards of GAP. “There is the zealot, who is the trickiest to handle but also pretty rare. There are the accidental ones who don’t know they blew the whistle; they just know that everything went to hell all of a sudden. There’s the kind who goes along with wrongdoing and tries to ignore it, but then realizes they can’t stomach it and have to speak out. And there are the straight arrow types who say, ‘I was just doing my job.’ They’re often law enforcement types.”

  Thomas Drake plainly belonged in the straight arrow category, as did Rich Levernier, the guy whose mock-terrorist squads made a dark joke of security protections at Los Alamos. Levernier emphasized in our interviews that he was a decidedly involuntary whistle-blower. A twenty-two-year veteran of the Department of Energy who had previously served nine years as an Army intelligence officer, he was by his own admission not someone who usually questioned authority. Working through the established bureaucratic channels, he tried for years to get his superiors at DOE to address the shortcomings that his war games had identified. But most of those superiors, he said, declined to acknowledge that the problems even existed, much less needed fixing.

  Also like Drake, Levernier was a by-the-book kind of guy with a serious if not stern demeanor. He related his story to me poker-faced, in an urgent monotone. Devine said it took six months of working together before he got Levernier to crack a smile. “Rich reminds me of Joe Friday in Dragnet,” Devine said. “Actually, he makes Joe seem animated.”

  One year, Levernier gave up his Super Bowl Sunday to run a surprise spot check on the security forces at the Rocky Flats nuclear facility near Denver. He and a colleague discovered that “patrols that were required three times per hour were not seen for more than six hours.” He and the colleague went looking for the absentees and found the entire squad inside, watching the football game.

  Chris Steele, another whistle-blower at Los Alamos, likewise was a personal eccentric who held his staff to exacting standards. As DOE’s senior safety official on site, Steele was responsible for making sure that the lab’s operations did not put workers, the public, or the environment at undue risk. A self-described nerdy workaholic, he was stumped when I asked what he did for fun. “I’m kind of boring,” he said with a shrug before mentioning that he spent his last vacation recalculating radiation releases from a hypothetical accident at Los Alamos.

  Nor did Steele suffer fools gladly. “Retarded” and “moron” were but two of the politically incorrect words he used for colleagues whose work did not measure up. He vetoed numerous proposals he regarded as dangerous, illegal, or just plain wacky. In 1998 he overruled a Los Alamos scientist who was so determined to run a certain experiment that he offered to drive a bulldozer into a nuclear reactor if the reactor overheated during the experiment. “I told him that was maybe the bravest thing I’d ever heard,” Steele dryly recalled, “because he’d certainly be killed by the radiation. But it wasn’t much of a plan.”

  Levernier and Steele shared another trait, one found among many whistle-blowers: a persistent, almost naïve determination to continue raising their concerns until the underlying problems were addressed. Whistle-blowers take the system at its word, confronting colleagues and superiors with well-documented objections, demanding answers, and then they seem almost shocked when their entreaties are rebuffed and they end up in hot water: surely everyone else should care as much as they do about making things right, shouldn’t they?

  Even then, many of these whistle-blowers keep coming, refusing to back down, and in many cases end up paying a steep price. Both Steele and Levernier, like Drake years later, were stripped of their security clearances, and therefore their professions, after coming forward with claims of wrongdoing and then sticking to their guns in the face of hostility from higher-ups.

  With GAP’s assistance, Steele successfully fought back and was reinstated, but Levernier’s story had no such happy ending. The war games specialist was not fired outright—that could have given him due process rights—but revoking his clearance effectively ended his career two years before he was due to retire with a full pension. He was then transferred to an administrative job at DOE even as his reputation was ruined by a whisper campaign charging, falsely, that he had leaked classified information. “When I walk down the halls now,” he said, “people I have known for twenty-five years turn and walk away. The stink they put on me is so strong that no one with any career aspirations wants to get close to me.

  “If I had to do this over again, I wouldn’t,” Levernier said. “I would have been more aggressive about keeping a record of the shortcomings I witnessed, and I’d have laid it on my bosses’ doorsteps, and then if they didn’t do anything, that failure would be on their backs. But that’s all. Because now I recognize that the power your superiors have over you is broad and deep, and they don’t hesitate to use it. When they took my security clearance, it was like a scarlet letter was painted on my forehead. It’s ruined my life.”

  “How Can We Fix It?”

  With their unswerving moral compasses and strict adherence to rules and regulations, whistle-blowers aren’t always the easiest persons to work with, a fact that can work against them when the targets of their disclosures fight back. The retaliation they encounter can in turn kindle feelings of paranoia, distrust, self-pity, and depression that go beyond the economic punishment of losing one’s job. Whistle-blowers can become so obsessive in the quest for justice that they drive even allies, including the attorneys at GAP, crazy.

  Devine blamed the break-up of his marriage in part on middle-of-the-night phone calls he got for months on end from Aldric Saucier, the US Army scientist whose revelations about faked test results for the “Star Wars” missile defense program helped kill what Saucier contended was a $1 trillion boondoggle. “He never left my family alone,” Devine recalled. Yet Devine confessed that he “kept taking his calls” not just because Devine was more than a bit obsessive himself, but also because Saucier sometimes faced undeniably urgent situations, such as the night two thugs badly beat him outside his home in suburban Virginia.

  Physical attacks, though rare, are but one in a suite of retaliatory tactics bureaucracies routinely employ against whistle-blowers, Devine added. “Shooting the messenger” is the cornerstone of the bureaucratic response, he said. His book provides a list of the subsidiary tactics most commonly employed toward that end; the list is adapted from the Malek Manual, a secret report president Nixon commissioned on “how to purge the career civil service system of ‘unresponsive’ employees—whistle-blowers or Democrats—without running afoul of the law,” wrote Devine, who noted the irony that the Malek Manual was itself exposed by federal whistle-blowers.

  “The first imperati
ve of retaliation is to make the whistleblower the issue: obfuscate the dissent by attacking the source’s motives, credibility, professional competence or virtually anything else that will work to cloud the issue,” Devine continued. “The point is to direct the spotlight at the whistleblower instead of the alleged misconduct.” For example, superiors of Steele and Levernier repeatedly complained that the two whistle-blowers’ personalities and their refusal to be “team players” were the reasons for stripping their security clearances, not the men’s challenges of institutional practices. (One of Levernier’s staff derided the superiors’ assertions, asking of Levernier, “Did he have a pleasing personality? I didn’t have to marry the guy, so that wasn’t my problem. But to say he wasn’t a team player is a bum rap. What that means is, ‘Don’t bring us any bad news, because we don’t want to deal with the problems.’”)

  Daniel Ellsberg was likewise derided as a malcontent and glory seeker after he leaked the Pentagon Papers. He was also targeted for physical attack, he later claimed; citing information he received from a prosecutor in the Watergate scandal, Ellsberg said that the White House Plumbers hired a group of thugs to “totally incapacitate” him at an antiwar rally, but Ellsberg eluded them. Many observers have speculated that the Plumbers’ break-in of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office was aimed at digging up dirt that could be publicized to smear Ellsberg as anti-American or simply a lunatic. Ellsberg believes there was another motive: “They wanted to keep me from leaking additional information,” he told me. “The break-in was partly about damaging my reputation, but mainly it was to threaten me into shutting up about what their Vietnam policy actually was.”

  The dubiousness of blaming the messenger is clear when one considers perhaps the most famous, if anonymous, whistle-blower in history: the “Deep Throat” of Watergate. “Whistle-blowers can have mixed motives, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong,” argued GAP’s Edwards. “The primary example is Mark Felt, the main whistleblower behind the Watergate scandal.” Felt, who was famously nicknamed “Deep Throat” by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, “was pissed off,” Edwards continues, “because [FBI director J. Edgar] Hoover passed him over for promotion at the FBI. His disclosure came from what amounted to a personnel dispute. But it showed that the president was operating illegally and that was certainly in the public interest to reveal.”

  Snowden, too, got the “shoot the messenger” treatment—he was denigrated as a high school drop-out, a bureaucratic grunt with dreams of grandeur, a traitor intent on selling US secrets to China and Russia, and more—but he blunted such attacks through a series of proactive maneuvers that once again set him apart from most whistle-blowers, not to mention demonstrated his shrewd understanding of how media and image making operated in today’s world.

  Above all, Snowden took steps in advance to define himself in the eyes of the public, rather than letting the media and government do the defining. He achieved this primarily by taping a video interview with Laura Poitras that identified him as the leaker of the NSA documents and gave his reasons for doing so; the video was posted on the Guardian website with the newspaper’s first NSA scoops. From there, other news outlets quickly picked it up and spread it through their networks, exponentially increasing its reach and influence. The public therefore was introduced to Snowden not as an anonymous character being led away in handcuffs—as had been the case with Drake—but rather as a calm, well-spoken, professionally dressed young man who clearly had thought carefully about what he was doing and was prepared to pay a price for his decision. In short, he came across as a person of conscience, not a shifty-eyed traitor.

  Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, aided by MacAskill of the Guardian, were vital allies in establishing Snowden’s public persona. Poitras shot the video in a flattering but authoritative tone and melded Snowden’s revelations with just enough personal insights to humanize the man. Greenwald, a lawyer turned journalist, was a ferocious advocate for Snowden, especially in the days following the initial revelations when Snowden was in limbo inside the Moscow airport and unable to speak for himself. Some mainstream journalists sounded as critical of Snowden as government officials were; Greenwald blasted them as government toadies who had forgotten that journalists were supposed to welcome the disclosure of newsworthy information. For example, Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst for CNN and the New Yorker, defended the NSA’s warrantless surveillance as a “legally authorized” program, called Snowden “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison,” and condemned him for fleeing to China and then Russia. Greenwald shot back that one reason Snowden left the United States before leaking the documents was that it was “a country full of Jeffrey Toobins” who would throw him in jail rather than confront his disclosures.

  The battle over how the public would judge Snowden would continue for years—it continues still—and his critics unleashed plenty of firepower. But this initial public relations maneuver asserting control over his own image and message, augmented by Snowden’s continued willingness to do interviews and public appearances (via satellite) to explain his actions, made it much harder to “shoot the messenger” or discredit him in the way many previous whistle-blowers had been.

  Time and again, Snowden told audiences, he did what he did out of a sense of responsibility and moral calling. In this respect, he was utterly typical of his newfound tribe. Responsibility is something whistle-blowers talk about a lot; it’s perhaps the main reason they do what they do. Snowden apparently was not the only one among his colleagues who was disturbed by the NSA’s mass surveillance—his day-to-day colleagues, he said, were “good people”—but he concluded he had the least to lose by revealing the information. Ray McGovern, the retired CIA agent who later befriended Snowden, recalled Snowden explaining his thought process. “Ed told me, ‘I looked around the office one day, and one colleague had kids in college, another had a mortgage, another had elderly parents who needed looking after, and I realized, if someone is going to do this, it has to be me,’” McGovern told me.

  “Whistle-blowers have a broader sense of empathy than the average person and they’re guided by a sense of morality they can’t just put on a shelf,” said GAP’s Clark. “They also have a capacity to identify with the victims of the information they’re disclosing, whether it’s the people being spied on in Snowden’s case or the fleeced taxpayers Ernie Fitzgerald spoke up for in the 1960s. Whistle-blowers are also unique in that their morality doesn’t change with circumstance. They don’t say, ‘Oh, I have an obligation to support my family, so I can’t put that at risk by speaking out.’ They don’t see their family obligations as necessarily higher than their obligations to the society around them.”

  Indeed, the absolutism of some whistle-blowers’ moral calculus—Ellsberg was a striking example—led them to marvel that not everyone was willing to act the way they did. “Forty years passed after the Pentagon Papers and I had come to despair that anyone else would do anything like that,” Ellsberg told me. “Then came Chelsea Manning with her revelations to Wikileaks about US atrocities in Iraq and three years later Snowden. So in all those years you’ve got three people who’ve spoken out, despite the fact that there are thousands who could have done it. Remember, what Snowden revealed was known by a thousand other insiders who also held the kind of super clearances Snowden did. Many of them hated and opposed [the NSA’s mass surveillance]. But they had wives and mortgages and children going to college and they didn’t speak out. Now, my own psychology leads me to ask, ‘Why are there so few? Why are there are only three of us?’”

  Here again, Snowden evinced wisdom beyond his years. When Ellsberg asked him much the same question during a joint appearance at the Hope X Conference in July 2014, Snowden replied that he would rather focus on encouragement than condemnation. “I don’t want to take a negative stance in judging [those who remain silent] and say, ‘You didn’t do what you were supposed to do, you didn’t do what you swore you would do,’” Snowden said. “Even if
that is the case, I think of it from an engineer’s perspective and go, ‘How can we fix it?’”

  Though barely in his thirties, Snowden came across as an old soul who was gentle in demeanor but unswerving in determination. The goal, he said, should be to empower whistle-blowers and improve transparency such that, when governments around the world “do unlawful things, when they do unconstitutional things, or when they do things that are entirely legal but comprehensively immoral, we will find out about it. That will change the world.”

  PART THREE

  The Third Man

  ________________

  “Do the Right Thing”

  Growing up, John Crane spent his summers in Germany, where he heard countless times about the time his grandfather faced down Adolf Hitler at gunpoint. His mother and grandmother both told the story, and the moral never changed. “My family had been very involved in the anti-fascist opposition, so I was raised that you always try to do the right thing,” Crane recalled. “And should someone do the right thing, there can of course be consequences.”

  Standing up to Hitler at gunpoint was a pretty high standard for a boy to live up to, but the moral lesson stayed with Crane as an adult, and decades later he became a formidable behind-the-scenes defender of Thomas Drake and other US government whistle-blowers. Crane was an assistant inspector general in the Department of Defense whose duties included supervising the whistle-blower unit. He worked to get Drake and the four officials Drake joined in blowing the whistle—former NSA executives William Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and Edward Loomis and former House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence staffer Diane Roark—a fair hearing and protection from retaliation. “I had no opinion on whether [Drake] was innocent or not, I was trying to make the system work as it’s supposed to work,” Crane told me.