Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington by Paul Sperry

Author:Paul Sperry [Sperry, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: book, ebook
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2005-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

SHOOTING THE MESSENGER

But, however much good the new technology does for managing backlogs, it does nothing to solve the security problems plaguing the foreign language department, critics say. In that area, the bureau appears to be out to lunch.

Remarkably, headquarters has a tin ear for hearing about security complaints from conscientious and patriotic employees, even after 9/11. And when such employees become frustrated and take their complaints to Congress or the press, headquarters responds by punishing them—proving once again that the FBI is better at protecting itself than the country. Cole is no exception.

“After I started raising the issue with the language specialists and the security, the bureau’s response was kill the messenger,” Cole says. “They decided to go after me.”

He says he sent four letters to Mueller’s office in 2002 and 2003 warning the director about the security problems. He never heard back from Mueller. So the longtime agent briefed the Senate Judiciary Committee and the office of the Justice Department inspector general, which promised to open an investigation but never even interviewed him.

After word got back to FBI brass of his whistleblowing activities, Cole was demoted and given negative evaluations, his first in eighteen years of service. “They didn’t want to investigate” any of the personnel security and espionage cases he brought to their attention, he says. And then early last year, he was suspended. Cole decided to call it quits three months later.

The FBI went after Edmonds hammer-and-tongs after she reported security breaches and potential espionage to upper management, including Dale Watson, the bureau’s counterterrorism chief at the time. She was subjected to a polygraph, which bureau insiders say she passed without a glitch. Headquarters still ignored her allegations and then thanked her with a pink slip. The day of her firing, the petite Edmonds, who hardly poses a threat, was physically escorted out of the building by FBI official Thomas Frields and the head of security. Frields told her “she would never be allowed to set foot on FBI premises again, and that the next time he would meet her would be in jail,” according to documents filed in federal court.27

Trying to make good on that promise, the FBI seized her home computer and subjected her to a security review. But officials could find nothing incriminating to use against her. Edmonds got her computer back, but not the belongings she kept at her FBI desk, including memos from agents praising her work performance. The FBI also impounded family mementos she holds dear, including two black-and-white photos of her late father, a surgeon who served under the Shah of Iran, and a Farsi-English dictionary her father gave her as a gift.

The bureau, which just months earlier had renewed her contract for another year, gave no reason for her termination. The cause listed on her pink slip stated only that she was “terminated completely for the Government’s convenience.”28

Even the Justice Department’s inspector general has concluded that Edmonds’s security whistleblowing was a factor in her firing, determining that her allegations “were at least a contributing factor in why the FBI terminated her services.

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