Whistleblower at the CIA by Melvin A. Goodman

Author:Melvin A. Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

The senior officer on the staff of the CIA’s inspector general was Carolyn M. Ekedahl, the recipient of one of the highest honors that the Agency can bestow, the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, in 2005, as well as a special award from the Presidential Commission on Integrity and Efficiency in Government, which oversees all inspectors general in the intelligence community. Upon her retirement after more than 40 years of service, she was one of the highest-ranking women in the Agency. Ekedahl received special commendations for her work in directing CIA inspections, including hard-hitting reports on CIA failures in regard to 9/11; the downing of a missionary plane over Peru; and our nation’s unconscionable detention, rendition, and interrogation programs.

Ms. Ekedahl is also my wife, and she is referenced in Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. as one of the “most senior officers on the staff” who was also “married to one of the Agency’s most vitriolic external critics.”1 Whenever I published an article critical of the CIA, she would be confronted with “pillow talk” accusations from one of her erstwhile colleagues from the Directorate of Operations. The truth was that she never shared classified information with me or anyone else outside her office.

If there were a compelling reason for being a CIA dissenter, it would be the double standard and double-dealing at the Agency. The absence of internal oversight from the Office of Inspector General, the absence of external oversight from the congressional intelligence committees, and the presence of corrupt CIA leadership have allowed continued improprieties and created a need to expose these activities.

There is no better example of the need for monitoring than the case of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the senior clandestine officer who destroyed more than 90 tapes of evidence documenting torture in the CIA’s secret prisons. These tapes represented the best evidence of the sadistic nature of the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a term used by the Germans during World War II. There was no punishment for the destruction of the tapes, despite a White House directive not to do so. The act committed by Rodriguez constituted an obstruction of justice.

Rodriguez was investigated by a special prosecutor, John Durham, who reported directly to the deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice. (Several observers believed that the White House should have appointed an independent counsel, who would have reported to no one.) On November 9, 2010, which happened to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the destruction of the tapes, the Department of Justice announced that “Durham has concluded that he will not pursue criminal charges for the destruction of the interrogation videotapes.”2

In 2013, Rodriguez got his revenge in a memoir that slandered the CIA’s Office of Inspector General and its personnel. Rodriguez set the tone for his views by comparing undergoing the scrutiny of the inspector general to being a “test dummy at a proctologist’s college.”3 It went downhill from there. The “personnel were flawed,” according to

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