Bravehearts by Mark Hertsgaard

Author:Mark Hertsgaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hot Books
Published: 2016-04-11T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

The Third Man

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“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.

But as his mother warned, there were consequences to trying to do the right thing, and in the end his bureaucratic superiors thwarted Crane. To his horror, Crane watched as Drake and the four other NSA whistle-blowers were secretly ratted out to the Justice Department and then had their homes raided at gunpoint by federal agents. Of the five members in this group, which I shall call the NSA 4+1, Drake fared the worst. As described in Part One of this book, he was stripped of his security clearance, indicted, threatened with life in prison, deprived of his federal pension, blackballed in security circles, and reduced to working as a clerk at an Apple store.

Crane’s testimony, published here for the first time, sheds fresh light not only on Drake’s persecution but also on the much better known whistle-blowing of Edward Snowden. “Crane was our fly on the wall, letting us understand after the fact what really happened to Drake,” said Tom Devine of GAP, which represented both Crane and Drake as well as Snowden. Crane’s account illuminates how a system that in theory is supposed to protect whistle-blowing can in practice do just the opposite, a lesson Snowden took to heart when planning his own disclosures. For Drake, despite following official procedures for blowing the whistle on waste, fraud, or abuse, was ruthlessly punished and his concerns about constitutionally questionable surveillance were disregarded. Snowden therefore chose a different path: “civil disobedience whistle-blowing,” as Devine dubbed it. Instead of approaching his superiors at the NSA or the congressional overseers of the agency, Snowden bypassed a system he concluded was corrupt and passed secret documents to journalists Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Ewen MacAskill in June 2013.

But what actually

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