26 January 2004, Gail Sheehy, The New York Observer
Sibel Edmonds says she was shocked at the lack of security in the F.B.I.'s counterintelligence squad when she went to work there shortly after Sept. 11. But when she spoke up, she was canned. Gail Sheehy tells her story.
excerpt:
Melek Can Dickerson was a very friendly Turkish woman, married to a major in the U.S. Air Force. She liked to be called informally "Jan."
The account that follows, which comes from extended interviews with Ms. Edmonds, was related in testimony to the Senate Judiciary committee.
"I began to be suspicious as early as November, 2001" said Ms. Edmonds. "In conversation Jan mentioned these suspects and said 'I can't believe they're monitoring these people.'"
"How would you know?" Ms. Edmonds remembers saying. She said Dickerson told her she had worked for them in a Turkish organization; she talked about how she shopped for them at a Middle Eastern grocery store in Alexandria.
Ms. Edmonds has told the Judiciary Committee that soon after, Ms. Dickerson tried to establish social ties with her, suggesting they meet in Alexandria and introduce their husbands to each other.
When Sibel invited the visitors in for tea, she said, Major Dickerson began asking Matthew Edmonds if the couple had many friends from Turkey here in the U.S. Mr. Edmonds said he didn't speak Turkish, so they didn't associate with many Turkish people. The Air Force officer then began talking up a Turkish organization in Washington that he described, according to the Edmondses, as "a great place to make connections and it could be very profitable."
Sibel was sickened. This organization was the very one she and Jan Dickerson were monitoring in a 9/11 investigation. Since Sibel had adhered to the rule that an F.B.I. employee does not discuss bureau matters with one's mate, her husband innocently continued the conversation. Ms. Dickerson and her husband offered to introduce the Edmondses to people connected to the Turkish embassy in Washington who belonged to this organization.
"These two people were the top targets of our investigation!" Ms. Edmonds said of the people the Dickersons proposed to introduce them to.
"My husband keeps thinking he's talking about promoting business deals," Ms. Edmonds later said of the encounter. "He has no idea the man is talking about criminal activities with some semi-legitimate front."
These are classic "pitch activities" to get somebody to spy for you, according to a Judiciary Committee staffer who investigated Ms. Edmonds' claims.
"You'd think the F.B.I. would be jumping out of their seats about all these red flags," the staffer said.
The targets of that F.B.I. investigation left the country abruptly in 2002. Later, Ms. Edmonds discovered that Ms. Dickerson had managed to get hold of translations meant for Ms. Edmonds, forge her signature, and render the communications useless.
"These were documents directly related to a 9/11 investigation and suspects, and they had been sent to field agents in at least two cities." By accident, Ms. Edmonds discovered the breach-- up to 400 pages of translations marked "not pertinent"-- and insisted that those classified translations be sent back so she could retranslate them
"We discovered some amazing stuff," she remembered.
The first half-dozen translations were transcripts from an F.B.I. wiretap targeting a Turkish intelligence officer working out of the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C. A staff-member of the Judiciary committee later confirmed to this writer that the intelligence officer was the target of the wiretap Ms. Dickerson had mistranslated, signing Ms. Edmonds' name to the printouts. Ms. Edmonds said she found them to reveal that the officer had spies working for him inside the U.S. State Department and at the Pentagon-- but that information would not have reached field agents unless Ms. Edmonds had retranslated them. She only got through about 100 more pages before she was fired.
"I didn't go out and blow the whistle," Ms. Edmonds said. She said she first reported these breaches both verbally and in writing to a supervisor, who assured her that the F.B.I. had done a background check on Ms. Dickerson, and the matter was put to an end.
Her further inquiries to counterintelligence agents raised a small alarm. Ms. Edmonds was told that Ms. Dickerson hadn't disclosed any links to the Turkish organization in her employment application. But nothing happened. Ms. Edmonds, despairing to another superior in the counterintelligence squad, remembers the agent saying: "I'll bet you've never worked in government before. We do things differently. We don't name names, and we usually sweep the dirt under the carpet."
She said another special agent warned: "If you insist on this investigation, I'll make sure in no time it will turn around and become an investigation about you."
The F.B.I., contacted with these allegations, would not comment; Ms. Dickerson could not be reached for comment, but has previously dismissed Ms. Edmonds' story as "preposterous." The F.B.I. has also previously said that it did not believe that Ms. Dickerson acted maliciously, though members of the Judiciary committee have expressed dissatisfaction with the F.B.I.'s investigation.
Going by the book was not without personal sacrifice for Ms. Edmonds. She remembered her erstwhile tea companion, Ms. Dickerson, threatening: "Why would you make such a fuss over translations? You're not even planning to stay here. Why would you put your life and your family's lives in danger?"
Ms. Edmonds said that after she reported this threat to Dale Watson, then executive assistant director of the F.B.I., she learned from friends in Turkey that plainclothes agents went to her sister's apartment in Istanbul with an interrogation warrant.
Ms. Edmonds had already brought her sister and mother to Washington in anticipation of such reprisals by Turkish intelligence. But her younger sister, a totally apolitical airline employee, hasn't spoken to her since.
After two years of futile efforts as an F.B.I. whistleblower, Ms. Edmonds figured the widows were her last resort. The former translator had information relevant to the commission that nobody else seemed to want to hear. Shortly after the Christmas holidays, in the leer of a nationwide orange alert based on a "sustained level of intelligence chatter," she contacted Mindy Kleinberg, the only mom whose telephone number is listed. Kleinberg rallied her cohorts, Kristen Breitweiser and Patty Casazza (their fourth member, Lori Van Aucken, was taking a brief "sabbatical"). The three moms jumped in an S.U.V. and gunned it down the Garden State to meet up with Ms. Edmonds halfway to D.C. at an anonymous roadside hotel. She gave them the outlines of her story, and asked "the girls" if they could get her an audience with the 9/11 commission. Her letter and follow-up calls to Tom Kean, the chairman, had gone unanswered for a year. The moms were so disturbed by all the security lapses she described, they slipped back into the sleepless agitation that was so familiar from the months after watching on TV while their husbands were turned to ash by terrorists in the World Trade Center attack. But they eagerly agreed to help.
Last week, Ms. Edmonds met with a New York attorney, Eric Seiff, a veteran of both the New York District Attorney's office and the State Department. He finds her case extraordinary.
"We're familiar with people in big bureaucracies putting job security over doing the right thing, but not at this dramatic level-- putting job security above national security," said Seiff. He is appalled at the invocation of State Secrets Privilege "It's the Attorney General saying to the judiciary, 'Not only don't we answer to Ms. Edmonds, we don't answer to you.'"
The last resort, Ms. Edmonds concluded, was the federal 9/11 commission. Maybe they would live up to their mandate to do a truly independent investigation of the security lapses that allowed our country to be invaded by terrorists supported by foreign powers, who have yet to be exposed or held accountable.
She sent a full report to one of the Democratic commission members. When this writer asked him about the commission's interest in the issues raised by Ms. Edmonds' report, he said: "It sounds like it's too deep in the weeds for us to consider, we're looking at broader issues."
It has not deterred her. And neither snow nor sleet nor mini child disasters could deter the moms from keeping their dates in Washington last Friday to do battle for Ms. Edmonds. When the 9/11 commission seemed close-minded, they met with Judiciary Committee staffers, echoing Sibel's pleadings that Senator Grassley hold his own hearings. Senator Grassley had told this writer that his hands were tied, because, "Senator Hatch is now chairman of the Oversight Committee." The staffers said they had written to both Mueller and Ashcroft several times, asking them to come in and talk about Ms. Edmonds' allegations. No reply. Sibel was surprised to hear them admit, "Senator Hatch has been an obstacle on everything we've tried to do."
Then a brainstorm. What if the Senate Intelligence Committee held a joint hearing with the Judiciary Committee? Breitweiser enthused, "Great, we've already talked to Senators Roberts and Rockefeller [co-chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee]. We were told by Senator Roberts that the translation issue remains "a serious problem." They said they would like to hold hearings in February of this year."
The moms' final meeting was their hour-and-a-half private session at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Ms. Edmonds was not welcome there. But Director Mueller, said Breitweiser, seemed genuinely interested in what the moms had to say. Asked about the Ms. Edmonds case, Mueller said he had handed it over to the Inspector General's office. Pressed, he said, "I can't investigate myself." Yes, but, the Moms nudged, had he looked into problems in the translation department? Mueller appeared to brush off the matter as anything but important.
"Then, I don't understand why you asked that State Secrets Privilege be asserted here?" Kleinberg piped up. "If her case was that important, why isn't it important enough to deserve a report?"
For the first time, the director did not look cordial. So Breitweiser switched back to an earlier subject - his cooperation with a Senate hearing on the translation issue. "So, Director Mueller, I just want to get you on the record," said Breitweiser. "If the Senate asks you to testify, we have your word you'll go?"
The square-jawed chief spook smiled at the girls' grasp of strategy. "You have my word," they all remember his saying, "if Senator Hatch invites me to testify, absolutely I will be there."
Now all they have to do is move the immovables. But they've done it before. And there is one motto shared by the Four Moms from New Jersey and the translator from Turkey: We're not going away.
FULL ARTICLE: Whistleblower Coming In Cold From the F.B.I.
From Center for Cooperative Research: 911 Timeline: Israeli Spy Ring
7 May 2002: Salon reports on the Israeli "art student ring." All the "students" claim to have come from either Bezalel Academy, or the University of Jerusalem. A look in the Bezalel database shows that not a single one of them appear to have attended school there. There is no such thing as the University of Jerusalem. In fact, the article points out that the sheer sloppiness and brazenness of the spy operation appears to be a great mystery, especially since the Mossad is renowned as one of the best spy agencies in the world. One government source suggests a theory to Salon that the "art students" were actually a smoke screen. They were meant to be caught and connected to DEA surveillance so that a smaller number of spies also posing as art students could complete other missions. One such mission could have been the monitoring of al-Qaeda terrorists. [Salon, 5/7/02] Shortly afterwards, a major Israeli newspaper publishes a story about the spy ring, but doesn't come to any conclusions. [Ha'aretz, 5/14/02] Could it be that Israel assisted the US in keeping an eye on the terrorists, thus allowing the US to maintain plausible deniability and a detachment if there were investigations on what the US knew?
June 2001, Drug Enforcement Administration Office of Security: Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities
2 May 2002, Christopher Ketcham, Salon, The Israeli "Art Student" Mystery
2 October 2002, Rob Broomby, BBC, Report Details US Intelligence Failures
23 August 2002, Jason Vest, The Nation, Turkey, Israel and the US
