Drake has been a guest lecturer at my classes at Johns Hopkins University, where he has mesmerized audiences with his experiences with an out-of-control federal government. During the search of Drake’s house, one embarrassed FBI agent even whispered to Drake, “Who in the world did you piss off?” The government’s treatment of Drake was disgraceful; it may explain why Snowden left the country before telling the world about the NSA’s vast grid of surveillance operations.
Like Drake, Thomas Tamm, an attorney with the Justice Department, went to James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times only after striking out with the Pentagon’s inspector general and the U.S. Congressional Intelligence Committees. Tamm returned home one day to find 12 cars parked all along his street and 18 federal agents (some in body armor) banging on the door and yelling at his wife, who was in her bathrobe.
My own efforts in the early 1990s to expose corruption of intelligence reporting by William J. Casey and Robert M. Gates were far more modest. In testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the fall of 1991, and then mounting a random but persistent public campaign in books and editorials, I called attention to the misuse of power and secrecy at our most elite intelligence organization. I didn’t face prosecution and ruin, but, like Daniel Ellsberg and others, I experienced the isolation of whistleblowing and the frustration of being ridiculed and marginalized in the political arena and the mainstream media. Like Drake, I encountered no serious efforts to understand my motivations for becoming a whistleblower, and instead faced efforts to dismiss my expertise and experience as a senior CIA veteran.
Whistleblowers go through an exhausting period of self-examination before taking on a path of dissent that involves secret and sensitive materials, but they underestimate the impact of taking on the national security state. Again, I cannot really compare my actions to those of Ellsberg, Drake, Manning, or Snowden, but taking on a presidential nomination in front of a Senate Intelligence Committee, whose chairman had unwisely “guaranteed” confirmation to the White House, could have been construed as a fool’s errand.
Snowden argued that he wanted to start a debate on privacy; he certainly has achieved that goal. Snowden’s documents raised the central issue of whether the National Security Agency undermines our democracy and violates our right to privacy. The debate over whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor continues to be a distraction from this discussion. Manning’s documents should have led to a major debate on the Iraq War in terms of how we went to war and how we fought the war, but the American public was insufficiently responsive.
The fact that I was a professor at the National War College and therefore an employee of the Department of Defense added to my problems. My boss at the college, Major General Walter Stadler, summoned me to his office to suggest that I not testify before the intelligence committee, and added that there were lawyers at the Pentagon who could get me “out of this.” When I reminded him that such a proposal to someone who had received a subpoena from the Congress was a violation of federal law, he backed off. Nevertheless, he hoped that I would not use my notoriety to “jump on a white horse” to lead a campaign against the Bush White House.
Senator Warren Rudman (R-NH) told his colleagues on the intelligence committee that he would “take care of Goodman because he’s a government official.” Rudman’s threats never panned out to more than petty whining. After the confirmation hearings were over, he wrote a personal letter to the commandant of the National War College to bark about my failure to provide an honorarium to a speaker, a desperate, empty gesture from a senator who wrongly presumed my duties at the college included cutting checks.
Despite widespread abuse of both government and corporate power, commercial media often ignore the civic motives of people who expose high-level wrongdoing. Instead, media often marginalize people who dare to challenge authority. For Snowden, the media carried titillating stories about a high school dropout and his girlfriend, a pole dancer. Manning was disparaged as a cross-dresser, which had nothing to do with her reasons for revealing state secrets. The White House circulated malicious rumors about me in 1991, but I was alerted by reporters from Time magazine and the Washington Post. The deputy director for intelligence at the time, John Helgerson, who later became an inspector general, refused to corroborate these tales. There is no better way to dilute the debate about our national security state than to lie about whistleblowers.
There are rational motivations for whistleblowing, but it is easier for journalists to use accusations from official sources than to dig for greater meaning. The media has been particularly derelict in examining the worst side of politics, particularly the conduct of public affairs for private or personal advantage. After all, the main task of the press should be to hold those in power accountable for their actions, and to expose those who violate the public trust. Investigative journalism is central to democracy for precisely this reason, but corporate media are too often a compliant extension of power, not its independent auditor. The rise and fall of Gary Webb’s career and personal life following his investigation of the CIA connections with narcotics trafficking is a good example. Years after his “Dark Alliance” story rocked the CIA, Webb was found killed by two gunshot wounds to his head. Despite this, his death was officially declared to be a suicide.
People and organizations face similar attacks and destabilization when they blow the whistle in the corporate sector. General Motors (GM) spied on Ralph Nader and hired women to lure him into compromising situations after Nader revealed lethal safety flaws in GM cars. Nader’s organization, Essential Information, produced a report on how this criminal activity against whistleblowers continues to this day as corporations continue to target individuals and public interest organizations, including groups devoted to food safety, consumer rights, pesticide reform, nursing home reform, gun control, social justice, the environment, anti-war efforts, animal rights, and arms control.”11 According to the report, corporations regularly infiltrate and violate the privacy of individuals and nonprofits that dare to step up and investigate possible corporate crime.
There is a lesson from these examples of whistleblowing. If you are unwilling to accept the possible consequences, then you should keep your head down and do as you are told. There is a cost to revealing corruption at the NSA or the CIA, just as there is a cost to exposing high-level corporate crime. Officials within the United States government will claim that the release of so-called sensitive information will harm national security, even when the unveiling of such information points to serious improprieties. In actual fact, whistleblowing could help the government. My own experience regarding the exposure of high-level corruption should have led the CIA to recognize the problem and to make sure that there was no more tailoring of intelligence to satisfy the wishes of those in power. Nevertheless, a decade after my testimony, a corrupt National Intelligence Estimate and an unclassified white paper on non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were prepared in order to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq that resulted in thousands of American soldiers and countless Iraqi people being killed, and the regional destabilization that has been an invaluable gift to the territorial advances of Al Qaeda and ISIS.
Several documentaries on whistleblowing have helped us to understand the importance of the Manning-Snowden revelations. Robert Greenwald’s The War on Whistleblowers and Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks provided an excellent framework for debating the legality and morality of our national security state and the culture of secrecy created in the wake of 9/11. Citizenfour won an Oscar in 2015 for its compelling examination of Snowden’s motivations, which the press overlooked. I took part in Greenwald’s earlier documentary, Uncovered, which exposed the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction and the failures of