David Rose

AN INCOVENIENT PATRIOT

Love of country led Sibel Edmonds to become a translator for the F.B.I. following 9/11. But everything changed when she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals. Fired after sounding the alarm, she's now fighting for the ideals that made her an American, and threatening some very powerful people.
In Washington, D.C., and its suburbs, December 2, 2001 was fine but cool, the start of the slide into winter after a spell of unseasonable warmth. At 10 o'clock that morning, Sibel and Matthew Edmonds were still in their pajamas, sipping coffee in the kitchen of their waterfront town house in Alexandria, Virginia, and looking forward to a well-deserved lazy Sunday.
Since mid-September, nine days after the 9/11 attacks, Sibel had been exploiting her fluency in Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani as a translator at the F.B.I. It was arduous, demanding work, and Edmonds--who had two bachelor's degrees, was about to begin studying for her master's, and had plans for a doctorate--could have been considered overqualified. But as a naturalized Turkish-American, she saw the job as her patriotic duty.
The Edmondses' thoughts were turning to brunch when Matthew answered the telephone. The caller was a woman he barely knew--Melek Can Dickerson, who worked with Sibel at the F.B.I. "I'm in the area with my husband and I'd love you to meet him," Dickerson said. "Is it O.K. if we come by?" Taken by surprise, Sibel and Matthew hurried to shower and dress. Their guests arrived 30 minutes later. Matthew, a big man with a fuzz of gray beard, who at 60 was nearly twice the age of his petite, vivacious wife, showed them into the kitchen. They sat at a round, faux-marble table while Sibel brewed tea.
Melek's husband, Douglas, a U.S. Air Force major who had spent several years as a military attaché in the Turkish capital of Ankara, did most of the talking, Matthew recalls. "He was pretty outspoken, pretty outgoing about meeting his wife in Turkey, and about his job. He was in weapons procurement." Like Matthew, he was older than his wife, who had been born about a year before Sibel.
According to Sibel, Douglas asked if she and Matthew were involved with the local Turkish community, and whether they were members of two of its organized groups--the American-Turkish Council (A.T.C.) and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (A.T.A.A.). "He said the A.T.C. was a good organization to belong to," Matthew says. "It could help to ensure that we could retire early and live well, which was just what he and his wife planned to do. I said I was aware of the organization, but I thought you had to be in a relevant business in order to join.
"Then he pointed at Sibel and said, `All you have to do is tell them who you work for and what you do and you will get in very quickly.'" Matthew could see that his wife was far from comfortable: "She tried to change the conversation to the weather and such-like." But the Dickersons, says Matthew, steered it back to what they called their "network of high-level friends." Some, they said, worked at the Turkish Embassy in Washington. "They said they even went shopping weekly for [one of them] at a Mediterranean market," Matthew says. "They used to take him special Turkish bread."
Before long, the Dickersons left. At the time, Matthew says, he found it "a strange conversation for the first time you meet a couple. Why would someone I'd never met say such things?"
Only Sibel knew just how strange. A large part of her work at the F.B.I. involved listening to the wiretapped conversations of people who were the targets of counter-intelligence investigations. As she would later tell investigators from the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General (O.I.G.) and the U.S. Congress, some of those targets were Turkish officials the Dickersons had described as high-level friends. In Sibel's view, the Dickersons had asked the Edmondses to befriend F.B.I. suspects. (In August 2002, Melek Can Dickerson called Sibel's allegations "preposterous, ludicrous and slanderous.")
Sibel also recalled hearing wiretaps indicating that Turkish Embassy targets frequently spoke to staff members at the A.T.C., one of the organizations that Turkish Embassy targets frequently spoke to staff members at the A.T.C., one of the organizations that the Dickersons allegedly wanted her and her husband to join. Sibel later told the O.I.G. she assumed that the A.T.C.'s board--which is chaired by Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush's national-security advisor--knew nothing of the use to which it was being put. But the wiretaps suggested to her that the Washington office of the A.T.C. was being used as a front for criminal activity.
Sibel and Matthew stood at the window of their oak-paneled hallway and watched the Dickersons leave. Sibel's Sunday has been ruined.
Immediately and in the weeks that followed, Sibel Edmonds tried to persuade her bosses to investigate the Dickersons. There was more to her suspicions than their peculiar Sunday visit. According to the documents filed by Edmonds's lawyers, Sibel believed Melek Can Dickerson had leaked information to one or more targets of an F.B.I. investigation, and had tried to prevent Edmonds from listening to wiretaps of F.B.I. targets herself. But instead of carrying out a thorough investigation of her allegations, at the end of March 2002 the F.B.I. fired Edmonds.
Edmonds is not the first avowed national security whistle-blower to suffer retaliation at the hands of a government bureaucracy that feels threatened or embarrassed. But being fired is one thing. Edmonds has also been prevented from proceeding with her court challenge or even speaking with complete freedom about the case.
On top of the usual prohibition against disclosing classified information, the Bush administration has smothered her case beneath the all-encompassing blanket of the "state-secrets privilege"--a Draconian and rarely used legal weapon that allows the government, merely by asserting a risk to national security, to prevent the lawsuits Edmonds has filed contesting her treatment from being heard in court at all. According to the Department of Justice, to allow Edmonds her day in court, even at a closed hearing attended only by personnel with full security clearance, "could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States."
Using the state-secrets privilege in this fashion is unusual, says Edmonds's attorney Ann Beeson, of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It also begs the question: Just what in the world is the government trying to hide?"
It may be more than another embarrassing security scandal. One counter-intelligence official familiar with Edmonds's case has told Vanity Fair that the F.B.I. opened an investigation into covert activities by Turkish nationals in the late 1990's. That inquiry found evidence, mainly via wiretaps, of attempts to corrupt senior American politicians in at least two major cities--Washington and Chicago. Toward the end of 2001, Edmonds was asked to translate some of the thousands of calls that had been recorded by this operation, some dating back to 1997.
Edmonds has given confidential testimony inside a secure Sensitive Compartmented Information facility on several occasions: to congressional staffers, to investigators from the O.I.G., and to the staff from the 9/11 commission. Sources familiar with this testimony say that, in addition to her allegations about the Dickersons, she reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast that they had a covert relationship with a very senior politician indeed--Dennis Hastert, Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House since 1999. The targets reportedly discussed giving Hastert tens of thousands of dollars in surreptitious payments in exchange for political favors and information. "The Dickersons," says one official familiar with the case, "are only the tip of the iceberg."
It's safe to say that Edmonds inherited her fearless obstinacy from her father, Rasim Deniz, who died in 2000. Born in the Tabriz region of northwestern Iran, many of whose natives speak Farsi (Persian), Turkish, and Azerbaijani, he was one of the Middle East's leading reconstructive surgeons, but his forthright liberal and secular opinions brought him into a series of conflicts with the local regimes. One of Sibel's earliest memories is of a search of her family's house in Tehran by members of SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, who were looking for left-wing books. Later, in 1981, came a terrifying evening after the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamist revolution, when Sibel was 11. She was waiting in the car while her father went into a restaurant for takeout. By the time Deniz returned, his vehicle had been boxed in by government S.U.V.'s and Sibel was surrounded by black-clad revolutionary guards, who announced they were taking her to jail because her headscarf was insufficiently modest.
"My father showed his ID and asked them, `Do you know who I am?,'" Sibel says. "He had been doing pro bono work in the slums of south Tehran for years, and now it was the height of the Iran-Iraq war. He told them, `I have treated so many of your brothers. If you take my daughter, next time I have one in my operating room who needs an amputation at the wrist, I will cut his arm off at the shoulder.' They let me go."
It was time to get out. As soon as he could, Deniz abandoned his property and his post as head of the burn center at one of Tehran's most prestigious hospitals, and the family fled to Turkey.
When Sibel was 17, she wrote a paper for a high-school competition. Her chosen subject was Turkey's censorship laws, and why it was wrong to ban books and jail dissident writers. Her principal was outraged, she says, and asked her father to get her to write something else. Denis refused, but the incident caused a family crisis. "My uncle was mayor of Istanbul, and suddenly my essay was being discussed in an emergency meeting of the whole Deniz tribe. My dad was the only one who supported what I'd done. That was the last straw for me. I decided to take a break and go to the United States. I came here and fell in love with a lot of things--freedom. Now I wonder: was it just an illusion?"
Sibel enrolled at a college in Maryland, where she studied English and hotel management; later, she received bachelor's degrees at George Washington University in criminal justice and psychology, and worked with juvenile offenders. In 1992, at age 22, she had married Matthew Edmonds, a divorced retail-technology consultant who had lived in Virginia all his life.
For a long time, they lived an idyllic, carefree life. They bought their house in Alexandria, and Sibel transformed it into an airy spacious haven, with marble floors, a library, and breathtaking views across the Potomac River to Washington. Matthew had always wanted to visit Russia, and at Sibel's suggestion they spent three months in St. Petersburg, working with a children's hospital charity run by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Sibel's family visited America often, and she and Matthew spent their summers at a cottage they had bought in Bodrum, Turkey, on the Aegean coast.
"People said we wouldn't last two years," Sibel says, "And here we still are, nearly 13 years on. A lot of people who go through the kind of experiences I've had find they put a huge strain on their marriage. Matthew is my rock. I couldn't have done it without him."
In 1978, when Sibel was eight and the Islamists' violent prelude to the Iranian revolution was just beginning, a bomb went off in a movie theater next to her elementary school. "I can remember sitting in the car, seeing the rescuers pulling charred bodies and stumps out of the fire. Then, on September 11, to see this thing happening here, across the ocean--it brought it all back. They put out a call for translators, and I thought, Maybe I can stop this from happening again."
The translation department Edmonds joined was housed in a huge, L-shaped room in the F.B.I.'s Washington field office. Some 200 to 300 translators sat in this vast, open space, listening with headphones to digitally recorded wiretaps. The job carried heavy responsibilities. "You are the front line," Edmonds says. "You are the filter fro every piece of intelligence which comes in foreign languages. It's down to you to decide what's important--`pertinent,' as the F.B.I. calls it, and what's not. You decide what requires verbatim translation, what can be summarized, and what should be marked `not pertinent' and left alone. By the time this material reaches the agents and analysts, you've already decided what they're going to get." To get this right requires a broad background of cultural and political knowledge: "If you're simply a linguist, you won't be able to discern these differences."
She was surprised to discover that until her arrival the F.B.I. had employed no Turkish-language specialists at all. In early October she was joined by a second Turkish translator, who had been hired despite his having failed language-proficiency tests. Several weeks later, a third Turkish speaker joined the department: Melek Can Dickerson. In her application for the job, she wrote that she had not previously worked in America. In fact, however, she had spent two years as an intern at an organization that figured in many of the wiretaps--the American-Turkish Council.
Much later, after Edmonds was fired, the F.B.I. gave briefings to the House and Senate. One source who was present says bureau officials admitted that Dickerson had concealed her history with the A.T.C., not only in writing but also when interviewed as part of her background security check. In addition, the officials conceded that Dickerson began a friendship at the A.T.C. with one of the F.B.I.'s targets. "They confirmed that when she was supposed to be listening to his calls," says one congressional source. "To me, that was like asking a friend of a mobster to listen to him ordering hits. She might have an allegiance problem. But they seemed not to get it...They blew off their friendship as `just a social thing.' They told us `They had been colleagues at work, after all.'"
Shortly after the house visit from the Dickersons, Sibel conveyed her version of the event to her supervisor, Mike Feghali--first orally and then in writing. The "supervisory language specialist" responsible for linguists working in several Middle Eastern languages, Feghali is a Lebanese-American who had previously been an F.B.I. Arabic translator for many years. Edmonds says he told her not to worry.
To monitor every call on every line at a large institution such as the Turkish Embassy in Washington would not be feasible. Inevitably, the F.B.I. listens more carefully to phones used by its targets, such as the Dickersons' purported friend. In the past, the assignment of lines to each translator has always been random: Edmonds might have found herself listening to a potentially significant conversation by a counter-intelligence target one minute and an innocuous discussion about some diplomatic party the next. Now, however, according to Edmonds, Dickerson suggested changing this system, so that each Turkish speaker would be permanently responsible for certain lines. She produced a list of names and numbers, together with her proposals for dividing them up. As Edmonds would later tell her F.B.I. bosses and congressional investigators, Dickerson had assigned the American-Turkish Council and three other "high-value" diplomatic targets, including her friend, to herself.
Edmonds found this arrangement very questionable. But she says that Dickerson spent a large part of that afternoon talking with Feghali inside his office. The next day he announced in an e-mail that he had decided to assign the Turkish wiretaps on exactly the basis recommended by Dickerson.
Like all his translators, Edmonds was effectively working with two, parallel lines of management: Feghali and the senior translation-department bosses above him, on one hand, and, on the other, the investigators and agents who actually used the material she translated. Early in the new year, 2002, Edmonds says, she discovered that Dennis Saccher, the F.B.I.'s special agent in charge of Turkish counter-intelligence, had developed his own, quite separate concerns about Dickerson.
On the morning of January 14, Sibel says, Saccher asked Edmonds to come into his cramped cubicle on the fifth floor. On his desk were printouts from the F.B.I. language-department database. They showed that on numerous occasions Dickerson had marked calls involving her friend and other counter-intelligence targets as "not pertinent," or had submitted only brief summaries stating that they contained nothing of interest. Some of these calls had a duration of more than 15 minutes. Saccher asked Edmonds why she was no longer working on these targets' conversations. She explained the new division of labor, and went on to tell him about the Dickersons' visit the previous month. Saccher was appalled, Edmonds says, telling her, "It sounds like espionage to me."
Saccher asked Edmonds and a colleague, Kevin Taskasen, to go back into the F.B.I.'s digital wiretap archive and listen to some of the calls that Dickerson had marked "not pertinent," and to re-translate as many as they could. Saccher suggested that they all meet with Feghali in a conference room on Friday, February 1. First, however, Edmonds and Taskasen should go to Saccher's office for a short pre-meeting--to review their findings and to discuss how to handle Feghali.
Edmonds had time to listen to numerous calls before the Friday meeting, and some of them sounded important. According to her later secure testimony, in one conversation, recorded shortly after Dickerson reserved the targets' calls for herself, a Turkish official spoke directly to a U.S. State Department staffer. They suggested that the State Department staffer would send a representative at an appointed time to the American-Turkish Council office, at 1111 14th St. NW, where he would be given $7,000 in cash. "She told us she'd heard mention of exchanges of information, dead drops--that kind of thing," a congressional source says. "It was mostly money in exchange for secrets." (A spokesperson for the A.T.C. denies that the organization has ever been involved in espionage or illegal payments. And a spokesperson for the Assembly of Turkish American Associations said that to suggest the group was involved with espionage or illegal payments is "ridiculous.")
Another call allegedly discussed a payment to a Pentagon official, who seemed to be involved in weapons-procurement negotiations. Yet another implied that Turkish groups had been installing doctoral students at U.S. research institutions in order to acquire information about black market nuclear weapons. In fact, much of what Edmonds reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity. There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder.