WHISTLEBL WING NATION The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy Edited by Kaeten Mistry and Hannah Gurman
INTRODUCTION KA E TE N MI ST RY AND H ANN AH G UR M AN
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H E TW ENTY- FI R S T CE NTU RY ushered in a new age of national security whistleblowing. When Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, made startling disclosures about the U.S. government’s warrantless global surveillance programs in June 2013, he emerged as the most famous—although not the first—high-profile whistleblower of the era. Snowden followed in the footsteps of Thomas Drake (who revealed waste, fraud, and abuse in the NSA), Chelsea Manning (who divulged military and diplomatic cables on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), Stephen Kim (who disclosed North Korea’s nuclear capacities in protest of official U.S. policy), and John Kiriakou (who exposed CIA torture of al-Qaeda detainees), among others. Alarmed by the reincarnation of the World War I–era Espionage Act to prosecute dissenting government officials, the documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald and others warned of a “war on whistleblowers.” The struggle has continued into the Donald Trump administration, with the conviction of Reality Winner for exposing evidence about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the arrest of Daniel Hale for disclosing further details of the secretive U.S. drone program, and the dramatic revelations by whistleblowers in the national security establishment of Trump’s dealings with the president of Ukraine.1
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The response to Snowden’s revelations proved that attitudes toward national security whistleblowing are ambiguous and paradoxical. The U.S. national security establishment immediately condemned him and brought charges carrying a possible sentence of decades in prison. Barack Obama said, “If any individual who objects to government policy can take it in their own hands to publicly disclose classified information, then we will never be able to keep our people safe or conduct foreign policy.” Bemoaning the “avalanche of unauthorized disclosures,” the president said, “Our nation’s defense depends in part on the fidelity of those entrusted with our nation’s secrets.” While he condemned the messenger, Obama simultaneously heralded the democratic dialogue the message instigated. Announcing reforms for the embattled NSA, he insisted that “important decisions about how to protect ourselves and sustain our leadership in the world” had to be reconciled with “the civil liberties and privacy protections our ideals and our Constitution require.” How could the nation balance security and civil liberty in the wake of Snowden’s revelations? “One thing I’m certain of,” said Obama, “this debate will make us stronger.”2 The phenomenon of national security whistleblowing has a long, revealing genealogy in the United States. Snowden’s act and Obama’s resolute denunciation have replayed themselves in every generation since the early twentieth century, and a pattern has emerged. An insider discloses privileged national security information, often to the press, in the name of the public interest. The U.S. government condemns the act as an “unauthorized disclosure” that undermines American security and leadership and moves to prosecute. In the public debate, the whistleblower is celebrated as a patriot or condemned as a traitor. Eventually, questions about the legitimacy of the disclosure and the character of the whistleblower overtake public consideration of the contents of the revelation. The pattern is well established. It plays out with virtually every new case of whistleblowing. The most famous historical episode remains Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was a strategic analyst with the RAND Corporation and a former Pentagon official who contributed to an internal Defense Department study about U.S. decision making in the Vietnam War. In 1971, he disseminated this
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report, the top-secret Pentagon Papers, to the New York Times. Ellsberg avoided prosecution because of the shenanigans of the White House “plumbers,” created to curb similar “leaks,” and became a touchstone for modern whistleblowers. When we focus on recent events and canonical cases, we forget earlier and equally consequential moments of whistleblowing. Over eighty years before Snowden, a cryptologist named Herbert O. Yardley published secret details of the first U.S. cryptanalysis agency in a book that celebrated American codebreaking and lamented the group’s disbandment in peacetime. The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration censored Yardley (after prosecution was deemed infeasible) and revised the espionage statutes to prohibit government employees from disseminating information gleaned from code. Testifying before Congress in 1968, an executive at the Air Force named A. Ernest Fitzgerald revealed gross overspending in avionics and defense to a congressional subcommittee, for which the Nixon administration fired him. Fitzgerald’s reputation was only rehabilitated amid efforts to enact limited whistleblower protections in a post-Nixonian political age. In 1975, in an effort to curb CIA interventionism abroad, Philip Agee exposed U.S. covert action by detailing Agency “tradecraft” and revealing the identity of officers and agents through information in the public domain. Agee lived in exile, but the Carter and Reagan administrations revoked his passport, censored his writing, and cited his case to enact the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act.3 Whether famous or forgotten, celebrated or neglected, such episodes and the developments around them have shaped the modern face of whistleblowing, the tools of state retaliation, and the response in the public consciousness.
*** This book presents the first comprehensive history of U.S. national security whistleblowing. With a wide historical lens, it looks beyond the reductive characterization of whistleblowers as heroes or traitors and rejects the
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notion of a simple choice between civil liberty and security. It eschews a biographical, case-by-case approach and the binary framing adopted by much social science and legal scholarship on the issue. Instead, it charts the evolving and intertwined histories of national security whistleblowing and the national security state since the early twentieth century. While the specific labels were popularized in later decades, the origins of both can be traced to the start of the century. Whistleblowing is, of course, not unique to the United States. But the scale and frequency with which it occurs is. The developments we examine exist within distinctly American political, legal, and cultural contexts that shaped the phenomenon in the modern era. Whistleblowing remains highly contentious terrain. As chapter 1 reveals, there is little consensus on how to define and identify a national security whistleblower. The term carries sharply contrasting meanings in political, legal, civic, and cultural contexts. While the state insists that any revelation constitutes an “unauthorized disclosure,” popular narratives emphasize the importance of transparency as a salve to the ills of democracy. The ongoing divide encourages isolated political and social debates on the subject that reinforce existing frameworks. There is a pressing need for a multidisciplinary history that explores how we arrived at this impasse and how it has served as a barrier to a fuller understanding of the phenomenon and its significance. Although there is no settled definition, national security whistleblowing is distinguished by several key characteristics: a revelation of privileged (not necessarily “secret”) information by a state insider seeking to challenge the status quo, a form of dissent that invokes public interest and the need to break the rules of the system if necessary, an individual whose identification authenticates the information being exposed, routine state retaliation, and civic and political contests over the legitimacy and significance of the revelation and whistleblower. National security whistleblowing is far from homogenous. It encompasses a range of ideological and political positions, motives, and objectives. While it resembles whistleblowing in the corporate and state sectors, it involves “national defense” information—classified but also unclassified information—which historically has placed it in a different category. It is also
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often conflated with “leaks,” but there are important distinctions between the two. Leaking is typically anonymous, highly political, and rarely punished. Blurring the line between whistleblowing and leaking—often a political move intended to stigmatize both— occludes important distinctions. Leaking is frequently sanctioned by the very officials that condemn whistleblowers. The following pages offer a conceptual, chronological, and thematic account of national security whistleblowing in the longue durée. It uses an expansive and multidisciplinary approach that draws on political, legal, cultural, social, and diplomatic history alongside research on state power, social movements, and dissent, as well as personal experience. Examining the emergence and evolution of whistleblowing, it analyzes the concerns of whistleblowers from waste, corruption, and flawed decision making to covert wars and the surveillance state. It traces the networks and structures that have enabled disclosures and the state reflex to criminalize them indiscriminately. The book also traces how efforts to prosecute whistleblowers tapped broader constitutional nerves, stirring resistance by Congress, the press, and the public. In Hollywood movies, documentaries, magazines, and novels, the whistleblower became a significant cultural icon. Informing broader developments in modern American politics, law, culture, and society, whistleblowing has shaped the rise of the national security state, the classification regime, and understandings of First Amendment rights. It has provided the public with unprecedented insights into the cult of state secrecy and shed light on the overt and covert dimensions of American power, from involvement in World War I to the Cold War to the Vietnam War to armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in the twenty-first century, from secret codebreaking at the turn of the twentieth century to covert operations in the Global South to the modern surveillance state. Years after Snowden’s revelations, the whistleblower remains the subject of intense political struggle. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump raged that “Snowden is a traitor and a disgrace” and suggested he “should be executed.” Mike Pompeo, who would become CIA director and secretary of state, said Snowden deserved the death penalty.4 Under Trump,
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Reality Winner became the first successful prosecution via the Espionage Act. In September 2019, reports of an intelligence community whistleblower who revealed the contents of Trump’s phone call with the leader of Ukraine dramatically kickstarted impeachment proceedings. President Trump retaliated with threats of violent punishment: “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? . . . With spies and treason? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”5 The historic war against whistleblowers continues to escalate. Yet this will not stop whistleblowing. Despite efforts since World War I to curb the phenomenon, the next disclosure is a matter of when, not if.
NOTES 1. Robert Greenwald, dir., War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State, (Culver City, CA: Brave New Films, 2013); John Hudson, “Obama’s War on WhistleBlowers,” Atlantic, May 24, 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com /politics/archive/2011 /05 /obamas-war-whistle-blowers/351051 /; Harry Litman and Molly Knobler, “Trump’s War on Leaks Is Really a War on Whistleblowers,” CNN, August 9, 2017, https://edition.cnn .com /2017/08 /09/opinions /whistleblowers-opinion-litman-knobler/index .html; Amy Goodman, “Trump Steps Up War on Whistleblowers with Arrest of Veteran,” Truthout, May 10, 2019, https://truthout.org/video/trump-steps-up-war-on-whistleblowers-with -arrest-of-veteran /. 2. “Transcript of President Obama’s Jan. 17 Speech on NSA Reforms,” Washington Post, January 17, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com /politics/full-text-of-president - obamas -jan-17 - speech- on-nsa-reforms /2014 /01 /17 /fa33590a- 7f8c -11e3 - 95564a4bf7b cbd84_story.html. 3. Malcolm Gladwell, “Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern WhistleBlower,” New Yorker, December 19 and 26, 2016; Kaeten Mistry, “Embarrassing Indiscretions: The Origins and Culture of U.S. National Security Whistleblowing,” in The Culture of Intelligence: Germany, Britain, France, and the USA, ed. Andreas Gestrich et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Kaeten Mistry, “A Transnational Protest Against the National Security State: Whistleblowing, Philip Agee, and Networks of Dissent,” Journal of American History 106, no. 2 (September 2019): 362–89; Hannah Gurman, “National Security Whistleblowing: The Creation of a Legal Paradox,” paper for the Navigating Law and Ethics at the Crossroads of Journalism and National Security conference, University of Pennsylvania Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, November 9–10, 2017.
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4. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, May 30, 2014, https://twitter.com /realdonaldtrump/status/472447734860218369, and October 30, 2013, https://twitter.com /realDonaldTrump/status/395683702757662721; “Trump’s CIA Pick Rep. Mike Pompeo Thinks Snowden Deserves Death Penalty,” C-Span, November 18, 2016, https://www. c - span . org / video / ?c4631588 /trumps - cia -pick-rep -mike -pompeo -thinks - snowden -deserves-death-penalty. 5. Maggie Haberman and Katie Rogers, “Trump Attacks Whistle-Blower’s Sources and Alludes to Punishment for Spies,” New York Times, September 26, 2019, https://www .nytimes.com /2019 /09/26/us /politics /trump-whistle-blower-spy.html. The Ukrainewhistleblowing issue was unfolding as this book went to press.
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n this pathbreaking history of national security disclosures from World War I to the present, historians, literary scholars, legal experts, and political scientists explore the complex politics, motives, and ideologies behind the revelation of state secrets that threaten the status quo.
“A dazzling collection that could hardly be more timely. Whatever your view of whistleblowers—heroes, traitors, or something in between—reading and reflecting on these essays will give you a far better appreciation of this controversial yet crucially important phenomenon.” —ANDREW BACEVICH, AUTHOR OF THE AGE OF ILLUSIONS: HOW AMERICA SQUANDERED ITS COLD WAR VICTORY
“With democracies under threat and systems of oversight collapsing around the world, whistleblowing has never been more relevant. This book is a crucial resource for understanding a great paradox: how laws are rescued by a few who dare to break them.” —EDWARD SNOWDEN
“This brilliant and compelling collection demonstrates that the fates of national security whistleblowing and democracy are linked. Whistleblowing Nation is essential reading on the tensions between government secrecy and the transparency essential in a democracy.” —MARY L. DUDZIAK, AUTHOR OF WAR TIME: AN IDEA, ITS HISTORY, ITS CONSEQUENCES
“This book, with its diverse voices, contains an abundance of valuable and interesting information. The authors examine whistleblowing in all of its complexity while avoiding the temptation to lionize whistleblowers or idealize them.” —STEVEN AFTERGOOD, FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS
KAETEN MISTRY is senior lecturer in American history at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare, 1945–1950 (2014) and editor of Reforms, Reflections, and Reappraisals: The CIA and U.S. Foreign Policy Since 1947 (2011). HANNAH GURMAN is associate professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She is the author of The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond (Columbia, 2012) and editor of A People’s History of Counterinsurgency (2013). Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee
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