[whistleblowers] heroes or traitors

Whistleblower or hero - Daniel Ellsberg

What qualifies 72 year old whistleblower Ellsberg, the man who hastened the end of the Vietnam War and who indirectly helped bring down President Richard Nixon, to make such inflammatory statements?

It’s half a lifetime spent studying the disconnection between American public policy and the secret, often unethical, manipulation of global events and public opinion behind the scenes.

What qualifies Ellsberg as an expert about such duplicity is the fact that once upon a time he studied documents pertaining to the inception and conduct of the war in Vietnam and found a stack of lies and secrets.

Finally, what qualifies Ellsberg to speak is the fact that more than 30 years ago, he risked his life and freedom to get the word out about Vietnam and, in so doing, helped end the war sooner.

His leaking of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, Washington Post and 17 other newspapers, in 197l, remains one of the most revolutionary acts of modern American citizenship and to many … a hallmark of
American patriotism . . . unless, of course, you agree with Henry Kissinger and still think of Daniel Ellsberg as a traitor.

"What I saw as a major ‘lesson of Vietnam’ was the impact on policy failure of lying to superiors, resulting in a cognitive failure at the presidential level to recognize realities. This was part of a broader cognitive failure of the bureaucracy.

There were situations — Vietnam was an example — in which the U.S. government, starting ignorantly, did not and would not learn."

Much of what he wrote about Vietnam applies to Iraq today.

"We’re not going to pacify Iraq, and nothing we do will end the war because it will go on as long as we’re there. It won’t be easy," he added, "to get this administration or any other to give up the oil and the bases and to admit that we made a mistake."

Ellsberg’s zeal to uncover and denounce institutionalized lying and mistakenly devised policy has had him arrested more than 60 times. He believes, like Henry David Thoreau before him, that the truest place for a just man is in jail.

He also believes that Richard Nixon was not the only recent president that deserved to be impeached.

"Plenty of our presidents could have been impeached, and I would definitely say that Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were impeachable, on grounds of deception on foreign policy issues."

To that list, Ellsberg adds Harry Truman for getting us into Korea. And Jimmy Carter, who, Ellsberg said, "has gotten off almost scot-free for the CIA-supported death squads in El Salvador." And Ronald Reagan.

"The Iran-Contra arms deal clearly violated congressional directives."

Finally, let us not forget George W himself, impeachable in that he lied to Congress as well as instituted "clear-cut aggression", which is unconstitutional.

It’s been decades since Ellsberg enjoyed the intellectual camaraderie he once took pleasure in, in Washington and at the RAND think tank.

Sometimes at night, he confessed, he dreams of being back at RAND, walking the halls of an intellectual arena he once loved.

Today, Ellsberg does what any self-respecting patriot would do. He goes out and gets arrested.

Chris Watson, Melbourne Age, September 27, 2003

A thorn in Israel’s side - Mordecai Vanunu

Mordecai Vanunu was released from Shikma Prison on April 21, 2004, after serving an 18-year prison term.

It was from London that Vanunu was lured to Italy 18 years ago by a woman who was working for Mossad.

A former nuclear technician, he had been in England giving information about the Dimona nuclear plant to the Sunday Times, but had wanted to get out of the city, ironically because he feared that Mossad was on his tail.

He was persuaded by the blonde American he met in Leicester Square — who pretended to be a tourist and critical of Israel — to accompany her to Italy for a romantic break. Once there, he was overpowered, drugged, bound and shipped back to Israel where, after a secret trial, he was jailed.

"They would like me to be angry with her as a woman but I am not," he said about the woman, since identified by the media as ‘Cindy’.

"She was American, she could have been CIA, she could have been recruited by Mossad but she was not an Israeli woman," he said. He believes that possibly British, French and Italian intelligence services were all involved.

Famously, when he was bundled into court for his secret trial, he scrawled the message on his hand that he had been kidnapped.

Despite his radical student past, he was cleared to work as a technician at the Dimona nuclear plant in the Negev desert and it was there that he became disquieted by his discovery of a secret weapons program, which is still not officially acknowledged. He took photos of the plant and smuggled them out. What prompted him to take such a risk?

He was aware, he said, of what Daniel Ellsberg, now himself a vociferous admirer of Vanunu, had done, by leaking the Pentagon Papers, which had helped to end the Vietnam War.

He was also inspired by the 1979 film The China Syndrome, the story of a nuclear whistleblower, which starred Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas and later by Mike Nichols' 1983 film Silkwood, played by Meryl Streep. But his main motivation was Hiroshima, he said.

He did not know what to do with his information, which he first divulged to a church group in Sydney, then eventually to the Sunday Times.

For more than 11 years he was kept in solitary confinement, initially in a two-metre by three-metre cell. "There was a lot of pressure, a lot of attempts at brainwashing," he said. "They would talk to me about the Holocaust and say that the Palestinians are terrorists or that the Arabs want to destroy the Jewish state so they need an atomic bomb."

In prison his main motivation was survival. "I decided from the beginning that they could have my body in prison but my spirit, mind, brain, I would keep free, under my control; that would be my way out. I used my Christianity as my defence, my barrier."

His family, who live in an orthodox community in Bnei Brek, near Tel Aviv, do not visit him and dissociated themselves from him years ago, with the exception of two of his brothers.

"The way to resist occupation and aggression is not by terror but by non-violence, civil disobedience and, all-important, to build a society, an economy and universities to prove that you are no less educated and developed than them.

The fact is that Israel wants the Palestinians to react, they make use of the terror for two things: to raise a new generation who will be much more anti-Palestinian and more right-wing and they use the terror for more occupation, building the wall, justifying what they do to the Palestinians."

Vanunu had decided to talk despite the fact that the restriction on him having any contact with foreigners had just been renewed for a further six months. "I don't know what is the best way to overcome this restriction - is it by silence or is it by speaking? I decided it was by speaking," he said, talking a few days before he was seized by the Israeli army.

Vanunu is lionised in many countries, particularly in Europe, as a whistleblower who was prepared to risk his life to draw attention to the dangers of nuclear warfare. Ellsberg, on a recent visit to London, hailed him as a hero.

In Israel, however, he is still regarded by many as a traitor and when he emerged from jail, many made throat-slitting gestures as he left the prison gates. Now he faces the courts once more.

Duncan Campbell, Guardian, November 18, 2004

Interview with Vladimir Rezun [Victor Suvorov]

What made you defect to the West?

I did it for a number of reasons. Of course, my decision was strongly motivated by the fact that my life was in danger. But the urge to describe a criminal system I abhor was equally important.

Weren't you aware of the nature of the secret service when you started working for it?

I had a vague idea. I was only a young officer when Soviet Military Intelligence turned its eye on me. I was subjected to long and meticulous investigations. I love my country, I love the army, I love the secret and adventurous life of an intelligence agent, but I hate communists. From my earliest years, I always felt that something really bad was happening in my motherland. This feeling intensified after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

I trained for five years. Working under the cover of a civilian diplomat, I learned about the horrors of the system which constantly pulled in new victims. A feeling of justice, fear of death and the urge to write the truth were growing. But in order to do that, I had to escape.

How much of your books is fact and how much is fiction?

I would divide my books into two categories. The first I would call textbooks where I describe the mechanisms and techniques governing Soviet intelligence. These include GRU-Soviet Military Intelligence, Specnaz and Inside the Soviet Army. My other books also contain many facts. When writing Aquarium, for instance, I had to change the names, pseudonyms, place names and the time of action for a number of reasons, but most of them did take place in reality.

Was there a difference in the way intelligence services operated in the Soviet Union and democratic countries?

Generally, all intelligence services act according to the same principles all around the world: their only purpose is to extract information. Intelligence agents can be compared to journalists. In the course of civilization progress, methods are constantly perfected and state-of-the-art solutions, unknown to the masses, are introduced.

Yet we must realize that a secret service is an instrument of the authorities. The type of government determines the type of instrument. This is where the differences lie. If a country has a criminal regime, the secret service will also be criminal. Western democracies draw well-defined lines which cannot be crossed. In a totalitarian system, anything is possible.

The Polish secret service boasts that it was the only intelligence agency in the East bloc to create its own school and manage to stay relatively independent from the Soviet secret service.

There's a lot of truth in it. I have met many Poles, I've heard about the achievements of the Polish secret service and I must admit that Polish agents are top-class professionals. Many of them were highly patriotic. But we can't really say that Poland was fully independent. The general communist bloc mechanism was cooperation-oriented. Despite that, the struggle for success among the GRU, the KGB and other East European secret services was vicious. Poles scored a number of spectacular successes in this area.

Have connections between the Russian secret service and intelligence agencies of former satellite states remained after the fall of the Soviet empire? Do they pose a threat to new democracies?

I'm sure there is a possibility of various connections and threats. Everything depends on people and, as everyone knows, there are good and bad people in this world. Yet I feel that every country struggling for and valuing its independence creates structures which can ensure that freedom, and guarantee stable protection for its interests.

After you fled to the West in 1978, the Soviet Supreme Military Court passed the death sentence on you. So far, it hasn't been repealed. Aren't you afraid that your old colleagues might want to take revenge?

Not at the moment. By killing me, they would be admitting that all I've written is true. I know that many of my colleagues support my point of view. But others are calling me a traitor. I have left the communists, that's true, but I still love my country. In Aquarium, I postulated that those who stayed behind may be the traitors. Those who killed children and old people in Afghanistan, those who were Brezhnev's and Andropov's puppets.

Or maybe those who hacked masses in Tbilisi during Gorbachev's reign, or those responsible for the Chechnyan massacre today. How do we refer to people who in February 1994, shot Sergei Dubov, my close friend who first published my novel, The Icebreaker, in Russia? I didn't want to kill! I believe that the day when people no longer want to kill each other is close at hand. That's why I write my books.

Mirosław Wójcikowski

Heroes or traitors?