A Daily Beast Exclusive
A top watchdog investigated 190 cases of alleged retaliation against whistleblowers—and found that intelligence bureaucrats only once ruled in favor of the whistleblower.
By Kevin Poulsen
By Kevin Poulsen
The nation’s top intelligence watchdog put the brakes on a report
last year that uncovered whistleblower reprisal issues within America’s
spy agencies, The Daily Beast has learned. The move concealed a finding
that the agencies—including the CIA and the NSA—were failing to protect intelligence workers who report waste, fraud, abuse, or criminality up the chain of command.
The
investigators looked into 190 cases of alleged reprisal in six
agencies, and uncovered a shocking pattern. In only one case out of the
190 did the agencies find in favor of the whistleblower—and that case
took 742 days to complete. Other cases remained open longer. One
complaint from 2010 was still waiting for a ruling. But the framework
was remarkably consistent: Over and over and over again, intelligence
inspectors ruled that the agency was in the right, and the
whistleblowers were almost always wrong.
The report was near
completion following a six-month-long inspection run out of the
Intelligence Community Inspector General office. It was aborted in April
by the new acting head of the office, Wayne Stone, following the
discovery that one of the inspectors was himself a whistleblower in the
middle of a federal lawsuit against the CIA, according to former IC IG
officials.
Stone also sequestered the mountain of documents and
data produced in the inspection, the product of three staff-years of
work. The incident was never publicly disclosed by the office, and
escaped mention in the unclassified version of the IC IG’s semiannual
report to Congress.
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