-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: July 7, 2007 1:00:18 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Neocons Still Punishing Whistleblower from the '80s
Whistle-Blower's Fight For Pension Drags On
Former Defense Official Seeks Private Relief Bill
By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post, July 7, 2007; A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/06/
AR2007070602127.html
From a cramped motor home in a Montana campground where Internet
access is as spotty as the trout, Richard Barlow wakes each morning
to battle Washington.
Once a top intelligence officer at the Pentagon who helped uncover
Pakistan's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, Barlow insisted on
telling the truth, and it led to his undoing.
He complained in 1989 that top officials in the administration of
President George H.W. Bush -- including the deputy assistant
secretary of defense -- were misleading Congress about the
Pakistani program. He was fired and stripped of his security
clearances. His intelligence career was destroyed; his marriage
collapsed.
Federal investigations found Barlow was unfairly fired, winning him
sympathy from dozens of Democratic and Republican lawmakers and
public interest groups. But for 17 years, he has fought without
success to gain a federal pension, blocked at every turn by legal
and political obstacles also faced by other federal intelligence
whistle-blowers.
"This case has been put before the Congress to right a wrong, and
for various reasons, they've failed to do it," said Robert
Gallucci, dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown
University and an expert in nonproliferation. "It's infuriating."
Barlow, 52, and his supporters want funding added to the defense
authorization bill to be debated by the Senate when it returns from
recess next week. The mechanism Barlow hopes to use -- a private
relief bill that benefits a specific individual -- is increasingly
rare and, in his case, still faces hurdles.
Gallucci has known Barlow since the late 1980s, when Barlow was
tracking the work of A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist amassing
materials to produce nuclear weapons. Some of the men setting
policy at the Defense Department at the time of Barlow's firing --
Stephen Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney -- resurfaced in the
current Bush administration, which Democrats and others have
accused of shaping intelligence on the Iraq war to fit political
goals.
Barlow's intelligence work began at the CIA, where he analyzed
nuclear programs in other countries. He contributed to the National
Intelligence Estimates and presented findings to national security
agencies, the White House and congressional committees. He received
the CIA's Exceptional Accomplishment Award in 1988.
The next year, he became the first intelligence officer for the
Office of the Secretary of Defense, charged with analyzing nuclear
weapons developments involving foreign governments. He answered to
Gerald Brubaker, the acting director of the Office of Non-
Proliferation. Supervising Brubaker was Victor Rostow, the
principal director. Rostow reported to Deputy Assistant Secretary
James Hinds, who reported to Assistant Secretary Stephen J. Hadley.
At the time, the government was poised to sell $1.4 billion worth
of new F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan to help the mujaheddin fight
the Soviets in Afghanistan. But Congress, through two laws passed
in 1985, had forbidden the sale of any equipment that could be used
to deliver nuclear bombs.
Barlow wrote an analysis for then-Secretary Dick Cheney that
concluded the planned F-16 sale violated this law. Drawing on
detailed, classified studies, Barlow wrote about Pakistan's
ability, intentions and activities to deliver nuclear bombs using
F-16s it had acquired before the law was passed. Barlow discovered
later that someone rewrote his analysis so that it endorsed the
sale of the F-16s.
Arthur Hughes, the deputy assistant secretary of defense, testified
to Congress that using the F-16s to deliver nuclear weapons "far
exceeded the state of art in Pakistan" -- something Barlow knew to
be untrue.
In the summer of 1989, Barlow told Brubaker, Rostow and Michael
MacMurray, the Pakistan desk officer in charge of military sales to
Pakistan who prepared Hughes's testimony, that Congress had been
misled.
Within days, Barlow was fired.
"They clearly didn't want the nonproliferation policy to get in the
way of their regional policy," Gallucci said. "They were worried
someone like Rich [Barlow], in his stickler approach, would insist
that if there's going to be testimony on the Hill about the F-16
aircraft, that the answers be full and truthful. He was a thorn in
their side, and they went after him. And they did a very good job
of screwing up his life."
In a 2000 deposition provoked by Barlow's subsequent lawsuit,
Hadley said he remembered underlings proposing to terminate an
employee in August 1989 but did not recall "someone named Richard
Barlow." In a separate deposition, Wolfowitz also testified he
could not recall Barlow. But Wolfowitz told Congress in 1990 that
the retaliation Barlow faced was wrong and the government was
legally obligated to keep Congress informed about Pakistan's
nuclear capability.
"There have been times on that issue when I specifically sensed
that people thought we could somehow construct a policy on a house
of cards that the Congress wouldn't know what the Pakistanis were
doing," Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
After a 1993 joint probe, the inspector general at the State
Department concluded that Barlow had been fired as a reprisal,
while the inspector generals at the CIA and the Defense Department
maintained that the Pentagon was within its rights to fire Barlow.
Congress directed the General Accounting Office (now the Government
Accountability Office) to conduct its own investigation, which was
completed in 1997 and largely vindicated Barlow.
Barlow's security clearances were restored, but he was unable to
get rehired permanently by the government because of the cloud over
his record, he said. Instead, he has worked as a contractor for a
range of federal agencies, including the CIA, the State Department,
the FBI and Sandia National Laboratories.
That left him without the $89,500 annual pension and health
insurance that Barlow believes the government owes him.
He faces no organized opposition now but has so far been stymied by
government inertia, the passage of time, congressional procedural
errors, and endless debates over how much money he's due and the
proper legislative vehicle for his pension.
Twenty Senators and eight legislative committees have considered
his case over the years without resolving it, suggesting a larger
dilemma: No process exists to compensate fired whistle-blowers in
the intelligence field, and those who retaliate against them face
no criminal penalties.
A 1998 law instead allows employees of the CIA, parts of the
Defense Department, the FBI and the National Security Agency to
notify their agency's inspector general that they intend to
disclose a matter of "urgent concern" to congressional intelligence
committees. But there is no remedy if they suffer retaliation for
using this legal channel.
"There just isn't a venue for someone like him," said Danielle
Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a
nonprofit organization that investigates and exposes corruption.
"He was trying to prevent lies to Congress about something of
global importance. And he didn't even go to Congress -- all he did
was suggest that Congress not be lied to."
Brian and Gallucci believe that had Barlow's alarms been heeded in
1989, Khan might have been deterred from building the world's
largest atomic black market -- a network that has since supplied
nuclear weapons technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Some Hill staffers say they worry that granting Barlow a pension
will cause hundreds of other injured whistle-blowers to demand
similar treatment. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a known
champion of whistle-blowers who supports Barlow's quest, is
contacted each week by four new whistle-blowers looking for help,
said his spokeswoman, Beth Levine. But Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.)
is considering sponsoring legislation providing Barlow a pension or
a lump-sum payment, a staffer said.
Bingaman attempted to sponsor a private relief bill for Barlow once
before, in 1998. But another senator persuaded colleagues to refer
it to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which hears lawsuits that
seek money from the federal government in excess of $10,000. During
the case, which lasted four years, the Justice Department invoked a
"state secrets" privilege to block the court from seeing most of
Barlow's evidence, according to Barlow's pro bono lawyer, Joseph
Ostoyich.
In 2002, the court found that Barlow was not entitled to protection
under whistle-blower laws. "It was a galling situation," Ostoyich
said. "There was plenty of evidence . . . and all of [it] . . . was
taken out of the court's hands. I've never seen anything like it."
Barlow's original pro bono attorney, Paul C. Warnke, who was
President Jimmy Carter's chief arms-control negotiator, died in 2001.
An attempt several months ago by Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.)
to sponsor a private relief bill for Barlow encountered resistance
from House Armed Services Committee lawyers who said there was no
precedent for it, according to her staff. Next, she tried to offer
a simple resolution stating that Congress supported Barlow in his
efforts, but that was thwarted by the Rules Committee, which was
juggling more than 100 other requests deemed more pressing.
Since his most recent employment contract at Sandia ended, Barlow
has been living in a motor home that he parks in Montana during the
summer and drives to Arizona or California in the winter. Most of
his possessions, including 200 pounds of documents related to his
fight, are sitting in a storage locker he rents for $100 a month.
Most weekdays, he pushes his cause in cellphone calls and e-mails
to Washington from his motor home, dogging Hill staffers with a
tenacity that seems bottomless and can be off-putting.
"This is such an extraordinary case," Brian said.
"He was trying to tell Congress the truth -- so now the guy is
living in a trailer."
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