-Caveat Lector- http://www.worldnetdaily.com/frame/direct.asp?SITE=www.insightmag.c om/archive/200103214.shtml Whistle-Blower Fired at State By Catherine Edwards [EMAIL PROTECTED] Linda Shenwick thought she was doing her duty when she informed Congress about U.N. mismanagement of funds. Madeleine Albright saw it as an attack on the world body. A onetime U.N. employee who claims that former secretary of state Madeleine Albright had her fired for blowing the whistle on waste and mismanagement is hoping to get her job back now that George W. Bush is president. But nobody at State will comment. Until June 1999, Linda Shenwick was earning $120,000 a year as counselor for resource management at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where she was the mission’s expert on U.N. finance and management issues. Asked in the summer of 1999 to go on leave without pay, Shenwick finally was fired by the State Department the day after the 2000 elections. Her “crime,” she says, was informing Congress about U.N. mismanagement of funds and the attendant cover-up by the U.S. mission. “I thought it was important for Congress and the taxpayers to know how their money was being spent, so I told them,” Shenwick tells Insight from New York, “but instead of working with me and the U.S. mission to help clean up the problem, [then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations] Albright made it her mission to get rid of me.” Shenwick now is represented by Judicial Watch, the public-interest law firm. “She has suffered a great deal, and we are keeping every option open concerning getting her job back at the U.S. Mission,” says Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. Shenwick sighs as she discloses that the U.S. Mission under Albright was determined not to recognize problems for fear of losing U.N. funding from Congress and triggering a similar response by other U.N.-member nations. In early February, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a letter to President Bush asking that he reinstate Shenwick in New York. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas and Reps. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., and Dan Burton, R-Ind., echoed the request, writing to Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney and urging them to review her case. Grassley wrote, “In the spirit of sending a positive message to public servants who report wrongdoing in government, I urge you to consider restoring Ms. Shenwick to a position so the taxpayers can reap the benefits of her skills.” The White House had not yet responded to Grassley when Insight went to press. Shenwick’s troubles began in 1992 when she was ordered to tell a Washington newspaper that there was no nepotism at the United Nations. When she told the reporter the truth, her superiors were not pleased. The next year, she disclosed that the United Nations was wasting millions of dollars in cash in Somalia. She had seen photos of U.N. offices there. “On a desk were piles of rotting green stuff,” she tells Insight. “Upon closer inspection, we learned that the rotting green stuff was U.S. dollars. When I reported this to U.N. Ambassador Albright, she laughed, dismissed the complaint and said I told a very good story!” Shenwick says she was very concerned about cash management throughout her tenure. “There were no bank accounts, no internal controls or standardized procedures, so I wrote a memo. But instead of being praised for reporting this and taking time to change things, I suddenly found myself the culprit,” she tells Insight. Shenwick says her boss, Clinton-appointee David Birenbaum, seemed more concerned about her disclosure than correcting the problems. She says the objective was not to deal with the United Nations’ problems, but to get U.N. employees to lie and say checking accounts had been established. In September 1994, Shenwick says, she reported to the inspector- general’s office that one of her supervisors was traveling home to Washington on weekends using official funds. An investigation ended the practice shortly thereafter, but again Shenwick was treated like the offender. In June 1995, she told the New York Times that a senior U.N. diplomat had put his common-law wife on the payroll with a large salary. In October of that year, she reported that the United Nations was paying more than $750 per page to print a book commemorating its 50th anniversary. At the time when Albright had become secretary of state and she and President Clinton were hoping to use the U.N. to support more peacekeeping missions worldwide, Shenwick’s revelations put a strain on U.S.-U.N. relations, especially with Congress and the public. Shenwick says she did nothing wrong in exposing serious management abuses, but her superiors appear to have viewed this as insubordination. “Yes, we had procedures on how to talk to the media and Congress, but I could not in good conscience continue to lie about things,” she says, “so I made disclosures to the press during my whole tenure there.” Shenwick was not a political appointee but a career civil servant who had worked at the United Nations since the mid-eighties. She had been employed by the State Department since 1979, when she graduated from law school, and was savvy about how Foggy Bottom worked. “There was no doubt that Albright herself was out to get me,” Shenwick avers. “I remember sitting on her blue couch sometime in 1995 when she told me to my face that I was responsible for all her problems with Congress.” Shenwick had been appalled when she saw her colleagues from the U.S. Mission give incomplete and inaccurate information to Congress during briefings. “Part of it was not telling the whole story and hoping they would not ask any more questions, or telling them in a complicated way they could not understand,” she notes. Former North Dakota senator Larry Pressler was her main champion before losing his re-election fight in 1994. After that, Grassley took up her cause. Former Grassley staffer Kris Kolesnik tells Insight that Grassley had a reputation for helping whistle-blowers, having protected FBI crime-lab whistle-blower Fred Whitehurst. After 18 years on Capitol Hill, Kolesnik now works at the National Whistleblower Center, a nonprofit organization that advocates the causes of credible whistle-blowers. He says Grassley always asks colleagues on both sides of the aisle about a whistle-blower’s credibility before taking on a case. Kolesnik was told privately by a staffer for a prominent Democratic senator that the State Department had gone after Shenwick because of the information she disclosed and that what she said was true. But in public both the staffer and the senator denied this. “They were playing politics,” says Kolesnik, “as they couldn’t appear to criticize the administration and Albright. But after many years on Capitol Hill, such behavior does not surprise me.” In 1999, Grassley put a hold on President Clinton’s nomination of Richard Holbrooke as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations until such time, he said, as “the issue of Linda Shenwick was cleaned up.” Confirming his resolve, he also put a hold on three other Clinton nominees for ambassadorships: J. Richard Fredericks to Switzerland, Karl Spielvogel to Slovakia and Peter Burleigh, a career diplomat, to the Philippines. After learning that Holbrooke and Albright were rivals for power, Grassley released his hold and let Holbrooke assume his post at the United Nations. But he asked President Clinton to get involved personally and talk with Albright to get Shenwick reinstated. According to Kolesnik, Clinton told Grassley he would help Shenwick if they let Fredericks through. The deal was made, and Fredericks went to Switzerland, but Clinton never made good on his promise to help Shenwick. Grassley later learned that Fredericks had been a major contributor to the Democratic Party. Hillary Rodham Clinton even became involved in what soon seemed like an Albright vendetta against the whistle-blower. Kolesnik recalls that Hillary Clinton was traveling in Slovakia and was informed by the embassy of the Grassley hold on Spielvogel. When she called Grassley and asked the reason for the hold, he told her it was because of Albright’s appalling treatment of Shenwick. Hillary Clinton claimed she would call Albright herself, but Kolesnik was unable to determine whether the call ever was placed. As for Burleigh’s nomination to the Philippines, Grassley never released his hold and the diplomat retired. “It was hard to know exactly how we could then help her,” Kolesnik tells Insight. But they tried. James Rubin, Albright’s spokesman at the State Department, told Shenwick that senators were calling the secretary of state directly and that Shenwick better watch out because “getting that kind of support from right-wing senators infuriated Albright.” Albright’s chief of staff reportedly told Shenwick in 1999, “You are finished here!” And Richard Skalar, deputy U.S. representative to the U.N. for management reform, reportedly told her, “We will destroy you. You can fight your whole life and we will destroy you, personally and financially. Our pockets are bigger than yours.” Shenwick then was stripped of all her duties, put in an office without a computer and told only to speak when she was spoken to. Forward to the present. Shenwick, still without a job, says all she wants now is to be made whole again by being returned to her duties. 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