The Secret War on FBI Whistle-blowers

Coleen Rowley didn't want to talk. She hadn't answered the phone in weeks. Picking it up this time was a fluke. "I'm just trying to focus on my work," the FBI's outspoken special agent said two days before testifying for the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I'm just trying to get back to the way it was."

That's a long way from where she is now, a long way from the nights in May when she typed that 13-page memo to the chief at headquarters and transformed herself, virtually overnight, into a sort of counterterrorism superhero -- "Cassandra" Rowley, a 20-year FBI veteran who blasted her bosses as "careerists" and claimed the agency "circled the wagons" to cover up a score of pre-9-11 intelligence blunders.

"It wasn't my intention to get the media involved," Rowley says. "Gosh, now it's a little like . . . whoa! . . . It's pretty way out there."

Was she worried about retaliation? Losing her job? Public smears?

She had to leave for Washington. She didn't want to say.

Enter the patriotic tattletale, star of America's most thrilling political drama. The stakes could not be higher, nor the characters and overwrought plot more ripe for prime time. It's Must-See Reality TV.

But a story like Rowley's often ends years later with a subtle game of bureaucratic payback, a bitter finale the public rarely gets to witness.

Rowley has been promised protection. Some think her mass exposure will provide her with a shield of immunity. So far, the Minneapolis field office reports that no investigations into her situation exist, and at the word of FBI director Robert Mueller, there will be none in the future.

Public promises, counter a chorus of former whistle-blowers, only last so long. "It's great TV for now," says Notra Trulock, former director of intelligence for the Department of Energy, "but she has no idea what's she's gotten herself into."

The first stop on the whistle-blower's roller coaster to ruin is discreditation. That's what happened to Trulock, who was accused of racial bias when he blew the whistle on the bungled investigation into Wen Ho Lee, a scientist accused of spying for China.

"Anonymous news leaks always come first," he says. Fellow agents may peek into Rowley's personnel file, quiz her colleagues about her habits, and find something to feed the press, and already rumors are being whispered on the Hill. The gossip: Rowley once punished a whistle-blower herself.

Next, say those who've taken the ride, comes a gamut of retaliatory tactics: harassment from supervisors, the loss of office allies, a stripping of security clearance, the monitoring of activities, inter-office relocation -- one Department of Agriculture informer was moved to a desk in the hallway outside the bathroom -- demotions, psychiatric or medical referrals, or "administrative leave," to put it euphemistically.

"The FBI never fires whistle-blowers, directly," says psychiatric social worker Don Soeken.

In the late '70s, Soeken worked for the U.S. Public Health Service, and his job was to perform "fitness for duty" examinations for federal employees whose supervisors thought they were mentally unstable. But Soeken noticed something curious about his clientele. All his patients seemed to be whistle-blowers, Soeken says, and he was asked to label the muckrakers mentally unfit, giving the government the green light to dismiss them. Soeken refused. He became a whistle-blower himself, reporting the shameful practice to Congress, and now helps whistle-blowers recover on a farm in West Virginia that he calls the Whistlestop.

"There's only one commandment in the FBI," says one of his patients, Fred Whitehurst. "Thou shall not say anything bad about the FBI." Whitehurst used to be the FBI's chief forensic scientist for explosives analysis; he examined the powders left on the rubble from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. For over a decade, he watched other lab scientists fudging reports to make quick criminal convictions. He howled. Now he lives in the backwoods of North Carolina and runs a forensic watchdog group.