The gagged whistleblower goes on the record.
By Sibel Edmonds and Philip Giraldi November 01, 2009 Issue The American Conservative
PHILIP GIRALDI:
We were very interested to learn of your four-hour deposition in the
case involving allegations that Congresswoman Jean Schmidt accepted money from the
Turkish government in return for political favors. You provided many names and details
for the first time on the record and swore an oath confirming that the deposition was true.
Basically, you map out a corruption scheme involving U.S. government employees and
members of Congress and agents of foreign governments. These agents were able to
obtain information that was either used directly by those foreign governments or sold to
third parties, with the proceeds often used as bribes to breed further corruption.
Let's start
with the first government official you identified, Marc Grossman, then the third highestranking
official at the State Department.
SIBEL EDMONDS:
During my work with the FBI, one of the major operational files
that I was transcribing and translating started in late 1996 and continued until 2002, when
I left the Bureau. Because the FBI had had no Turkish translators, these files were
archived, but were considered to be very important operations. As part of the background,
I was briefed about why these operations had been initiated and who the targets were.
Grossman became a person of interest early on in the investigative file while he was the
U.S. ambassador to Turkey [1994-97], when he became personally involved with
operatives both from the Turkish government and from suspected criminal groups. He
also had suspicious contact with a number of official and non-official Israelis. Grossman
was removed from Turkey short of tour during a scandal referred to as "Susurluk" by the
media. It involved a number of high-level criminals as well as senior army and
intelligence officers with whom he had been in contact.
Another individual who was working for Grossman, Air Force Major Douglas Dickerson,
was also removed from Turkey and sent to Germany. After he and his Turkish wife Can
returned to the U.S., he went to work for Douglas Feith and she was hired as an FBI
Turkish translator. My complaints about her connection to Turkish lobbying groups led to
my eventual firing.
Grossman and Dickerson had to leave the country because a big investigation had started
in Turkey. Special prosecutors were appointed, and the case was headlined in England,
Germany, Italy, and in some of the Balkan countries because the criminal groups were
found to be active in all those places. A leading figure in the scandal, Mehmet Eymür, led
a major paramilitary group for the Turkish intelligence service.
To keep him from
testifying, Eymür was sent by the Turkish government to the United States, where he
worked for eight months as head of intelligence at the Turkish Embassy in Washington.
He later became a U.S. citizen and now lives in McLean, Virginia. The central figure in
this scandal was Abdullah Catli. In 1989, while "most wanted" by Interpol, he came to
the U.S., was granted residency, and settled in Chicago, where he continued to conduct
his operations until 1996.
GIRALDI:
So Grossman at this point comes back to the United States. He's rewarded
with the third-highest position at the State Department, and he allegedly uses this position
to do favors for "Turkish interests"—both for the Turkish government and for possible
criminal interests. Sometimes, the two converge. The FBI is aware of his activities and is
listening to his phone calls. When someone who is Turkish calls Grossman, the FBI
monitors that individual's phone calls, and when the Turk calls a friend who is a
Pakistani or an Egyptian or a Saudi, they monitor all those contacts, widening the net.
EDMONDS: Correct.
GIRALDI: And Grossman received money as a result. In one case, you said that a State
Department colleague went to pick up a bag of money…
EDMONDS: $14,000
GIRALDI:
What kind of information was Grossman giving to foreign countries? Did he
give assistance to foreign individuals penetrating U.S. government labs and defense
installations as has been reported? It's also been reported that he was the conduit to a
group of congressmen who become, in a sense, the targets to be recruited as "agents of
influence."
EDMONDS:
Yes, that's correct. Grossman assisted his Turkish and Israeli contacts
directly, and he also facilitated access to members of Congress who might be inclined to
help for reasons of their own or could be bribed into cooperation. The top person
obtaining classified information was Congressman Tom Lantos. A Lantos associate, Alan
Makovsky worked very closely with Dr. Sabri Sayari in Georgetown University, who is
widely believed to be a Turkish spy. Lantos would give Makovsky highly classified
policy-related documents obtained during defense briefings for passage to Israel because
Makovsky was also working for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
GIRALDI:
Makovsky is now working for the Washington Institute for Near Eastern
Policy, a pro-Israeli think tank.
EDMONDS:
Yes. Lantos was at the time probably the most outspoken supporter of
Israel in Congress. AIPAC would take out the information from Lantos that was relevant
to Israel, and they would give the rest of it to their Turkish associates. The Turks would
go through the leftovers, take what they wanted, and then try to sell the rest. If there were
something relevant to Pakistan, they would contact the ISI officer at the embassy and say,"We've got this and this, let's sit down and talk." And then they would sell it to the
Pakistanis.
GIRALDI: ISI—Pakistani intelligence—has been linked to the Pakistani nuclear
proliferation program as well as to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
So the FBI was monitoring these connections going from a congressman to a
congressman's assistant to a foreign individual who is connected with intelligence to
other intelligence people who are located at different embassies in Washington. And all
of this information is in an FBI file somewhere?
EDMONDS:
Two sets of FBI files, but the AIPAC-related files and the Turkish files
ended up converging in one. The FBI agents believed that they were looking at the same
operation. It didn't start with AIPAC originally. It started with the Israeli Embassy. The
original targets were intelligence officers under diplomatic cover in the Turkish Embassy
and the Israeli Embassy. It was those contacts that led to the American Turkish Council
and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations and then to AIPAC fronting for the
Israelis. It moved forward from there.
GIRALDI: So the FBI was monitoring people from the Israeli Embassy and the Turkish
Embassy and one, might presume, the Pakistani Embassy as well?
EDMONDS:
They were the secondary target. They got leftovers from the Turks and
Israelis. The FBI would intercept communications to try to identify who the diplomatic
target's intelligence chief was, but then, in addition to that, there are individuals there,
maybe the military attaché, who had their own contacts who were operating
independently of others in the embassy.
GIRALDI:
So the network starts with a person like Grossman in the State Department
providing information that enables Turkish and Israeli intelligence officers to have access
to people in Congress, who then provide classified information that winds up in the
foreign embassies?
EDMONDS: Absolutely. And we also had Pentagon officials doing the same thing. We
were looking at Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. They had a list of individuals in the
Pentagon broken down by access to certain types of information. Some of them would be
policy related, some of them would be weapons-technology related, some of them would
be nuclear-related. Perle and Feith would provide the names of those Americans, officials
in the Pentagon, to Grossman, together with highly sensitive personal information: this
person is a closet gay; this person has a chronic gambling issue; this person is an
alcoholic. The files on the American targets would contain things like the size of their
mortgages or whether they were going through divorces. One Air Force major I
remember was going through a really nasty divorce and a child custody fight. They
detailed all different kinds of vulnerabilities.
GIRALDI: So they had access to their personnel files and also their security files and
were illegally accessing this kind of information to give to foreign agents who exploited
the vulnerabilities of these people to recruit them as sources of information?
EDMONDS: Yes. Some of those individuals on the list were also working for the RAND
Corporation. RAND ended up becoming one of the prime targets for these foreign agents.
GIRALDI:
RAND does highly classified research for the U.S. government. So they were
setting up these people for recruitment as agents or as agents of influence?
EDMONDS:
Yes, and the RAND sources would be paid peanuts compared to what the
information was worth when it was sold if it was not immediately useful for Turkey or
Israel. They also had sources who were working in some mid-western Air Force bases.
The sources would provide the information on CD's and DVD's. In one case, for
example, a Turkish military attaché got the disc and discovered that it was something
really important, so he offered it to the Pakistani ISI person at the embassy, but the price
was too high. Then a Turkish contact in Chicago said he knew two Saudi businessmen in
Detroit who would be very interested in this information, and they would pay the price.
So the Turkish military attaché flew to Detroit with his assistant to make the sale.
GIRALDI: We know Grossman was receiving money for services.
EDMONDS:
Yes. Sometimes he would give money to the people who were working
with him, identified in phone calls on a first-name basis, whether it's a John or a Joe. He
also took care of some other people, including his contact at the New York Times.
Grossman would brag, "We just fax to our people at the New York Times. They print it
under their names.....................
.................GIRALDI: Armitage was deputy secretary of state at the time Scowcroft and Baker were
running their own consulting firms that were doing business with Turkey. Grossman had
just become undersecretary, third in the State hierarchy behind Armitage.
You've previously alluded to efforts by Grossman, as well as high-ranking officials at the
Pentagon, to place Ph.D. students. Can you describe that in more detail?
EDMONDS: The seeding operation started before Marc Grossman arrived at the State
Department. The Turkish agents had a network of Turkish professors in various
universities with access to government information. Their top source was a Turkish-born
professor of nuclear physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was useful
because MIT would place a bunch of Ph.D. or graduate-level students in various nuclear
facilities like Sandia or Los Alamos, and some of them were able to work for the Air
Force. He would provide the list of Ph.D. students who should get these positions.
In
some cases, the Turkish military attaché would ask that certain students be placed in
important positions. And they were not necessarily all Turkish, but the ones they selected
had struck deals with the Turkish agents to provide information in return for money. If
for some reason they had difficulty getting a security clearance, Grossman would ensure
that the State Department would arrange to clear them.
In exchange for the information that these students would provide, they would be paid
$4,000 or $5,000. And the information that was sold to the two Saudis in Detroit went for
something like $350,000 or $400,000..................
...........EDMONDS:
But some of the agents continued to investigate the congressional connection. In 1999,
they wire tapped the congressmen directly. (Prior to that point they were getting all their
information secondhand through FISA, as their primary targets were foreigners.) The
questionably legal wiretap gave the perfect excuse to the Justice Department. As soon as
they found out, they refused permission to monitor the congressmen and Grossman as
primary targets. But the inquiry was kept alive in Chicago because the FBI office there
was pursuing its own investigation. The epicenter of a lot of the foreign espionage
activity was Chicago.