Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995

The Witness of Other Truth Tellers

We are painfully aware of the experience of Frank Grevil. In more fortunate circumstances, whistleblowers have scored major successes. Let me mention a couple, before we give Frank the Sam Adams award.

It has been 50 years since my first extended visit to Europe as a university student. Most of you are too young to remember, but a “wonder-drug,” Thalidomide, had just come on the market. This drug gave temporary rest and relief to millions, especially prospective mothers with morning sickness and problems sleeping.

Stationed in Germany more than a decade later, I witnessed the human results of the horrible side effects of Thalidomide, which had become available all over Germany, the rest of Europe, and beyond.

Over 10,000 babies in 46 countries were born without limbs or otherwise disfigured and disabled. Those still alive would be in their late forties now. Perhaps you have encountered some of them.

Frances Kelsey

How did the United States escape this plague? One whistleblower, a woman named Frances Kelsey of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration saw through the charade — the magic suit, you might say, of the swindlers from the drug company.

Although Doctor Kelsey came under extreme pressure to fall in step and approve the drug, she would not be moved. She saw right through this particular magic-suit-type scheme, scorned the testing that had been done by the Thalidomide manufacturer, and blocked introduction of the drug into America.

As the sixties and seventies wore on, the horrible damage caused by the drug made itself known. And what also became clear was the reality that a decade of American babies born in whole, with all their limbs, owed a debt of gratitude to Frances Kelsey, whistleblower par excellence!

Tom Clark, who did so much to help arrange this evening’s event, tells me that he is of that generation, that his mother suffered from morning sickness in bearing him, and that he might well be missing a limb or two today, had his mother been able to acquire Thalidomide in the United States.

W. Mark Felt

Just last month, W. Mark Felt, now perhaps the most famous whistleblower in our country’s history, died at the age of 95. Felt was the senior FBI official referred to as “Deep Throat,” who resisted and exposed the cover-up of the Watergate crimes under President Richard Nixon.

Felt leaked to the press so much damaging information that President Richard Nixon was driven out of office when it became clear that he was trying to be king, rather than president. With help from journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post — an independent newspaper in those days — a would-be dictator was forced to resign the presidency.

One must make some practical application here in order to explain why Bush and Cheney were permitted to serve out their term.

It was the power of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) and the cowardice of an invertebrate legislature that were responsible for the fact that those war criminals were not impeached, convicted, and removed from power — a process for which the provident Founders of our country were careful to provide in the Constitution.

Freedom is endangered when there is no truly free and independent Fourth Estate, which the British statesman Edmund Burke called the “most important estate of all.”

The biggest sea change I have witnessed in the American body politic in the 45 years I have been in Washington is the reality that our country no longer has, in any meaningful sense, a free media. That is, as we say in America, BIG! Perhaps the situation is better here in Denmark?

The morphing of Bob Woodward is perhaps most instructive of all. He kept his explicit promise to Felt to avoid revealing the identity of “Deep Throat” until Felt released the reporter from that pledge shortly before Felt’s death.

Woodward did not, however, keep the implicit promise of an investigative journalist to pursue truth without fear or favor. Rather, like the craven Washington Post, Woodward made an unconscionable transition from fearless “junkyard dog” to Historian to the Court of George W. Bush and his regent Dick Cheney.

It was the price Woodward would pay for uniquely privileged access to them.

All, including investigative journalists, are vulnerable to the temptations of power. Lord Acton’s dictum at work once again.

Sadly, Britain’s Lord Goldsmith seems blissfully unaware of Lord Acton’s dictum. Or perhaps he means to prove it! Goldsmith is the U.K Attorney General who conveniently obliged when then-Prime Minister Tony Blair told him to change his legal opinion on attacking Iraq from illegal to legal.

I am not making this up. An official British document that was leaked to the Sunday Times contains the minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting with Blair at 10 Downing Street and has become known as the “Downing Street Memo.” The minutes record Goldsmith as saying that “the desire for regime change was not a legal basis for military action.”

Elizabeth Wilmshurst

But no matter. Under great pressure, Goldsmith was persuaded to change his mind. And so did all the lawyers in the Foreign Office — all, that is, but one Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the deputy legal counsel.

Wilmshurst had been deeply involved in negotiations with the International Criminal Court regarding crimes of aggression. She knew a war of aggression when she saw one.

Wilmshurst would not go with the flow like the proverbial dead fish. When her boss Michael Wood and her colleagues did a 180-degree collective change of mind on the legality of attacking Iraq, she resigned on March 18, 2003, one day before the war began.

In her letter of resignation, Elizabeth Wilmshurst wrote that she was leaving “with very great sadness” after almost 30 years in the legal department of the foreign office:

“I cannot in conscience go along with advice — within the Office or to the public or Parliament — which asserts the legitimacy of military action without a [new Security Council] resolution, particularly since an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression; nor can I agree with such action in circumstances which are so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law.”

Her boss, Michael Wood, who went with the flow, was rewarded with knighthood the following year. So was Christopher Greenwood, the outside jurist from whom Lord Goldsmith sought cover, when he dutifully changed his opinion on the legality of the war. O Tempora, O Mores!

Katharine Gun

The bravery of Katharine Gun is well depicted in the book published last year, The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War.

Working on Chinese affairs in the British equivalent of the U.S. eavesdropping agency (NSA), Katharine had little access to sensitive information regarding the Middle East. Yet at the turn of 2002-2003 it became clear to her that the U.S. and U.K. had decided to attack Iraq, whether or not it had threatening weapons, and whether or not the UN Security Council approved.

Still, Katharine was startled to see set down in black and white, in an e-mail of late January 2003, a blanket instruction to her colleagues to help the U.S. National Security Agency “surge” the monitoring of conversations of Security Council members in New York, in order to give American and British diplomats the wherewithal to pre-empt any initiative that could block the path to war.

Her conscience led her to make that blanket instruction available to the media.

Katharine’s objective, pure and simple, was to prevent a war of aggression. And, absent approval by the Security Council, that was precisely what an attack on Iraq would be.

She expected that if she provided unimpeachable documentary evidence, including the full name of the senior NSA official ordering the “surge” in monitoring, this would demonstrate to the world how hell-bent Bush and Blair were on war — even if illegal.

Katharine Gun reasoned that exposing the wealth of detail regarding what the NSA was urging in order to rig the results of any discussions among Security Council members would bring a flurry of attention in the Western press. She expected that this, in turn, would give a boost to those trying to stop the launching of an unprovoked war.

As things turned out, Katharine was shocked that the information she leaked was virtually ignored by the U.S. Fawning Corporate Media (FCM), which had long been cheerleading for war.

She was arrested and brought to trial. Her pro bono lawyers argued that she was trying to prevent a war. They contended that the war was illegal, which of course the British government denied. However, when asked to make public the opinion(s) of the British Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, on the legality of the war, the government refused.

Blair was not inclined to let his own and Lord Goldsmith’s dirty linen hang out for all to see. As a result, Katharine escaped the fate that befell Frank Grevil.

I would now like to introduce to you that same Katharine Gun, and ask her to read the citation awarding Frank Grevil the Sam Adams award:

The Sam Adams Associates
Corner-Brightener Candlestick

Awarded to Frank Grevil

Know all ye by these presents that FRANK GREVIL is hereby awarded The Corner-Brightener Candlestick, presented by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

Heeding the dictates of conscience and true patriotism, Danish Army Maj. Frank Grevil put his career and his very liberty at risk for democracy. He did this by exposing the deceptive nature of the intelligence conjured up in an attempt to “justify” Denmark’s role in the attack on Iraq in March 2003.

Maj. Grevil and other intelligence analysts had warned the Danish government that there was very little evidence that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.” Despite this, on the day before the invasion of Iraq, Denmark’s Prime Minister told Parliament: “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. This is not something we just believe. We know.”

Grevil believes it to be extremely destructive of democracy when national leaders deceive the citizens’ representatives, whether in Parliament or Congress, into voting for what the Nuremberg Tribunal called the “supreme international crime” — a war of aggression. He thought it essential that Danish citizens learn that their political leaders had not told the truth. And so he gave to the press documents that exposed this, fully aware that, in doing so, he ran the risk of going to prison.

Like previous SAAII annual award winner, Katharine Gun of British intelligence, the documents that Frank Grevil released shone a laser beam of light through a thick cloud of deception. Grevil set a courageous example for those intelligence analysts of the “Coalition of the Willing” who have first-hand knowledge of how intelligence was corrupted to “justify” war, but who have not yet been able to find their voice.

Presented this 26th day of January 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark by admirers of the example set by our former colleague, Sam Adams.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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