The Whistleblower's Dilemma: Snowden, Silkwood and Their Quest for the Truth

By Richard Rashke

A look at Edward Snowden, Karen Silkwood, and government and corporate whistleblowing, by an author praised for his “first-rate reporting” (Kirkus Reviews).

In June of 2013, Edward Snowden, a twenty-nine-year-old former CIA employee, leaked thousands of top secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents to journalist Glen Greenwald. Branded as a whistleblower, Snowden reignited a debate about private citizens who reveal government secrets that should be exposed but may endanger the lives of others. Like the late Karen Silkwood, whose death in a car accident while bringing incriminating evidence against her employer to a meeting with a New York Times reporter is still a mystery, Snowden was intent upon revealing the controversial practices of his employer, a government contractor. Rightly or wrongly, Snowden and Silkwood believed that their revelations would save lives. In his riveting, thought-provoking book, Richard Rashke weaves between the lives of these two controversial figures and creates a narrative context for a discussion of what constitutes a citizen’s duty to reveal or not to reveal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Delphinium Books
• Release date: Dec 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504025317

Richard Rashke

Richard Rashke is the author of nonfiction books including The Killing of Karen Silkwood (2000) and Useful Enemies (2013). His books have been translated into eleven languages and have been adapted for screen and television. Rashke is also a produced screenwriter and playwright; his work has appeared on network television and in New York.

Book preview

The Whistleblower’s Dilemma

Snowden, Silkwood and Their Quest for the Truth

Richard Rashke

To Thomasina

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1. The Whistleblower’s Dilemma

2. Disillusioned: Edward Snowden

3. Disillusioned: Karen Silkwood

4. Whom To Tell?: Snowden

5. Whom To Tell?: Silkwood

6. Why: Snowden

7. Why: Silkwood

8. The Price: Snowden

9. The Price: Silkwood

10. Silkwood: Death

11. Demonization: Snowden: Publicity Hound, Coward, Liar

12: Demonization: Snowden: Spy, Traitor, Criminal

13. A Higher Law?

14. Demonization: Silkwood: Heartless Mother, Drug Addict, Mentally Unstable, Plutonium Smuggler, Liar

15. Silkwood: Asleep at the Wheel

16. Was It Worth It?: Snowden

17. Was It Worth It?: Silkwood

Afterword

Major Sources

Notes

PREFACE

Choosing two subjects to compare and analyze in The Whistleblower’s Dilemma was challenging but offered a broad field of candidates. There was Frank Serpico, the famous New York cop who blew the whistle on the NYPD in the early 1970s. Peter Maas wrote a bestselling book about him and Al Pacino played him in the movie version. There was Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, who blew the whistle on the tobacco industry in the 1990s. Wigand was the subject of a CBS 60 Minutes story and a movie, The Insider, starring Russell Crowe in the title role and once again featuring Al Pacino. There was also the Daniel Ellsberg story. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in the 1970s and made international headlines. The Justice Department charged him with a felony crime under the statutes of the Espionage Act of 1917. That charge was dismissed by a federal judge because the government had illegally procured evidence against him.

Although Serpico, Wigand, and Ellsberg were important whistleblowers who took on big targets, I ultimately paired Edward Snowden with Karen Silkwood, a contemporary of Ellsberg.

Karen Silkwood blew the whistle on powerful targets. Like Dr. Wigand, she exposed the wrongdoing of a large and influential company—the Kerr-McGee Corporation and its subsidiary, the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation. Also like Wigand, she pitted herself against an entire industry—the government-protected nuclear industry, vital to the Cold War. And like Snowden, she blew the whistle on the most powerful government agency at the time—the Atomic Energy Commission. In so doing, Karen Silkwood also challenged the CIA, FBI, Oklahoma City Police Department, and Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

Silkwood’s death in a car crash in 1974 caused little more than a ripple. But her family’s 1979 negligence suit against Kerr-McGee created national headlines. And the superficial but factually accurate movie Silkwood, starring Meryl Streep, made Karen Silkwood cocktail party conversation. But the ink has long since dried, the celluloid has faded, and Silkwood’s message is largely forgotten.

In analyzing the Silkwood story here, I rely heavily on the research done for my 1981 book, The Killing of Karen Silkwood, for the fact-based foundation. I have enhanced that material with new information, and the analysis of her whistleblower dilemma is sharper, broader, and bolder than in my earlier book. I hope that this new information and analysis will lead to a greater appreciation of who Karen Silkwood was and of her important contribution to society, and finally give her the recognition she deserves and a rightful place in a whistleblower hall of fame dominated by men.

The Snowden story is contemporary and ongoing. Just about everyone who reads the news or watches television or goes online knows who Edward Snowden is—at least superficially. What makes him exceptional is that he went after the National Security Agency (NSA), the most powerful agency in the U.S. government. In so doing, he challenged the Obama White House, the U.S. Congress, the Department of State, the FBI, and the CIA. And he risks going to prison for a very long time, if he isn’t assassinated. In analyzing Snowden and his story as a whistleblower, I rely on sometimes contradictory facts found in the work of journalist and author Glenn Greenwald, fellow journalist Luke Harding, author Michael Gurnow, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, a comprehensive team-written article published in Vanity Fair, and a steady stream of articles published in the British newspaper, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Christian Science Monitor, between 2013 and 2015.

Discussing Edward Snowden with colleagues, friends, and the strangers I met during walks in the National Arboretum, in pubs, and on the subway in Washington, I learned that everyone who knows who Snowden is has already decided whether he is a traitor or a hero. I also learned that these opinions are, for the most part, based on emotions, false information, or superficial impressions. It is not the intention of this book to try to sway readers in either direction, but to provide a factual basis for deciding whether whistleblower Edward Snowden served or betrayed his country.

Although the lives and concerns and circumstances of Edward Snowden and Karen Silkwood are vastly different, they shared the same goal—truth—as they challenged established organizations. Snowden has revealed alleged unconstitutional government programs devoted to collecting electronic bulk data on Americans who were not terrorist suspects. Silkwood blew the whistle on health and safety violations that endangered nuclear workers, their families, and the environment. The issue was life and death.

The Silkwood story has one huge advantage over the Snowden story—distance. Silkwood blew the whistle more than forty years ago. That span of years gives her story a depth and us a perspective that the ongoing Snowden story will one day achieve. Forty years from now, who Edward Snowden was and what he accomplished will be much clearer and arguably less emotional. And its ending will have been written. If what Snowden says is true, and government agents are plotting to kill him, then his end may mirror Silkwood’s and dramatically illustrate the whistleblower’s dilemma.

Richard Rashke

Washington, D.C.

August 2015

Introduction

One dry, cold November night in 1974, Karen Gay Silkwood left a union meeting at the Hub Café in rural Crescent, Oklahoma, jumped into her white Honda Civic, and headed down Highway 74 toward Oklahoma City. It was 7:30 p.m., the last day of her life. On the seat next to her were the documents she had stolen from her employer, Kerr-McGee, a contractor that manufactured fuel rods filled with plutonium pellets for the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Silkwood planned to deliver the sensitive documents to a New York Times reporter waiting at the Holiday Inn Northwest. Her documents included doctored quality-control negatives.

Silkwood may also have had classified or government-protected Kerr-McGee inventory reports showing that forty pounds of plutonium, called material unaccounted for, or MUF, was missing from the plant. It was an open secret among Silkwood’s fellow workers that plutonium was missing. Silkwood discovered the actual size of the shortfall.

A little more than seven miles out of Crescent, Silkwood’s Honda Civic crossed over to the left side of the road, straightened out, traveled more than 240 feet down a washboard shoulder, and smashed into the cement wall of a culvert running under the road. She died instantly.

Did Karen Silkwood fall asleep at the wheel as the Oklahoma Highway Patrol ruled, or was she wide-awake when her car sped down the shoulder of the highway, as an independent accident investigator determined? Was it a one-car crash as the state police reported, or did someone force her off the road as the accident investigator concluded?

The answers to these questions still lie buried under layers of secrecy in the files of the FBI, the Justice Department, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, which are protected by loopholes in the Freedom of Information Act and Oklahoma’s Open Records Act. Those laws allow federal and Oklahoma government officials to exclude from public disclosure—at their own discretion—their secret and possibly embarrassing Silkwood files.

Forty years after Karen Silkwood’s death, the questions remain: What are government agencies still hiding? Whom are they protecting?

As troubling as the secrecy issue is after almost two and a half centuries of American democracy, the fundamental questions raised by Karen Silkwood’s death and the posthumous 1979 negligence trial against Kerr-McGee, detailed in my book The Killing of Karen Silkwood, are much broader. And they are as valid today as they were then. Driven by Cold War fears—both warranted and exaggerated—the United States government and its nuclear contractors sacrificed health, safety, and the environment in order to develop weapons of mass destruction. The Silkwood story asks: Can government regulators, politicians, the military-intelligence complex, and profit-oriented corporations be trusted to deal responsibly with nuclear energy, hazardous nuclear waste, and the production and management of highly dangerous nuclear weapons? Do they have the will and courage to protect Americans from indifference to life, gross negligence, unaccountable mismanagement, human error, deception, corruption, and greed?

In his own way, in a different time, and dealing with a different issue, Edward Snowden asked the same questions about the war on terror.

In May 2013, thirty-nine years after the death of Karen Silkwood, computer whiz and uber-hacker Edward Snowden packed up some clothes, a few personal belongings, four laptops, and several thumb drives. Those thumb drives contained thousands of pages of top-secret government documents so well firewalled that even the most accomplished hackers in the world hadn’t been able to access them. Snowden then boarded a plane for Hong Kong under his own name, checked into a hotel under his own name, and prepaid his bill by personal credit card.

Like Karen Silkwood, Edward Snowden was about to blow the whistle—not on a major corporation like Kerr-McGee or a government agency like the AEC, but on the most secret and most powerful intelligence hub in America—the National Security Agency (NSA). Unlike Silkwood, who was on her way to meet New York Times reporter David Burnham the night she was killed, Snowden was waiting for reporter Glenn Greenwald to come to him.

David Burnham never had the chance to write an exposé based on Silkwood’s documents, which disappeared from her car the night she died. Glenn Greenwald wrote a series of articles that exposed a facet of America’s top-secret, electronic snooping program that had been blessed by a top-secret court and secretly approved by the Obama administration. The articles sent tremors around the world.

Like the Karen Silkwood story, the Edward Snowden story raises a string of serious and intriguing questions. Snowden fled to Hong Kong. Was he working for the Chinese, as his critics allege? Next, Snowden took up residence in Moscow. Was he sharing his documents with Russian intelligence officers? Snowden admits copying top-secret NSA documents. Was that theft or was he just returning documents that belonged to the people? Was bulk collection of phone and electronic data on Americans, who were not terrorist suspects, unconstitutional? If so, did the NSA commit a crime if it illegally invaded the privacy of U.S. citizens? Snowden admits that he broke the law when he copied classified files and gave them to the media, but he denies that it was a crime to do so. Did he commit a crime? If he did, was it treason? Snowden says he is willing to face a judge and jury as long as he gets a fair trial. Will the Justice Department guarantee him a fair trial? If Russia eventually decides to expel Snowden, will another country grant him asylum, and if it does, can it protect him from assassins?

In the end, Karen Silkwood paid a heavy price for daring to blow the whistle on Kerr-McGee, the nuclear industry, and the AEC. So might Edward Snowden.

The Whistleblower’s Dilemma

In June 2013, Edward Snowden shoved himself and other whistleblowers like Karen Silkwood into the spotlight when he leaked top-secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents. In so doing, he reminded the nation that whistleblowing is both a First Amendment right, albeit controversial, and a necessity to keep government and commerce honest. Snowden’s actions provoked a series of questions ranging from nettlesome to troublesome:

Are whistleblowers heroes or traitors?

Are whistleblowers snitches or saviors?

Do they have a legal, moral, or ethical obligation to blow the whistle?

Do they do more damage than good for the nation?

What personal price do they pay?

Is it worth it?

Most of the hundreds, if not thousands, of whistleblowers never earn ink on the front pages of national newspapers or their online counterparts. Most of the whistleblowers who make headlines do so because they have exposed the secrets of powerful corporations and government agencies with seemingly unlimited resources to hound, scare, silence, and break their critics financially, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Whistleblowers who leak classified government secrets force the nation to question the legality or criminality of their controversial activity. These whistleblowers also leave the government with little choice but to charge, try, convict, and sentence them under the Espionage Act of 1917—as the U.S. Department of Justice did with Wiki leaker Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and threatens to do with Edward Snowden, if it can ever extradite him to the United States to face a judge.

A potential whistleblower who discovers wrongdoing is, more often than not, forced to grapple with a life-altering or life-shattering dilemma. What to do?

Look the other way. It’s none of my business.

Rationalize the problem. It goes on everywhere, so why should I stick my neck out?

Pass the buck. It’s somebody else’s problem, not mine.

Be pragmatic. Nothing will change anyway.

Protect self and family. It’s too risky.

Get rich. Doesn’t the government pay for information on waste and fraud?

Blow the whistle. It’s my duty.

Researchers such as sociologists Joyce Rothschild and Terance D. Miethe, who have conducted an extensive survey of whistleblowers and written thoughtful articles on the whistleblowing phenomenon, have provided a context to evaluate and understand both Edward Snowden and Karen Silkwood. One of their important findings is that, unlike Snowden and Silkwood, at least half of those who observe wrongdoing in the workplace remain silent. They fear retaliation and believe that blowing the whistle wouldn’t do any good. Why take the risk?

Rothschild, Miethe, and other researchers have also discovered striking similarities among whistleblowers who, like Snowden and Silkwood, challenged organizations rather than individuals.

Most or a vast majority of whistleblowers were naïve before they reported wrongdoing. They didn’t understand the risks or foresee the consequences. They reported the wrongdoing internally rather than to the media, which they considered a last resort. And they were motivated to blow the whistle by pride in their work and/or by personally held values.

Most or a vast majority of whistleblowers saw their job performance ratings decline, experienced an increase in the monitoring of their work and phone calls, and were eventually fired or forced to resign. Fellow workers, warned to avoid contact with them, shunned them, making them pariahs in the workplace. Most experienced some form of retaliation by their employer that resulted in severe depression or anxiety, deteriorating physical health, severe financial loss, and stressed family relations. The retaliation against them was greater when the wrongdoing was systemic—an essential part of the culture and modus operandi of the organization.

Most or a vast majority of whistleblowers felt that the stress, insecurity, loss of