Transcript
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last week, Bill Arkin confronted a potentially career-ending accusation. A one time Army intelligence analyst, Arkin has been for more than 20 years a journalist and crusader for military transparency. He was, for instance, the first to disclose the US military plans for Operation Iraqi Freedom, and most recently, he's published a comprehensive list of code names assigned to US military and intelligence operations. He's continually explored the limits of what the public has a right to know and what the military should keep secret. And so it was especially damning and suspect when a cable sent to Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz offered evidence that Arkin had been a spy for Saddam Hussein. Arkin quickly proved the cable a fake and called for a Defense Department investigation, but questions remain about the cable's origins. Bill, thanks for coming on.
WILLIAM ARKIN: Thank you very much for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So describe the chain of events that led you to finding out about this thing.
WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, last Monday, I got a call from Bill Gertz, the defense correspondent for the Washington Times, asking me if I would like to respond to allegations that I had taken money from Saddam Hussein from 1994 to 1998. I said, well I can't really answer any allegation until I see the document, and he sent it to me, and it certainly looks authentic. Someone has spent a lot of time and energy to create an intelligence report that looks sort of like intelligence reports. But the reality is that there were little things about it that were wrong. Well, there was, first, a big thing about it that was wrong.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And what was that?
WILLIAM ARKIN: I wasn't an Iraqi spy.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Oh. [LAUGHTER] Not to get too wonky here, you seem to be the absolute worst person to fake a Defense Department intelligence memo about, since you have files of thousands of them and you know exactly how they're supposed to look and what the code names for various periods covered would be. But what was the tipoff that it was a forgery?
WILLIAM ARKIN: It was addressed, for instance, to US CINCCENT, and that is Commander in Chief, Central Command. Well, the reality was that at the time that the cable was purportedly written, there was no such thing as a US CINCCENT. Secretary Rumsfeld had decided that they should all be called Commanders of Central Command rather than Commanders in Chief. There's only one Commander in Chief.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And this jumped out at you, did it?
WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, it jumped out at me with 15 other minor things that I could bore you to death if I went into them. Overall, the allegations, you know, they were close enough to the truth, and that is an issue with any forgery - it has to be plausible - yet, at the same time, when I looked at the form of the reporting, it appeared to be a forgery, which, by the way, the Defense Department confirmed.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Explain why this was, as you say, somewhat plausible. You were in Iraq at one point as a consultant to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Now, the forged cable cites this as evidence of your collusion with Saddam? How did it make that link?
WILLIAM ARKIN: I had worked as a consultant for the secretary general in 1998. I was hired to conduct an investigation whether or not the UN Special Commission was spying on behalf of the United States. I didn't go to Iraq in 1998, something that the cable says I did do. Certainly the US Government was very mad at me in 1998 for exposing the fact that they were using the UN Special Commission to spy on Iraq, and the cable claims that documents were recovered in Baghdad after the Iraq war which indicated that I was being paid.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This isn't the first time you've been smeared.
WILLIAM ARKIN: [LAUGHS] No, it's not. I feel like there's sort of two separate issues here. One is former Defense Department officials or former intelligence officials saying that I'm a commie pinko. I kind of wear that, these days, as a badge of honor, [LAUGHTER] but the fact that there was a document out there that, to some untrained observers might have appeared to be authentic, really was worrisome to me, particularly in the electronic age, where documents can be fabricated and circulate so quickly and so easily, and I feel like, given that I just had a new book that came out, this fabricated document might have been the beginnings of or might be the beginnings of a campaign to not only intimidate me but intimidate other journalists.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What advice would you give to those who might consider whistleblowing?
WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, I think whistleblowers are an important element of the democratic process, and they are protected, and generally, I think, even revered, particularly when they blow the whistle on boondoggles and expensive wastes of American taxpayer dollars. But, I think what is happening now in the Bush administration is that we see sort of three things happening at the same time. One is this trend towards greater personal attack; two is a tremendous increase in secrecy, even trivial secrecy, particularly at new departments, like the Department of Homeland Security; and then, three, I think, is the dilution of the protection of federal employees who might step forward to speak about improprieties.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. Bill, thank you very much.
WILLIAM ARKIN: Thank you for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bill Arkin is a military analyst for NBC News, and the author most recently of Code Names: Deciphering US Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World. [MUSIC]