Army of Bias?
The U.S. Army National Ground Intelligence Center has been rocked by charges of racial discrimination and illegal electronic surveillance of whistle-blowers.
By Timothy W. Maier

It started as a discrimination complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed by intelligence analyst Alice Lewis against the U.S. Army National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) outside Charlottesville, Va. It since has turned into a national-security nightmare with charges of illegal computer monitoring, obstruction of justice and allegedly deliberate abuse of federal work rules and civil-rights laws. It started as a discrimination complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed by intelligence analyst Alice Lewis against the U.S. Army National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) outside Charlottesville, Va. It since has turned into a national-security nightmare with charges of illegal computer monitoring, obstruction of justice and allegedly deliberate abuse of federal work rules and civil-rights laws.
       The FBI launched a preliminary investigation of the matter in August, Insight has learned. And the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is preparing to file a class-action lawsuit against the facility. Outraged employees have briefed the FBI half-a-dozen times, and an FBI source tells Insight the bureau is going through hundreds of records to see whether laws were broken. “We are taking it very seriously,” says the source.
       The NAACP Federal Sector Task Force recently met outside the facility with its key black intelligence employees. “They’ve got to start firing people,” says Leroy Warren Jr., chairman of the task force that investigates civil-rights abuses. “This is the kind of stuff [Fidel] Castro would do — it is disgraceful. The complaints are dismissed, there is no punishment — and then those who are dismissing the complaints are rewarded with promotions. At some point if the military keeps doing this we’re going to call for a boycott.”
       During the last four years, NGIC has had 24 EEOC complaints, of which five were settled, 18 were withdrawn or dismissed and one is pending. Insight has learned that at least two more EEOC complaints are likely to be filed this month. Lewis settled an earlier complaint filed in 1994, but her most recent complaint was dismissed in 1998.
       Insight’s review of hundreds of declassified records and interviews with current and former intelligence analysts provide a never-before-seen picture of NGIC administrative practices that confirm questionable domestic electronic surveillance of employees. And the number of reprisals claimed by intelligence specialists raises more questions about whether the Whistle Blower Protection Act has been violated. Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has been briefed by staff but has yet to announce hearings.
       While intelligence specialists at this level rarely talk to the press, they broke their silence to Insight in hope of ending reprisals and surveillance. “Management will do anything to get you,” says Lewis, noting that the managers found to have discriminated against her in 1994 were made her supervisors in 1997. Not surprisingly, she since has been demoted and her personnel file shows that managers conducted a series of bizarre investigations ranging from checking her attendance at school to snooping into what she does on her days off.
       The outraged specialists portray NGIC as a “plantation” being run by a vengeful “Southern Boys network” that has been allowed to punish and intimidate those who resist racial, age or gender bias. If you are not a “yes man” to managers who discriminate, the employees claim, you will be electronically targeted and harassed until you either quit or are fired.
       “I’m tired of the physical, telephonic and computer surveillance,” says North Korean intelligence specialist James Harrison outside of NGIC headquarters. He says he found himself targeted after openly supporting Lewis’ racial complaint and says he can’t walk into the building without people trying to listen to his conversations. “I want all this dirt exposed in an open court and people going to jail,” Harrison says.
       Iranian intelligence analyst Steven Jenkins, who also supported Lewis, says, “I consider myself a good guy who wanted to work for NGIC to fight communism. But our legacy appears to be fighting constitutional abuses by our own government.”
       The NGIC managers characterize Lewis, Harrison, Jenkins and several others who have filed or supported EEOC complaints as “malcontents” with axes to grind against supervisors, according to declassified internal intelligence reports. But those records contain no details to support such allegations.
       Martie Cenkci, chief spokeswoman for Intelligence Security and Command (INSCOM) at the center, says the analysts’ allegations of electronic surveillance have been investigated and dismissed by the INSCOM inspector-general’s (IG’s) office. Both the NGIC commander, Col. Michael Rosenbaum, and Deputy Director Bill Rich declined Insight’s repeated requests for interviews. Cenkci says Army policy prohibits officials from commenting on personnel issues or federal investigations.
       Silence is security here. In June the NGIC quietly moved from its asbestos-contaminated building in downtown Charlottesville to a new building in the nearby farm country. From there civilian and military analysts monitor the world by reviewing thousands of pieces of electronic data that reach the center daily. A software program called Pathfinder converts this raw material into useful intelligence, such as pinpointing launching locations of Scud missiles.
       The NGIC was created when the Army’s Foreign Science and Technology Center in Charlottesville and the Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center in Washington merged in 1994. There are about 900 employees — 675 civilians and 225 military — at the center and the agency’s other facilities at Fort Meade and Aberdeen Proving Ground, both in Maryland, and the Washington Navy Yard.
       The top brass doesn’t always take kindly to visitors at the supersecret NGIC, although family members received a private tour in late August and this month the press is expected to be invited in for a look. Historically, however, the facility has been off-limits to outsiders. Lest there be any doubt, a menacing tank is parked in front of the security entrance. Nevertheless Insight managed to tag along on the private family tour without once being asked for identification.
       Inside the building, NGIC had set up several exhibit booths to show low-tech weapons and gear ranging from Russian land mines to Swedish camouflage nets. Analysts explained how NGIC purchases and studies such foreign equipment so it can research ways to defeat it. Nearby the analysts sit in partitioned spaces with classified documents under lock and key.
       On the first floor an unmanned exhibit booth promotes NGIC’s commitment to hiring minorities. The booth stood in contrast to the notable absence of minorities on this particular day as a sea of whites took center stage as exhibit presenters. There are no black intelligence specialists at Charlottesville with a senior government grade of 15 (GG-15) but dozens of senior white specialists. Cenkci claimed there was one black GG-15 at NGIC, but Insight subsequently learned he works at the Washington Navy Yard. There are seven other black intelligence specialists scattered throughout the NGIC facilities compared with more than 100 white intelligence specialists.
       The de facto exclusion of minorities from senior positions promoted employees such as Lewis to seek guidance from the NAACP. “This was a simple discrimination complaint,” says Lewis. “I was not promoted after two exceptional performance reviews,” while whites reported to have lesser evaluations and experience were. Lewis claimed managers told her that her work was unpublishable. But when she provided letters of support from other analysts praising her briefs, the managers reversed themselves and published her material on a classified-intelligence Internet site. But then, she says, her white supporters became targets for reprisals.
       “I don’t see myself as a troublemaker,” says Jenkins. “I didn’t think what might happen if I stood up for Alice. Now you got to ask yourself, ‘Is the system fair or is it only interested in damage control?’ I believe the events that occurred are the result of blatant racial discrimination directed against Ms. Lewis. It’s a reprisal against Ms. Lewis for filing an EEOC complaint and a reprisal against the rest of us for defending and supporting Ms. Lewis in her EEOC complaint.”
       Jenkins says the reprisals involved being placed under electronic surveillance, downgrading of performance reviews and routine denial of educational and training opportunities. Jenkins no longer feels safe around his computer, he tells Insight, after learning from managers that he was under surveillance for perhaps six months between 1998 and 1999. He has no idea who tapped into his computer or even if they had security clearance to review his top-secret work.
       Internal INSCOM records show Deputy Director Rich authorized the surveillance of Lewis; both Jenkins and his wife, Barbara; Harrison; and another woman. However, the records do not say who or how many reviewed the contents of their computers. Insight repeatedly requested an interview with Rich, but his secretary said he would not make himself “available.” On his orders she referred all questions to INSCOM’s public-affairs office at Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County, Va. When Insight again requested an interview with Rich, INSCOM’s chief spokeswoman Cenkci replied, “We don’t know if the FBI is looking at it or if there is a class-action lawsuit, so there is nothing for Deputy Rich to talk about.”
       She adds that the INSCOM inspector general reviewed the computer monitoring and found no basis for complaint. “Everything was aboveboard,” she insists, adding that when employees turn on their computers there is a warning that the computers are subject to lawful monitoring.
       Jenkins raised the issue with Greg Anderson, one of the Army’s most senior consultants on computer monitoring and author of the regulations. In a 1999 response Anderson submitted a policy clarification to the Army general counsel and the judge advocate general charging that the monitoring of the analysts was illegal because it failed to follow the intent of the Army regulations. This memo went to command stations around the world. Cenkci insists it was sent without authorization and has been “rescinded” by commanders. However, the Anderson memo was not a new policy but an explanation of an existing regulation. The Pentagon has delayed releasing a formal opinion on the policy, apparently to avoid liability, say critics.
       Anderson did not return calls, but in his unclassified memorandum, obtained by Insight, he says the Army computer-monitoring policy “does not, repeat, does not provide authority for commanders to monitor, intercept or target an individual’s electronic communications as part of, or in support of, any type of internal command/
       organizational investigation. In fact the [policy] prohibits the monitoring, intercept or targeting of a specific individual’s electronic communication for such purposes.”
       As for the computer warning, Anderson wrote, “In most cases commanders are misinterpreting the warning banner as their authority to conduct some form of unit/organizational-level monitoring, intercept or targeting a specific user’s electronic communications [e-mail] to support a variety of internal command investigations or inquiries.”
       In November 1998, Jenkins accidentally stumbled onto the computer surveillance after returning from lunch and noticing in his file manager that his computer allowed unlimited access to his e-mail and electronic files. Harrison also noticed this, and the two reported it immediately, thinking a foreign power might have penetrated their computers. “Anyone could read the documents,” Jenkins says. “Someone could go in there and change what I wrote without me knowing about it.” At this point the two analysts were told they were under surveillance, as were Barbara Jenkins, Lewis and another employee. All had supported Lewis during her EEOC complaint.
       According to declassified internal records, Rich justified the surveillance by claiming all of them were writing Lewis’ intelligence reports. They vehemently denied the allegations, but the managers claimed not to believe them. “The lying, deceit and plagiarism of degrees of all individuals concerned I find totally unacceptable,” charged one unnamed manager in a June 1999 declassified document.
       To prove these exotic allegations, Rich authorized the surveillance for what was described as “administrative purposes,” according to declassified intelligence records, even though Army regulations say such surveillance must be authorized by a court order or be a random systems-administration procedure. The court orders are for criminal or national-security investigations, which the FBI tells Insight would have had to be under their jurisdiction to be legal. Declassified documents show there was no court order in this case and that the individuals were not randomly chosen by a systems administrator but specifically targeted.
       Despite the monitoring, the managers failed to prove that Jenkins and the other whistle-blowers wrote Lewis’ briefs. They were cleared. Lewis, however, believes the managers lied about when the monitoring began. INSCOM documents claim monitoring began after Oct. 28, 1998, when her EEOC complaint was dismissed and she was placed on a Personnel Improvement Plan (PIP), which employees say is part of building a paper trail to justify firing a government worker who has run afoul of the managers.
       Lewis believes it began earlier when she filed her EEOC complaint. She cites several instances when she provided briefings to NGIC personnel but found they already had copies. When Lewis confronted managers to demand how they obtained copies of her computer documents, she says, “They wouldn’t tell me. They said nothing.”
       Jenkins couldn’t leave it alone. In 1998 he contacted the Army’s EEOC counselor, Elizabeth Sutphen, and asked for an informal investigation of the computer monitoring. EEOC records obtained by Insight show the investigation consisted of no more than asking NGIC managers if what they did was legal. They told her it was and the probe ended. Sutphen concluded nothing was wrong and then was promoted to division chief.
       Angered and frustrated by the lack of investigation, Jenkins and others presented their case in 1999 to the commander, who then was Col. Gary Phillips, and he promptly ordered a new investigation. That probe found NGIC failed to submit the proper paperwork to request authority for such surveillance but claimed this selective snooping was within its authority. According to internal declassified records, Phillips stated that employees had no expectation of computer privacy, comparing it to a footlocker search. Jenkins countered, “You cannot continuously inspect the lockers of only five individuals out of 800 without legal authorization.” Phillips refused to do a computer audit to determine who had access or whether and how material may have been tampered with. The issue was dropped.
       But Jenkins was burning with indignation and still wouldn’t let it go. He asked the IG at INSCOM to investigate, and the IG stated that monitoring in the workplace has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court despite Anderson’s claim that it was illegal under current Army policy. But every Supreme Court case cited by the IG involved a criminal matter where evidence was turned over to security. The monitoring at NGIC did not involve criminal activities, Jenkins notes. “The searches were deliberate and investigative, not administrative, nor were the searches of our computers based on any security-related or criminal-investigative purposes, nor were they random. I believe the NGIC management was primarily seeking information to use in defeating Ms. Lewis’ EEOC action and building a paper trail for her future termination.”
       In the summer of 2000, Jenkins contacted several congressmen. Shortly thereafter he again found himself pulled into the office and counseled about using government phones to call Congress. He was told his telephone would be monitored for three months.
       Other former employees also charged management used domestic surveillance to intimidate or force specialists to drop their complaints. Domestic surveillance, such as wiretapping telephones, falls under the FBI charter and not military intelligence.
       So how much of this is occurring? In early 1996 Susan Young, then an analyst, claimed her telephone conversations at work were being played back to her on her home phone after she filed a sex-discrimination complaint stemming from her work in a Washington intelligence office. After the case was settled, she was transferred to Charlottesville, where she says NGIC managers made life terrible for her.
       Once in the hands of the Charlottesville managers she almost immediately was placed on a PIP. “Everything she did wasn’t good enough,” recalls Harrison. “She knew she was being set up. I told her not to move down to Charlottesville, that they were going to nail her. I told her, ‘You may have won the battle but you are going to lose the war.’”
       She eventually was fired, but not before she got the scare of her life. “I came home around 10 p.m. and my answering machine was filled up with a 15-minute conversation I had at work with a Pentagon employee. It freaked me out. It was very upsetting — someone has invaded my personal space. This was wrong in every which way.”
       Harrison drove the frightened Young to the FBI and she made a criminal complaint, but the perpetrators never were caught. “It was a little intimidation to all of us to watch what you say,” Harrison tells Insight.
       Asked if management had tapped Young’s phone, Cenkci replied, “That’s a negative.” But when Young was told management denied it, she responded, “I’ll take a lie-detector test. I still have a copy of the tape.”
       Senior intelligence analyst William “Larry” Cruse claimed Army intelligence investigators confirmed to him in a private meeting that Young’s phone was tapped. Cruse was part of a management council where he was privy to such information. When Cruse objected to senior managers about the tapping, he was told to keep it quiet because “no one could prove it.”
       But he has been far from quiet. In April he called the IG at INSCOM to investigate a long list of alleged misconduct at NGIC, but the IG office turned him down. Two months later he was stripped of his security clearance, Cruse says, because of charges of spousal abuse (from which he was exonerated in court) and comments he made about his managers outside of work in a private conversation in another state.
       Preparing to defend himself, Cruse requested his personnel file — only to learn a classified document had been slipped into his papers. His immediate reaction? “I’m being set up,” he says. He turned the documents over to the FBI, which has launched a probe into the matter.
       Intelligence specialist Robert Fontaine also suffered suspension of his security clearance after being accused of mail fraud. The charges came after he settled his 1998 EEOC complaint alleging age discrimination. “They said I used the government mail system to send letters stating management was a prick,” Fontaine says. “I didn’t do that.” Nonetheless he sat in an isolated office in Fort Belvoir unable to work on any intelligence matters for nearly two years. After spending $20,000 on legal bills for his defense, he was cleared of the administrative charges and his security clearance was reinstated after 22 months. “Their investigation was a witch-hunt. They said I yelled at a neighborhood kid 19 years ago. The child assaulted my daughter, which shows how desperate they were,” he says.
       Fontaine since has been told to report to Charlottesville, but he says he’d rather retire at age 60 than go there. “Charlottesville is a dead-end, one-way trip to Jurassic Park,” he says. “If you go, you will never come back.”