Back in the late 1960s, a US Defence Department engineer was tasked with evaluating the quality, reliability and — most importantly — the cost of the highly complex avionics systems being constructed for the US military’s latest, massive transport plane. But something didn’t seem to add up for that particular engineer, a man named A Ernest Fitzgerald.

He wrote critical reports, refused to certify the systems as appropriately costed, ready, and right for purpose, and generally caused a major hiccup in the contracts for those systems. When he was told to cease all this nonsense by higher ups, he stood his ground, and communicated his deep misgivings to Congress and the public via the media. Things got sufficiently difficult and President Richard Nixon told the secretary of defence to “fire that SOB”. Fitzgerald fought back through a maze of personnel appeals channels and the courts, and ultimately he kept his job, well, a job, anyway.

In the end, he was not definitively dismissed. But, after he gained reinstatement, he was assigned the bureaucratic equivalent of counting the paper clips on his desk. But, through his admirable bureaucratic tenaciousness, he successfully exposed the waste and fraud he had encountered. But it cost him personally.

As The Washington Post described it in their obituary of him earlier in 2019, “A. Ernest Fitzgerald, a Pentagon official tasked with analyzing project expenses, was summoned to Capitol Hill in 1968 to discuss a new fleet of Lockheed C-5A transport planes before the Joint Economic Committee.

“He had been instructed to play dumb about the cost. He did not. Under oath, he said the C-5A was $2-billion over budget. In testifying, Mr. Fitzgerald later said, he was merely ‘committing truth’.

“The revelation about the vast cost overruns made national headlines, stunning members of Congress as well as Mr. Fitzgerald’s superiors. Back at the Pentagon, he was met with a blunt question from his secretary: ‘Have you been fired yet?’ Mr. Fitzgerald lasted another two years in his position before President Richard M. Nixon ordered his dismissal. He went on to sue Nixon, an action that resulted in a landmark US Supreme Court case on presidential immunity and helped make him ‘America’s best-known whistle-blower’, The Washington Post wrote in 1987.

“Through his more than 50 subsequent appearances on Capitol Hill, said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), Mr. Fitzgerald all but single-handedly ‘created the concept of Pentagon waste and fraud. People didn’t even think about it. And now they very much understand it is happening,’ even as policymakers have failed ‘to listen to his message’, she said.

“Mr. Fitzgerald, alternately dubbed ‘the patron saint of government whistle-blowers’ and ‘the most hated man in the Air Force’, was 92 when he died Jan. 31, exactly 46 years after Nixon’s Oval Office taping system recorded the president discussing Mr. Fitzgerald’s ouster.

“ ‘This guy that was fired’, he [Nixon] told aide Charles W. Colson, ‘I’d marked it in the news summary. That’s how that happened. I said get rid of that son of a bitch.’

“ ‘The point was not that he was complaining about the overruns’, Nixon said in a separate conversation that day, ‘but that he was doing it in public… And not, and frankly, not taking orders’.

“The transcripts were made public as part of Mr. Fitzgerald’s effort to win $3.5-million in damages from Nixon and three of his aides — the final chapter in a legal saga that began soon after his C-5A testimony, when the Air Force inundated him with busy work, investigated his private life and launched a smear campaign against him, according to court documents.

“In 1970, he was laid off from his position as a senior financial management specialist; he was told that it was part of a general staff reduction. Mr. Fitzgerald fought the dismissal with a lawsuit, and in 1973 the Civil Service Commission took his side, ordering his reinstatement with around $80,000 in back pay.

“But while his job title was the same, the work was not. ‘I’m completely excluded from the big weapons systems jobs’, Mr. Fitzgerald told The Post. ‘They keep me out of Boeing’s and Lockheed’s hair and all the big ones’. He was instead ordered to examine maintenance depots. As his daughter Nancy Fitzgerald-Greene said in an interview, the Air Force ‘put him in charge of inspecting bowling alleys in Thailand.’ ” Sometimes it takes guts to be a whistle-blower, as well as a whole lot of fortitude and perseverance, and justice is not always easy to achieve.

Ultimately, Fitzgerald’s persistence led to public applause and awards named in his honour, and the passage of whistle-blower protections in law, designed to prevent administrative retribution exacted against civil servants who call attention to that now-familiar triad of waste, fraud, and abuse, along with attempts to cover up the resulting messes by more senior officials protecting their respective patches of turf. More recently, employees of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are now covered by whistle-blower protections as well — although their protections are somewhat more limited than other whistle-blower protections for those outside intelligence agencies.

At about the same time as Fitzgerald’s ordeals, in 1971, an analyst at the Rand Corporation (a defence Department research and analysis contractor), Daniel Ellsberg, secretly began photocopying a 47-volume history of America’s misbegotten engagement in Indochina, along with supporting documents.

Ellsberg had been on a tour of duty with the State Department in Vietnam and during that period, he had reached the conclusion that the war was unwinnable. He returned to the United States in 1967, rejoined Rand and worked on “US Decision-Making in Vietnam, 1945–68”, the classified report commissioned by Defence Secretary Robert McNamara.

By late 1969, he began secretly photocopying the entire study and then offered it to several members of Congress, but none of those chose to act on it. By then, Ellsberg had moved on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and with the expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, he began leaking parts of the study to The New York Times which started to publish articles based on those “Pentagon Papers” — as the McNamara report came to be known—and the US Department of Justice quickly obtained a restraining order against the newspaper for publishing highly classified material. As the Encyclopedia Britannia summarises it:

“After more than two weeks of legal wrangling, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had not made the case for prior restraint of publication.

“Ellsberg was indicted under the Espionage Act, and the charges levelled against him could have resulted in up to 115 years in prison. The trial against Ellsberg, which began in January 1973, lasted four months and concluded with the dismissal of all charges after evidence of gross governmental misconduct came to light. John D. Ehrlichman, an adviser to Pres. Richard M. Nixon, had utilised a team of ‘plumbers’ — so named for their ability to ‘repair leaks’ and later made famous by their role in the Watergate break-in — to burglarise the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in an unsuccessful effort to uncover embarrassing or harmful material. Cleared of wrongdoing, Ellsberg devoted the rest of his life to peace activism and academia.”

More recently, Ellsberg has been a vocal supporter of the efforts of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Assange himself has said Ellsberg’s activities had inspired him in his own efforts.

The study Ellsberg had secretly released had originally been commissioned by McNamara to answer how, why, and when the country had gone so far off track (and along the way, how did the entire military and civilian apparatus of warfare succeed in so deeply deluding itself) in Vietnam. In this sense, despite Ellsberg’s later writings that often turned into a more systemic critique of the US government, back in 1971, Ellsberg’s original motivation appears to have been to render the nation a public service as he defined it. He had revealed a vast, costly (in both human and material terms), debilitating, devastating policy failure, and he had attempted to remedy this failure by providing ammunition to support anti-war activists throughout the country who were pushing for a conclusion to the US role in the Southeast Asian war.

It is crucial to remember that both Fitzgerald’s and Ellsberg’s cases were based on putting information into the hands of the public to move government policy — unlike, say, the surreptitious ferreting out and handing over of secret information for ideological dedication to another nation or for financial gain, as with Manhattan Project spies Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on the one hand, and Aldrich Ames on the other — with Jonathan Pollard’s actions poised somewhere in-between). The cases of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange/Chelsea Manning seem to make up a category of their own — that is, illicitly obtaining US government secret information in order to distribute it as widely and as publicly possible to embarrass the American government’s military and diplomatic activities. Perhaps it’s best to put those two more anomalous cases aside for now.

But this year in particular seems to have been a banner year for classic whistle-blowers, travelling in the footsteps of Fitzgerald and Ellsberg, in America and elsewhere. First has been the still-unidentified whistle-blower who risked his/her professional (and perhaps even personal) circumstances to report through the professional food chain the troubling elements in President Donald Trump’s conversation with the new Ukrainian president.

In that conversation, Trump effectively dangled greatly needed anti-tank missiles and a White House presidential visit in exchange for a promise to make a public announcement of Ukrainian investigations of Trump’s potential 2020 presidential rival, Joe Biden, and his son. The consequences of that whistle-blower memorandum are now playing out, having given the vital kickstart to the effort to impeach the US president, even as the whistle-blower has still maintained public anonymity – even if the implications are very, very public.

Two surprising non-American examples of the whistle-blower’s fraternity came to light as well in 2019. Pulling a veil from China’s vast network of human rights abuses in Xinjiang where an extraordinarily large number of Uighur Muslim youth have been involuntarily put into re-education camps, an anonymous individual, presumably somewhere within the Chinese government, released a whole sheaf of documentation on this policy. Meanwhile, someone else in Iran, a person still unknown, and in the midst of the country’s growing demonstrations against repression, economic circumstances and the heavy-handed police reaction that have reportedly led to hundreds of deaths, managed to work around the government’s shutdown of the internet to release video images to the world of police activity against demonstrators. In both these cases, if the individuals had announced themselves publicly, the results to them would obviously not have been pleasant.

And then, in mid-December 2019, yet another astonishing revelation, with circumstances almost eerily mimicking those of “The Pentagon Papers”, came into public view. The Pentagon had carried out a multi-year, in-depth study of the American role in Afghanistan, interviewing hundreds of American and Afghani leaders, military figures and others. The drafters of the study came to the inescapable conclusion that the American intervention under three separate presidents has largely been an expensive failure.

As The Washington Post reported on 10 December 2019:

“A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

“The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

“The US government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

“In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare. With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

“ ‘We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,’ Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: ‘What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking’.

“ ‘If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … 2,400 lives lost,’ Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. ‘Who will say this was in vain?’

“Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defence Department figures.

“The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.”

While this cache of material does not — yet — have a whistle-blower’s name attached the way Ellsberg’s name came to be linked to that earlier study, someone clearly tipped off Post reporters. With that, they could file their “Freedom of Information” requests and then successfully pursue their lawsuits when the documents were not forthcoming.

We are now only at the very beginnings of how the impact of this trove of information on Afghanistan will play out, just as we still do not know the ultimate impact of the Ukrainian saga whistle-blower’s memorandum, or, for that matter of the efforts of those brave leakers in China and Iran. Collectively, however, these examples now point to the criticality of the whistle-blower and the truth-teller for today’s world — and for tomorrow’s as well. DM

Previous Global People of the Year

2018 International Person(s) of the Year: Jamal Khashoggi

2017 International Person(s) of the Year: The Silence Breakers

2017 International Person(s) of the Year (Runners-up): Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron

2016 International Person(s) of the Year: The Troll

2015 International Person(s) of the Year: The Refugee

2014 International Person(s) of the Year: Vladimir Putin

2013 International Person(s) of the Year: Edward Snowden

2013 International Person(s) of the Year (Runners-up): Pope Francis

2012 International Person(s) of the Year: Barack Obama

2011 International Person(s) of the Year: Mohamed Bouazizi