BROADCAST EXCERPT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000402120001-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 22, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: November 22, 1995
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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FRCH : Panasonic PPF
PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
Fred Ritz
November 22, 1995 7:40 AX
BROADCAST EXCERPT
BOB EDWARDS : A year ago, the CIA settled a sex, discrimination
case brought by one of its top female operatives. The settlement
was for some $700,000.. NPR has learned that the woman who brought
the case, known as Jane Doe Thompson, has asked the Justice
Department to investigate top CIA officials for deliberately
falsifying information against her. The Justice Department is
conducting a preliminary investigation to see whether the CIA
Inspector General, Fred Ritz, and others should be charged with a
crime. 01
Just three weeks ago, three former CIA directors asked the
Senate to conduct an independent investigation of the Inspector
General's office.
NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG: Jane Doe Thompson is not allowed to use her
real name because the CIA insisted she remain under cover, even
though she no longer works for the agency.
For 26 years she served in the CIA, eventually becoming one of
four women to reach the rank of Station Chief in the Directorate of
Operations, the Clandestine Services. For 23 of those years she
was a star, a brilliant case officer who was steadily promoted.
And in 1989 she was sent to Jamaica as the first female Station
Chief in Latin America.
According to former CIA Director William Webster, Jamaica was
a problem station for the CIA, and Thompson was sent there to clean
it up. Within the first year and a half, Thompson reported her
deputy for beating his wife, and she disciplined two other
subordinates.
In 1992, Thompson was called to the Inspector General's office
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in Washington for a meeting, a meeting that she thought would be
about her deputy's repeated and admitted wife abuse. Instead, she
found that the Inspector General had been investigating her for six
months.
JANE DOE THOMPSON [Former CIA Station Chief]: I got to the
interview, they called me for an interview, and the first thing
that I was told was that I was the target of the investigation.
TOTENBERG: Jane Doe Thompson's life was suddenly turned
upside down. The very people she had disciplined and had reported
for alleged wrongdoing had made charges against her and been
believed.
THOMPSON: I left there and I must have been in such a state
of shock, I ran into a friend of mine as I was walking down the
hall,. just after leaving the IG's office, and she said to me,
"Jane, what's the matter with you? You're all white." She said,
"What happened to you?"
TOTENBERG: Thompson has never spoken publicly before, but in
a lengthy interview, she told the story of what happened to her.
Initially, she said, the charges against her were that she claimed
some unauthorized overtime and had used a government helicopter for
personal purposes. But when she was able to definitively disprove
those charges, the focus of the Inspector General's investigation
switched to more personal allegations, that she was a drunken,
promiscuous case officer who sexually harassed a subordinate.
Thompson got herself a lawyer, and in November of 1992, more
than a year after the investigation of her began, she was allowed
to see the Inspector General's report on her conduct.
THOMPSON: I was horrified. They said that I dressed in
revealing clothing, in short shorts, in thin T-shirts, in skimpy or
no perceptible underwear. The whole report was vicious. I was
just -- I guess I was just shocked and appalled by it.
TOTENBERG: Over the course of the investigation, Thompson had
offered to take a polygraph test, had offered all her doctor's
records to prove she was not a problem drinker, and had presented
affidavits from the ambassador she worked for in Jamaica and others
attesting to her sobriety and good professional conduct.
Now, looking at the inspector general's report, she saw that
the ambassador had not been interviewed. Neither had any of the
other witnesses she had said would back her up. Rather, the
Inspector General had relied almost exclusively on the testimony of
the individuals she had disciplined in.Jamaica.
Thompson said she was able to easily identify the unnamed
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sources cited in the report, all except one, the subordinate whom
she had allegedly harassed.
THOMPSON: I became an insomniac. I didn't sleep for days and
days on end. I was absolutely devastated. I mean, I tried, I
wreaked my brain day after day, night after night, trying to think
of what male subordinate would say that about me.
TOTENBERG: By 1994, the CIA was telling Thompson's lawyers
that the unnamed subordinate was the linchpin of their case against
Thompson. And the time finally came when the CIA was required by
law to identify its star witness. The witness was no subordinate.
Rather, the agency identified him as Stephen Widener, who had
served as the ranking Drug Enforcement Agency officer in Jamaica at
the same time Thompson had been there.
THOMPSON: They told my lawyers that I had draped myself on
him at this Christmas party, I had massaged him, I had said things
to him about what I wanted to do to him sexually, that they could
not repeat it to my lawyers. And so my lawyers came and told me
that, and I said, "Let's call him up and ask him, because it never
happened."
TOTENBERG: Within days, Widener had gotten permission from
his superiors at the 'Drug Enforcement Administration to file an
affidavit with Thompson's lawyers.. It was nothing short of a legal
bomb, rebutting in every specific, the CIA's allegations. "Yes,"
said Widener, "he had been at the Christmas party referred to by
the Inspector General, but nothing said about Thompson's conduct
was true. At the Christmas party and in all my c9ntact with Miss
Thompson," said Widener, "Miss Thompson never massaged my chest or
back, touched me in any way that was sexually provocative, draped
herself on me, said anything that was sexually provocative or
behaved in any way that suggested she was inebriated or abusing
alcohol."
Perhaps even more devastating for the Inspector General was
this fact. Widener stated in the affidavit that he had never been
interviewed or questioned about Thompson by anyone from the
Inspector General's office.
Within hours, the Justice Department lawyers representing the
CIA agreed to settle the case and to pay Thompson $400,000 in
damages and her lawyers $300,000 for nearly three years of legal
work.
But Jane Doe Thompson says she wants more than money. In a
letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, she charged that Inspector
General Fred Hitz and his staff, quote, "knowingly accepted lies as
truths and produced a perjurious and fabricated report," close
quote. That, says Thompson, would appear to be a violation of a
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federal law making it a crime punishable by up to five years in
prison for any federal official to knowingly make any false
representations in a government report.
Upon receiving Thompson's letter, the Attorney General
authorized a preliminary investigation of Inspector General Hitz,
his staff and the CIA employees who made the original charges
against Thompson, the individual she disciplined in Jamaica.
Inspector General Fred Ritz and the CIA had no comment when
queried about the Justice Department investigation yesterday.
Ritz, however, did testify about the Thompson case before the
Senate Intelligence committee last March. At that time he said the
case should not have been settled and insisted his office had not,
in any way, mishandled the investigation.
But former CIA Director Robert Gates, the CIA director who
signed off on the original reprimand of Thompson, had told friends
recently that he believes an injustice was done to Jane Doe
Thompson and it was the CIA Director who succeeded Gates, James
Woolsey, who overrode Hitz in settling the case.
Ritz has won high marks on Capitol Hill for the damage
assessment he completed last month on the Aldrich Ames case. But
the three former CIA directors he criticized in his report wrote to
Congress noting that Hitz himself had twice reviewed the
Clandestine Services -Operation when the CIA knew they had a mole
and yet Ritz found none of the failures he listed in his report to
Congress last month.
Within the CIA, all three former CIA directors, William
Webster, Robert Gates and James Woolsey, were seen as strong Hitz
supporters over the years. But as one of them put it recently, "I
think Fred Hitz has gotten the sense that he can do whatever he
wants to, because the Senate likes him to go out and get as many
heads as he can."
The Senate, of course, may have good reason to cast a doubting
eye on the CIA, given the agency's many fumblings and failures of
late. The question is, has the Inspector General perverted the
process? Jane Doe Thompson thinks he has.
THOMPSON: When the Soviet Union was still in existence and we
had this big propaganda program and used to direct it against the
KGB, and these were the kind of things we said about the KGB. And
until it happened to me, I realized that this exists in my own
agency. It is Kafkaesk.
TOTENBERG: I'm Nina Totenberg in Washington.
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