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RIP Tyler Drumheller, CIA Operative & Iraq War Truthteller

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With President Obama rightly sounding a cautionary tone during his speech yesterday promoting the Iran nuclear deal—by citing the many examples of flawed judgment shown during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq—I note with rue and sadness the death this week of Tyler Drumheller, longtime CIA operative and an Iraq War truthteller whose book, On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence written with Elaine Monahan, I edited and published with him (Philip Turner Books, Carroll & Graf, 2006). Tyler wrote about how he and other US intelligence officials had spotted early on that the Iraqi source Curveball was a serial fabricator whose claims about mobile biological weapons labs should not be believed. Yet Curveball’s claims remained in the inventory of malarkey from unreliable Iraqis that Bush administration officials exploited, with his bogus info being inserted into Colin Powell’s disastrous speech at the UN. As Greg Miller’s excellent Washington Post obit on Drumheller reports, Tyler was flabbergasted when he heard Powell’s speech, and bravely tangled in print and on “60 Minutes” with the CIA Director George Tenet about Curveball. It was a distinct pleasure for Tyler when I suggested to him that we use the agency photo of the two of them for the back cover photo that you see below.

I worked on Tyler’s book amid an amazing, energized period of six years during which I also acquired, edited, and published Susan McDougal’s The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk: Why I Wouldn’t Testify Against the Clintons and What I Learned in Jail (Carroll & Graf, 2001), which sort of stamped ‘paid-back’ to the Whitewater years, and Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s blockbuster book The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity, (Carroll & Graf, 2004) a story that was in the news for months, bridging Bush’s first and second terms. Following Tyler’s book—a true insider’s account that showed definitively how determined the Bushies had been to find and cultivate intelligence that would give them a pretext for invading Iraq—with journalist Murray Waas I brought out The United States v. I. Lewis Libby (Union Square Press, 2007), a compendium of public documents that featured the transcript from the trial that saw Scooter Libby, Chief of Staff to VP Cheney, prosecuted for obstructing justice in the circumstances surrounding the release of Valerie Plame Wilson’s CIA status. I’ve written more here about these books and the years when rogue prosecutors, the Bush administration, and determined adversaries were targeting authors with whom I worked.

I’m thinking of Tyler today, who less than ten years ago was devoting his reluctant retirement from the CIA to exposing how the agency had been used and abused by Bush administration officials to justify the tragic invasion of Iraq. I’m so relieved that a decade later President Obama is in charge of our foreign policy, determined to use diplomacy to make peace with adversaries.

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What Were Editors & Execs at Dutton & Penguin Thinking?/Part II

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Because I’ve edited & published a number national security books* containing sensitive information that ended up being vetted by government agencies before publication, I’ve been following the ‘No Easy Day’ situation carefully. Yesterday I shared a blog post, questioning how Dutton and Penguin could’ve been so careless in seemingly just accepting the pseudonymous ex-Navy Seal author Mark Owen’s claim that a lawyer he’d hired had said his manuscript didn’t breach any disclosure rules. If that is what happened–and there’s a lot of murk here so one can’t be sure–that’s not the way publishing houses are supposed to deal with these books.

Today, another shoe dropped on the author. According to Bloomberg News, at a press conference today, chief Pentagon spox George Little told reporters, “Sensitive and classified information is contained in the book.” It was a judgment I’ve been waiting to hear rendered since last Friday when it was revealed the Pentagon had sent the author a letter, saying his book may have violated national security. I guess they took the weekend to read it.

Another nugget in the Bloomberg article is that the author’s attorney–Robert Luskin, defense attorney for Karl Rove in the Valerie Plame matter–claims his client’s agreement with the Navy merely “invites but by no means requires” him to provide his manuscript for vetting, that he’s not obliged to do so. Doesn’t sound like any non-disclosure agreement I’ve ever heard of.

While the Pentagon warning about possible seizure of “royalties, remunerations, and emoluments” has been directed to the author, Penguin could also suffer, having heedlessly brought out an unvetted book deemed harmful to nat’l security, and then being forced to pull it from distribution, or even defy the government. More from the Bloomberg story on the Pentagon press conference.

In response to reporters’ questions today, Little gradually toughened his statements, first saying the book contains “sensitive” information, and then saying it “probably” contains “classified” information before saying the Defense Department believes classified information is in the book and finally that it does contain such information. The Pentagon has consulted the Department of Justice about the book while reviewing all legal options, Little has said. “It is the height of irresponsibility not to have this kind of material checked for the possible disclosure” of classified information, Little said today. The need for a pre-publication review is “a no-brainer,” Little said. “This is common sense.”

*Among these national security books have been The Politics of Truth–A Diplomat’s Memoir: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (Carroll & Graf, 2004) by Ambassador Joseph Wilson. For his book, which came out more than a year before his wife Valerie Plame brought out hers (with Simon & Schuster), Joe asked the State Dept. to vet it, even though it had been a number of years since his retirement from the diplomatic corps. Another title, mentioned in yesterday’s post, was On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence by Tyler Drumheller, former chief of CIA clandestine operations, Europe.
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What Were Editors & Executives at Dutton & Penguin Thinking?

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This post has been updated. New material in bold.

For more than a week I’ve been following coverage of the forthcoming book, No Easy Day, by the pseudonymous Mark Owen and a co-author, supposedly detailing the undercover mission Owen was part of that led to the death of Osama Bin Laden. While it seems that Penguin is going ahead with publication Sept. 4–and news organizations have been reporting on the book’s contents, after purchasing copies ahead of the official on-sale date–I am pretty much flabbergasted that editors and executives at Dutton, the Penguin division bringing out the book, evidently allowed the book to go to press even though the author had failed to submit the manuscript for the vetting required under his non-disclosure agreements with the military.

Reporter Husna Haq writes in the Christian Science Monitor, “According to the terms of Bissonnette’s non-disclosure agreements, he would have to submit any manuscript for pre-publication review and obtain permission before publishing it. . . . The book was not vetted by government agencies prior to publication. Disclosure of classified information is a crime and the US government may be entitled to all ‘royalties, remunerations, and emoluments’ from [the author]’s disclosures, the [Pentagon] letter warned.” To be clear, the Pentagon’s letter was addressed to the author, and not to his publisher. He stands to lose the most from all this, but if the Pentagon does rule in the next week that the book’s disclosures go beyond what he was entitled to reveal, and that they’re harmful to national security, Penguin will be under some pressure to cease distribution of the book. If they defy the government after that, they run some risk too, at least to their reputation, and maybe financially, as well.*

Eli Lake in the Daily Beast/Newsweek reports that a “spokeswoman for . . .  Dutton, said the book was vetted by a former special-operations attorney provided to the publishing house by the author. It was not, however, reviewed by the military, according to Pentagon spokesmen.”

This is really lame. So staff at Dutton decided to just accept the author’s representation that everything with the ms. was okay because he had shown it to an attorney of his own choosing who gave it a pass? If that is what happened, and multiple news accounts indicate it did, this was truly amateurish.

In my years editing and publishing topical nonfiction, I had a number of sensitive books that required careful handling with government agencies. One of them was On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence by Tyler Drumheller, former chief of CIA clandestine operations, Europe. Well in advance of publication in 2006, the author submitted the ms. to the agency’s Publications Review Board. After they read it, a two-way communication ensued and we edited the final ms. to accomodate their concerns. We didn’t necessarily like that this was necessary, but that was really beside the point. It had to be done, and it was. I should add, however, that even though the book was by implication and inference critical of the Bush administration, none of the edits requested had anything to do with political sensitivities; it was entirely about operations and maintaining security.

Let me make clear, so that there’s no doubt here. I’m not ‘siding’ with the government–I’m an editor and publisher by temperament and experience. I’m for information being shared as freely and openly as possible. But when an author has a prior legal agreement with any agency–be it governmental, corporate, or just between himself and another individual–as a publishing house you can’t just blunder forward, with some stupid ‘let the chips fall where they may’ attitude. The risks of non-compliance are too great.

Penguin/Dutton may get their big launch date this Tuesday, but they also may have sown an enormous hassle for themselves by failing to ensure that their author had had his manuscript properly vetted. I’d dare say Penguin has enough troubles with the Department of Justice right now, in the ebook agency pricing lawsuit, they didn’t need this one too.

* H/t Mike Shatzkin who suggested a helpful revision to this paragraph, clarifying that it’s the author who has the most exposure to the Pentagon’s claims. I had an email exchange with another publishing friend, who, feeling waggish, said maybe Dutton and Penguin planned all this, to get the book maximum publicity. Friends on Facebook, where I shared the first version of this piece have said the same thing. But I can’t conceive this is correct, though that may show my own risk-aversion and lack of imagination. I think the editing and publishing broke down and shows incompetence. Weirdly, publicity and sales of the book may even be fueled by the controversy, at least for a while, but if this has been a deliberate strategy, it seems a crazy, high-risk way of going about it all.

* H/t Mike Shatzkin who suggested a helpful revision to this paragraph, clarifying that it’s the author who has the most exposure to the Pentagon’s claims. I had an email exchange with another publishing friend, who, feeling waggish, said maybe Dutton and Penguin planned all this, to get the book maximum publicity. Friends on Facebook, where I shared the first version of this piece have said the same thing. But I can’t conceive this is correct, though that may show my own risk-aversion and lack of imagination. I think the editing and publishing broke down and shows incompetence. Weirdly, publicity and sales of the book may even be fueled by the controversy, at least for a while, but if this has been a deliberate strategy, it seems a crazy, high-risk way of going about it all.

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On the Imperative of Publishing Whistleblowers

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Neal Maillet, editorial director of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, has published a good opinion piece in Publishing Perspectives on what he sees as the imperative of publishing books by whistleblowers, and the dynamics that prevail when working with these authors and their books. In 2004 Berrett-Koehler published the breakthrough book on vulture capitalism, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, a mega-hit by John Perkins that was licensed to Plume for trade paperback for whom it was also a bestseller. More recently, he writes that B-K has published Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic, on the little-known darker side of what we like to think of as progressive measures to facilitate economic progress in the developing world.

For my part, when I describe the imperatives and mandates that impel my personal publishing choices I have long placed “whistleblowers, truthtellers, muckrakers, and revisionist historians” highest on my list, and refer to this on the two business-oriented pages at the top of this website, Philip Turner Book Productions and Philip Turner. Quoting from the latter page, I’ve written “As an editor and publisher I have always felt impelled to publish books by and about singular witnesses–whistleblowers, truthellers, muckrakers, revisionist historians–people who’ve passed through some crucible of experience that’s left them with elevated author-ity, and the only person who could write the book in question, or about whom it could be written. Whether told in the first person by an author who has passed through some crucible of experience that leaves him or her uniquely qualified to tell the tale or in the third person by a reporter or scholar who has pursued a story or historical episode with single-minded passion, I am devoted to publishing imperative nonfiction, books that really matter in people’s lives.”

My definition of an imperative book is not limited to books by corporate and government whistleblowers, though it certainly includes them. The list of relevant books I’ve acquired and/or published over the past decade and a half includes these ten titles:

1) DEAD RUN: The Shocking Story of Dennis Stockton and Life on Death Row in America (1999), a nonfiction narrative by reporters Joe Jackson and Bill Burke with an Introduction by William Styron, chronicling an innocent man on Death Row in Virginia and the only mass escape from Death Row in U.S. history. The condemned convict, Dennis Stockton, wasn’t among the escapees, but he kept a whistleblowing diary detailing corruption in the penitentiary that he later with the reporters;
2) IBM & THE HOLOCAUST: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (2001), an investigative tour de force by Edwin Black showing how one of the world’s most successful technology companies lent its technology to the Third Reich’s killing machinery;
3) THE WOMAN WHO WOULDN’T TALK: Why I Refused to Testify Against the Clintons and What I Learned in Jail (2002) by Susan MacDougal, a New York Times bestseller. Susan served 18 months in jail for civil contempt when she wouldn’t give Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr the testimony he wanted from her.

4) THE POLITICS OF TRUTH: Inside the Lies that Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (2004) by Ambassador Joseph Wilson, which later became the basis in part for the film, “Fair Game,” a New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller;
5) AHMAD’S WAR, AHMAD’S PEACE: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq (2005) by Michael Goldfarb. A longtime NPR correspondent, this is Goldfarb’s tribute to Kurd Ahmad Shawkat, his translator during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, who started a newspaper in the months after Saddam’s fall, only to be assassinated for his editorials critical of intolerance. A New York Times Notable Book.

To the books by these authors, I would also add my writers, the late Edward Robb Ellis, the most prolific diarist in the history of American letters, and 100-year oldRuth Gruber, award-winning photojournalist–each of them singular eyewitnesses to history. Over the years I have published four and six books by them, respectively.

Among my professional roles nowadays is that of independent editor and consultant to authors on book development in which I continue seeking out unique individuals with stories like these to tell. That’s also why I enjoy working with Speakerfile, the company that connects conference organizers with authors who do public speaking. Thanks to Neal Maillett and Berrett-Koehler Publishers for reminding me and all readers of the vital role publishers play in helping us hear the voices of whistleblowers and truthtellers. H/t to Mike Shatzkin for alerting me to Mr. Maillett’s article. Also, thanks to the Open Democracy Action Center (ODAC) for use of their whistleblower graphic.

Please click through to the complete post to read about the last five books from the above list and see many of the book jackets.

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