Sibel Edmonds

Early life and education

The daughter of an Iranian Azerbaijani father and Turkish mother, Edmonds lived in Iran and then Turkey before coming to the United States as a student in 1988. Fluent in Azerbaijani, Turkish, Persian and English, Edmonds earned her bachelor's degree in criminal justice and psychology from George Washington University and her master's in public policy and international commerce from George Mason University.

FBI employment

Edmonds worked for the FBI for six months from late September 2001 until March 2002. Edmonds was hired, as a contractor, to work as an interpreter in the translations unit of the FBI in Washington on 13 September, 15 September or 20 September 2001. Among her main roles was to translate covertly recorded conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets.

Edmonds filed complaints about the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility and the United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. In response, she claims that managers retaliated against her, and she was fired on 22 March 2002. In June 2002, the Associated Press and Washington Post reported that the FBI claimed Edmonds was dismissed because her actions were disruptive and breached security and that she performed poorly at her job. A 2005 internal investigation by the FBI Office of the Inspector General found that many of Edmonds's allegations of misconduct "had some basis in fact" and that "her allegations were at least a contributing factor in the FBI’s decision to terminate her services," but were unable to substantiate all of her allegations, nor did they make a statement regarding her dismissal being improper.

Edmonds's allegations of impropriety at the FBI later came to the attention of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which held unclassified hearings on the matter on 17 June 2002, and 9 July 2002. During the hearings, the FBI provided various unclassified documents and statements relating to the case, which led to Senators Patrick Leahy and Chuck Grassley sending letters, dated 19 June 2002, 13 August 2002, and 28 October 2002 – to Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, Attorney General Ashcroft, and FBI Director Robert Mueller, respectively – asking for explanations and calling for an independent audit of the FBI's translation unit. These documents were published on the Senators' web sites.

Post-FBI

In April 2004, Edmonds claimed she had provided information to the panel investigating the September 11 attacks in February that year. Although she started work shortly after 9/11 and worked for just over six months, she claimed knowledge of information circulating within the FBI during spring and summer of 2001. The session was closed and over three hours long, she said. Reportedly, she told the commission that the FBI knew of a planned attack months away and the terrorists were in place. She stated, "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers." On the 26th, a deposition of Edmonds was quashed under the state secrets privilege.

On 13 May 2004, Ashcroft submitted statements to justify the use of the State secrets privilege against the planned deposition by Edmonds, and the same day, the FBI retroactively classified as Top Secret all of the material and statements that had been provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2002 relating to Edmonds's own lawsuit, as well as the letters that had been sent by the Senators and republished by the Project on Government Oversight.

On 23 June 2004, the retroactive reclassification was challenged in a suit filed by the Project on Government Oversight, citing fear that the group might be retroactively punished for having published the letters on its website. The Justice Department tried to get the suit dismissed, and the Justice Department explicitly approved their release to the Project on Government Oversight. The reclassification did, however, keep Edmonds from testifying in the class action suit as well as her own whistleblower suit. The latter decision was appealed, and Inspector General Glenn A. Fine released a summary of the audit report, claiming "that many of her allegations were supported, that the FBI did not take them seriously enough, and that her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the FBI's decision to terminate her services. Rather than investigate Edmonds's allegations vigorously and thoroughly, the FBI concluded that she was a disruption and terminated her contract."

In August 2004, Edmonds founded the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), which exists to assist national security whistleblowers through advocacy and reform. Edmonds is also the founder and publisher of the Boiling Frogs Post, an online media site that aims to offer nonpartisan investigative journalism featuring contributions, collaborations, and interviews with journalists like James Corbett of The Corbett Report.

In September 2005, Edmonds claimed in Vanity Fair that a price was set for Dennis Hastert to withdraw support for the Armenian Genocide resolution. That the "... Turkish Consulate ... claimed in one recording that the price for Hastert to withdraw the resolution would have been at least $500,000."

In September 2006, a documentary about Edmonds's case called Kill the Messenger (Une Femme à Abattre) premiered in France. The film discusses the Edmonds case and offers interviews with various involved individuals. In the film, Edmonds, former CIA agent Philip Giraldi, and others say that Israel was a significant actor in the illicit activities Edmonds discovered.

Edmonds gave testimony in August 2009 and gave information that had twice previously been gagged under state secrets privilege.

On 1 February 2011, Edmonds published a story on her own website, adding details of events she described as taking place in April 2001. The account is of another translator's description of meetings with an Iranian informant months before 9/11, and FBI agents' reaction to it:

Bin Laden’s group is planning a massive terrorist attack in the United States. The order has been issued. They are targeting major cities, big metropolitan cities; they think four or five cities; New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, and San Francisco; possibly Los Angeles or Las Vegas. They will use airplanes to carry out the attacks. They said that some of the individuals involved in carrying this out are already in the United States. They are here in the U.S., living among us, and I believe some in US government already know about all of this.

It was believed the agents reported this information internally at the FBI, but it is unclear that it ever went beyond that, in fact, both the agents remarked, and the translator told Edmonds, that the intelligence was not specific enough to take action upon.

Classified Woman

In 2012, she published an autobiography called Classified Woman – The Sibel Edmonds Story: A Memoir. Reviewing the book for The American Conservative, Philip Giraldi said that some details of the book could be challenged due to passage of time. However, he felt the central thesis of government incompetence and corruption was correct.

Operation Gladio B

According to Edmonds, "Operation Gladio B" is an FBI codename adopted in 1997 for ongoing relations between US intelligence, the Pentagon, and Al Qaeda. The name refers to the original Operation Gladio, in which US intelligence had established groups (stay-behind forces) in Europe in preparation for a Soviet invasion.

According to Edmonds, Gladio B identified, among other things, regular meetings between senior US intelligence and current leader of Al Qaeda Ayman al-Zawahiri at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan between 1997 and 2001, with al-Zawahiri and other mujahideen being transported by NATO aircraft to Central Asia and the Balkans to participate in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations. She added that in 1997, NATO asked Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to release from prison Islamist militants affiliated with Ayman al-Zawahiri. They were flown by U.S. intelligence orders to Turkey for training and use in operations by the Pentagon. Additionally, she reported that an Al-Qaeda leader had been training some of the 9-11 hijackers at a base in Turkey. These and related allegations were seemingly confirmed by Sunday Times journalists in 2008 who spoke to Pentagon and MI6 sources. However, according to Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, the journalists were prevented from publishing many of these allegations when the second half of their four-part series was dropped, possibly due to pressure from the U.S. State Department. She suggests that the objectives of Gladio B are "projecting U.S. power in the former Soviet sphere of influence to access previously untapped strategic energy and mineral reserves for U.S. and European companies; pushing back Russian and Chinese power; and expanding the scope of lucrative criminal activities, particularly illegal arms and drugs trafficking." Former FBI special agent Dennis Saccher states Edmonds's story "should have been front page news" because it is "a scandal bigger than Watergate".

NewsBud

Sibel Edmonds, along with others, formed NewsBud, a nonpartisan journalism team supported by Kickstarter donations (setting a new fund raising records for news media, $150,000 each for the 1st & 2nd of 4 phases) by a growing community seeking alternative online news, investigative reports, analysis, original stories, video-podcasts, editorials, and discussion forums. Sibel Edmonds's primarily solo Boiling Frogs Post featuring articles and videos is being merged and absorbed into NewsBud - so BFP content is becoming NewsBud content and NewsBud content occasionally appears as a BFP heading or website.