Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington

by Sharyl Attkisson

  “What is it?” I ask.

  He picks up the loose end and untwists a cap exposing a tiny glass dome underneath. “It’s an extra fiber optics line,” he tells me. “In addition to your regular line.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “I’m not an expert, but someone could remove the cap and attach a receiver and download data. Or they could put a tiny transmitter here,” he points to a place under the cap, “and send information to a receiver off site once a day, once a week, or whenever. You need to have this checked out.”

  I photograph the cable and decide to begin by asking Verizon reps if they installed the extra line for some unknown reason. For the moment, I’m operating under the assumption that the company will be able to explain everything. So on New Year’s Eve 2012, I place the call to Verizon and describe the mystery cable.

  “Can you tell me if this is something you installed?” I ask. I tell the representative that Verizon has made repeated troubleshooting visits to my house in the past year. Maybe a spare line got left behind.

  The Verizon rep puts me on hold for long periods as she contacts one department, then another in hopes of answering my question. Finally, she tells me authoritatively: “That’s nothing that we would have installed or left there. You need to contact law enforcement.”

  “Can I email you a photograph and have your technicians look to be sure?” I ask.

  I’m not convinced it’s time to call the cops. What would they do, anyway, other than tell me that they don’t know why the cable is there and recommend that I call Verizon? My husband, a former law enforcement official, agrees. Besides, in the unlikely event that there’s a legal tap on my phone, neither Verizon nor the police would tell me.

  But the Verizon rep won’t let me send the photo for technicians to review. She insists they have no process that allows a customer to email a picture. For the moment, I give up. We’ll wait until the holidays are over and get some advice on what we should do.

  An hour later, my phone rings. A woman identifying herself as a Verizon supervisor says she’s following up on my call and wants to dispatch a technician to my house the next day to take a look. That’s New Year’s Day. I find that unnecessary and somewhat surprising. It’s not always easy to get a service call scheduled quickly, let alone on a holiday when I didn’t even ask for one.

  “You don’t have to send anybody out on New Year’s Day,” I tell the supervisor. “Why don’t you let me just email this photograph and you might be able to save yourself the trouble. Maybe it’s just a piece of equipment your technicians installed or left here. Can’t someone look at the picture and see if they can tell?”

  “No,” she insists. “We’ll just send a technician out tomorrow.”

  I report this to Jeff, who also finds it curious that Verizon would rush out a technician, unsolicited, on New Year’s Day.

  “Mind if I come by when he arrives?” he asks.

  “That would be great.”

  So I begin the first day of 2013 by answering a knock on the door. The Verizon technician introduces himself and hands me a business card with his first name and phone number handwritten on it.

  “Be sure and call me anytime if you need anything or have any questions,” he says.

  I begin by asking him if he has a record of the work that Verizon has done at our house in the past year. That might help tell us whether a previous technician left the cable. He says he has no access to such records and that the main office wouldn’t have any, either. He’ll just need to take a look at the box himself. As I lead him to the back of the house, I text Jeff to come over.

  The technician takes one look at the cable and says it doesn’t belong.

  “Yeah, that shouldn’t be there.”

  “Why’s it here, then?” I ask.

  “Well, we deal with a lot of third-party contractors. It probably got left here when some work was done and a contractor was supposed to pick it up but didn’t. Something like that,” he says. “I’ll just remove it.”

  He goes out to his truck to get some tools and Jeff arrives. We watch together as he removes the cable, coils it up, and prepares to take it with him.

  “Just leave that here,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “I just want to keep it,” I tell him. I figure when I drop off my computer for analysis in a few days, I’ll send along the mystery cable, too. The Verizon technician seems hesitant but puts down the cable on top of the air-conditioning fan next to us. We continue to chat and I make a mental note: Don’t leave the cable there. If you do, it might disappear. The Verizon man really seems to want to take it. Am I imagining that?

  Jeff and I walk the technician back to his truck. Jeff has a few more questions for him but it’s chilly outside and I leave the two of them to finish their conversation.

  A couple of days later, I’m driving to work when I remember the cable. I call my husband at home.

  “Go get that cable off the air-conditioning fan,” I tell him.

  I listen as he walks outside with the phone to look. “It’s gone.”

  “Gone? Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, it’s nowhere around here,” he says. Also gone are several other pieces of wire that Jeff had pulled up from the ground in front of the Verizon man.

  “Well what happened to it?”

  “The Verizon guy must’ve come back and taken it,” my husband speculates.

  Later, at the office, I decide to call the Verizon technician and ask him myself. I want to know if he took the cable after I’d said to leave it, and why. More important, I hope he still has it so that I can have it examined. I have that handwritten business card he gave me. I call the phone number on it, it rolls me to his voice mail, and I leave a message. But he doesn’t call back. That day or any other. I call almost every day, sometimes twice a day, for the next month. But the once-helpful Verizon man never responds.

  At least I still have my photographs.

  And an expert source who’s willing to peer inside my laptop and see what secrets it might reveal about covert attempts to monitor my work.

  CHAPTER 1

  | Media Mojo Lost |

  Investigative Reporting’s Recession

  The first time you catch the government in a lie, it changes you.

  I was twenty-one years old and working as a reporter at WTVX, the local CBS News television station in Vero Beach, Florida. (“X-34 Newwwwwws,” sang our theme song over video of our smiling news anchors, Michelle and Jim, wearing matching bright orange blazers with big X-34 patches on the breast pockets and the geographically incorrect globe spinning behind them.) It’s such a small station and I’m so enthusiastic that I happily perform additional duties as videotape editor and producer.

  I’m covering one of my first big, original stories there when I make contact with a whistleblower who tells me there are places in the county where raw sewage is being secretly, illegally dumped into local waters. The worst part, he says, is that the county water and sewer department knows about it.

  It’s a simple enough story to check out: I figure all I need to do is to call the county and ask. This was at a time when I believed the government had to tell the truth. It’s silly in retrospect, but I nonetheless thought there was some sort of unofficial code of ethics, if not something more formal, that required government officials to be honest in their dealings with the public and press. That they’d be kicked out of the government club if they weren’t.

  When I ask the county about the raw sewage allegations, the officials tell me the information I’ve received is absolutely, unequivocally false. And I believe them, at first. Why wouldn’t I? So I go back to my whistleblower but he remains insistent. With his information and assistance, I eventually locate and videotape multiple incidences of raw sewage pouring into public tributaries and find evidence that the county had been well aware.


  This is my first big lesson on the subject that the government—our government—can lie. And as I continue my career, I come to understand that this type of deception is not an anomaly.

  A few years later, I’m working at WTVT, “Big 13,” then the local CBS station in Tampa, Florida, where again I pull multiple duties as a reporter, producer, editor, and anchor. (“Pulse News,” says our baritone-voiced announcer in promos, “Where News Comes First.”) It’s one of the best local news markets in the country and I’m sharpening my reporting skills. I make contact with an insider from the Florida agriculture department. He wants to blow the whistle on the fact that there’s been an outbreak of a terrible agricultural disease called citrus canker, and the state is covering it up. If true, this would be a major story: a confirmed outbreak would subject Florida’s powerful citrus industry to a restrictive quarantine to prevent the disease from spreading. It could devastate citrus growers in the Sunshine State, and roil international markets in citrus futures.

  Here again, the path forward seems simple enough: all I need to do is call the state agriculture department and ask for comment. When I do, they tell me it’s all hogwash. Confidently, assuredly. But this time I’m a little wiser. I press them; give them a chance to hedge their answer. They don’t. The allegation is absolutely, unequivocally false, they say: there’s been no citrus canker in Florida since 1933. Period.

  But once again, my source remains insistent and he has specific information to back up his claims. He gives me a geographic area in Manatee County south of Tampa where the outbreak has supposedly been discovered. I get the plat records and identify the farmer who owns the grove in question in the town of Bradenton. I look up his phone number and call him cold.

  “Hi there. I’m Sharyl Attkisson, a reporter with Channel 13. I hear you have some citrus canker in your groves.”

  “Yup,” the farmer readily admits.

  I’m shocked it’s that easy. I ask a few more questions and then, “Can I come over and take some pictures for a story?”

  “Sure,” says the farmer. “In fact the state fellas are here right now getting ready to burn a bunch of the bad trees.”

  The state fellas are there . . . right now? My luck can’t be this good.

  I arrive with my cameraman. We park our news truck and walk down a dusty pathway between the rows of orange trees until we come upon several state agriculture officials. They’re carrying clipboards and overseeing a large pile of trees that have been cut down and stacked together. There are men wearing gloves and boot covers and they set the trees on fire. As plumes of gray smoke billow into the afternoon sky, the officials whisper to one another and look over at me. They won’t speak to me but the farmer tells the whole story: how the state confirmed the presence of canker through lab tests a while back, how the state has been working with him on what steps to take. As he talks, I’m thinking about how blatantly the state lied. We wrap up our shooting and one of the state officials stops us. He directs me and my cameraman to a shallow pan of liquid and tells us to step in it before we exit the grove. It’s a bleach mixture, he explains, to kill any canker we may have picked up on the bottom of our shoes so that we don’t spread it outside the grove. The man sprays our hands and camera equipment with the mixture, too.

  Within hours of Big 13 breaking the news of the citrus canker outbreak on the local evening news, the Florida agriculture department issues a brief press release confirming what they’d known for quite some time but denied: citrus canker had been discovered in Manatee County. The result is a statewide quarantine by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. No citrus can be shipped outside Florida without a special permit.

  I wonder whether we would have ever known about the outbreak if it hadn’t been for that insider. I also wonder whether, in the supposed fifty-three years between canker outbreaks in Florida, there were ones that we just never found out about because the state covered them up.

  Since that time, government and corporate authorities at the heart of many of my stories have proven time and again to be less than forthright—even dishonest—in their portrayal of facts. The following are just a few examples of assertions by the powers that be that were all later proven false:

  Until the 1990s, tobacco companies claimed cigarettes didn’t cause cancer.

  The FBI said that Wen Ho Lee, accused of spying for China in 1999, had failed his FBI lie detector test.

  Government officials claimed all links between autism and vaccines were debunked in the early 2000s.

  During the rash of Firestone tire–Ford Explorer rollovers in 2000, the government claimed there was no inordinate danger. Firestone and Ford said their products were safe and that any problems were due to driver error.

  The Red Cross claimed it did not mishandle donations intended for September 11, 2001, terror attack victims.

  Also in 2001, the behemoth energy company Enron said it wasn’t cheating employees or the public. Auditor Arthur Andersen said Enron’s books were solid.

  In 2002, the Los Alamos National Laboratory denied that employees were purposefully abusing their government credit cards.

  The makers of the dietary supplement Ephedra said it was safe in 2004.

  The Bush administration claimed the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program would help homeowners facing foreclosure by helping banks purchase their troubled assets.

  In 2010, oil company BP and the government said a relatively small amount of oil was leaking from the Deepwater Horizon wreckage.

  In 2011, the Obama administration insisted to Congress that no guns were “walked” in Fast and Furious or any other government case.

  The State Department said it did not refuse security requests prior to the September 11, 2012, attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

  The government defended the safety of prescription drugs such as Rezulin, fen-phen, Duract, Vioxx, Trovan, Baycol, Bextra, and Propulsid, as well as the first rotavirus vaccine and the oral polio vaccine: all later withdrawn from the market for safety reasons.

  The State Department said Secretary of State John Kerry was not out on his boat the day the coup in Egypt was unfolding in 2013.

  Also in 2013, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told Congress that the National Security Agency doesn’t collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans.

  You can see how things begin to look from where I sit.

  | PUZZLE SOLVING

  I’m politically agnostic . . . motivated by the desire to solve puzzles and uncover public information that the government, corporations, and others in positions of authority are trying to keep from you. I’m not here to tell you how to think. I just want to give you information. What you do with it is your business. Do your own research. Consult those you trust. Make up your own mind.

  Think for yourself.

  There’s nothing more intriguing than a good puzzle or an unsolved mystery. The building blocks of a story are there, but pieces are missing. Things don’t make sense, documents are withheld, nobody wants to talk. My goal is to chip away at the secrets little by little and put the bits of information together to ultimately reveal a larger truth. It takes time, persistence, and a tin ear for criticism from the targets of a story and the peanut gallery.

  In the quest to reveal information, the logician in me is troubled when I see the media treat stories differently depending upon who we think did the bad deed, what ideologies we personally hold, or how we secretly wish a story would turn out. Everyone has opinions and biases; our job is to keep them out of our journalism.

  It’s not always easy. It’s an intellectual challenge. A matter of training our brains to think differently. As students in the Journalism College at the University of Florida, we were taught to think outside our own belief systems when reporting. The ultimate accomplishment is to report stories on issues about which we have strong opinions based on personal convictions,
yet produce results that are so cleanly absent our biases that nobody really knows which side we’re on (or they may incorrectly guess that we’re on the opposite side). To do this successfully, we must be able to disconnect ourselves from our personal opinions for the sake of our reporting. And we have to remain unmoved by the inevitable criticism and attacks that come from the interests who feel criticized.

  Believe it or not, journalists are still capable of doing this. One such example comes from the 2008 presidential campaign.

  I prefer not to cover political campaigns. They’re no-win assignments. You follow a candidate around the country: if you expose their flaws, you’re viewed as being politically biased against them and it jeopardizes your access. If they have a good day and you report it as such, you risk critics accusing you of being their cheerleader. And if your observations from the front lines aren’t in synch with what the news managers back in New York see on cable news or read on the wire services or hear on the competition, you may find yourself eternally second-guessing and getting second-guessed. Nonetheless, a campaign story occasionally falls into my lap and draws me into the fray. That happened in 2008 when I returned from a trip overseas to be greeted with a strange question from my husband.

  “When you went to Bosnia with Hillary Clinton in 1996, were you guys shot at?” he asks.

  “No,” I reply. “Why?”

  “Are you sure?” he presses.

  “Of course. I’d know if we’d been shot at,” I say.

  It seems that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has been publicly saying that we took sniper fire on that trip to Bosnia twelve years before when she was first lady. Some observers theorize that Clinton is saying this now because she believes that getting shot at in a war zone would help voters view her as being qualified to serve as commander in chief. More so than a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama with no such experience.

  “She must be speaking of a different trip,” I postulate. Nothing else makes sense.