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Praise for his skills, friends in high places and four years of high-level national-security work — Richard M. Barlow can claim it all. What he lacks is a career.
Barlow was forced out of his job at the Defense Department in 1989. He's been trying to get it back ever since — along with his pension — with help from powerful supporters.
“As a message to whistleblowers, Rich's case is chilling,” says former Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, who is trying to persuade Congress to restore Barlow's retirement pay.
Barlow's adversaries tended to criticize him for being too rigid — and not a team player. His supporters said he was honest — and accurate — to a fault. Indeed, Victor Rostow, a former director of negotiations policy at the Pentagon, said Barlow's views “may have been absolutely right, but in the atmosphere of the creation of policy, being absolutely right is sometimes a hindrance. . . . There's a point at which you have to back off.”
Barlow's downfall began in 1987 at a closed-door briefing for the House Subcommittee on South Asian Affairs on Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. Barlow, then a brash, young CIA specialist, had the temerity to contradict testimony by Gen. David Einsel, a top National Intelligence Council official.
At the time, the Reagan administration wanted to keep aid flowing to Pakistan, which had been helping the United States oppose the Soviet Union's takeover in Afghanistan. But after the outlines of Pakistan's nuclear program surfaced, Congress had imposed two conditions on aid: The president was forced to certify that Pakistan wasn't building a nuclear weapon. And no aid could go to any country that was illegally obtaining U.S. materials of any kind to build a nuke.
Years later, after Barlow sued to get his job back, a Court of Claims judge conceded, “We can safely assume that General Einsel's testimony was materially incorrect.”
Yet, abrasiveness aside, Barlow had delivered his testimony under orders from his bosses at the CIA, which months later awarded him a “certificate for exceptional accomplishment.” Nonetheless, the episode effectively ended Barlow's agency career, and he quit and joined the Defense Department as a proliferation specialist in 1989.
Again, he clashed with a superior over Pakistan, this time after learning the CIA was still misinforming Congress about Pakistan's nuclear weapons in order not to jeopardize the $1.4 billion sale of F-16 fighters by the U.S. to Pakistan. Barlow had reported to his bosses that the planes were being modified to carry nuclear weapons. Told he'd be fired, Barlow quit.
Over the years, as more details surfaced about Pakistan's weapons program — including black-market sales of nuclear technology by A. Q. Khan, then the director of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, — Barlow's accuracy was confirmed. But the Defense Department refused to rescind its actions against him, even when a General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) report called the Pentagon's case against Barlow legally unsupported. The 1997 report noted that even the Pentagon did not accept an account by Barlow's boss, Gerald Brubaker, that Barlow had threatened to contact Congress over the matter on his own.
By 1998, it was clear that even Barlow's influential lawyer, former Assistant Defense Secretary Paul C. Warnke, had failed. Although Warnke had persuaded congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle to pressure the Pentagon to rescind its personnel actions, it wouldn't budge. Then, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., introduced a “private relief bill” to obtain for Barlow the equivalent of the $1.1 million retirement pay he had forfeited when he was forced out of government.
The bill never got out of committee. Instead, the Senate in 1998 sent Barlow's case to the U.S. Court of Claims, which designates a judge to act as a hearing officer for Congress. Four years later, Senior Judge Eric G. Bruggink concluded that Defense had acted within the law. In doing so, he accepted an account that Barlow had threatened to contact Congress about Pakistan's nuclear weapons on his own — a conclusion previously rejected by the Defense Department itself. “Mr. Barlow was a probationary employee who was terminated because of performance deficiencies and personality conflicts,” Bruggink wrote.
Bruggink's decision ignited a delayed behind-the-scenes dispute centering on the decision to bow to the government's wishes on excluding evidence. Aides to Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the committee's ranking Democrat, told Barlow that Bruggink's report was the last word. But the staffers agreed to meet with Gallucci, Joseph Ostoyich, who took over the case from Warnke, and Louis Fisher, then a senior specialist in separation of powers at the Congressional Research Service.
Former Defense Department nuclear-proliferation expert Richard Barlow. (Richard Barlow)
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Fisher argued that Bruggink had not been obliged simply to accept the secrecy claim but could have reviewed documents and admitted some of them or sent the case back to the Senate because full evidence was unavailable. As it was, Fisher wrote, the court allowed the government to introduce the evidence it wanted, while denying Barlow the same right. “My pitch was that the court didn't do what it was supposed to do to get at the facts,” Fisher says. “The record is pretty clear that the court failed in its duty.”
Barlow, for his part, faults congressional lawmakers. “You can hardly blame the executive branch for pushing its power and authority as far as Congress lets them push it,” he says. “We're dealing with a Congress that's not been engaging in any checks and balances or oversight — giving the signal that the executive can do whatever it wants.”
As for the misinformation about Pakistan's nuclear weapons that Congress received, “There is something to the idea that Congress sort of half-wanted to be misled in the '80s,” Gallucci says. “People like Rich were going to force them to look at it in the eye. He really did get screwed.”
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