A Bitter Angel On My Shoulder
How Bureaucracy and Journalism Kills People
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28 July 2024 (Sunday)
A Bitter Angel On My Shoulder
How Bureaucracy and Journalism Kills People
By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德
TAIPEI - It was Janet Malcolm who said that journalism was a pathology. Then Mark Pedelty said that you could be a human being or a journalist, but not both.
Not to sound too cliché, but their insights still haunt me 30 years after reading their books.
Have I gotten anyone killed yet? I do not know. But people have lost their careers, security clearances, divorced, suffered bankruptcy, even imprisonment in U.S. Federal Prisons based on articles I have written.
I have killed billion dollar arms deals, exposed a front company serving as an adoption service for pedophiles, destroyed a cult in DC that had training contracts with the CIA.
The list goes on and on…
There are people in the world who hate me and would enjoy torturing me to death.
But I did these things because I believed that journalists were obligated to expose hypocrisy and irony, not for winning Pulitzers. The more corrupt the more fun.
But Is journalism pathological? Probably in spades.
At one airshow in Asia a Washington think tanker managed the impossible - the names of the North Korean delegates visiting the expo. “Publish them!” he said. I tore it into pieces. “But why?” The answer was easy. These men had families in North Korea and exposure like this could get their entire family thrown into a gulag where their wives and daughters would be raped.
Perhaps it was my Judaism that triggered a sense of empathy. Growing up with holocaust survivors like Eva Kor made it easy to destroy that list.
Have I tormented North Korean front companies before? Yes, with great delight. But this list had the names of men with families. I can destroy an evil institution, but not a family man.
At the same time has there been violence? I was never one of those journalists who believed that asking hard-hitting questions meant they were holding public figures accountable and seeking the truth on behalf of the public. That kind of showmanship annoys me.
Violence is the result of feelings of betrayal. Sources realize that I have mingled with them at whorehouses not because I like whores, but because they are the story. When they discover the truth there has been violence on numerous occasions. A U.S. “diplomat” came at me with an empty beer bottle once. I beat him senseless.
There is one rule you have to follow if you are a man and a hard lesson for any journalist: When you beat a man you have to continue until you humiliate them. Or they will just come back later when their ego and rage return. Horrifying? But true.
New journalists do not realize it, but every time they write a story they invite people into their lives. The journalist will have forgotten the story written ten years prior, but the subject of the story has not. Perhaps that person lost their job, security clearance revoked, wife and kids gone via a humiliating divorce…on and on. People do not forget your name, even though you, the journalist, have moved on to another deadline.
This is what happened after writing a story based on the drunken rantings of a man working on contract for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) at the signal intelligence facility on Yangmingshan Mountain at Pingtun Li. The facility intercepts Chinese military radio communications and is a joint U.S.-Taiwan National Security Bureau (NSB) program.
The source was a “drinking buddy”. Angry at the world, but who was not? Part of today’s nihilistic worldview. He was close enough in my life to drop by the apartment and was always a gentleman to my girlfriend. He seemed reasonable until drunk, then an insane level of rage was switched on. His anger stemmed from his current paycheck, his career status after retirement from the U.S. military, divorce, and on and on. Alcohol fueled his anger. But nothing was more like nitrous oxide than Bacardi 151° (75.5% alcohol by volume), banned in 2016 as literally a fire hazard.
Then one night he gave me an envelope. It had details of the facility, the names of personnel, and evidence of the NSA-NSB relationship. I followed their morning bus to the work site later that week to confirm.
My “drinking buddy” working at the facility knew I worked for Jane’s Defence Weekly and knew what I would do with material in the envelope. So after several months of confirming much of the data, I did what all good journalists should do.
The problem is that I never asked for the envelope. We talked about the base a lot, as it was largely an open secret in my world. But I was hungry to break a big story for Jane’s. Make a name for myself. I placated my conscious by contacting the Defense Attache Office (DAO) at the American Institute of Taiwan (AIT) to ask whether they would like to inspect the rough draft and if there were any requests to redact, I would do so. AIT declined.
On 24 January 2001, Jane’s Defense Weekly published “Taiwan-USA Link Up on SIGINT” [SIGINT = Signals Intelligence]. I was already in the U.S. during my annual visit. Two weeks of snowy days and nights, covered bridges, bonfires and beers with my old hunting buddies. My then girlfriend would continue working at her job, nest while I was gone, visit friends for coffee, whatever. For the first week, e-mails bounced back and forth. Nothing out of the ordinary…then silence.
D.H. Lawrence perfectly quantified existential threats and American morality: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted."
I believe this is endemic in the American male psyche even if the Woke generation has rejected it. It still exists and always will be part of me.
That is what kicks-in when you face the existential abyss that Nietzsche had warned: “He who fights with monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
According to my personal journal, when my plane landed in Taoyuan just after 9pm, I tried to call her at the airport. Nothing. After an hour in the taxi, I arrived at the front door. When I twisted the key, pushing the door open, I could smell it. I did not even bring my luggage inside.
I walked around. Dried blood all over the bed. Dried blood all over the sink and toilet. Her little hand prints from the bed to the bathroom plastered on the ceramic floor. It could have been the art from a caveman you see in documentaries. Her belongings, clothes, personal items, all gone. She had packed and left.
Except for a coffee with her a few months later, I was able to confirm the gory details, then I never saw her again.
When she had lived with me, I had told her more times than I can count to never open the door when someone knocked, including my friends. That my job was dangerous. That it made me a target. That anyone within arms reach was potentially collateral damage. But that does not make it her fault for ignoring my warnings.
Women do not take men seriously; they have studied men all their lives; they know our bravado, the hero narrative, the mansplaining; we are not real men to them…we only act like it.
I was just playing make believe spy games in her worldview. I was not a real man. I was not the hero. I was not the brave one. To her, I was just another foreign boyfriend; one of many Peter Pans she had dated in the past and no doubt would in the future. That is, until she was beaten and raped by my “drinking buddy”.
But as I began ripping the sheets off the mattress, in those small seconds, I became that hard, isolate, stoic…monster that to this day has never melted.
When I heard Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast on John Rizzo’s book, Company Man, on the murder of a CIA source due to a New York Times report, I felt nothing but loathing for my fellow journalists. I was also less than impressed for my friends in the CIA. Both were responsible for his death and the reasons included bureaucracy, narcissism, deranged clown car follies.
Intelligence collectors and journalists are not very different.
And I hope aspiring journalists and spies learn from his narrative:
The Road to Damascus | Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell
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