Long before Julian Assange posted a video of an alleged American ‘attack’ on civilians in Baghdad and Edward Snowden exposed US spies snooping into phone records, there was Richard Marven. The Navy midshipman reported war crimes that led to the first US whistleblower law in 1778.
As long as there have been secrets, it seems there have been whistleblowers fueling the debate around privacy and national security. SPYSCAPE rounds up 15 of the most notorious.
1.Smedley Butler, military whistleblower, 1930s
Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated Marines in US history with 16 medals, was at the heart of the ‘Business Plot’ scandal. Butler told a House of Representatives Committee that wealthy industrialists were plotting a military coup to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The media ridiculed the claim and industrialists denied it but the committee’s final report confirmed some of Butler's testimony. Butler later wrote his exposé, War Is a Racket(1935), about large US corporations and the motivations behind US wars.
2. Herbert von Bose, Nazi whistleblower, 1934
German government press chief Carl Fedor Eduard Herbert von Bose was a spy who opposed Hitler’s Nazi regime and was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934. Bose passed intelligence about the Nazi’s secret atrocities to the foreign press. He was shot by a squad of SS-men and later dubbed the ‘Deep Throat of the Third Reich’
President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor called Ellsberg ‘the most dangerous man in America’ who ‘had to be stopped at all costs’. The ex-US military analyst was behind the leak of the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of US government decision-making in the Vietnam War. The Papers indicate JFK’s administration helped assassinate South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 and contradicted the official US position about the bombing of North Vietnam. Ellsberg faced 115 years in prison but the charges were dropped. Fifty years later, in 2021, the whistleblower said he has no regrets.
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Long before Julian Assange posted a video of an alleged American ‘attack’ on civilians in Baghdad and Edward Snowden exposed US spies snooping into phone records, there was Richard Marven. The Navy midshipman reported war crimes that led to the first US whistleblower law in 1778.
As long as there have been secrets, it seems there have been whistleblowers fueling the debate around privacy and national security. SPYSCAPE rounds up 15 of the most notorious.
1.Smedley Butler, military whistleblower, 1930s
Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated Marines in US history with 16 medals, was at the heart of the ‘Business Plot’ scandal. Butler told a House of Representatives Committee that wealthy industrialists were plotting a military coup to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The media ridiculed the claim and industrialists denied it but the committee’s final report confirmed some of Butler's testimony. Butler later wrote his exposé, War Is a Racket(1935), about large US corporations and the motivations behind US wars.
2. Herbert von Bose, Nazi whistleblower, 1934
German government press chief Carl Fedor Eduard Herbert von Bose was a spy who opposed Hitler’s Nazi regime and was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934. Bose passed intelligence about the Nazi’s secret atrocities to the foreign press. He was shot by a squad of SS-men and later dubbed the ‘Deep Throat of the Third Reich’
President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor called Ellsberg ‘the most dangerous man in America’ who ‘had to be stopped at all costs’. The ex-US military analyst was behind the leak of the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of US government decision-making in the Vietnam War. The Papers indicate JFK’s administration helped assassinate South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 and contradicted the official US position about the bombing of North Vietnam. Ellsberg faced 115 years in prison but the charges were dropped. Fifty years later, in 2021, the whistleblower said he has no regrets.
Inspired by Ellsberg, NSA analyst Perry Fellwock revealed the Agency’s worldwide covert surveillance network in Ramparts magazine. At the time, the ultra-secretive NSA was known as ‘No Such Agency’ as it didn’t officially exist. Fellwock’s whistleblowing led the US Senate Church Committee to introduce legislation to stop the NSA from spying on Americans - whether the law was followed or not is a matter of debate. It would be decades before Fellwock was taken seriously.
5. Vladimir Bukovsky, Soviet whistleblower, 1971
Soviet Union whistleblower Vladimir Bukovsky leaked a 150-page document to the mediathat indicated Moscow used psychiatry as a tool to eliminate political dissidents. The document detailed how dissidents were imprisoned without charge in mental hospitals described by the Soviet doctors as ‘our little Auschwitz’. At the KGB’s request, doctors administered mind-altering psychotropic drugs. In 1972, Bukovsky was convicted of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda and circulating false reports. He was later part of a spy swap and relocated to the UK.
6. Mark ‘Deep Throat’ Felt, Watergate whistleblower, 1972
Mark Felt’s dramatic story of power and corruption was made into a thriller starring Liam Neeson. Felt was the FBI associate director who helped The Washington Post break the Watergate story that led to Richard Nixon’s downfall. The scandal revolved around the arrest of five men breaking into Democratic National Committee HQ - nicknamed ‘Watergate’ after the office complex where the break-in took place. Felt, known as ‘Deep Throat’ at the Post, headed the FBI investigation into the break-in to determine if there was White House involvement.
7. Karen Silkwood, nuclear power whistleblower, 1974
More than one whistleblower has identified safety concerns at nuclear power plants including Karen Silkwood, a chemical technician at Oklahoma's Kerr-McGee nuclear plant. A union activist, Silkwood testified at a US Atomic Energy Commission meeting about her concerns in 1974. Later that year, she died in mysterious circumstances involving a one-car crash en route to meet areporter. Silkwood was immortalized in a mural (above) later turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Cher.
8. Peter Wright, British MI5 whistleblower, 1988
In his sensational book Spycatcher, MI5 spy Peter Wright claimed the Security Service plotted to remove British PM Harold Wilson from office and that MI5’s Director-General was a Soviet spy. Oddly, Wright effectively discredited his own evidence in a 1988 BBC interview in which he said his claims about MI5 torpedoing PM Harold Wilson’s government was greatly exaggerated. So why was MI5 still blocking the author’s Spycatcher files 30 years later? Wright isn’t the only MI5 whistleblower to emerge. David Shayler (later known as Deloras Kane) alleged MI5 was involved in a failed assassination attempt on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
9. Linda Tripp, White House whistleblower, 1998
White House civil servant Linda Tripp blew the whistle on former President Bill Clinton, alleging Clinton committed misconduct during a federal civil rights suit in relation to his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. Tripp also accused Lewinsky of perjury. Tripp was fired from her job at the Pentagon and sued the US government for leaking her security and employment file to the media in breach of the Privacy Act. She settled for $595,000, back pay, and clearance to work for the US federal government again.
10. Katharine Gun, Iraq War whistleblower, 2003
Katharine Gun, a translator for British signals intelligence spy agency GCHQ, tried to derail the course of history by leaking a top-secret document in 2003 on the brink of the US invasion of Iraq. The memo exposed a US plot to secure support for the invasion through blackmail. Gun’s case was to be heard in a London court in 2004 but within half an hour of convening the case was dropped when government prosecutors declined to offer evidence.
11. Thomas Tann, Department of Justicewhistleblower, 2005
Former DoJ lawyer Thomas Tamm leaked a story about the NSA’s mass warrantless surveillance to The New York Times for a 2005 exposé that won reporters a Pulitzer Prize in 2006. His home was raided by the FBI but by 2011 the Justice Department said it would drop its investigation without charge. The Bar decided to discipline him anyway for violating the confidences of the DoJ. Tann accepted censure to resolve disciplinary proceedings and avoid years of litigation.
12. Edward Snowden, 2013: NSA whistleblower
In 2013, former US government contractor Ed Snowden leaked intel about the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program and fled to Moscow. Laura Poitras, the director/producer who won an Oscar for Citizenfour about Snowden’s leak, also produced a documentary critical of the US invasion of Iraq. As a result, Poitras was put on a US terrorist watch list. Border guards detained Poitras up to 100 times between 2006 and 2012. She won the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism in 2014.
13. Christopher Wylie, 2018 Facebook whistleblower
Christopher Wylie revealed that 50m Facebook profiles were harvested for use by a British company, Cambridge Analytica, in a major data breach. Wylie claims former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target US voters and swing the election in Trump’s favor. Wylie isn’t the only Facebook whistleblower to come forward. In 2021 Frances Haugen leaked thousands of documents about how the social media giant ensures young users stay on its platforms. Haugen claims Facebook values profit over user safety (a claim Facebook denies) and called for increased privacy regulation.
14. Trump White House whistleblowers, 2016-2020
Donald Trump’s presidency triggered two high-profile whistleblowing claims including one from NSA contractor Reality Winner, who leaked an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 elections. An unnamed CIA spy also filed a complaint that came to be known as the Trump-Ukraine scandal. The claim involved an allegation that Trump solicited foreign interference in the 2020 US election.The Senate acquitted Trump of wrongdoing.
15. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks whistleblower
Last but not least, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange argues that he exposed intelligence in the public interest when WikiLeaks published 400,000 secret military documents related to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, diplomatic cables, and the ‘Collateral Murder’ video of US soldiers in Baghdad. The US government argues Assange should be tried for espionage. (One of Assange’s sources, whistleblower and US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, was sentenced to 35 years in prison but was released early.) Born in Australia in 1971, Assange has spent more than a decade fighting extradition requests from Sweden and the US.
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