Sibel The Fateful Visit
The Fateful Visit
CD: Now let's fast-forward to November 2001, when Jan Dickerson joined you at the FBI. What were her duties?
SE: She was a "monitor," the second type of translator, because she didn't have the scores on one of her two language proficiency exams. As a monitor she was supposed to make general summary translations, not verbatim.
CD: Did you have any idea at the time about her suspect allegiances?
SE: I had no idea at first. It was only after some suspicious behavior and then her and her husband's unannounced visit to our house that everything became clear.
One day in December [2001], my husband and I were at our home in
CD: She started trying to recruit you for their illegal activities?
SE: No, actually she herself did not. It was the husband who started talking about this semi-legitimate organization: "Hey, have you ever heard of this group?" he said, casually mentioning this organization to my husband. He replied, "Yeah, I know about them." And I started sweating, because I knew this organization was under FBI investigation, and I was by law not allowed to discuss anything about it with my husband.
CD: But, for your husband to have heard of it, it had to have been a group that was well known to the public as something fairly innocuous, right?
SE: Yes, as I said, a legitimate front. And Dickerson asked my husband if he'd ever thought of joining the organization.
CD: So there was something socially desirable about belonging in this group?
SE: Correct. And so my husband was kind of surprised, you know, because this wasn't the sort of group just anyone could belong to. "But I thought you had to be such and such a person, with such and such connections and references to get in," my husband was saying.
And then Major Douglas Dickerson smiled and pointed at me. "All you have to do is tell them where your wife works and what she does, and they will let you in like that," he said [snapping his fingers]. They wanted to sell me for the information I could provide, basically.
CD: What did you take this to mean? You would have to hand over classified FBI information –
SE: Correct. The information I could give these people would be worth a lot of money.
CD: And what would you get out of it?
SE: Well, money, and we could leave the country, you know, live a very comfortable life wherever we wanted. We would never have to work again, they promised.
CD: So what did you do then, with him propositioning your husband right in front of you?
SE: I tried to change the subject, because anything I might say on the subject would have been against the law, considering the ongoing investigation.
CD: When you went back to work, did you bring the matter up?
SE: I reported it two days later to my direct supervisor, a former Arabic translator. He told me he would file it immediately with the security department. This was in December 2001. When nothing happened, I pursued the matter with a special agent who had also been getting suspicious about some of Jan Dickerson's translations. When we finally got through to the security department, they said they'd never been notified in the first place about my complaint. I have all of the dated documents, emails, etc., still to prove it.
CD: Did Dickerson's protection of the suspects, and their larger infiltration of the American security apparatus, did these things have a deleterious effect on bureau investigations?
SE: As a result of their penetration, certain people who had been detained were released – people who had valuable information. And other targets of this investigation, key people, were allowed to flee the country, right up through January and February of 2002.
CD: These were foreign nationals based in the
SE: Correct.
CD: Did you have any awareness of this exodus?
SE: I reported some of the suspects' names higher up as I came across them in our investigation. And you know what? Within two weeks, they had all left the country. Just vanished.
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