BLOWING IN THE WIND

The strange cult of the Washington whistle-blower

'Call me the dean of federal whistle-blowers," says Joe Carson, handing me his business card. prevailing whistleblower, it reads, along with his job as a Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear safety engineer. Carson, a towering man whose shoulders slope forward as if he's pushing into a gale wind, hovers above the crowd at the Warehouse Theater bar in Washington detailing his bona fides: He first blew the whistle on safety violations at Tennessee's Oak Ridge lab in 1992; since then, he has blown it seven more times, all while still employed at DOE. "Anybody want to match that record?" he barks.

Actually, there are plenty of people here at the kickoff reception for Whistleblower Week in Washington who can blow it away. It's the first whistle-blowers' convention in 15 years, and everybody who has ever told on anybody has come to town for it. There are old movement patriarchs like Jeffrey Wigand, who ratted out big tobacco in the '90s (the Russell Crowe movie he inspired--The Insider--will play later in a small theater behind the bar) and younger stars of the Bush era like FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley, who hobnobs with a clutch of admirers. There is a U.S. air marshal who estimates he has blown the whistle 20 or 30 times, in the beginning under the code name "Vegas," and an ob-gyn in plaid who hands everyone packets detailing his cases against several hospitals and the California Medical Board from a box he drags around on a little trolley.

Presiding over them all is a tiny, twinkly-eyed Government Accountability Project (GAP) lawyer named Tom Devine. "I think of Jesus as a whistle-blower," he muses, when asked to give a short history of whistleblowing. "But, at this stage, with Bush's legitimacy falling apart, there are probably more whistle-blowers than at any other point in modern times."

This, the end of President Bush's reign, is the whistle-blower's moment. Squealing is sexy when your bosses are Brownie and Gonzo. House Democrats, hungry for more oversight, passed a whistle-blower protection bill in March that extends protections to government employees--the people who "knew that Iraq did not try to import uranium from Niger," as Henry Waxman put it. Whistle-blowers attending the convention were urged to lobby their senators on behalf of the now-stalled bill, and a "people's tribunal" was mounted in the Rayburn House Office Building to give whistle-blowers like Bunnatine Greenhouse (tattled on Halliburton) and Marsha Coleman-Adebayo (spilled the beans on the EPA) a chance to show legislators whistle-blowing's human face.

But, as the week goes on, it becomes clear that Whistleblower Week is more than a rally. It's a chance for people who have long been miserable lone gunmen to come together and rejoice in whistle-blowing's transformation into a full-fledged personal identity--a scene with its own specialized lawyers, therapists, 40-odd advocacy groups, a publishing imprint, swag, and even a timeless philosophy. We "believe in Kant and Mill and Aristotle," Wigand tells the whistle-blowers at the reception, "in the categorical imperative." But, the funny thing is, even all this solidarity can't make Joe Carson happy.

Two days later, at the Willard Hotel, the conventioneers further their education with such colloquia as "The ABCs of a Successful Whistleblower Case" and "Whistleblowers and the Press." Inside the seminar rooms, sports-coach-like instructors scribble power-balance diagrams on whiteboards: In one, the whistle-blower is a tiny dot and the bureaucracy a circle around him; fat arrows of hostility shoot in from the circle toward the hapless speck. Guest speakers advise rapt audiences to keep money in mind ("sometimes, you're so worried about winning the case, you forget about damages!"), consider going anonymous ("we have Mr. Blue, we have Apples, we have P.J."), and maintain perspective ("know when it's time to move on").

This last point can be hard to learn, because whistle-blowing is addictive. "After it's over, you see people wandering, desiring that level of involvement," explains Jim Holzrichter, a soft-spoken former auditor whose epic struggle with Northrop Grumman put his family in a homeless shelter for months. Down the hall from the seminar rooms, in a prim beige-and-cinnamon lounge, Veterans Affairs Whistleblowers Coalition head Jeffrey Fudin perches patiently on a couch, waiting for his V.A. colleagues to come help put the finishing touches on their presentation. Fudin started blowing the whistle back in 1993, when he suspected that the Albany V.A. hospital where he worked was illegally experimenting on cancer patients. Most recently, he blew it in 2004, when the hospital refused him time off to give a lecture on, natch, whistle-blowing. "To you, it might not seem a big deal," he allows, smiling gently. "But, to me, it was just another twist of the knife."

Since that episode, though, times have been flush for V.A. Whistleblowers. After the Walter Reed scandal broke, Fudin started receiving several new membership inquiries every week. A national security whistle-blowers' group has had to turn away applicants, and staffers visiting Whistleblower Week's events exhibit special interest in people from the Department of Justice. This end of loneliness and newfound sense of community is the convention's grand theme, and the lower-profile whistle-blowers, along with the stars, emit the grateful sense of being inducted into a fellowship. "I was like, 'Oh, my God, they're me, and I'm them,'" gushes a Tennessee nurse.

But, after the seminars are done, when a handful of whistle-blowers retire to sip chardonnay at a Marriott hotel restaurant nearby, some tensions begin to peek through. Talk turns to the omnipresent plaid-coated doctor. "I'm not sure his whistle-blowing was all that important," someone whispers.

At the beginning of the week, I was skeptical of the proposition that whistle-blowing is a personality type you are born with. But it never seemed more true than at the end of Whistleblower Week, during a $150-a-head wrap-up retreat to help whistle-blowers de-stress. Seated with the whistle-blowers in a darkened room, retreat leader Don Soeken--a psychotherapist who runs a mountain sanctuary for whistle-blowers in West Virginia-- encouraged them to contemplate a healing career change. But conversation soon circled back to the whistle-blowing life, as one Naval whistle-blower recounted the story of a cryptographer whose valiant work at Pearl Harbor the Navy had rewarded with bitter demotions. "Oh--oh," an ex-Army Corps of Engineers manager cried out, as though the long-dead cryptographer's humiliation was her own. Later, Soeken showed a relaxation video, because "it's hard for whistle-blowers not to make noise," he explained. "It's like a group of unruly children." During the film, one whistle-blower threw spitballs.

Above all, "whistle-blower" is a personality type that thinks in absolutes. Isolated from professional peers, they long for a cozy community of like-minded souls, but they also instinctively distrust such coziness. That might explain what made all that whistle-blower fellowship less than satisfactory for Joe Carson. While he showed up to almost every Whistleblower Week event, all the while he was plotting. His targets were the whistle-blowing advocates themselves, whom he alleged turn a blind eye to dysfunctional government oversight because it feeds their business model. "GAP, Tom Devine--they exploit a lot of these people that need rescuers," says Carson.

The accusation does not go unanswered. "It makes me a little resentful," Devine says, adding that he no longer intends to spend time with Carson or represent him for free.

But Carson knows how to take his complaint to the next level. "We're on a crusade to embarrass and enlighten GAP," says a whistle-blower friend, detailing their plan to expose the group to its donors. After all, if you believe anything of Kant or Mill or Aristotle, you have a mandate to expose fraud unconditionally. Even if that means blowing the whistle on the whistle-blowers.

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By Eve Fairbanks