By Maidhc Ó Cathail. Published in Kansai Time Out, April 2009.
A high-ranking U.S. Air Force officer and his Turkish wife, alleged to be part of an international weapons smuggling ring by an FBI whistleblower, moved to Yokota Air Force Base in Japan in 2006. According to former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, Lieutenant Colonel (then Major) Douglas Dickerson and her fellow translator Melek Can Dickerson tried to recruit her to this network in late 2001. If Edmonds is to be believed – and there seems little reason to doubt her credibility – the implications could be very serious for Japan.
For Sibel Edmonds, the story began just after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Like most ordinary American citizens, Edmonds was shocked by the events of 9/11, so when the FBI called a few days later to ask her to begin work in their Washington D.C. office, she immediately agreed out of a sense of patriotism. At the time, she thought that she might be able to help prevent another attack. It wasn’t long, however, before she realised that not everyone working there had similarly noble intentions.
Edmonds was mainly assigned to work on the large backlog of wiretaps of telephone conversations related to an FBI counterintelligence operation which had targeted a number of Turkish organisations in the United States since the mid-90s. To her amazement, Edmonds discovered hundreds of important transcripts and other documents related to the attacks marked “not pertinent,” and others which were poorly translated.
Moreover, she became suspicious of one of her co-workers, a young Turkish woman by the name of Melek Can Dickerson, who had previously worked for one of the Turkish organisations under investigation, the American-Turkish Council (ATC), which the FBI suspected was being used as a front for criminal activity including drug trafficking, and of giving illegal donations or bribes to a number of Congressmen. Dickerson, Edmonds alleges, was still close to some ATC members who were targets of the FBI operation, whose recorded conversations she tried to have allocated to herself alone, apparently to protect them from surveillance.
The ATC was founded in 1994 ostensibly to promote Turkish interests in the United States. Modelled on AIPAC, the Israel lobby, the group’s founders included many prominent Americans involved in the Israel-Turkey strategic relationship such as Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
One Sunday morning, on December 2, 2001, Sibel Edmonds and her husband received a surprise visit from Melek Can and her husband, Douglas Dickerson, a US Air Force officer who had spent years in Turkey as a military attaché. Douglas did most of the talking. He told the Edmondses about his “network of high-level friends” in the Turkish community in Washington, and asked them if they knew about the ATC, which he said was a good organisation to belong to. According to Sibel’s husband, Matthew, he told them, “It could help to ensure that we could retire early and live well, which was what he and his wife planned to do.”
While her husband was a little baffled by the strange conversation, Sibel understood that the Dickersons were trying to recruit her as an agent for an organisation that she was supposed to be monitoring, so she told her boss what had happened. He didn’t seem too concerned, however, and told her to forget about it. Undeterred, Edmonds refused to forget about it, and proceeded to report her concerns about Melek Dickerson to higher and higher levels of management, right up to the FBI Director, Robert Mueller. Instead of conducting an investigation into her serious allegations of security breaches, and after both threats and inducements failed to stop her speaking out, the FBI fired Sibel Edmonds in March, 2002.
Not one to be easily subdued, Sibel Edmonds then sued for unfair dismissal. As part of her lawsuit against the FBI, Edmonds subpoenaed the Dickersons. But before they could be questioned, the Dickersons abruptly left the United States on September 9, 2002, for NATO headquarters in Belgium with U.S. government approval, despite being the subject of three other separate investigations: one by the Air Force Office of Special Investigation, another by the Justice Department, and a third by the Senate Judiciary Committee. A 2004 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general on Edmonds’ allegations determined that “many of Edmonds’ core allegations relating to the co-worker [Melek Can Dickerson] were supported by either documentary evidence or witnesses” and concluded that “the FBI did not, and still has not adequately investigated these allegations.”
There’s No Business Like War Business
Douglas Dickerson met Melek Can Harputlu while he was working at the U.S. embassy in Ankara, where he was responsible for logistics matters with the Turkish military. According to investigative reporter Wayne Madsen, U.S. intelligence sources claim that Melek Can was on the payroll of the MIT – the Turkish Intelligence Agency. Douglas’ boss, the U.S. ambassador Marc Grossman, now reportedly earning $3 million a year as vice-chairman of the Cohen Group, the defence lobbying firm of former Secretary of Defence, William Cohen, was also “a subject of interest to counterintelligence agents,” Madsen claims.
“U.S. intelligence sources confirmed that Grossman ordered Dickerson to assist International Advisors, Inc. (IAI), a lobbying firm registered in 1989 by Douglas Feith under the stewardship of Richard Perle. The main task of IAI was to represent the government of Turkey in the United States and ‘promote the objective of U.S.-Turkey defence industrial cooperation.’”
Madsen continues: “Soon, Dickerson, under Grossman’s aegis, was promoted to handle all U.S. weapons procurement for Turkey, Azerbaijan (where Richard Armitage was heading up the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce), Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan. In 1996, the Defence Department’s Inspector General’s office launched an investigation of a U.S. military officer at the Ankara embassy who was caught receiving a bribe from MIT agents. Shortly after the investigation started, Dickerson was transferred to a U.S. Air Force base in Germany. Dickerson’s wife, Melek Can, worked for the German-Turkish Business and Cultural Association, known to be a cover for MIT activities in Germany.”
In 1998, Dickerson was transferred from Germany to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, where, incidentally, the alleged ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, is believed to have once attended the International Officers School.
In 2001, after George W. Bush became president, Dickerson was promoted and placed in charge of weapons procurement for Turkey, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan at the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, while Melek Can obtained positions with the ATC and Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA).
After 9/11, Melek Can applied for work as a translator with the FBI. Months later, when Sibel Edmonds reported her suspicions about her Turkish colleague to Senators Patrick Leahy and Charles Grassley, they asked the FBI why no Special Background Investigation (SBI) was conducted on Melek Can. According to Madsen, “The FBI responded that Melek Can entered the FBI ‘through the backdoor’ with her husband’s Top Secret/SBI being sufficient grounds to grant Melek Can access to FBI classified information.”
In January 2006, Dickerson was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and transferred to the U.S. Air Force base in Yokota, Japan, where he became acting commander of the 374th Logistics Readiness Squadron.
Tip of the Iceberg
But just what does it mean for Japan that the Dickersons are here? Coming directly from NATO to Japan, is it a further indication of an emerging military alliance between the two? It may also be no coincidence that the arrival of Lt. Col. Douglas Dickerson, who specialises in arms procurement, coincided with a massive increase in military spending in the region.
As John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus, pointed out in “Asia’s Hidden Arms Race”: “Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, five of the six countries involved in the Six Party Talks have increased their military spending by 50% or more. The sixth, Japan, has maintained a steady, if sizeable military budget while nonetheless aspiring to keep pace. Every country in the region is now eagerly investing staggering amounts of money in new weapons systems and new offensive capabilities.”
And then there is the question of the couple’s alleged ties to an international criminal network.
In a 2005 interview with Christopher Deliso of Antiwar.com, Sibel Edmonds said that her allegations against Melek Can Dickerson were just the tip of a very dirty iceberg. “I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion dollar drug smuggling operations, black market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it,” she said.
“You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the [Valerie] Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people. There may be a lot of them, but it is one group. And they are very dangerous for all of us.”
We can get a frightening glimpse of just how dangerous they are from the article “For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets” published in the Sunday Times on January 6, 2008. Frustrated with U.S. authorities failure to take action, Edmonds told the Times what she knew about high-ranking officials in the State Department and the Pentagon who helped Turkish and Israeli agents acquire U.S. nuclear secrets and technology which were then passed on to the Pakistani A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network. Khan, known as the father of the Islamic bomb, became a millionaire by selling nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.
So, here we have a USAF officer supposedly in Japan as part of the U.S.-Japanese defence alliance, which ostensibly protects Japan from the North Korean “threat” that has been greatly facilitated by an arms smuggling network to which he is said to belong. Funny old world, isn’t it?
Sibel Edmonds’ allegations about the Dickersons have been documented in the award-winning 2006 film, “Kill the Messenger.” Gagged by the U.S. government to prevent her naming names, she deftly revealed other key players in the network by posting their photographs on her website
(www.justacitizen.com ) under the title “State Secrets Privilege Gallery.”
Note: Reading Luke Ryland’s excellent blog on Sibel Edmonds, I learned that Douglas Dickerson left Japan in October, 2008 after spending a year here as Director of Strategic Development. He is now back in the US studying an MBA at Duke University. His studies were interrupted for a year he spent as US Senior Logistics Mentor, Ministry of Interior, in Afghanistan. His official CV is available here.
