Classified Woman by Sibel Edmonds Read Free Book Online Page A

the day. When I opened that document the following workday, the page would appear but with paragraphs deleted and sentences cut in half, with the other halves missing. I would have to start from scratch. It was driving me nuts. What ordinarily took me two days to finish was dragging into five. To make matters worse, this particular translation was urgent business.
    I had never before experienced anything like this. I called Amin, since he was the most technologically savvy in the unit.
    Amin checked and tried everything. Nothing worked. Then he had an idea. “How many people know your password?”
    “No one, except for supervisors—they have a key password for all our computers.”
    This interested him. “Maybe someone who doesn’t like you stood behind you and stole it. I know the three sisters don’t care for you at all. Maybe it was one of them.”
    I told him I didn’t think so.
    “There is only one way to find out. We’ll report it to the computer and database department downstairs. They can print out the records of all login and logout sessions into your computer. Match that against the hours you worked and bam! we’ll know if anyone logged in to your system when you were not here. If it was one of the supervisors, it’ll show that it was from another computer and will tell you whose computer it was from.”
    Brilliant. How does one go about reporting this to the database department downstairs? Amin said the best and fastest way is to inform my supervisor and have him report it and request the data. So I went to Feghali’s office and explained the problem, asking him to do exactly that.
    “That’s interesting,” he said. I urged that we find out right away.
    “I don’t think it is a good idea for you to report this. Let it slide one more time. We don’t want this to turn into a major incident.”
    “It is a major incident. Whoever did this should be reprimanded, fired. This is sick!”
    Feghali replied a little more sharply, “No. I won’t report it this time. If it happens again, I will. Maybe you should consider it a lesson. Maybe you were working too fast and someone decided to warn you, to teach you a lesson.”
    It suddenly sank in. My own supervisor had done this—right after I had defied him and sent the expedited translation to New Jersey. The man would halt urgent counterterrorism investigations for a budget increase. If I had any doubts before, I now believed I was on his wrong side—permanently.
    In mid October, another Turkish translator, Kevin Taskesen, entered the department. Feghali brought Kevin to my desk, and after a short introduction asked me to train and supervise him. Kevin was in his midforties, overweight and dark with a thick black mustache and a noticeable limp. He was hired as a “monitor.” The bureau divides translators into two ranking groups. The language specialists are those with high scores in both the target language and English: they perform all types of translations (verbatim, interviews, live interpretations) and supervise monitors. The monitors are those with low scores in either English or the target language. Technically (that is, as presented in FBI rulebooks and classification manuals), monitors are only allowed to perform summary translations; they are not to translate verbatim or interpret for court cases or live interviews, and they must submit their final product to their assigned language specialist for approval. In actuality, things never worked that way.
    Kevin seemed timid and not very social. He spoke only in Turkish, with me. I tried my best to explain things to him, to demonstrate by having him sit next to me and watch. Saccher also helped and had a briefing session with Kevin in my presence.
    In less than a week, Feghali had Kevin performing summary translations of our ongoing counterintelligence project. Kevin didn’t know how to use a computer; he had never typed a word in his life on a word processor. Feghali asked Amin to show him