Those who witnessed what happened to Capt. Chris Koury and Cmdr. Rita Szymanski after they blew the whistle on problems they found at Central Command say the two were victims of a culture of cronyism that has grown up throughout the military.It seriously endangers the Command’s missions and harms morale, they say.
The former chief of Central Command’s Joint Intelligence Center, retired Army Col. Kirk Davidson, has been critical of command since leaving it in 1999, once calling it an intelligence “black hole.”
“There are some intelligence improvements that have always been needed there,” Davidson told The Anniston Star. “My feeling was, there was no fresh blood and it was an incestuous place. People made their own jobs there, especially among the civilian force.
“It was what I used to call the Bubba system. They were fat, dumb and happy, and they still are.”
A military base can be compared to a railway station. Military officers come and go like passengers sticking to timetables, while civilian officials, like transit officials in the booth, provide them with permanent support.
But the transitory nature of the military leadership can give rise to problems within the ranks.
At Central Command, cronyism is a serious problem, officers interviewed for this series all say.
It wasn’t uncommon to see officers retire on a Friday and be back the next Monday morning in civilian clothes. The officers often hand-tailored civilian job descriptions, which they held open and filled themselves after they retired, the sources say. Eventually, says Davidson, “no one came from the outside.”
Davidson, who spent 28 years in the military, says he did not cooperate with the system, and was “pressured pretty heavily” to resign.
“They’re very smart and they covered themselves very, very well,” he said. “If you weren’t on the team, you went to other places.”
Current and former senior leaders of the Intelligence Directorate would not comment for this series.
However, several former intelligence officers who worked at Central Command agree with Davidson’s assessment of the culture there.
“I always thought DIA was bad, but CentCom makes DIA look like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” says Victoria Brittain, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who worked at Central Command until recently. She complained anonymously to the Department of Defense inspector general about what she saw happen to Koury and Szymanski.
Intelligence has suffered, officers say. Yet senior military officers who should confront the problem often don’t.
The end of the line
Looking back on everything that happened, Szymanski says she feels betrayed.
The former manager of the Intelligence Directorate’s Reserve Management Office always had received exceptional performance evaluations prior to bringing several problems to the attention of the senior leadership at Central Command.
Szymanski is “keenly intelligent,” her superiors had written, and a “superb leader … best Joint Intelligence Center action officer of all…”
She has “unlimited potential,” they had written.
Her discoveries were a damage to her. Shortly after, her new superiors wrote Szymanski her first poor evaluation. Alexander signed the evaluation sheet himself.
Szymanski’s evaluations have leapt back up, reflecting positive performance since she was transferred to Strategic Command, documents show. But her chances of promotion are exceedingly small. Her record is ruined, she said.
“I felt the system that you’re taught, as you’re growing up in the military, the regulations and instructions, didn’t seem to apply in this situation,” Szymanksi said in a phone interview. “Although I was going by those regulations and instructions, everyone else didn’t seem to be going by them, you know? They didn’t matter. They were playing by their own set of rules.”
* * * * * Koury, who is now on inactive Reserve status, has sent dozens of letters to Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and the Department of Defense inspector general, asking them to reinvestigate his case. With each new terrorist attack, each bomb that takes more lives, he begins another letter.
Then he doesn’t finish.
If those in positions of power would only listen to him and look beneath the command’s investigative report to the actual testimony, they would see he has been seriously wronged, that the former charges against him are false, Koury says.
And if they did see this, what then? What else might they have to believe? Maybe, Koury says, that there are serious problems at Central Command that need to be looked into.
Or maybe, Koury says, he just never understood that he doesn’t really matter.
“It’s the layering of a lie,” he says.
* * * * * Todd Wynkoop, who served as Szymanski’s and Koury’s legal adviser, said he was distressed by what happened to them — and why it happened. It had seemed to him to be the case of a personality clash between officers in the workplace.
“I found it extremely troubling that the command was willing to end someone’s career the way they did, more than one person’s career the way they did,” he said. “It’s completely contrary to every aspect of leadership I learned after 15 years in the Navy.”
* * * * * Doraine Dorman, a former Army sergeant who also was fired from Central Command following the discoveries in the Intelligence Directorate, says the ripples of what happened must have been felt elsewhere, maybe as far as the Pentagon.
She wishes someone would reach out, like she was always taught.
“When something like this is done it’s got to be heard other places,” Dorman says. “And nobody does anything about it. That’s the sad thing.”
* * * * * Navy Lt. Cmdr. Larry Baxley says he and the junior officers who saw what happened to Koury and the others learned a valuable lesson.
“This guy’s an outsider, he’s a reservist, a pretty easy scapegoat,” Baxley said. “Meanwhile, Central Command senior members were able to act with impunity, both civilians and officers. It seems kind of bizarre. And that’s the kind of lesson that junior officers get. Because they’re not blind to it. Because everybody’s watching.”
A call to reform
Central Command’s problems involve more than just the story of a group of officers who, as Baxley put it, “discovered some bad things,” the officers interviewed for this series say.
The problems are systemwide and have caused a shortage in the resources — money, equipment and personnel — that the men and women at Central Command must have to do their jobs, they say.
But the problems often have been ignored by the leadership, endangering military operations and American lives at home and at the “tip of the spear” in the Middle East, the officers claim.
Yet those in leadership who do wrong are protected, the officers say. The problems are entrenched. The military system, which is supposed to police itself, has failed.
The officers say what is needed is for the independent leadership at the very top — in Congress and the State Department — to perform a militarywide study comparing every U.S. military command’s mission and appropriate resources accordingly.
Things might not change unless Congress enacts reforms.
Reform it must, the sources say. Lives are at stake.
