Feature

An Inconvenient Woman

In fact, her obsessiveness, the dramatic, even conspiratorial nature of her charges, and the difficulty of corroborating events in a hostile environment are a serious threat to her credibility. Kleiman is aware of the risk. She is also aware that when something like this takes over your entire life, and you claim to see things no one else says they see, you can be dismissed as easily as the guy who wears a tin-foil hat because he claims he’s receiving signals from another galaxy. “They drove me nuts at Customs,” Kleiman says, “but I can assure you I’m not crazy.”

When I first met Diane Kleiman, at the Garden Diner on South End Avenue, a block from her apartment in Battery Park City, she was in the middle of a loud conversation across several booths with a salesman who appeared to be trying to pick her up. She seemed to be basking in the attention. In fact, she was downright giddy from their exchange, even though it was only a little before ten in the morning.

She wears too much makeup and can at times, in her efforts to seem friendly, be a little cloying. Certainly, there are moments when she repeats the same point over and over, like a malfunctioning CD, and it is easy to imagine her as an irritating if not troublesome co-worker.

But her employment record doesn’t indicate any obvious difficulties at any of her other jobs. “She’s definitely intense,” says one senior prosecutor in the Bronx who worked with Kleiman when she was in the Queens D.A.’s office. “She worked hard, she fit in fine, and she was certainly no wackier than anyone else you’ll find floating around this business.”

“She’s really gone through some terrible times,” her mother says. “She’s not the same happy-go-lucky daughter I used to have.”

In May 2001, she discovered there was a government entity called the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) set up to consider grievances from federal employees—such as that of a whistleblower who believes she was retaliated against. (The process is complicated and slow. People familiar with it say it is also solidly stacked against whistleblowers.)

In November of that year, the OSC agreed to investigate Kleiman’s case, and its report is expected anytime now. Not long after that, again mostly as a result of her tireless efforts on her own behalf, Senators Chuck Grassley (who was a co-author of the Whistleblower Protection Act fourteen years ago), Richard Shelby, and Joe Lieberman took a strong interest in Kleiman’s case as well.

Grassley and Shelby in particular have gotten behind her, writing letters to the OSC and closely monitoring the investigation. “The fact that Senator Shelby has written to OSC on her behalf is indicative of how compelling he believes her case is,” says Senate banking committee spokesman Andrew Gray.

Given the lack of any kind of response from Customs, particularly to the security issues raised by Kleiman, sources now say it’s possible the case may result in congressional hearings. Customs, citing the pending litigation, declined several requests for comment for this story.

“I want to see at least one person referred to the U.S. Attorney for prosecution,” she says. “People have to understand they’ll be held accountable for their actions.”

Kleiman is far from alone in her concerns about security at JFK. One Customs agent at JFK I talked to, a man with eighteen years of experience, is himself wrestling with going public about the problems. He believes the security failures remain critical. His conscience is pushing him to speak out, even though he knows the impact this will have on his professional and personal life.

There are, he says, few checks and balances built into the system. Each airline hires its own independent contractors to handle tasks like cleaning the planes, and there are no hard-and-fast rules about background checks. “So you have all these people allowed on the ramps and in secure areas,” says the Customs agent, “and maybe there’s been an FBI check or maybe not. It’s all up to the individual companies. And these are not exactly the highest-paid jobs. There’s a very high turnover rate.”

And just as Kleiman has said based on her experience, there is this perception that if someone is on the ramps, he belongs there. The checkpoints where I.D.’s are needed are staffed by private security, not federal screeners like the ones now mandated to conduct passenger checks. Nor are any of the employees searched or asked to pass through a metal detector before gaining access to the ramps—the way prison guards, for example, are examined every time they report to work.

Perhaps even more alarming, however, given the concern about terrorists entering the country, is what the veteran agent says about the integrity of this process. When a plane comes in from a foreign country, passengers on that flight are supposed to go directly from the aircraft to the Customs checkpoint without having any outside contact. This is accomplished though the use of “sterile” corridors—the same ones that were found to be compromised when Kleiman made her big drug bust.

“There are exit doors along the sterile corridors, and they’re supposed to be locked and secure at all times,” says the Customs agent. “But it’s not unusual to find these doors unlocked and open. You can imagine the dangerous possibilities that presents.” Only eleven months ago, for example, federal authorities broke up a smuggling operation that was exploiting these holes to bring illegal aliens into the country.

The key to the operation was an airline-food-service employee with security clearance and a set of keys. He would meet an arriving foreign national at the gate and shepherd him into a sterile corridor, where he would unlock an exit door, allowing the illegal to slip into the main area of the terminal without passing through Customs. He was getting $1,000 a head for each undocumented alien he smuggled through.

As Kleiman waits for OSC to issue its findings, she has had plenty of time to think about the decisions she’s made since she first walked into Building 75 at JFK to begin her job at Customs. “There’s not been a day in the last four years,” she says, “when I haven’t gone over all this in my head trying to figure out why me? Why did I have to confront this? Why couldn’t I have had just a normal career at the agency?”

Having asked those questions, however, and knowing what she knows now, Kleiman still says she would do it all again. “Even though it doesn’t feel like it, in my heart I know I did the right thing.” What she wants now is vindication. She desperately wants a positive finding by OSC, then she wants to be reinstated and given her back pay. She even says she’d still like to work for the government. Just not at Customs. She would like some kind of job working in homeland security.

But as with most whistleblowers, her job is only part of it. “I want accountability. I want to see at least one person referred to the U.S. Attorney for prosecution,” she says, pointing out that this is about more than vindictiveness.

“People have to understand they’ll be held accountable for their actions,” Kleiman says just before leaving for Washington to meet with Senate staff. “Unless someone is punished, there won’t be any change in the system. And that’s what this has really all been about.”