I want you to picture two places.

The first is a summer field in Ukraine, gold grain stretching to a low horizon, a dirt track running along the edge, trees in the distance under a clear sky. The second is quieter and darker: a pond ringed by grass and reeds, rolling hills behind it, a rough stone structure in the foreground, the whole scene drained of color. Nothing in either view announces itself as a crime scene. They look like the kind of landscapes you might pass on a drive or glimpse from a train window and forget.

For more than one million Jews in Ukraine during the Second World War, places like these were not scenery. They were the last thing they saw before they were shot. Rounded up in towns and villages, marched to the outskirts, forced to the edge of fields, ravines and ponds, men, women and children were killed at close range and buried on the spot in pits that were later leveled, plowed or flooded.

Historians now describe this chapter as the “Holocaust by bullets.” It was the first phase of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, and in Ukraine alone an estimated 1.5 million to more than 2 million Jews were shot at roughly 2,000 execution sites. Roma families were murdered in similar fashion. Most of those mass graves are still unmarked, unprotected and largely unknown outside the communities that remember them.

Beyond Babi Yar is a 32‑minute documentary that fixes the camera on those ordinary sites and asks viewers to see them as killing fields. Rather than staying only at Babyn Yar, the ravine outside Kyiv that has become a symbol of the “Holocaust by bullets,” the film moves through smaller towns and village outskirts where mass graves sit under crops, pastures and water. In many of these places, there is little to indicate that the ground holds the remains of entire communities.

That absence is the point.

For decades after the war, Soviet policy blurred Jewish and Roma victims into generic “peaceful citizens,” and official markers often avoided naming the people targeted for extermination. Subsequent surveys and fieldwork—in projects such as Protecting Memory and its successor, Connecting Memory—have documented thousands of graves in danger of erosion, development or simple neglect, far from the better‑known memorials that draw international attention. A few sites have been transformed into dignified memorials with educational materials. Most have not.

The film drops viewers directly into that gap between what is known and what is protected.

It shows landscapes that look peaceful and asks why so many of them still lack basic recognition, let alone legal safeguards. It raises uncomfortable questions about who bears responsibility when mass‑murder sites remain unmarked: national governments, local councils, religious bodies, Jewish communal organizations, international funders or some mix of all of them. And it suggests that leaving these graves to decay is not just a failure of memory, but a failure of human rights.

For executive producer John Pollick, that failure is personal.

His relatives were murdered in these shootings, and he has spent years pressing officials, communal institutions and media outlets to confront what it means for so many killing fields to remain invisible. When traditional coverage did not materialize, he helped bring Beyond Babi Yar into being and pushed it through festivals as a way to place evidence, names and places in front of audiences who had never heard of most of these sites.

In the exclusive written Q&A that follows, Pollick walks through his family’s connection to the shootings, how Beyond Babi Yar came together, and the politics of memory that decide whether Ukraine’s mass graves are protected or forgotten. He spells out the changes he believes are overdue — in law, money and local behavior — to keep thousands of killing fields from quietly disappearing, and what he wants viewers to carry with them after watching the film.

Background and motivation

Your family history is the spark for this film. Can you walk me through which relatives were killed, where they were shot in Ukraine, and how you first confirmed the details of their deaths through records or testimony?

Pollick:
The Holocaust victims in my family were relatives of my maternal grandparents. My grandparents were shtetl Jews from neighboring towns in what is now northwest Ukraine. My grandfather immigrated here in 1914, just before WWI, my grandmother and uncle in 1920. Both left large families behind.

In June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and occupied their hometowns. Jews were forced into ghettos where they were abused and exploited. In August 1942, they were taken from the ghettos and shot into pits. In my grandmother’s family, victims included her mother, sister, four brothers and 13 nieces and nephews. In my grandfather’s family, they included two brothers and eight nieces and nephews.

The details of my relatives’ death have never been confirmed through records or testimony. Although Nazis kept meticulous records of concentration and death camp victims, they did not for shooting victims. Also, many of the mass shootings, including in my grandparents’ hometowns, were done or assisted by local Ukrainians who kept poor records. As a result, the only confirmation of my relatives’ death is the fact that no one in my family has heard from them in 84 years. This is common. Another result is that the names of nearly half of the estimated 1.5 to 2.1 million Jewish shooting victims in Ukraine are missing from databases of Holocaust victims.

The issue of missing names is of great significance. In 2018 I checked the Yad Vashem victims database and found the names of only 11 of the 29 victims in my family, entered years ago by a niece of my grandmother who survived the war. Shortly afterward, I entered the names of the remaining 18, including my grandmother’s mother. If I hadn’t, their existence and fate would have been lost forever.

It is estimated that the names of a million or more Jewish shooting victims in Eastern Europe remain missing from victims databases.

You’ve said you spent a decade trying to get journalists to write about this. What did editors and reporters actually say or signal when they passed, and what shifted in 2019 that convinced you that producing a film and pushing it through festivals was the only viable route?

Pollick:
To answer this question and others here, it is important to understand the historic marginalization of the shooting victims and the reasons for it.

It is estimated that the total number of Jews killed in mass shootings is 2.4 million, or 40%, of the six million Jewish Holocaust victims. They lie in thousands of mass graves across Eastern Europe. After the war, the vast majority of these people and graves were in the Soviet Union. As a matter of policy, the Soviet Union did not recognize the Jewish identity of these victims or acknowledge that their murder was part of the larger Nazi genocide. Instead, they were identified as “peaceful Soviet citizens” murdered by German fascists, a small and unremarkable fraction of the estimated 20 million Soviet civilians who were killed or died as a result of the war.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and recognition of these murders as part of the Holocaust became possible, the marginalization was essentially set. In the 35 years since, other than token measures and Babi/Babyn Yar in Kyiv, it has only deepened. In addition, the subject itself, the subject of mass shootings and mass graves in Eastern Europe, especially in Ukraine, has become taboo – the murders too brutal to contemplate, the neglect too embarrassing to admit, Ukrainian collaboration too damaging to recognize, especially today, and the number of victims and graves too vast to comprehend, let alone do something about.

When Holocaust remembrance emerged in a major way in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s, the stories of the shooting victims were unavailable, locked up in the Soviet Union, while the stories of camp victims were not. Unlike the mass shootings in the East which only a handful, literally, survived, tens of thousands of Jews survived the camps. Many were articulate Westernized Jews like Elie Wiesel. As a result, stories about the camps, the only stories we heard, became the foundation of Holocaust memory and education in the West. The shooting victims, if mentioned at all, were an afterthought. Eventually, as elsewhere, the subject, other than token gestures, became taboo, especially the thousands of unmarked and desecrated mass graves in Eastern Europe.

Over the years I have written to countless journalists about the neglected victims and graves. The most common response overwhelmingly is silence. I am a stranger writing about a dark subject, telling them that American Jewish and Holocaust leaders, the highest and most powerful moral authorities in our country, have neglected nearly half of the Holocaust and millions of unburied Holocaust victims in Eastern Europe. Who is going to touch that, especially when ignoring me has, or appears to have, no consequences? They may not know the subject is taboo, or why it is taboo, but they know it is a major challenge to powerful American Jewish leaders on an enormously important and sensitive subject and want no part of it.

Among the responses I do receive, some journalists acknowledge the issue but say they don’t have time or I should contact someone else. Regarding journalists who respond more substantively, here are three examples, all of them Jewish:

Prominent journalist I have corresponded with periodically over the years: “Write about what? I’m sure this is clear to you, but it’s incomprehensible to me, and I’m a smart guy.”

Prominent journalist who enthusiastically praised an early version of my film and regularly addressed me by my first name, after I criticized Holocaust leaders who were trying to silence me for speaking up: “Dear Mr. Pollick, I am not involved with your film. Please do not write to me about it.”

Award-winning film reviewer, whose review of a Holocaust film I admired: “I saw the film and found it quite compelling. I pitched a review to the Forward, but regrettably, the editor did not bite.” For decades, the Forward, formerly the Jewish Daily Forward, was the great voice of Eastern European Jewry in America. It has “bit” on hundreds of articles about the Holocaust and continues to do so but won’t bite on a review of an award-winning film about the very people it was founded to serve.

I started on this cause in 2015. After four years of talking and writing to officials of American Jewish organizations and Holocaust museums, scholars, rabbis and journalists, none of whom showed any interest and, if anything, were hostile, I decided that the only way to get the story out was to make a film about it myself. I found a filmmaker and in September 2019 we went to Ukraine to film the reality of this neglect. When the film was completed in 2023, I started submitting it to film festivals. As the film’s website shows, it has won awards across North America and Europe.

Two notable things about the film. First, the filmmaker is the son of a survivor of Auschwitz and made an acclaimed film about it yet, before working with me, he had no idea of the millions of shooting victims and thousands of desecrated mass graves in Eastern Europe. Second, despite the fact the film has received more than a dozen film awards and praise from many prominent people, the film was rejected by every major Jewish film festival I submitted to. At this point, no Jewish or Holocaust organization will touch it nor, until now, would any journalist. Like the mass graves and the shooting victims themselves, the film and I have become taboo.

“Holocaust by bullets” and neglected sites

For readers who only know the camp system, how would you explain the “Holocaust by bullets” in present‑day Ukraine: who did the killing, roughly how many Jews and others were shot, and what range of estimates exists for victims and sites?

Pollick:
The mass shootings in Ukraine were done by Germans and Ukrainians. The Germans were part of mobile killing units, called Einsatzgruppen, who followed behind the German army as it advanced in Ukraine. Their mission was to kill Jews – all Jews, men, women and children - and others they considered undesirable, such as Roma and resisters.

While the Einsatzgruppen numbered no more than a few thousand in Ukraine, they were assisted in the mass shootings by over 100,000 Ukrainians, many, if not most of them, Ukrainian nationalists. The Holocaust in Ukraine could not have happened without them. Ukrainian nationalists – their various organizations or affiliates were referred to as the OUN, the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and the UPA - saw the Soviets as their main enemy and aligned themselves with the Nazis to fight them. Like the Nazis, many were fascists themselves and believed all Jews in Ukraine should be exterminated.

Estimates of the number of Jewish shooting victims in Ukraine range from 1.5 million to 2.1 million. This broad range itself is testament to the vast neglect of these victims - 80 years after the war, estimates still vary by 600,000 or 40%. Estimates of the number of Roma killed in Ukraine are 20,000 to 25,000, although some are considerably higher.

There are an estimated 2,000 mass graves of Jewish Holocaust victims in Ukraine. Most of them are unmarked, unprotected and desecrated. They haunt local communities unable or unwilling to protect and memorialize them. Most of them are plundered. Neighbors view them as gold mines because of the gold teeth of the victims, and dig up the graves to find them. Those who do so are rarely, if ever, prosecuted.

Beyond Babi Yar, the film shows smaller mass‑grave sites. Can you describe a few specific places where you found a dignified memorial versus a ploughed field, a garbage dump, or nothing at all, and what pattern those examples reveal about how these graves are marked or ignored?

Pollick:
The mass grave in my grandmother’s hometown illustrates both. For 60 years after the war, it was part of a working agricultural field, plowed over every year. In the mid-2000s, it was identified as an execution site and subsequently protected and memorialized by Protecting Memory. In 2015, my daughter and I attended the dedication of the memorial. When I returned to Ukraine in 2019 to make the film, a Ukrainian woman I met in 2015 showed me recent pictures of the memorial: local residents cleaning the site and planting flowers, and schoolchildren standing in front of the memorial holding up Ukrainian letters which, translated, spelled out “Never Again.”

This is the worst and the best. If anyone made the effort, I actually believe the best is possible in Ukraine. The existence of this possibility is the central message of my film, shown at dedication ceremonies for Protecting Memory memorials where local Ukrainians respectfully remember and honor their former Jewish neighbors. Unfortunately, only 17 Jewish execution sites in Ukraine, out of an estimated 2,000, have been protected and memorialized through Protecting/Connecting Memory. Worse, in 2023 Germany cancelled the entire program. I have yet to read or hear a word of protest.

Typically, the mass graves are used as garbage dumps, reflecting both the contempt and fears of the local population. Most, as discussed above, are plundered. A distant French cousin recently wrote me the following:

“I attended Father Desbois’ [founder of Yahad-In Unum which has investigated over 3,000 Holocaust execution sites] conference. I gave him the names of our ancestors’ hometowns, and he gave terrible details as for example a dog was lying on the pit and was growling and didn’t let people approach because that was his bones cellar, the bones of our ancestors….”

This is not taught. Instead, American Jewish and Holocaust organizations purport to remember and honor all of our “Jewish martyrs,” while hundreds of thousands, if not millions, lie forgotten in thousands of desecrated mass graves across Eastern Europe, their remains serving as a dog’s bone cellar.

This is one of the reasons why nobody talks about this. The depths of the inhumanity, degradation and horror are beyond human comprehension. Silence, however, not only deepens the desecration of the memory and remains of these people, it created it in the first place.

When you look at that neglect, who do you believe bears formal responsibility today for locating, registering, and protecting these graves, and who bears moral responsibility for the decades of silence: Soviet authorities, post‑Soviet governments, local communities, Jewish organizations, international funders, or some combination?

Pollick:
Above all, Germany bears moral responsibility for protecting and memorializing these sites because Germany created them. Germany is often held up as the model of “facing up to its past” but it has not faced up to its past with respect to the mass shootings in the East. There has only been tokenism. Its responsibility includes publicly proclaiming its responsibility for the thousands of mass shootings in Eastern Europe and the thousands of desecrated mass graves there, and immediately funding a massive program under which it and Eastern European countries, including Ukraine, find, protect and memorialize these graves which have haunted them and the Jewish people for over 80 years.

Although Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust would not have happened without Nazi support and cover, the responsibility of Ukrainians is not only enormous but one which, in my opinion, they have done virtually nothing to meet. Their responsibility includes openly recognizing that these murders occurred on a vast scale and that Ukrainian nationalists played a major role in them; investigating and prosecuting all desecrations of mass Holocaust graves in Ukraine; publicly proclaiming that when the war ends and the process of rebuilding begins, the estimated 2,000 Holocaust execution sites in Ukraine will, with outside funding, be located, protected and memorialized; and requiring memorials to acknowledge the role of local Ukrainians in the mass shootings.

Most responsible for the silence in both Eastern Europe and the West is the Soviet suppression of the Holocaust and labelling Jewish victims as “peaceful Soviet citizens.” After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, much of this narrative continued in Eastern Europe, together with the silence. Over time, other than tokenism and narrow academic interest, the subject of the shooting victims and their neglected mass graves became taboo. Nothing was to be gained by bringing it up and nothing was to be lost by not. The victims were strangers to them, not their relatives.

On the other hand, they are the relatives of many American Jews. Great responsibility for the silence, therefore, also goes to American Jewish and Holocaust leaders who have created a narrative, essentially unchallenged, that: (a) the Holocaust took place only in camps, with Westernized and often glamorized camp victims; (b) the millions of shooting victims in the East, who suffered the most, are to be remembered as lovable characters from Fiddler on the Roof, not as real people lying forgotten and unburied in thousands of mass graves who deserve respect and proper burial; and (c) to ensure that the leaders’ neglect and callousness are not exposed, the reality of the shooting victims and their graves is not to be discussed or taught, except in obscure academic circles and through token gestures.

I know and have seen this firsthand. It is Jewish dirty laundry of the highest order. In the view of American Jewish leadership, I am a traitor for exposing it. That, however, is not how I see it. I am very proud of my Jewish heritage and because of it, and based on it, it is far more important to me that our dead be properly remembered and buried than it is to protect the sensitivities of American Jewish leaders who have betrayed our dead.

Politics of memory and power

You’ve said the film “embarrasses many powerful people.” Without naming individuals, which kinds of institutions do you think have had incentives to keep these sites obscure or under‑funded—national governments, local councils, religious bodies, Jewish communal groups, foreign ministries, philanthropies?

Pollick:
All of them have incentives to obscure this situation because admitting it exposes their decades of neglect and embarrasses them, and because acknowledging it means they have to do something about it which no one wants to do. The problem is too large, too dark and brings up issues of historical guilt that no one wants to face.

Since 2014—and now under full‑scale war—how have Ukraine’s politics of memory and national narratives, along with wartime priorities and security concerns, affected efforts to document and memorialize these killing fields on the ground?

Pollick:
The search for and protection of mass Holocaust graves in Ukraine has stopped since the 2022 Russian invasion, which no one questions, including Jewish organizations. What Jewish organizations should question but do not is the growing glorification of Ukrainian nationalists in Ukraine, including by President Zelensky himself. To me, this glorification is the greatest obstacle to the future protection and memorialization of the mass Holocaust graves in Ukraine and restoring dignity to the shooting victims.

The most recent example of the glorification of Ukrainian nationalists in Ukraine is a May 2026 decree, signed by President Zelensky, bestowing upon a Ukrainian military unit the honorary title “named after the Heroes of the UPA.” The UPA was the military wing of Ukrainian nationalists which, among other things, massacred Poles and Jews in Ukraine during WWII.

The decree sparked outrage in Poland and demands that Ukraine immediately rescind it. Ukraine responded defiantly, with President Zelensky declaring that “no one, ever, will dictate … which heroes we should honor.” In reply, an aide to Poland’s President stated that the UPA “adhered to Nazi ideology” and although Ukraine has the right to honor whomever it wants, “they must also consider the consequences that this entails.” He added:

“Does [Zelensky] want to apply for EU membership with swastikas? Does he want to build Ukraine’s historical memory with Hitler’s collaborators? This is his choice, and he will bear responsibility for it.”

Last month the European Parliament agreed with Poland. In a resolution approved by the majority of its members, it stated that it “regrets the recent unnecessary and unprovoked escalation by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by renaming an elite military unit…after the heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)”.

Although Ukraine has eased off the intensity of its defiance, the controversy remains ongoing. To me, Jewish organizations, directly and through diplomats, must raise similar protests with Ukraine. The failure to do, in my opinion, will condemn the millions of shooting victims and their mass graves in Ukraine to oblivion.

The film’s choices and message

You chose a 32‑minute short rather than a feature. Was that decision driven more by festival strategy, budget, attention spans, or editorial judgment about what was essential, and what did you gain and lose with that format for reaching audiences, journalists, and policymakers?

Pollick:
I am a lawyer and until I got involved in this cause, the idea of making a film never occurred to me and, if it had, I would have had no idea how to do it. I made the film because I saw no other option. The film is 32 minutes because there were certain events, commentary and ideas that I wanted to get across from our hours of filming in Ukraine and that is what it boiled down to. Several people urged me to make it longer but, having made my points, I had no interest. The budget was very modest but it accomplished what I hoped for.

The ending is framed as a call to action. If we break that down, what do you want individual viewers to do—whether as voters, donors, or neighbors—and what measurable actions do you want from governments, Jewish organizations, and international funders over the next five years?

Pollick:
I would like viewers to: (a) pass the film on to others and find ways to get more people to watch it. I am happy to participate remotely in group showings; (b) contact officials of Jewish organizations and Holocaust museums and insist that they watch the film, and follow up to make sure they do and take action to address this situation; and (c) urge educators to begin teaching about the Holocaust in Ukraine, including the mass shootings, Ukrainian involvement and the desecrated graves.

I would like American Jewish organizations and Holocaust museums to greatly increase their focus on the shooting victims and create and implement strategies to: (a) discover the names of the estimated one million shooting victims whose names are missing from victims databases, and get their names entered into them; and (b) work with U.S. and European diplomats to ensure that, after the war, the shooting victims are remembered, honored and properly buried

I would like philanthropists to create organizations, and help fund efforts, to remember and bury these victims and educate the public about their lives, deaths and the decades of neglect that led to this moral and humanitarian injustice.

I would like the U.S. government to direct its agencies that deal with Jewish and Holocaust issues to make the memory and dignity of the shooting victims one of their highest priorities, instead of their lowest, and exert maximum pressure on Germany, the EU and Eastern European countries to comprehensively address the remembrance and proper burial of these victims.

If you could secure one concrete change in that same five‑year window—a national protection law for mass graves, a sustained funding mechanism modeled on projects like Protecting Memory, or a formal registry of all known sites—which would you prioritize and why?

Pollick:
I would prioritize the sustained funding and implementation of projects like Protecting Memory which, to me, is the gold standard for protecting and memorializing execution sites in Eastern Europe. This is what my film shows – that if done properly, like Protecting Memory, these victims can be honored and buried with dignity and local populations, no longer haunted by the unburied dead, can take ownership of the memorials and openly remember the Jewish communities that once existed there.

In the words of scholars in the field, “non-sites of memory” are “neutralized by funerary rights,” freeing the local population from the psychological burden of the unmarked and plundered sites and the role their communities played in the killings.

I also believe that Protecting Memory-type memorials, if properly publicized which they haven’t been, would encourage further interest in these sites and lead to more memorials and greater remembrance of all shooting victims.

I see no reason why a formal registry of all known execution sites and their condition cannot be created at the same time.

To me, national protection laws for Jewish Holocaust victims in Ukraine are meaningless unless they are consistently and aggressively enforced, which Ukraine has never done. I see them as window-dressing for Western consumption, to give the impression that President Zelensky and Ukraine care about these murdered Jews.

The proof that they do not is the continued existence of these desecrated graves and dehumanized victims, and the fact that no one has the courage to openly discuss and address them.

Accountability and next steps

You’ve engaged with projects like “Protecting Memory” and seen newer efforts like “Connecting Memory.” In practice, what are the biggest legal, bureaucratic, or practical barriers—land ownership, religious law, municipal zoning, funding cycles, archival access—that these groups face when they try to locate, mark, and protect graves?

Pollick:
To begin with, the difference between Protecting Memory and Connecting Memory, which is not entirely clear to me, is now irrelevant because Germany has cancelled the entire program.

That said, the issue of barriers to protecting and memorializing these sites is one of great importance and, like many issues relating to these victims, has never been properly discussed or understood. Also, an important barrier not mentioned and never discussed is the attitude of American Jews toward Ukrainians.

When the idea of a memorial in my grandmother’s hometown first occurred to me in the 2000s, I discussed it with an uncle. While he admired my sentiment, he assured me that it would be a waste of time and effort because any memorial I put up would be vandalized. At the time, I accepted that as true, as any other American Jew would have.

There is a background between American Jews and Ukrainians that has been passed down from the immigrant generation to today. As other American Jews have put it to me, “Ukrainians were the worst,” worse than the Germans, worse than the Austrians, worse than the Poles, worse than everyone. A friend whose father survived the Holocaust in Ukraine by posing as a Catholic wrote me the following after watching the film:

“[My father] always believed that Ukrainians were the most vicious of all Jew haters and that much of the killing at these sites was done by Ukrainians under the supervision of the Germans. He said many of the killers had been neighbors of the victims and knew them personally.”

These beliefs, I know now, are entirely vindicated by vast historical literature.

In my opinion, and notwithstanding our support of Ukraine in its war against Russia, this is and remains the prevailing attitude of American Jews of Ukrainian-Jewish descent toward Ukrainians. We have heard too many stories from our families about Cossacks with whips and swords murdering our ancestors. These memories still reverberate with us, together with those of the Holocaust. As one friend put it recently, “I admire Ukrainians but I don’t like them.” It is hard to like descendants of people who murdered your relatives because attitudes of hatred and distrust change slowly, especially when murder is involved.

In addition to the change in the attitude of Ukrainians toward its murdered Jews, there must also be a change in the attitude of American Jews toward Ukrainians. We must no longer view them as “the worst” of all Jew haters, as if their hate were eternal, but as people who might actually regret the hate and crimes of their ancestors and wish to express genuine sympathy for the Jewish victims and their families.

I have seen many Ukrainians who have sincerely expressed this caring and remorse. The film’s greatest achievement, in my opinion, is showing the willingness of Ukrainians to face their brutal and horrifying past with humility and compassion. In this way, I believe the film is one of the most pro-Ukrainian films of recent years. Rather than feeding Russian propaganda, it dispels it, showing Ukrainians as the opposite of Nazis. This is what makes the film hopeful and inspiring – something can be done now because Ukrainian attitudes toward Jews have changed.

The greatest testament to the power of the film to change American Jewish views toward Ukrainians are the words of my friend whose father “always believed that Ukrainians were the most vicious of all Jew haters.” After the quote above, and in direct reference to the young Ukrainian forensic archaeologist in the film who speaks so movingly about her work locating Holocaust execution sites and her compassion for the victims, he wrote:

“So I’m pleased to learn that young Ukrainians are taking an active interest in locating and memorializing the mass graves.”

In other words, the film by itself changed his attitude from hatred of Ukrainians, passed down by his father, to one of respect and hope. In my opinion, every American Jew who watches the film will feel the same. It is only with this new sense of hope that American Jews will come to believe that the restoration of dignity to these victims is possible and finally be inspired to achieve it.

Whether this hope is now being destroyed by the growing glorification of Ukrainian nationalists in Ukraine remains to be seen and, to me, is a matter of great moral, humanitarian and historical concern.

In addition to the necessary change in the attitude of American Jews toward Ukrainians, there are several other obstacles to protecting and memorializing mass Holocaust graves in Ukraine. Again, there is much misunderstanding regarding them.

One myth promoted by certain American Jewish and Holocaust leaders, which they use to excuse their neglect, is that families of Jewish victims who want a memorial should just go to Ukraine and put one up. One wrote that relatives should form online groups for their ancestors’ hometowns, agree collectively to erect memorials and go to Ukraine and do it. This is not the reality.

When we were filming in Ukraine in 2019, I told the person in charge of the Protecting Memory project that some American Jewish leaders believe that relatives of shooting victims who want a memorial should just go to Ukraine and put one up themselves. I asked her what she thought about that. Her response surprised me, not what she said, which I expected, but how she said it. A kind, mild-mannered and courageous woman who had spent years attending to every detail of protecting and memorializing mass Holocaust graves in Ukraine, she almost exploded in anger. It can’t be done, she said, and proceeded to list the countless permits and permissions needed, the costs, the time, the disputes over land and construction, the requirement of rabbinical supervision, the need to educate local communities to ensure the memorial is respected and maintained, and on and on.

If the mass Holocaust graves in Ukraine and Eastern Europe are to be widely protected and memorialized, the process must be institutionalized and done by professionals who know and understand what is needed to build them and how to achieve it. Those who say do it yourself are ensuring that no more than a handful of memorials will ever be built and the vast majority of the mass graves and the victims in them will remain forgotten and desecrated forever. To me, this myth and excuse for American Jewish leaders’ neglect is cruel and immoral.

If a journalist or researcher wanted to follow your path—travel to sites, talk to locals, dig into records—what specific steps would you tell them to take first, and what would you warn them about in terms of physical safety, political sensitivities, and emotional toll?

Pollick:
I have contacts with Ukrainian Holocaust and Jewish organizations which might be helpful but, overall, it is very difficult. Leaving the war aside, there are enormous language, cultural and trust issues, travel is difficult and locals may shade their stories, especially now. Regarding digging into records, I have never done that in Ukraine but I expect it would be difficult for a Westerner unfamiliar with Ukraine and its archives. My two trips to Ukraine were both part of Protecting Memory which scheduled all of our activities and provided transportation to the memorial sites, so I had it easy in that regard.

Political sensitivities are a very important concern. Ukrainians nationalists are glorified in Ukraine now, so the person should get expert advice on current memory politics before proceeding. They should also get expert advice on safety issues.

Regarding the emotional toll, if they want to be most effective, they have to learn to shift from feeling to thinking to outrage almost at will. If they do not, they will be overwhelmed. They must be strongly motivated to find the truth.

From what you’ve seen, where does this story intersect most directly with current issues in Ukraine—wartime damage to heritage, displaced communities, and the risk that new destruction or redevelopment will further erase these sites—and can you point to at least one place where you’ve already seen that play out?

Pollick:
The most important place where my interests intersect with current issues in Ukraine is the growing, if not exploding, glorification of Ukrainians nationalists. In my opinion, the more Ukrainian nationalists are glorified in Ukraine, the less the likelihood that, after the war, the forgotten shooting victims will be remembered and their graves protected and memorialized.

Although soldiers inspired by Ukrainian nationalists have been heroic in Ukraine’s fight against Russia, I have no illusions about their sympathies. When the war ends, regardless of their lack of influence in Ukrainian elections, I see no way they will support or allow the restoring of dignity to the millions of Ukrainians Jews murdered by or with the assistance of their heroes.

This is my greatest concern.

On the other hand, if these heroic soldiers were to publicly proclaim otherwise, as they should, and support these efforts, and President Zelensky does too, it would be an historic moment not only for Ukraine but for the Jewish people and humanity. It would also ensure that President Zelensky goes down in history not only as a great Ukrainian but as a great Jew as well.

In my opinion, the memory politics which emerge from the war will finally determine whether the shooting victims will be remembered and buried or be forever lost to humanity. If it is the latter, it will achieve the final stage of, and complete, the Nazi genocide of nearly half of its victims.

Personal stakes and legacy

You’re a lawyer, not a filmmaker. What did making this film teach you about how change actually happens—or stalls—in the realm of historical memory and human rights, compared to what you believed when you were working only through legal channels?

Pollick:
As a lawyer, you have laws and procedures which, in my experience, are generally followed and supported by our courts. Historical memory is more like clay, molded according to the memory politics of the time.

We filmed in Ukraine in 2019, before the 2022 invasion. One expert in the film refers to “Babi Yar,” another, the young Ukrainian woman, refers to where she was born as “Kiev, Ukraine.” These references are no longer used in Ukraine because they are the Russian names for these places.

Instead, they have been replaced with their Ukrainian names, Babyn Yar and Kyiv, and it is politically incorrect to refer to them otherwise. I have been severely criticized for not changing the name of my film from Beyond Babi Yar to Beyond Babyn Yar, even though I and others have always known the site, and most here still know it, as Babi Yar.

This is how dramatically and quickly memory politics operate.

Based on that experience, which legal tools or advocacy mechanisms now look most promising to you for forcing action on neglected mass graves—litigation, administrative complaints, international mechanisms—and where do you think film and public pressure can realistically move those levers?

Pollick:
It is ultimately a matter of diplomatic pressure, especially the United States putting pressure on Germany, the EU and Eastern European countries to address this situation and formulate and implement plans to do so. All funding, in my opinion, should come from Germany.

A legal mechanism to force the issue is denying Ukraine admission to the EU unless it makes concrete and public commitments to achieve this. This is what Poland has threatened to do in response to the current memory politics in Ukraine. It has publicly stated that it will block Ukraine’s admission to the EU if it doesn’t properly acknowledge the so-called Volyn Massacre of 1943-45, where the UPA murdered up to 100,000 Poles.

As mentioned above, two months ago, in response to President Zelensky’s decree bestowing on a Ukrainian military unit the honorary title of “named after the Heroes of the UPA,” the tension between Poland and Ukraine exploded and Poland managed, at last, to blast open the issue of memory politics in Ukraine.

Now that Poland has opened the door, it is time for every Jewish and Holocaust organization to follow its lead and demand that, after the war, with German or other funding, the 2,ooo mass Holocaust graves across Ukraine, with an estimated 1.5 to 2.1 million murdered Jews in them, be identified, protected and memorialized.

Ukraine will likely respond, as it often does, that raising the issue now only helps Russian propaganda and hurts its war effort and it should wait until after the war. After Poland’s outburst, this response is no longer viable.

If Ukraine has the time and resources to respond at the highest levels to Poland’s outrage over the massacre of up to 100,000 Poles by Ukrainian nationalists, then it has the time and resources to respond at the highest levels to Jewish outrage over the massacre of up to 2.1 million Ukrainian Jews in which Ukrainian nationalists played a major and essential role and Ukraine’s wretched treatment of them and their mass graves.

If this Q&A reaches a wide audience and only one thing sticks with readers, what do you hope that is?

Pollick:
There are over two million forgotten and unburied Holocaust victims in Eastern Europe, we should speak up and demand that they be properly remembered and buried, and the time is now.

What happens next

Beyond Babi Yar is, at its core, an argument that the story of the Holocaust is still unfinished as long as millions of shooting victims lie in thousands of unmarked and desecrated graves. The film and Pollick’s answers here make it hard to treat those sites as distant history or someone else’s problem.

For readers who want to see the landscapes and memorials described in this Q&A for themselves, the documentary is available to watch here: Beyond Babi Yar. What you do after watching — who you talk to, what you demand of institutions, whether you help surface missing names or push for real protection — is, as Pollick keeps insisting, where the story goes next.

Four months ago, when Uncovered Investigates first reported on Rick Ward, his disclosures were still fighting for oxygen outside the federal installation where he worked. The former civilian safety chief at Crane Army Ammunition Activity had spent years warning that explosives were being handled with uncertified chains and slings, that safety systems were decades out of date and that the same underlying problems that led to a 2013 explosion still had not been fixed. “I probably saved lives,” Ward said at the time, as he described how his efforts to force those issues into the open had put a target on his back.

This week, Ward stood on a national stage.

He was one of four whistleblowers granted 2026 Pillar Awards at the Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival, recognized, in the words of the Government Accountability Project, for “courageous truth-telling”. Ward shared the honor with independent scientist Scott Smith and Voice of America journalists Patsy Widakuswara and Kathryn Neeper, all three of whom have been clients of the Government Accountability Project in their battles with federal agencies. Each took a path that most people, understandably, never do.

From internal warnings to public recognition

Ward’s case traces a familiar arc. Inside Crane Army Ammunition Activity, he raised repeated concerns about safety failures, aging infrastructure and systemic breakdowns he believed could lead to catastrophe. He documented conditions that echoed the factors behind a 2013 explosion and pressed supervisors to replace uncertified lifting equipment and modernize safety systems.uncoveredinvestigates.

According to Ward, those efforts were met with internal resistance and delay, with the burden ultimately shifting onto the person sounding the alarm rather than the systems he said were at risk. His disclosures eventually reached outside watchdogs and the press, including Uncovered Investigates, which published a detailed account of his case on April 29.

The facts Ward pushed into the open have not been resolved. But this week’s recognition ensures they are no longer easily ignored.

Scott Smith and East Palestine’s lingering contamination

Scott Smith’s path to the Pillar Award runs through East Palestine, Ohio, and the toxic fallout from the 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment. A chemist and independent scientist, Smith began traveling to East Palestine shortly after the disaster, ultimately making about 25 trips and conducting more than 30 rounds of testing on homes, soil and water, according to the Government Accountability Project.

His sampling, GAP says, detected dangerous levels of dioxins and related furans in air, water, soil and inside residences—results that directly rebutted Environmental Protection Agency assurances that the community was safe. Smith’s work has provided independent data to residents who felt federal and state agencies were minimizing continuing risks, and it has helped other chemically impacted communities question official claims of safety.

In recognizing Smith, the Pillar Award committee highlighted his role as a whistleblower whose testing and advocacy exposed gaps in the government’s response and communication to a town still living with the derailment’s effects.

Widakuswara, Neeper and the fight over VOA’s mission

While Smith’s case centers on environmental contamination, the whistleblowing by Patsy Widakuswara and Kathryn Neeper unfolds inside the U.S. Agency for Global Media and Voice of America. Both are journalists who, according to GAP, became named plaintiffs in litigation aimed at “saving Voice of America from shuttering” by challenging actions taken by senior agency officials.

The lawsuit and related complaints alleged that USAGM leadership failed to fulfill legally required functions and violated journalistic freedom and separation of powers when it ordered staff not to report to work, suspended contractors, turned off services and locked the agency’s doors. Widakuswara, VOA’s White House correspondent, has separately been the subject of public reporting on reprisals and demotion after she pressed questions to senior U.S. officials and resisted moves she believed undermined VOA’s congressional mandate.

Together, Widakuswara and Neeper’s cases frame whistleblowing not as a departure from journalism but as an extension of it: exposing internal decisions that, in their view, threatened the integrity and independence of a congressionally funded news organization.

Whistleblowing, consequence and endurance

Whistleblowing is often framed around what follows: retaliation, isolation, career loss. That framing is not exaggerated. It is documented across cases like Ward’s, Smith’s, Widakuswara’s and Neeper’s, in which individuals who raised concerns faced demotion, marginalization, financial strain or official rebuttals while their allegations worked through slow-moving systems.

It is also why many who witness misconduct or systemic failure make another calculation—to stay quiet, to look away, to tell themselves it is not their fight. For those who do come forward, the act of disclosure is less a single moment than the start of a long period of uncertainty in which outcomes are far from guaranteed.

Events like the Pillar Awards represent a different, less visible part of that story: endurance and, occasionally, recognition.

The Government Accountability Project’s role

All four of this year’s honorees were supported by the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit that has spent decades at the intersection of disclosure and consequence. GAP’s work typically begins after an individual has raised concerns internally and encountered resistance, retaliation or legal threats. From there, the organization helps navigate everything from congressional outreach and media strategy to administrative complaints and federal litigation.

Tom Devine, GAP’s longtime legal director, has been a central figure in building that infrastructure, helping develop whistleblower protections and representing clients across federal agencies, international institutions and private-sector employers. The group’s press release on this year’s Pillar Awards emphasizes that their clients’ cases involve both concrete harm—unsafe working conditions, environmental contamination, shuttered news operations—and larger structural questions about transparency, accountability and the rule of law.

Much of that work happens out of public view. But many of the whistleblower cases that eventually reach headlines pass through this less visible layer of legal and advocacy support first.

Recognition without closure

The Pillar Award does not resolve the underlying disputes these whistleblowers raised. Ward’s allegations about safety failures at Crane Army Ammunition Activity remain contested within the Army’s bureaucracy. Smith’s findings in East Palestine continue to clash with official messaging about the community’s long-term safety. The litigation and internal battles over USAGM and VOA’s governance have not fully settled the questions Widakuswara and Neeper raised about statutory obligations and editorial independence.

What the award does, instead, is establish a public marker that their decisions to speak up mattered. In a landscape where outcomes often range from partial reforms to quiet stalemates, formal recognition can serve as a corrective to the more common story in which whistleblowers are punished and forgotten.

For some, it also offers a measure of validation that the risks they took were not invisible.

A message to those still deciding

For people watching from the outside—especially those sitting on information, weighing whether to come forward—the message is complicated. The fear is real. The risks are real. The history of retaliation is real. The track record of institutions correcting themselves only under pressure is, by now, unmistakable.

But so is this: there are paths forward that do not begin and end with isolation. There are organizations willing to stand with whistleblowers as they navigate legal and professional fallout, and there are moments, however rare, when the public record bends enough to acknowledge that their disclosures made a difference.

Four months ago, Rick Ward was still trying to be heard, his warnings about Crane Army’s safety systems filtered through internal channels and a single detailed investigation. Now, he—and three others who refused to stay silent—are being recognized for stepping into that fight.

That does not mean the fight is over. It means they did not walk away.

Editor’s Note: This investigation was originally reported and published by Uncovered Investigates on June 12, 2026. It has been archived here in The Whistleblower Files as part of our permanent whistleblower repository. Original reporting can be found here.

By the time the federal judge stamped “summary judgment” on her case, Eve Baker Sparks had already learned what institutions say to women like her without ever using the words: that didn’t happen, and even if it did, we don’t want to hear about it anymore.

Sparks wasn’t deployed to a combat outpost or sleeping in a tent downrange when she says a coworker assaulted and harassed her. She was an explosives handler at Crane Army Ammunition Activity (CAAA), a munitions depot tucked inside the massive NSWC Crane installation in southern Indiana—a place that prides itself on discipline, precision, and control.

When she reported what happened, the system seemed to move the way it is supposed to. A sexual‑assault complaint went to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division at Fort Knox. An investigator told her the prosecutor believed something had happened but declined to file charges because there were no witnesses who could survive cross‑examination, noting in the CID file that the case lacked physical evidence and “no resolution could be obtained through a criminal trial.” Her workplace complaints went to Equal Employment Opportunity counselors and the depot’s own SHARP and HR offices, and a colonel promised an internal inquiry.

What followed, Sparks says, was not protection but a long, punishing lesson in how a high‑level installation can convert a victim into a problem employee. The more she pushed, the more doors closed: EEO and internal inquiries, a whistleblower retaliation complaint to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an MSPB filing, and finally a federal lawsuit against the Secretary of the Army—all ending in variations on the same message.

This is not a story about one bad boss, or even about a single “toxic” base. It is about what happens when a woman in a male‑dominated corner of the defense world comes forward and finds the machinery around her working not to fix what happened, but to make her go away.

In recent years, NSWC Crane has become a quiet test case for how the federal government handles employees who push back—from whistleblowers who flag safety and environmental issues, to workers who report harassment and assault. In Eve Baker Sparks’s case, the stakes are more intimate: what happens when a sexual‑assault survivor on a stateside installation is told, at every level, that her experience is either legally insufficient or procedurally misplaced.

Starting at the end

In this report, we start where stories like this usually end: with a federal judge signing off on an order that closes the case.

By the time Sparks’s name appeared on a federal docket, the internal systems at CAAA had largely finished with her. The sexual‑assault allegations had gone through CID. Her workplace complaints had been channeled into EEO counseling, internal inquiries, and administrative findings that would later be summarized in a few bureaucratic sentences. What remained was the narrow space federal law leaves for a civil suit.

In December 2020, Sparks filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Terre Haute Division, naming the Secretary of the Army—later Christine Wormuth—as defendant in Case No. 2:20‑cv‑00601‑JMS‑MJD. On one side was a former explosives handler in her fifties, proceeding without a lawyer. On the other was the Army, defended by Department of Justice attorneys.

Her complaint alleged that the Army discriminated against her because of her sex and age, and retaliated against her for protected EEO activity. The story behind those claims stretched back to 2015 and 2016: alleged assaults at the Ammunition Burning Ground; the CID investigation and decision not to prosecute; multiple EEO complaints; non‑selection for munitions jobs; schedule changes and reassignments; and internal inquiries that found her own conduct—not the conduct she reported—in violation of rules.

For more than a year, the case moved through discovery and briefing. Sparks, like most pro se plaintiffs, had to learn federal procedure as she went—how to respond to a statement of material facts, how to cite exhibits, how to oppose a motion for summary judgment. The judge noted that she “attempted to do just that,” and that the court had “done its best” to evaluate her filings, but emphasized that even a pro se litigant must comply with the rules of evidence and procedure.

In early 2022, both sides asked the court to rule without a trial. Sparks filed what she titled a “Motion for Summary Judgment with Compensation,” arguing that the record supported judgment in her favor. The Army filed a cross‑motion for summary judgment on all claims, attaching its own statement of undisputed material facts and highlighting gaps in her evidence; it later submitted a notice of supplemental authority citing fresh Seventh Circuit precedent, which Sparks unsuccessfully moved to strike.

On September 16, 2022, Judge Jane Magnus‑Stinson issued a roughly 60‑page order. It denied Sparks’s motion, granted the Secretary’s cross‑motion, and entered judgment for the Army on all claims. In formal terms, the court held that Sparks had not put forward enough admissible, properly supported evidence for a reasonable jury to find that her sex, age, or protected EEO activity caused the adverse actions she described.

The opinion opens with the standard summary‑judgment boilerplate: the court must view the evidence in the light most favorable to the non‑moving party, but unsupported assertions do not create genuine disputes of fact. Where Sparks failed to properly cite the record or dispute the Army’s factual assertions, those assertions were deemed admitted. From there, the order walks through her allegations and the Army’s responses.

On the harassment and assault claims, the court leans on the administrative record and the CID file. It notes that Sparks alleged that in August 2015 a coworker at the burning grounds groped her at work, coerced her into oral sex in a truck after threatening her job, and forced intercourse on the tailgate of a government vehicle near the Jeep trail. Army investigators interviewed witnesses, collected statements, and forwarded their findings to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where a prosecutor concluded the case lacked physical evidence and could not succeed at trial; CID closed the matter with a finding of no probable cause for abusive sexual contact.

The opinion then turns to what becomes a central legal detail: Sparks’s own description of what happened after those August incidents. According to the record, in September 2015 she and the same coworker began what the court calls a “voluntary, consensual sexual relationship,” meeting off‑base; once that relationship began, she said, the touching and comments at work stopped. When asked about rumors she was having sex at the Jeep trail, she initially denied any misconduct.

Legally, those facts mattered. In assessing whether she had been subjected to a hostile work environment because of her sex, the court weighed the timing and nature of the alleged harassment, her later consensual relationship, her denials, and the absence of corroborating witnesses or physical evidence, and concluded no reasonable jury could find an actionable hostile environment under Title VII.

On the discrimination and retaliation claims, the court focused on the adverse actions she alleged: non‑selection for higher‑graded munitions jobs, removal from certain work areas, discipline for safety violations, and eventual termination. Applying familiar burden‑shifting and “mosaic” frameworks, it asked whether a jury could infer these decisions were taken because of protected characteristics or activity rather than for the Army’s stated reasons—performance, safety, and business needs—and found that she had not created a triable factual dispute on that point.

In many instances, the Army supported its explanations with declarations and documents: incident reports, internal investigation summaries, and disciplinary letters. Sparks, without counsel, responded with narrative statements but often without precise citations to contradict those exhibits. The court repeatedly noted where she failed to meet the local rules for disputing facts, accepted the Army’s reasons as undisputed, and held that no reasonable jury could conclude that sex, age, or EEO activity made the difference.

From the court’s perspective, this was a straightforward application of summary‑judgment doctrine. The last lines of the order are clinical: Sparks’s motion denied, the Secretary’s granted, judgment entered, case closed. For Sparks, the message landed differently. After reporting harassment and assault, going through CID, EEO, internal investigations, OSC and MSPB filings, and the long wait for a federal ruling, the system’s final word was that there was no case a jury was even allowed to hear.

The opinion does not say she invented her experience. It says that under the rules of evidence and procedure, applied to the record she could assemble on her own, the law could not recognize what happened to her as discrimination or retaliation. In that gap—between what paperwork can prove and what a survivor says she lived—this story sits.

The EEO complaints: when the system turned inward

Long before a federal judge weighed her claims, Sparks tried to resolve what happened to her inside CAAA. In March 2016, she met with interim EEO director Angel Ladakar and laid out multiple complaints: a harassment complaint against coworker Brian Stevens, a sexual‑assault complaint, and broader claims about promotions, training, and treatment that would later be combined at the EEOC level. One harassment complaint ended in a settlement that barred her from future contact with Stevens.

The other complaints could not be handled with a quiet agreement. On March 28, 2016, Sparks reported the alleged sexual assault to SHARP representative Mark Mason. According to her statements and later records, she described being groped at work, coerced into oral sex in a truck under threat to her job, and forced into intercourse on the tailgate of a government vehicle near the ammunition pits. Mason immediately called CID at Fort Knox; a related harassment complaint naming some of the same individuals was also turned over to CID.

CID opened a case, interviewed witnesses, and forwarded its findings to a federal prosecutor, who declined charges, citing lack of physical evidence and corroboration. Investigator Callie Bernstein told Sparks by phone that the prosecutor believed something had happened but did not think he could “make the charges stick” in court. The CID report, later cited in the federal opinion, notes that “no resolution could be obtained through a criminal trial,” and CID closed the matter for lack of probable cause for abusive sexual contact.

Administratively, the response followed a similar pattern. Bernstein says she informed CAAA commander Colonel Hooper that the prosecutor believed the assault occurred and recommended administrative action. Follow‑up inquiries did move forward, but internal findings later summarized the results starkly: Sparks’s allegations of sexual assault and harassment were “unsubstantiated,” while several allegations about her own conduct—entering an explosives building in violation of safety rules to confront her coworker’s son, and creating a disturbance—were substantiated.

At the same time, her working life began to shift. On May 6, 2016, she applied for a promotion to a WG‑07 Munitions Destroyer position, a job she says “meant everything” to her and would have made her the only female destroyer at CAAA. When she learned on June 9 that she had not been selected, she returned to the EEO office, now led by permanent director Tony Edwards. Because division chief Lance Daters and supervisor Sean Pinckney were the alleged offender’s bosses, she asked Edwards whether he needed her original assault statement to investigate whether the non‑selection was retaliation. He said yes. She handed over the statement, believing the process would be confidential.

It was not. In her formal EEO amendment and in her later interview, Sparks says the details of that statement—initially known only to herself, Mason, and HR representative Donna Cox—soon circulated among the very people she had named: Daters, Pinckney, supervisor Mickey Wager, and the coworker she accused. The colonel had been briefed on the statement but did not read it until the CID report came back in August. By then, she says, the damage was done: the man she reported and his chain of command knew her account, and the power imbalance deepened.

On June 21, 2016, Sparks called Edwards to discuss her retaliation claim. According to her contemporaneous statement and later testimony, the call veered from process into threat. Edwards told her she could not use her sexual‑assault statement in her EEO complaint and then offered his personal views: that she was “lucky to still have a job,” that if he were the colonel he would have “fired [her] ass a long time ago,” that CID investigators were lying to her, and that by her own statement he would have fired both her and the coworker. He said a restraining order should be filed against her because she had told the offender’s wife and visited his son.

Sparks hung up and called Investigator Bernstein. “He isn’t allowed to say things like that, especially in his position and to an assault victim,” she recalls Bernstein saying. Bernstein, knowing Sparks was scheduled to meet Colonel Hooper on June 23 about hiring and EEO issues, says she informed the colonel herself. Before that meeting, Edwards went to Hooper and admitted he had “overstepped his boundaries” and made inappropriate comments.

At the June 23 meeting with Hooper, labor attorney Joby Jerrells, and manager Norm Thomas, the colonel confirmed Edwards’s admission and outlined three tracks for Sparks’s complaints: his own “colonel’s inquiry,” the EEO process, and a possible Inspector General complaint. Sparks continued on all three, but her trust in EEO was broken. She says she was told she had to use the EEO process anyway, and agreed only if a different informal counselor handled her case and Edwards had no direct role.

When the informal EEO effort ended without resolving her concerns, she prepared a formal EEO complaint. Before filing it, she went outside the command. On October 2, 2016, she filed a whistleblower retaliation complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, accusing Edwards and Daters of retaliating against her for raising safety and assault issues; OSC opened File No. MA‑17‑0007 and confirmed in a January 2017 letter that the case was under active review. The next day, she emailed Jerrells to say that because OSC was investigating, she did not believe she should have further contact with either man and asked that her formal EEO complaint be routed to an outside specialist at Joint Munitions Command.

Her eventual formal EEO amendment reads like a catalog of what she saw as retaliation. She cites being passed over for the WG‑07 destroyer job; being left off a key overtime day in Building 104 until the union intervened; being told quietly about upcoming permanent WG‑05 explosives‑handler slots, then watching outsiders with no explosives experience get hired; being a “key player” painting rounds in Building 104 during a production push and suddenly being shipped to Building 2728 “to do absolutely nothing”; walking into the WG‑05 interview to find Daters—whom she believed was under a no‑contact restriction and whom she had named in complaints—on her panel and asking the first questions.

On paper, many of these events would later be framed as routine: business needs, safety responses, application of union agreements. In Sparks’s EEO narrative and in the documents she has collected, they form a pattern: once she raised her hand about harassment, assault, and safety at a major ammunition depot, the system that was supposed to protect her instead shared her statement, threatened her job, and cleared the people around her while documenting her as the problem.

The bigger picture: sexual assault and harassment in the ranks

Sparks’s story is not an outlier in an otherwise healthy system. It sits on top of data that have, for years, painted a grim picture for women in and around the U.S. military.

Pentagon surveys estimate that in 2023, about 6.8 percent of active‑duty women—roughly one in fifteen—experienced some form of unwanted sexual contact in a single year. In fiscal year 2024 alone, DoD received 8,195 reports of sexual assault involving service members as victims or subjects, including 5,169 unrestricted reports in which survivors allowed their cases to go to command and law enforcement. Independent researchers estimate that actual assaults are two to four times higher than official prevalence estimates, with one 2024 analysis suggesting about 73,000 cases in a year where DoD estimated roughly 29,000.

Harassment is even more common. Recent gender‑relations surveys show that about 23 percent of active‑duty women report sexual harassment in a year, compared with about 4 percent of men. During the war in Afghanistan, an average of 24 percent of active‑duty women reported sexual assault at some point in their service. Women of color and LGBTQ+ service members face still higher risks of harassment and assault than white, heterosexual peers.

What happens after a survivor reports is just as important as what happened to them. Studies using DoD data show that only about a quarter of service members who experience sexual assault file an official report; around a third disclose only to family or friends; roughly 40 percent never tell anyone. Among those who do report, more than half say they experienced retaliation—professional, social, or both—ranging from ostracism to adverse evaluations and career roadblocks. Less than half of women in uniform say they trust their leaders to handle sexual‑assault reports properly.

The psychological fallout is distinct from, and often more severe than, what civilian survivors face. Research on women veterans has found that military sexual assault and broader military sexual trauma are associated with higher rates of PTSD and depression than comparable civilian assaults, even after accounting for other traumas. The reasons are structural: many survivors must keep working on the same installation as their assailant, report through a chain of command that may include the perpetrator or his allies, and watch their private medical and investigative information circulate in a small, closed community.

Stateside installations are not exempt. Pentagon surveys and independent reviews show that many assaults occur in workplaces, barracks, and other on‑base settings, not just in deployed environments. The betrayal survivors describe is not only between victim and perpetrator, but between them and the commands and systems they were told would protect them.

Seen against that backdrop, Sparks’s case looks less like the complaint of a single unhappy former worker and more like a textbook example of how these dynamics play out in one place over time. She reported harassment, assault, and safety violations at a major ammunition depot on the NSWC Crane base; an investigator told her a prosecutor believed her but would not go forward without witnesses; internal inquiries labeled her assault and harassment allegations “unsubstantiated” while substantiating misconduct allegations against her; and when she kept pressing, the systems around her shared her statement, moved her off key jobs, and eventually let her term appointment expire.

The federal court that ruled against her was not tasked with fixing that system. Its charge was narrower: to decide whether Sparks had marshaled enough admissible evidence, under strict rules, to prove discrimination and retaliation as defined by statute. The answer the law gave her—no—does not change the broader reality that, for thousands of women in and around the military every year, coming forward about sexual assault and harassment still carries a greater risk of retaliation and disbelief than of justice.

“Consensual” after assault: what the data actually shows

In the federal opinion, one detail does quiet but heavy work against Sparks. After recounting her account of being groped, coerced into oral sex in a truck, and forced into intercourse on a tailgate at the burning grounds, the court notes that a month later, in September 2015, she and the same coworker began what it labels a “voluntary, consensual sexual relationship.” Once that relationship began, she told investigators, the touching and comments at work stopped. In the legal analysis, that becomes a key data point: if she later chose to be with him, how bad could the earlier conduct have been?

The problem is that this tidy logic is out of step with what the research says about how many survivors behave after an assault—especially when the perpetrator is someone they already know.

Studies consistently find that continued contact with a perpetrator is common, not exceptional. When victims know the assailant beforehand, many maintain some form of relationship afterward, particularly when cutting ties would mean losing a job, a home, or a social network. In one study focused on violent sexual assault within romantic relationships, 53.85 percent of respondents reported staying in the relationship after the first assault. Research on intimate‑partner rape shows that victims often struggle even to label what happened as “rape” because doing so would shatter their understanding of the relationship and of themselves; it is psychologically easier to minimize or reframe the experience than to confront it head‑on.

Military and defense settings add layers that make breaking contact even harder. Oversight reports and advocacy analyses find that the vast majority of military sexual‑assault cases involve people who already know each other, often fellow service members or coworkers who may outrank the victim or control aspects of her work. Victims often cannot simply transfer or quit; they remain on the same installation, in the same shops and units, under the same chain of command.

Psychologists who work with military survivors describe “institutional entrapment”: a situation where the safest option available can look, from the outside, like cooperation. The brain’s trauma response does not always push people to fight or flee; it can push them to appease, to fawn, to stay close to the source of harm in hopes of regaining control or preventing worse harm. In that context, agreeing to a relationship after an assault can be a survival strategy—an attempt to stop the most frightening behavior, keep a job, or manage gossip in a closed workplace—not a retroactive endorsement of what happened before.

None of that nuance appears in the official documents on Sparks’s case. The CID report and internal administrative findings emphasize that the criminal case was closed for lack of corroboration and that later, off‑duty contact was consensual. The federal court opinion treats her later relationship as weighing against her credibility and against a finding of a hostile work environment. Defense Department sexual‑assault reports, for all their detail on prevalence and reporting, do not track what happens in the months after an assault: whether victims remain in contact with perpetrators, whether rank or job control play a role, or how often victims feel pressured into “voluntary” relationships to make the problem go away.

That omission is itself a kind of finding. It means that when a survivor like Sparks ends up in court, there is no official Pentagon data showing how common it is for victims to stay, to minimize, to try to turn an abuser into a boyfriend because every other option feels worse. The law sees a consensual relationship and draws one set of inferences. The research, and the lived experience of many survivors, point to another: that what looks like consent on paper can, in reality, be one more way a victim tries to survive inside an institution that has already shown whose story it is inclined to believe.

What Happened, In Eve’s Own Words

In an exclusive interview with Uncovered Investigates, Eve Baker Sparks agreed to answer a detailed set of written questions about who she was before Crane, what she says happened to her there, and how it changed her life. What follows are her responses, lightly edited for clarity and length.

Section 1 – Before Crane and your career

1. Before any of this happened, how would you describe yourself—at work and outside of work?

I used to be a strong, independent, fun‑loving person who had been married for almost 29 years. I married my high school sweetheart and had two wonderful kids. I would go anywhere I wanted to whenever I wanted to and did not think a thing about it.

At my last position before I worked at Crane, I was an office manager of a large department at Indiana University Bloomington’s Kelley School of Business. I quit there to pursue and finish my bachelor’s degree in labor studies. I was a union steward when I worked at IU, was an area steward, and was also on the 2008 bargaining team for the staff.

2. What first drew you into this line of work (explosives handling, munitions, federal service, etc.)?

Once I finished my degree in 2012, I wanted to work at Crane because they made good money and I needed the income—my husband was a heavy equipment operator and his work was not very steady. I kept applying for job after job and I got called to be an explosives handler for CAAA, so I thought, okay, I need to start out at the bottom and work my way up.

It was the most physical job I had ever had in my life. I started working there on February 24, 2014.

3. Can you walk me through your training, qualifications, and experience before you got to CAAA/Crane?

I had nothing but clerical work before I started with CAAA. I had no formal training to be an explosives handler; you learned on the job as you went.

You were required to get a full medical exam and a urine test every year to be medically certified to be an explosives handler. They paid for the exam and urinalysis and if you did not pass, they pulled your certification and you were not allowed to work in an explosive building. You were paid two dollars more an hour when you worked in an explosive building, so if your certs were pulled you had to work in an inert building making two dollars less.

In an explosive building you produced or demilled artillery for the military. If you were in an inert building, you produced or demilled product that was not explosive.

4. When you first started at this installation, what did you hope your career would look like in five or ten years?

That is easy—I wanted to work my way up to an office job. I was a go‑getter who liked to learn everything I could about the jobs I was working on so it would make me more marketable and get my name out there to advance at a decent rate.

I was 47 years old when I started working for CAAA.

5. In those early days, did you feel like you had to prove yourself more because you were a woman in a male‑led career field, or did it feel fairly level at first?

I felt like I had to prove myself daily, do what I was told, and keep my mouth shut. If I tried to report violations of the safety procedures, I was looked at like a troublemaker.

When safety came around to each building, an employee would go around to everyone and warn them so they could get all of their proper PPE on. I worked with a lady at Pyro who refused to wear her prescription safety glasses and her conductive boots except when she was told safety was in the building; then she would leave the line and run to the locker room to put all her PPE on so she wouldn’t get in trouble.

When I started at the Ammunition Burning Ground (ABG) it was really bad. The supervisor there was Mickey Wager. He had just been promoted back to his supervisor’s role right before I got there. He had been demoted because Amy, the lady he was having an affair with for six years, was his leader working underneath him and all of this happened on base. Mickey was married that whole time. The lady turned him in when she found out he was married and she was terminated. The only punishment he received was a demotion for six months.

So when I started at ABG, Mickey kept making snide comments toward me, thinking I was just like Amy. He would let men coming in after me advance ahead of me in job duties. I spoke with him in his office one day about not getting the same opportunities as the guys and stormed out of his office. It was not long after that he came looking for me on the range and apologized to me, and he said he would try to do better. After that I was allowed to work on the “Dinos” (the big forklifts), and I was starting to learn more about the job.

Things like this went on a lot. I was also working at Pyro and Kenny would only schedule men to work on the press line. I worked at the end of the line and got to know the guy who headed up the line, and he finally gave me my shot at working on the line—and to Kenny it was his idea. After that, every once in a while Kenny would let me work the line, but not often.

Section 2 – Events leading to your EEO complaints

6. Back in March 2016, you filed three EEO complaints—one that was resolved informally, one involving sexual assault, and a third that overlapped with both. In your own words, what was happening around that time?

The first complaint was against Brian Stevens for harassment. That was settled.

A second complaint I tried to file wasn’t accepted because the CID investigation was going on and CAAA would not allow that filing while CID was involved.

A third complaint was against CAAA for two denied promotions, denied training, and wrongful termination. A fourth complaint was against CAAA for harassment and related issues.

When the third and fourth complaints got to the EEOC level, I had them combined to save time and money for everyone.

What I think was happening is I finally got tired of all the treatment I was receiving and started reporting it. Then all of the idiots started coming out of the woodwork filing any complaint against me to retaliate against me for saying anything at all.

7. What do you think is important for people to understand about the harassment and assault you reported, in terms of how it affected you?

I want people to know that everyone down at CAAA thought if one person were getting by with the harassment/assault then they could get by with it too. That is why everyone kept trying to attack me, asking for naked pics or trying to get me alone.

Management did not care what went on as long as their production was being met.

I knew another girl there who was sexually assaulted way before I was by a supervisor. When she reported it, they took her out of the building for a little bit, but because the supervisor threw a fit and wanted her back, CAAA put her back with the same supervisor who assaulted her. She had to endure the treatment until she was finally moved to another job at a different building.

8. When you decided to come forward on or around March 28, 2016, who did you go to first, and what were you told about how the system (SHARP, CID, HR, EEO) would protect you?

I went to my union steward first, who I knew and trusted. She took me to Angel Ladakar, who was the interim EEO director at the time. Angel said she could not even hear my complaint, that this had to be handled through SHARP, and the CAAA SHARP rep was Mark Mason.

I was told I would be moved to Pyro since it was right next to headquarters so management could keep an eye on me. CID was called from Fort Knox, and I went through a very intense interview session that lasted about three hours. I asked if I could have Mark Mason present so I could have someone with me, and they hesitated but did allow it. After the session was finished, I was so mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted I asked if I could have the rest of the day off and I was allowed to go home.

Actually, I wasn’t protected at all at Pyro because that’s where I was constantly questioned by other employees and harassed, thinking they could get the same thing that Theron Wright did.

9. Investigators later told you that the prosecutor believed the assault happened but was not going to bring charges because there were no witnesses. How did you find that out, and how did that decision affect you?

Investigator Callie Bernstein was the one who told me this over the phone to try and explain things so I would not be upset when the report came out because he was not being prosecuted.

I was devastated because I had just been through hell and back and was not going to get justice.

Section 3 – Changes at work and alleged retaliation

10. After you reported the harassment and assault, how did your day‑to‑day life at work start to change?

I was constantly being asked about what went on, and guys were asking if they could “get what Theron got,” or filing complaints against me for petty things or things that never even happened.

11. You applied for the WG‑07 Munitions Destroyer position in May 2016. What did that job mean to you, and how did the application and non‑selection process feel from your perspective?

It meant everything to me. I loved working as a destroyer and wanted to advance in that area. Also, there were no female destroyers at that time and there had not been one since Amy Wagler was terminated somewhere in early 2015.

The selection process was rigged from the beginning. The three gentlemen who were chosen did not have much training at all, but they happened to be working there at the time. The supervisor at that time, Sean Pinckney, geared the interview questions around those three guys and trained them on the items that were asked so they would yield a higher score than anyone else.

Witnesses proved that the interview questions were given to the three chosen before the interview and that they were coached by Sean so they would do better and score higher because they were hand‑picked.

12. You have alleged that your division chief and others advised the offender and his son to file protective orders against you. How did you first learn that was happening, and what impact did that have on you?

I found this out in court during the hearing for the protective order that Theron Wright filed against me. They were waiting to see how that filing played out before Matt Wright filed his. Theron told the judge in court that Matt’s protective‑order filing was sitting there right on the table and would be filed as soon as Theron’s order was approved.

At the end of the hearing, the judge told us he would take things into consideration and make a ruling later that afternoon. When Theron found out he was not getting a judgment right away, he told the judge that Lance Daters was waiting on the approval of the protective order in order to take action against me at work.

13. You describe being a key worker painting rounds in Building 104 under a tight deadline, then being suddenly moved to Building 2728 “to do absolutely nothing.” How did that reassignment affect you professionally and emotionally?

It absolutely terrified me because I had already been attacked from every different direction—from everyone working there from WG‑5s all the way up to the colonel of CAAA, CID, NCIS, and the FBI. I felt like that was the start of the end of my employment and I did not know what I was going to do to support myself and my daughter.

14. Later, you interviewed for a WG‑05 permanent position. When you walked into the panel interview and saw someone you believed was not supposed to have contact with you sitting on the panel, what went through your mind, and how did that interview feel?

The entire process was rigged from the beginning. How were people from outside CAAA, who had no experience whatsoever, getting hired over the employees who were currently working as explosives handlers and had been for several years?

I knew once I saw Lance Daters on the interview and selection panel I was not going to get hired for that position.

15. Looking back at the missed promotions, overtime issues, reassignments, and treatment you describe, what do you feel you were being punished for?

Oh, I was definitely being punished for reporting safety violations, harassment, the assault, and all the other issues I reported. As another employee once told me, “We are not working with marshmallows,” and I wanted to go home every night alive.

Section 4 – Confidentiality, trust, and being turned into “the problem”

16. When you agreed to give your original sexual assault statement to support the retaliation part of your EEO case, what were you told about confidentiality, and why did you decide to trust that process?

I was told by Tony Edwards, the EEO director at the time, that I had to turn over my statement as part of the EEO case and that he would be the only one to see it. Later I found out he gave it to Lance Daters to read.

I made them give it back to me, but they made a copy before they did.

Between my case and Shannon Reinhart’s, he retired all of a sudden, and it was funny that all the EEO records he had processed disappeared when he left.

17. At first, you say only a few people at CAAA knew the details of that statement. How did you realize that others—including the offender and his bosses—now knew about it?

Lance Daters called Mickey Wager to his office and let him read my statement. Then Mickey went back to ABG and told Theron what was in it.

18. There was a phone call where the EEO director told you that you were “lucky to still have a job,” said that if he were the colonel he would have fired you, and suggested a restraining order should be filed against you. What do you remember most clearly about that call, and how did it make you feel?

I remember him being so angry and degrading while speaking to me, and I felt like he did not believe me and would not accept any complaint I submitted.

19. When the CID investigator reacted by saying he was not allowed to say things like that to an assault victim, what did that validation mean to you at the time, if anything?

It meant everything—that someone was finally listening to me.

But he himself knew I was meeting with the colonel the next day and knew I was going to bring it up, so he took it upon himself to tell Colonel Hooper what had been said. Tony was never disciplined for his actions.

Section 5 – Navigating EEO, SHARP, OSC, MSPB and IG

20. When you first started seeking help outside your immediate chain of command—EEO, MSPB, OSC, IG—who did you contact, and what were you told about where your case belonged?

I contacted OSC originally. Then I filed something with the MSPB, but I cannot remember the outcome of that.

At the direction of OSC, I filed EEO complaints. Later, after that process was over, I contacted OSC again and they responded, including a 2023 letter closing my case on timeliness and jurisdiction grounds.

21. Did anyone ever give you a clear, step‑by‑step explanation of the differences between EEO, MSPB, SHARP, OSC, and IG, and how they fit together—or did you have to figure that out on your own while everything else was happening?

Absolutely not. I was never given any guidance whatsoever on any of these processes, so I had to wing it during this entire process and mostly without an attorney.

22. You filed an OSC whistleblower retaliation complaint, MA‑17‑0007, naming people who had power over your schedule and interviews. Did filing that complaint make you feel safer, more exposed, or something else? Please explain.

More exposed and in fear of retaliation.

Section 6 – Impact on your life and what you want people to understand

23. How has this entire experience changed your life—not just your career, but your health, relationships, and sense of safety?

Everything changed. My 31‑year marriage ended. My health has declined tremendously to where I am now filing for disability. I still feel I am paying the price for this, even with my last employment with DFAS (Defense Finance & Accounting Service) in Indianapolis.

Due to having doctor‑documented PTSD from all of this, I do not feel safe at all in my own home.

24. Did this change how you view the military, federal service, or high‑level installations like Crane/CAAA? If so, how?

The military itself I see the same; this was not their fault. It was several bad eggs that spoil the bunch, as the old saying goes. You cannot hold an organization responsible for the wrongful doings of employees of that organization.

What I mean is Crane/CAAA is who allowed this to happen, so they are the ones who should be punished—not the whole military in general.

25. Many stories about sexual assault and harassment in military or defense settings focus on deployments or overseas bases. What feels different to you about having this allegedly happen stateside on a major installation that is supposed to be professional and controlled?

After only working on a base stateside, it is more common than you think. I knew of at least three other girls who were assaulted besides myself, and I know at least two of them lost their job, including myself. I was escorted out before the other girl’s ordeal was completed.

Unfortunately, when women work on a military base you have to keep your head down and be like a little kid—be seen and not heard—or you are considered a troublemaker and escorted off base. I knew a lot of other girls who lost their jobs also because they kept reporting safety violations, and it was easier to get rid of the “troublemaker” in their eyes than to spend money addressing the issues.

Once the troublemaker was gone, things went back to normal, documentation was hidden or destroyed, and life went on for CAAA without spending a dime to fix the issues at hand.

26. If you could speak directly to another woman starting work in a similar environment, what would you want her to know or be prepared for?

Always keep your eyes open. Learn as much as you can to get out of there as soon as possible. Document everything and keep several copies. Trust no one and always fly under their radar.

27. When you think about “accountability” now, what would that look like—for you personally and for the institutions that handled your case?

That would look like several things to me. First, I used every cent I had fighting them, so I think it would only be fair that they owe me some monetary compensation.

Second would be some type of punishment for the key management players in this entire process. Unfortunately, most of them have rushed to retire, been forced to retire by CAAA, or have quickly found employment elsewhere before this process finished.

Norm Thomas was the decision‑maker over most of my issues, and he is now retired living a good life while I am struggling. He should be stripped of his retirement in some way.

The same goes for Lance Daters. He was forced to retire because CAAA knew they could not protect him in my case, plus he made racist remarks on the CAAA Facebook page during diversity month. They forced Georgetta Daters to retire also—she was told it would be in her best interest to retire.

Paul Allswede (still in his same position), Mickey Wager (promoted), Theron Wright (now on the Depot Operations side), and Matt Wright (also on the Depot Operations side) all should lose their jobs. Allswede and both Wrights committed perjury, and Wager circumvented policy to protect Theron Wright because he was already in trouble from my reporting.

Theron Wright retaliated against me by drumming up safety issues that he said I did. Four employees who worked at ABG said they never saw that happen, but Wright and Luongo, who were named in my complaints, said it did. CAAA took the word of Wright and Luongo and substantiated the claim.

Lastly, I think there should be sanctions imposed on CAAA for all of the reporting that is coming out that they compromised by intimidating whistleblowers. We are supposed to be a protected class, but no one protected me at all.

28. Is there anything important about your story or your experience that we haven’t covered in these questions that you want people to understand?

I tried to find someone who would prosecute the individuals for perjury, but no one wanted to help me. That’s where my case is stuck.

I have attached the AR 15‑6 report where Allswede did an investigation, but it was full of lies. I also attached a document of perjured statements by CAAA employees that I put together, and a timeline of events I wrote to document things.

I cannot provide the CID report on the sexual assault because it is confidential, but it did state in one part that “There is sufficient evidence to provide to the command for consideration of action.” Investigator Bernstein told me that the action was not recommended towards me; it was to be directed towards Theron Wright.

But I was the one terminated because I was the path of least resistance—get rid of me, or have to get rid of six or seven other employees, and half of them were upper management.

What the Institution Told Uncovered Investigates

Uncovered Investigates sent detailed rights‑of‑reply requests to Crane Army Ammunition Activity and the Department of the Army, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, the Department of War/Defense, and the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, outlining Eve Baker Sparks’s allegations and the documentary record, and asking specific questions about how their systems handled her case and similar ones.

Crane Army Ammunition Activity / Department of the Army

On June 6, Uncovered Investigates sent a rights‑of‑reply letter to Army and CAAA public affairs asking, among other things:

• How CAAA and Joint Munitions Command handled Ms. Sparks’s 2015–2017 sexual‑assault, harassment, and safety complaints, including any administrative action taken after the criminal case was closed without charges.

• Whether any supervisors or managers were counseled, disciplined, or removed from supervisory roles as a result of her complaints or the related investigations.

• What policies and safeguards were in place to protect the confidentiality of a written sexual‑assault statement, and whether the Army disputed Ms. Sparks’s account that details of her statement were shared with managers in the alleged offender’s chain of command and with the alleged offender himself.

• How the Army explains the sequence of non‑selection for a WG‑07 Munitions Destroyer position, reassignment from key production work, overtime issues, and eventual non‑renewal of her term appointment as driven by non‑retaliatory reasons.

• Whether managers named in her complaints were screened out of later panels or decision‑making on her employment to avoid conflicts of interest.

• Whether any reforms have been implemented since her case regarding confidentiality, anti‑retaliation in scheduling and term decisions, and removing conflicted officials from decision roles.

On June 10, CAAA responded with the following statement, attributable to Marshall Z. Howell, Public and Congressional Affairs, Crane Army Ammunition Activity:

“The Army takes allegations of sexual assault and harassment seriously. Sexual assault and harassment are not tolerated at Army installations. The Army protects the privacy of discrimination complainants and sexual assault victims. Retaliation of any kind is strictly prohibited. Army policies concerning sexual assault and harassment allegations are widely publicized and publicly available.”

CAAA did not directly answer the specific factual questions about Ms. Sparks’s case, including how her complaints were handled, whether details of her statement were shared with the alleged offender and his chain of command, whether any managers were disciplined, or whether anyone named in her complaints was removed from decision‑making over her assignments, promotions, or term appointment.

U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC)

On June 6, Uncovered Investigates sent a rights‑of‑reply letter to OSC regarding its handling of Ms. Sparks’s whistleblower retaliation case (File No. MA‑17‑0007) and a later complaint closed in 2023 (MA‑23‑001112). The letter noted that:

• A January 2017 OSC letter told Ms. Sparks her MA‑17‑0007 complaint was under active review.

• A March 23, 2023 letter closed MA‑23‑001112 on timeliness and jurisdiction grounds after years of related proceedings in EEO and the courts, while acknowledging her disclosures about safety, harassment, and assault, and her allegations of retaliatory non‑selection, reassignment, and non‑renewal.

The OSC letter requested comment on:

• What steps OSC took to review her retaliation allegations in MA‑17‑0007 and what the outcome was.

• How OSC’s timeliness and jurisdiction rules applied in her case, given that she pursued EEO remedies, and how OSC ensures employees routed toward EEO are not later barred from OSC review on timeliness grounds because they followed that advice.

• OSC’s structural limits in cases like hers and whether it has identified recurring patterns where employees are told they went to the “wrong door” first and later find it “too late” at OSC.

• Current guidance OSC provides to employees and agencies on retaliation after reporting sexual assault, harassment, or significant safety issues.

OSC did not acknowledge the June 6 inquiry and did not provide a substantive response. Follow‑up emails were sent on June 10 and June 12; as of publication, OSC has not answered the questions or provided any comment beyond what is contained in its 2017 and 2023 letters to Ms. Sparks.

Department of War / Office of the Secretary of Defense (SAPRO/OSD)

On June 6, Uncovered Investigates sent a rights‑of‑reply request to the Office of the Secretary of War / Office of the Secretary of Defense Public Affairs, with questions directed to SAPRO/OSD about: how the department tracks sexual‑assault and harassment prevalence for civilian employees on military installations; whether it collects data on retaliation against civilian workers who report; how, if at all, it tracks post‑assault “consensual” contact between survivors and alleged perpetrators in closed workplace settings; what oversight it exercises in patterns like the one documented in Sparks’s file; and any recent policy changes aimed at protecting civilian employees who report and addressing retaliation and career impacts.

A Pentagon press officer acknowledged receipt on June 6 and June 10 and said the questions were being reviewed. In a subsequent on‑background response, a Pentagon official directed Uncovered Investigates to SAPRO’s public website and press‑kit materials—which contain DoW sexual‑assault prevalence reports, prevention and response descriptions, and other general information—and indicated that Army‑specific SHARP questions should be addressed to the Army. The official said they had nothing further to add beyond those public resources.

OSD did not provide any case‑specific answers to the questions about civilian workers on installations like CAAA, retaliation tracking for civilians, data gaps around post‑assault “consensual” contact, or oversight of situations where an assault allegation is administratively labeled “unsubstantiated” while misconduct findings against the complainant are credited.

U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB)

On June 6, Uncovered Investigates sent a rights‑of‑reply request to MSPB Public Affairs. The letter explained that Ms. Sparks filed an MSPB matter after reporting sexual assault, harassment, and safety concerns at CAAA and experiencing non‑selection, reassignment, and non‑renewal of her term appointment, and asked MSPB to comment in general terms on:

• When MSPB has jurisdiction over retaliation claims involving non‑selection, reassignment, or non‑renewal of term appointments after protected disclosures.

• Common reasons MSPB is unable to reach the merits in cases where employees allege retaliation after engaging in protected activity.

• How MSPB’s filing deadlines and jurisdictional rules interact with ongoing EEO and OSC processes.

• Whether MSPB has identified recurring patterns where employees are effectively told they went to the “wrong door” first (for example, focusing on EEO) and later encounter timeliness/jurisdiction barriers at MSPB, and whether MSPB has recommended any reforms.

• Any guidance MSPB provides to employees who allege retaliation after reporting sexual assault, harassment, or serious safety concerns.

MSPB did not acknowledge the June 6 inquiry. After a June 10 follow‑up, MSPB Public Affairs Officer Zac replied:

“As a quasi‑judicial agency responsible for adjudicating federal employee appeals, MSPB is limited in its ability to provide commentary or analysis comparing the outcomes and/or fact patterns of specific federal employee appeals. In general, MSPB speaks through its decisions.

Since Ms. Sparks did not appeal her initial decision, you would need to either find it using Westlaw or submit a FOIA request, and we’d be happy to provide you with the initial decision in MSPB Docket No. CH‑1221‑23‑0245‑W‑1.”

Uncovered Investigates responded that since MSPB had identified the docket number and referenced the existence of an initial decision, it should be able to provide that decision directly without requiring a FOIA or Westlaw search, and stated that Zac’s email would be treated as MSPB’s formal response unless the Board had anything further to add. MSPB did not reply further and did not address the broader, general‑policy questions about jurisdiction, timeliness, and the interaction between MSPB, EEO, and OSC processes.

As of publication, none of the institutions involved has provided a point‑by‑point account reconciling their official findings with Sparks’s version of events. CAAA offered a general statement of policy; OSC, DoW/OSD, and MSPB either declined to answer specific questions or limited their responses to procedural acknowledgments and references to existing decisions and statutes.

The responses—and refusals to respond—matter in Eve Baker Sparks’s case because they mirror the dynamic she has described living through for a decade: her experience is acknowledged in the abstract, but rarely engaged with in detail. CAAA’s statement affirms that the Army “takes allegations of sexual assault and harassment seriously,” insists such conduct is “not tolerated,” and says retaliation is “strictly prohibited,” yet it does not answer whether any specific manager was disciplined, whether her assault statement was shown to the man she accused, or how the command justifies leaving people she named in charge of hiring and term decisions about her career. OSC’s silence, DoW/OSD’s ongoing “we are looking into it,” and MSPB’s narrow procedural reply each point back to existing rules and decisions without grappling with how those rules played out for a civilian explosives handler on a remote base who says she was punished for reporting.

For other civilian women working on military installations—who often share the same isolation, power imbalances, and dependence on the institution as uniformed service members—the way these entities respond publicly is part of the signal they receive about whether it is worth coming forward. When commands, watchdogs, and adjudicatory bodies decline to explain how a case like Sparks’s was handled, or to say plainly what, if anything, they would do differently now, it reinforces the fear that the system’s first priority is protecting itself rather than them. In an environment where data already show high rates of under‑reporting, retaliation, and institutional betrayal, the absence of clear, case‑level accountability is not just a public‑relations gap—it is another reason the next woman on a line like Sparks’s may decide to keep her head down, stay quiet, and hope she gets to go home alive.

Where Eve’s Story Leaves Us

Taken together, the court records, agency letters, and Sparks’s own documents describe a single story told in two languages. On official paper, she is a term explosives handler whose assault allegation could not be prosecuted for lack of corroboration, whose EEO and EEOC claims failed, whose OSC case was closed as untimely and outside jurisdiction, and whose federal lawsuit ended at summary judgment for lack of admissible proof.

In her words and timeline, she is something else: a mid‑career woman who fought her way into a dangerous, male‑dominated job; reported harassment, assault, and serious safety violations; and watched as the systems that promised to protect her turned her into the problem, then quietly wrote her out of the story.

The institutions she turned to did not always ignore her. CID opened a case. A colonel ordered an internal inquiry. EEO officials met with her. OSC accepted and then revisited her complaints. A federal judge read thousands of pages and wrote a long opinion. But at each stage, the outcome was the same: no criminal charges, no substantiated harassment or assault, no formal finding of retaliation, no day in front of a jury. The doors did not slam all at once; they closed one by one, often with polite explanations attached.

That pattern—of partial engagement followed by ultimate refusal—is what makes Sparks’s case larger than one workplace dispute at one ammunition depot. It shows how a survivor can do almost everything the rulebooks say she should do and still end up hearing that she went to the wrong office, at the wrong time, in the wrong way, until the clock runs out and the paper trail reads, essentially, “no further action.”

It is also a measure of the cost. Sparks writes about a 31‑year marriage that did not survive this fight, health so damaged she is seeking disability, a sense of safety so eroded that she does not feel secure in her own home. She describes watching the men she named move on—retired, promoted, reassigned—while she labors to prove that what happened to her was real and mattered.

Nothing in the record can definitively resolve every contested fact in her story; that is what a trial might have been for, and she never got one. What the record does show is that the systems built to protect workers like her are still structured in ways that make it far easier to close a file than to confront what it would mean to believe her.

The question her case leaves for the Army, for OSC and MSPB, and for the broader defense community is simple and uncomfortable: how many other Eve Baker Sparkses are there—people whose experiences exist in the gap between what the paperwork can prove and what a survivor says she lived, and whose files now sit in archives as neat examples of “no cause” and “no jurisdiction”?

Editor’s Note: This investigation was originally reported and published by Uncovered Investigates on May 15, 2026. It has been archived here in The Whistleblower Files as part of our permanent whistleblower repository. The original reporting can be found here.

Introduction: When the System Fights Back

This report follows the paper trail of a single federal engineer whose career crossed some of the most sensitive corners of the U.S. national‑security apparatus—and then collided with the machinery that is supposed to police it. It draws on court filings, agency records, security‑clearance proceedings, medical documentation, and prior investigative work to examine what happens when a technically trained insider insists that something is dangerously wrong.

At its center is Glenanne Johnson, a former Defense Department engineer whose disputes did not begin with politics or personality, but with technical objections: human‑subject protections in Navy laser work, safety and compliance in nuclear‑weapons modernization, and foreign code and cost overruns in a program that would later trigger a historic Nunn‑McCurdy breach. Around those disclosures, the record shows years of discipline, ratings fights, clearance actions, ostracism, medical crises, and what she and her doctors now describe as Anomalous Health Incidents that the government itself formally recognizes but has not meaningfully treated in her case.

The goal here is not to adjudicate every contested fact. It is to map the system around those facts: the way internal complaints, IG reviews, EEO processes, security protocols, medical boards, courts, and clearances can converge on a single whistleblower until the process itself becomes a form of pressure. Taken together with earlier reporting on the Rick Ward case, Johnson’s file raises a question that cannot be answered by any one agency in isolation: when the federal government is confronted with uncomfortable truths from inside its own ranks, does it correct course—or close ranks?

What follows begins by laying the record on the table.

Section I: Laying the Record on the Table

This report begins from a simple premise: Glenanne Johnson’s story is not only a dispute about one office, one command, or one bad stretch of federal employment. In the existing record, it appears as a longer and more consequential conflict about what happens when a technically trained employee raises safety, compliance, and national-security concerns and then has to fight the consequences across multiple institutional fronts.

That is why this story matters beyond NSWC Crane. Crane matters because it appears to be one of the first places where the pattern became visible, but the larger issue is whether retaliation can outlive the original disclosure and migrate with the whistleblower into later jobs, later agencies, and later adjudicative processes. The public-interest question is not limited to what happened at one installation. It is whether a federal employee who refuses to sign off on conduct she believes is unsafe or unlawful can later find herself defending her reputation, livelihood, and security eligibility in proceeding after proceeding, long after the original events should have been resolved.

The Rick Ward report provides the clearest frame for understanding why Johnson’s story deserves that broader treatment. Ward’s case showed that the central issue is often not just the underlying hazard or violation, but the machinery that can turn against the person who insists on documenting it. In that report, the retaliation story was larger than a workplace disagreement. It became a record of isolation, administrative punishment, loss of access, damage to credibility, and years of professional fallout, even while oversight channels validated major parts of what had been reported.

Johnson’s file appears to extend that pattern into a more complex and potentially more revealing form. Her materials do not read like a single retaliation claim confined to one supervisor or one event. They describe a whistleblower conflict that touches Navy-era allegations involving laser safety and human-subject protections, later Air Force disclosures involving program protection and national-security risks, and a prolonged fight through discipline, grievance procedures, EEO channels, Inspector General complaints, and security-clearance proceedings.

That multi-front structure is what makes this case especially important. In the DOHA hearing material, testimony tied Johnson’s Crane-era conflict to her refusal to approve testing that she believed lacked required human-subject protections and adequate risk controls. In later Air Force filings, she alleged that disclosures about program-protection failures, foreign source code, and related national-security issues were followed by disciplinary action, administrative obstacles, grievance cancellation, and adverse security-related consequences. Read together, those records present a whistleblower who says she was punished not for one isolated act of dissent, but for repeatedly refusing to look away in different technical environments.

That matters because it changes the scale of the story. A single retaliation case can be dismissed as personality conflict, management friction, or a disagreement over judgment. A record that spans multiple subject matters, multiple agencies, and multiple years raises a more serious question: whether the federal system can turn fragmented procedures into a form of pressure so relentless that the process itself becomes the punishment.

The record also points to another theme this report must confront directly: the enormous asymmetry between an individual whistleblower and the federal government. The materials show Johnson moving through overlapping forums that include internal complaints, EEO activity, administrative grievances, Inspector General submissions, suspension and reprimand disputes, and clearance-related litigation. By February 2023, the DOHA summary reflects that she appeared pro se at hearing, meaning the burden of presenting the case, handling witnesses, organizing the exhibits, and answering the government’s case had fallen on her personally in that forum.

That detail is not secondary. It is part of the core meaning of the story. A pro se whistleblower in a case like this is not merely contesting facts. She is forced to become her own archivist, investigator, strategist, and advocate while the government appears through offices, commands, supervisors, security officials, and counsel that each control part of the record and part of the process. Whatever the ultimate legal outcome of every allegation, that imbalance itself is a public-interest fact worth putting plainly before the reader.

This first section therefore lays the cards on the table. The report is not going to treat Glenanne Johnson’s case as a narrow employment dispute, and it is not going to isolate her story from the wider pattern already visible in the Rick Ward reporting. The emerging picture is of a whistleblower whose conflict appears to begin around Crane, but whose consequences did not stay there. Instead, the available record suggests a years-long fight over safety, compliance, access, credibility, and survival inside a federal system with far more resources, more procedural leverage, and more staying power than any single employee can match alone.

That is why Johnson’s story matters. It matters not only because of what she says she reported, but because of what her case may reveal about how the federal government handles a whistleblower who raises concerns on more than one front and then has to continue the fight without institutional backing, and at times without counsel, against the full administrative weight of the state.

Section II- Johnson’s Background, Whistleblower Complaints, & Initial Retaliation

Why Her Complaints Should Have Mattered

When Glenanne Johnson started raising alarms about unsafe laser testing and foreign source code in nuclear modernization programs, she did so from inside the system—not as an outsider lobbing speculation. By the time those disclosures were made, the government had already trusted her for years with safety‑critical engineering decisions, classified work, and program‑of‑record responsibilities.

Johnson is a Chemical engineer who was recruited into the field by a retired Air Force Colonel and former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s nuclear division, specifically because of her aptitude and family background in engineering and national‑security work. She went on to earn Level III Systems Planning, Research, Development, and Engineering–Systems Engineering (SPRDE‑SE) certification, gain membership in the DoD Acquisition Corps in 2013, and hold multiple explosives and weapons‑related safety credentials—qualifications the Pentagon reserves for people expected to understand, and challenge, high‑risk designs.

During her Navy tenure at NSWC Crane, Johnson served as the command’s Laser Safety Officer and Technical Laser Safety Officer, a role that required specialized training at the Navy’s Lead Naval Technical Laboratory for Laser Safety at Dahlgren. In sworn DOHA testimony, Sheldon Zimmerman—chief engineer for that laboratory, a voting member of the Laser Safety Review Board, and a co‑author of the Navy’s laser safety regulations—confirmed that Johnson correctly interpreted the governing instructions and that when she escalated laser‑safety and contractor‑training issues to him, she was “doing what you were supposed to do… as a Safety Officer.”

Her Air Force record is equally stark. In a 2021 close‑out evaluation at the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, her supervisor documented that she “exceeds minimum requirements” for Level II and had already held Level III SPRDE‑SE since 2011, noting that she was considered a functional/technical expert and was “regularly sought out by others for advice and assistance.” That same evaluation credited her as Chair of the Systems Engineering and Integration Subgroup (SEISG) for the Minuteman III–to‑GBSD transition, leading joint working groups on cyber, risk, and nuclear certification; updating joint qualification plans, risk processes, and integrated master schedules; and helping develop demilitarization alternatives that could save the government hundreds of millions of dollars.

By late 2021, the Air Force was actively trying to promote her: she rose to the top of a competitive pool for a 36‑month headquarters “career broadening” assignment as Enterprise Systems Engineering Technical Director in SAF/AQ, with selection emails praising her as a “great fit” who had risen “to the top of a highly competitive pool of candidates.” At the same time, the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center was recruiting her for a NH‑04 Lead General Engineer billet in its Mission Defense Branch—a critical acquisition position overseeing GBSD cybersecurity, program protection, supply‑chain risk management, and unauthorized‑launch analysis. Those opportunities only exist because, on paper, Johnson was precisely the kind of engineer the Air Force wanted guarding its most sensitive systems.

In other words: by the time Johnson said, “this test is unsafe” or “this chip and code do not belong in a nuclear weapon,” she was speaking from exactly the seat the government itself had placed her in—Laser Safety Officer at a weapons lab, SEISG Chair for the ground‑based leg of the nuclear triad, and a hand‑picked candidate for enterprise‑level systems‑engineering roles. Her complaints were not coming from the margins; they were coming from the middle of the command structure the Pentagon had built to prevent precisely the kinds of failures she was reporting.

Laser testing and human subjects

While serving as the command Laser Safety Officer and Technical Laser Safety Officer at NSWC Crane, Johnson objected to a planned laser demonstration that involved human subjects on boats being illuminated by a high‑power neodymium‑YAG system (green with an infrared component), purchased as a one‑watt “Wicked Lasers”–type device sourced from China. She identified multiple hazards: untested leakage at other wavelengths in the retinal hazard band, lack of proper baseline and post‑test medical exams, and the absence of an Institutional Review Board and ombudsman despite the test clearly qualifying as human testing under Pentagon human‑protection rules.

Johnson refused to sign off on the test plan, instead documenting her concerns, consulting the Navy’s lead laser‑safety authority at Dahlgren, and elevating the issue to local JAG and the Navy ombudsman. Witness testimony in the DOHA hearing recounts that her supervisors pressed her to sign despite knowing IRB requirements were not met and that test range personnel openly prioritized keeping the money and test work over compliance with human‑subject protections. When she insisted on following the law and the laser‑safety standards, local management labeled her insubordinate, mishandling data, and “alienating customers,” and those characterizations later appeared in Air Force/DoD clearance paperwork as adverse credibility and judgment indicators.

OSINT, adversary threats, and retaliation

Separately, Johnson’s open‑source intelligence (OSINT) work and reporting of emerging threats were also turned into pretext for discipline and clearance concerns. She provided volunteer reach‑back support and OSINT on issues including hypersonic threats and foreign technology, then received an AFOTEC cease‑and‑desist memo ordering her to stop OSINT and volunteer reach‑back activity, which was later cited in the security‑clearance record. Her DOHA response points out that the government treated her open‑source threat reporting as suspect while ignoring the underlying national‑security issues she raised.

Foreign source code and chips in Sentinel/GBSD

After moving into Air Force nuclear‑modernization work, Johnson reported that foreign‑sourced hardware and code had been allowed into the U.S. land‑based strategic deterrent, including the Sentinel/GBSD weapon system. In a 2021–2022 retaliation complaint to the DoD Inspector General, she stated that an Air Force official “accepted risk on behalf of the USAF to the NSA to allow Chinese source code into the US nuclear land based strategic deterrent” via a Taiwanese‑manufactured chip, in violation of program‑protection requirements and trusted‑systems mandates. She documented that this hardware and code path touched the warhead, fuze, and broader ballistic‑missile‑defense network, creating a foreign backdoor risk into multiple nuclear and missile‑defense programs.

Johnson reported these concerns up her military chain of command, to the AFNWC Inspector General, to OSI program‑protection personnel, and to multiple congressional offices, explicitly framing them as violations of DoD program‑protection policy, public law, and national‑security‑systems requirements. Shortly after these disclosures, she was hit with a local “security incident” for a SCIF‑closure issue that AFNWC later rescinded as improper, followed by a cascade of adverse personnel actions: letters of counseling and reprimand, a proposed indefinite suspension without pay, and security‑clearance suspension and revocation proceedings. In her filings, she characterizes these actions as prohibited personnel practices and whistleblower reprisal for raising program‑protection breaches in the Sentinel/GBSD and related nuclear programs.

How the complaints were weaponized back against her

Across the Navy and Air Force chapters, the same pattern recurs in the official record: Johnson makes a protected disclosure about safety or foreign compromise; local management resists; and the resulting friction is later reframed as evidence that she is the problem.

• The NSWC Crane human‑testing dispute appears in Air Force security paperwork as “insubordination,” despite Navy laser‑safety authorities testifying she followed doctrine correctly and should have been treated as a whistleblower.

• Her OSINT and program‑protection disclosures are followed by a rescinded but documented “security incident,” counseling, reprimands, and then clearance suspension.

• In DOHA proceedings and adverse‑action documents, those retaliatory episodes are then cited as proof of poor judgment, inability to work with others, or mishandling of information, rather than as the predictable blowback against someone trying to enforce safety rules and protect nuclear systems from foreign compromise.

Section III: The Human Cost — An Interview with Glenanne Johnson

For more than a decade, Glenanne Johnson worked inside some of the U.S. government’s most sensitive weapons programs, from Navy laser testing ranges to the Air Force’s Sentinel nuclear‑missile program. Her decisions and disclosures, now echoed in formal investigations and a $140.8 billion Nunn‑McCurdy breach, cost her her clearance, her career, and, she alleges, her health. In this interview, she describes what it looks like when the system turns on the person it is supposed to protect.

Navy Years – The First Pattern (2011–2013)

Q1. The human testing incident

Walk me through the moment when you were ordered to conduct laser tests on U.S. soldiers without their knowledge or consent. What exactly were you being asked to do, and what went through your mind?

Glenanne Johnson:

In March of 2012, in my capacity as the acting Laser Safety Officer for the command at NSWC Crane, I was presented with a test plan for review and approval. The plan involved using a commercial, high‑powered laser device on U.S. soldiers during an over‑water exercise.

My professional training and responsibilities required me to ensure any such test complied with all federal and Department of Defense safety and ethics regulations. As I reviewed the plan, my thought process was a direct application of that training. I immediately identified several critical issues.

First, the plan appeared to lack the mandatory approval from a certified Institutional Review Board, or IRB. As my colleague, who wishes to remain unnamed, confirmed in his sworn testimony at the DOHA hearing, DoD Instruction 3216.02 requires this board’s approval to ensure the protection of human subjects. When I asked the program leads about this, they indicated they had not needed it before and were concerned that seeking it would delay the test and risk losing the funding.

Second, there was no evidence of informed consent. The soldiers involved were not being told about the specific device or the potential hazards. The DOHA witness testified that he was aware the soldiers were simply told they would “drive boats really fast, and they’re going to shine some lights at us.” This is not informed consent.

Third, as a technical expert, I had serious concerns about the specific device—a commercial laser purchased online. These devices were known to have reliability issues and could emit additional, invisible, and highly dangerous infrared wavelengths that were not accounted for in the test’s safety analysis.

I was pressured by my supervisor to sign and approve the test plan despite these deficiencies. The emails from that time, which are part of the record, show this pressure. My response was not to be difficult, but to be diligent. I refused to sign until these fundamental safety and legal requirements were met. I stated my concerns and sought guidance from the Navy’s own top experts, including the Navy JAG office and Mr. Sheldon Zimmerman, who is one of the authors of the very laser safety standards we are required to follow.

Mr. Zimmerman later testified under oath that in raising these concerns, I was “doing what you were supposed to do” as a Safety Officer and that my technical interpretation was correct. Another witness on my safety review board testified, “I would not have put my name on it.”

For refusing to approve what I, and the Navy’s own experts, believed to be an unlawful and unsafe test on our own soldiers, I was removed from my position as Laser Safety Officer and issued a letter of caution for “insubordination.” That was the moment this all began.

Q2. Making the choice

When you refused that order and reported it to the Inspector General, what did you think would happen? What actually happened?

Glenanne Johnson:

When I took my oath, I committed to upholding the law and ensuring the safety of our service members. In 2012, when I refused to approve what I believed was an unlawful order to test a laser on U.S. soldiers without proper human‑subject protections, I saw it as my duty. My expectation was simple: that the Inspector General system would investigate the issue, uphold the safety regulations, and protect the person who reported the problem.

What actually happened was a decade‑long, multi‑agency campaign of retaliation that proves the process itself can become the punishment. Immediately, I was issued a letter of caution and my official personnel file shows an SF‑50 form documenting my punitive “Reassignment” out of the safety office.

But it did not stop there. The retaliation migrated with me to the Air Force. When I made new, high‑stakes disclosures about the GBSD/Sentinel nuclear missile program—disclosures about a massive budget breach and foreign code that have since been independently validated by Congress, the DoD, and a public RAND Corporation report—the retaliation escalated dramatically.

Instead of addressing the national‑security risks I identified, the system turned on me. The Air Force created a sham “Classified Message Incident” to suspend my clearance, an incident so baseless that it was later debunked by the Air Force’s own Office of Special Investigations (OSI). They used a fraudulent medical review to deny my disability rights. And as alleged in my federal lawsuit, when administrative pressure failed to silence me, the retaliation escalated to physical harm, resulting in medically‑verified Anomalous Health Incidents for myself and my son, for which the DoD is now actively obstructing our access to mandatory medical care at Walter Reed.

So, what happened? I expected the system to work. Instead, it was weaponized to silence a whistleblower who was proven right on every single count.

Q3. The cost of integrity

Sheldon Zimmerman testified at your DOHA hearing that you “should have been protected under whistleblower” protections and were just “trying to do the right thing from a safety perspective.” Instead, you were labeled insubordinate. How did that label follow you?

Glenanne Johnson:

Mr. Zimmerman’s sworn testimony was a crucial vindication. As the co‑author of the Navy’s laser safety regulations, he confirmed I was right, stating, “You were doing what you were supposed to do… you should have been protected as a whistleblower.” Another expert on my safety committee testified that management was “more interested in money” and tried to force me to sign the unsafe plan.

But instead of protection, I was labeled “insubordinate.” That label became the seed for a fraudulent official record that followed and haunted me for the next decade.

The retaliation was immediate and documented: I was punitively reassigned. Then, after I left the agency, Navy officials created a false, back‑dated security‑incident report based on that “insubordination” charge.

The definitive “smoking gun” that proves how that label followed me is the Air Force’s May 2022 Statement of Reasons (SOR)—the official document used to revoke my security clearance. The SOR explicitly resurrects the 2012 Navy incident, stating my “history of behavior from 2013 to 2022, which includes failure to follow supervisory instructions… supports a whole‑person assessment of questionable judgement, untrustworthiness, unreliability….”

They used a retaliatory, discredited charge from the Navy as the official pretext to punish me for entirely new, and ultimately validated, whistleblowing at the Air Force. It proves a coordinated, multi‑agency effort. To complete the circle of bad faith, after the Navy’s false records were used against me in multiple federal proceedings, the Navy’s public‑affairs office publicly denied to the press in 2025 that those records ever existed.

The label did not just follow me; it was actively curated, transported across federal agencies, and deployed as the primary weapon to end my career.

Q4. The NSWC Crane retaliation

You documented in your MSPB appeal that officials at NSWC Crane tried to backdate a security‑incident report from March 2013 to September 2013—after you had already left the Navy. Your contractor FSO caught them. What was that moment like when you realized people were fabricating records about you?

Glenanne Johnson:

That was a chilling and clarifying moment. It was the point at which I understood this was no longer about a professional disagreement; it had escalated to the active, deliberate fabrication of official records with the clear intent to permanently damage my career.

As documented in my MSPB appeal, the attempt to backdate that security‑incident report happened after I had already separated from the agency. They were trying to plant a fraudulent, career‑ending document in my file when they thought no one was looking.

The only reason this attempt was stopped was because my contractor Facility Security Officer—a woman who was an honest broker in the system—caught them in the act. She did not just stop it; she documented it. She wrote a formal memo detailing the attempt to backdate the report and escalated the issue, creating an official record of their misconduct.

When I learned of her memo, it was the moment that any lingering self‑doubt was replaced by the cold, hard certainty that I was being targeted. It was no longer just my word against theirs. There was now a contemporaneous, written record, created by a security professional, proving that officials were willing to falsify documents to retaliate against me.

That memo became the first piece of hard evidence in what would become a decade‑long pattern. It confirmed that individuals within the government were willing to commit documented, fraudulent acts to punish me for doing my job. It was the first “smoking gun,” and it foreshadowed exactly what would happen years later when the Air Force resurrected these same discredited claims to justify revoking my clearance.

That moment was just the beginning. While the attempt to backdate the security report was caught, the underlying false narrative was not abandoned. Instead, it was maliciously curated and weaponized for the next decade.

They maintained these manufactured, retaliatory records and actively disseminated them. They provided false reports to prospective employers and to security officials during background checks. A clear example is how they misrepresented my federal service. They repeatedly claimed my service began in 2011, attempting to erase my earlier years and qualifications. However, my own official SF‑50 form from June 17, 2012, which documents my punitive reassignment, clearly shows my “Service Computation Date” as July 21, 2008. Their own contemporaneous records prove they were lying.

This false narrative was then used as pretext in multiple federal proceedings, including my DOHA hearing and MSPB appeals, to paint a picture of a problematic employee. They provided false employment information to security investigators and prospective employers, causing OPM to flag my background with “issues” and creating delays or causing job offers to be withdrawn.

The final, most brazen act in this campaign of deceit was when they lied to the press. After using these false records for years to justify their actions and destroy my career, the Navy’s public‑affairs office publicly stated in 2025 that they never maintained such records.

So, to be clear:

1. They created false records.

2. They maintained and spread these lies to other agencies and employers.

3. They used these lies as the foundation for career‑ending actions against me.

4. And when it all came to light, they lied to the public and denied the records ever existed.

Q5. The connection to the Air Force

You later discovered that supervisors at AFOTEC had overlapped with you and your former supervisor at NSWC Crane and were in the same graduate program. When did you realize the same people from the Navy investigation were now in positions of authority over you at the Air Force?

Glenanne Johnson:

The connection was not just a professional overlap; it was a pattern of events that my legal filings allege was a continuous campaign of retaliation. My federal complaint details that the individuals who became my supervisors at the Air Force had direct knowledge of the discredited retaliation against me at the Navy.

The complaint alleges this led to a “coercive hiring process” where a job offer was extended with the understanding that I would drop my pending legal actions against the Air Force. Once I was hired, the complaint details how the retaliatory playbook from the Navy was repeated: a retaliatory letter of caution was issued, and a false security incident was fabricated.

This pattern extended beyond official actions. During the pandemic, I was directed to make travel arrangements that involved paying my supervisor’s family member for lodging and then was pressured not to submit the voucher for reimbursement.

When you see the same individuals from a past conflict reappear in positions of authority over you, and the same pattern of retaliatory actions detailed in my court filings begins again, you realize this is not a new problem. My complaint alleges it is one continuous, migrating campaign of reprisal.

Air Force – The Sentinel Disclosure (2021)

Q6. The discovery

In early 2021, you discovered the Sentinel program was not following federal acquisition law and was headed for catastrophic failure. What exactly did you find, and how did you know it was going to be a Nunn‑McCurdy breach?

Glenanne Johnson:

My discovery in early 2021 was the result of foundational due diligence required by my role as a systems engineer on the nuclear‑triad transition. It was not a matter of opinion; it was a matter of law.

What I found was that the GBSD/Sentinel program was not in compliance with federal acquisition law, specifically the DoD 5000 series. The core of the problem was “Milestone B,” the official, legally required gateway a program must pass before full‑scale development. To pass it, the DoD must certify that the technology is mature, the design is stable, and the cost and schedule estimates are realistic.

My analysis, as detailed in my federal complaint, revealed that the GBSD/Sentinel program had not actually met these mandatory requirements. It was, in essence, a house being built on a cracked foundation. The cost, schedule, and performance baselines the Air Force was reporting to Congress were fundamentally flawed.

The Nunn‑McCurdy Act is a cost‑control law that acts as a legal tripwire. If a major program’s costs increase by a certain percentage above its approved baseline, it triggers a “breach” requiring the program to be restructured or even canceled.

It was a matter of simple math. If the initial baseline reported to Congress is artificially low because you have not properly passed Milestone B, the true costs will inevitably surface later. I knew that once the real costs of maturing the technology and stabilizing the design were accounted for, the program’s budget would explode, blowing past the Nunn‑McCurdy thresholds.

That is exactly what happened. My complaint states I reported this in early 2021. Three years later, on January 18, 2024, the Department of Defense publicly confirmed my disclosure, announcing a record‑breaking $140.8 billion (81%) budget breach and officially rescinding the program’s Milestone B approval—the very issue I had identified. My disclosures were further validated by a public RAND Corporation report that confirmed systemic acquisition failures.

I found a violation of law, I predicted the inevitable financial consequence, and tragically for the taxpayer, I was proven right.

Q7. The foreign‑code issue

You reported in March 2021 that malicious foreign code and materials had been accepted into critical Air Force systems. In layman’s terms, what does that mean, and why is it so dangerous?

Glenanne Johnson:

I am legally and ethically bound by my security oaths not to discuss any classified or technical details about U.S. nuclear systems. Therefore, I cannot and will not describe the specifics of any vulnerability.

However, I can explain the fundamental principle of the danger, which is a matter of public interest and national‑security policy. My federal complaint alleges that I reported the “presence of malicious foreign code and materials in critical USAF systems.” In layman’s terms, allowing unvetted software or hardware from a strategic adversary like China into any critical defense system is like giving that adversary a hidden key to the system.

You do not know what that key does. It could be a kill switch that allows them to disable the system at a critical moment. It could be a backdoor that allows them to spy, steal data, or subtly alter how the system functions without our knowledge. It could introduce a hidden vulnerability that they could exploit years down the road.

The danger is not just the code itself. The greater danger, and the core of my disclosure, was the breakdown in the acquisition and security process that is supposed to prevent this from ever happening. We have laws and policies like Program Protection and Supply Chain Risk Management specifically to ensure our most sensitive systems are built from trusted components. My disclosure alleged that these legally mandated safeguards were bypassed.

Shortly after my disclosures, the government issued broader policy directives on improving cybersecurity and securing the supply chain, and the RAND report that validated my other concerns also pointed to systemic failures in acquisition and security. So the danger is twofold: the immediate risk of a compromised weapon system, and the systemic risk of a broken security process. My duty as a systems engineer was to report both, regardless of the consequences.

Q8. The warning you gave

You reported the Sentinel breach in early 2021. The Air Force did not publicly acknowledge it until 2024. In those three years, what were they telling you about your concerns?

Glenanne Johnson:

They did not engage with my concerns; they attacked me, the messenger. During that nearly three‑year gap, while the Air Force was withholding the truth about the Sentinel breach from Congress and the public, their communications to me were a two‑pronged campaign of official denial and unofficial retaliation.

First, there was the official denial. In April 2022, a senior official issued a letter declaring my disclosures “unsubstantiated,” despite managing the very program whose failures I had reported. That letter was later used against me as a government exhibit in my security‑clearance hearing.

Second, their real answer was in their actions. During that period they: fabricated a “Classified Message Incident” to suspend my clearance and obstruct the DoD IG investigation; used a retaliatory reprimand to block an earned promotion; orchestrated a sham medical review to deny reasonable accommodation; and withheld the RAND Corporation report that independently validated my disclosures, even though the final report was delivered internally in March 2022.

So while they were sitting on a $140 billion time bomb, they were telling me I was wrong by systematically dismantling my career. Their actions were a clear message: they were not interested in the truth; they were interested in silencing the person who told it.

Q9. The RAND vindication

When the RAND Corporation report (RRA‑1506‑2) came out confirming “systemic challenges” and that the Air Force was “not consistently implementing its own acquisition policies”—validating what you had reported—how did you feel, and how did the Air Force respond to you personally?

Glenanne Johnson:

It was a profound moment of vindication, but it was not a celebration. Reading the conclusions of the RAND report—an independent study commissioned by the Air Force itself—was like seeing my own engineering reports and warnings from three years prior echoed back to me. It confirmed that the systemic acquisition failures and national‑security risks I reported were real and much broader than I had originally estimated.

The more important part is how the Air Force responded to me personally: with absolute silence. My complaint alleges that the Air Force had the final RAND report internally in March 2022. They had this vindicating report in their possession during my security‑clearance hearing and other critical legal proceedings, yet they withheld it.

There was no phone call, no email, no correction of the record, no apology. Instead, they finalized the revocation of my security clearance based on a narrative that the RAND report disproved, continued to use the fabricated “Classified Message Incident” against me even after OSI confirmed no classified spillage ever occurred, and forced my constructive discharge into a medical retirement at 40% of my pay.

Their response was to bury the truth and continue the character assassination. It proved, in the clearest possible terms, that their goal was never to address the systemic failures I had identified; it was to eliminate the person who exposed them.

Q10. The $140.8 billion admission

On July 8, 2024, the Pentagon announced the Sentinel program cost had exploded to over $140 billion and rescinded Milestone B approval—the exact engineering failure you had reported. You were right about everything. So why are we sitting here talking about what happened to you instead of what happened to the program?

Glenanne Johnson:

You have asked the fundamental question, and the answer goes to the heart of why this is a national‑security issue, not just an employment dispute.

We are talking about what happened to me because the Sentinel program is the land‑based leg of our nuclear triad—it is so essential to our national defense that failure is not an option. The cost breach I reported was so catastrophic that, to prevent the program’s automatic termination under the law, Congress had to pass a special amendment to the Nunn‑McCurdy Act just to keep the program alive.

But the problem is much bigger than Sentinel. When I transferred to AFOTEC—the Air Force’s operational test agency—I saw the same systemic rot everywhere. It was in nearly every program I reviewed. The RAND report later confirmed this, finding that the Air Force was “not consistently implementing its own acquisition policies” across the board.

So why are we talking about what happened to me? Because my case is evidence of how the system deals with inconvenient truths. It buries them by burying the people who report them. The officials who presided over the failures were promoted; the engineer who warned about them was removed.

The Constitutional Violations

1. The gag order

Q. You documented that you were given an illegal gag order and explicitly told not to speak to the Inspector General or Congress. Who gave you that order, in what form, and what did they threaten would happen if you disobeyed?

Glenanne Johnson:

The gag order was not a single event; it was a multi‑part, escalating campaign of illegal obstruction, and it is detailed explicitly in my federal court complaint.

First, to answer your question directly: my complaint alleges that my supervisor, James Eck, was the primary official who issued and enforced these illegal orders.

Second, in what form? It came in multiple forms.

Direct written orders: My complaint alleges that Mr. Eck issued a series of written “Cease and Desist” orders designed to silence me on multiple fronts. One email explicitly directed me not to speak with members of Congress and was then cited as a substantiating fact to pull my clearance locally and stop me from providing documentation to the DoD IG during their investigation in February 2022. Another order targeted my approved, off‑duty humanitarian volunteer activities, interfering with my First Amendment right of association. A third ordered me to stop cooperating with an FBI and OSI investigation into an American hostage situation.

Weaponizing a non‑disclosure agreement: I had signed a standard NDA with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) related to a procurement‑fraud investigation. My complaint alleges that Mr. Eck twisted that NDA into a blanket gag order to prevent me from cooperating with the separate DoD Inspector General investigation into the Sentinel missile breach, even though the NDA’s plain text explicitly permitted communication with the IG and Congress. To make matters worse, the OSI agent who issued the NDA was on maternity leave at the time and, according to my complaint, completely unaware that Mr. Eck was unlawfully enforcing it to obstruct my protected activities.

The threat was not hypothetical. The consequence was immediate and severe.

As my complaint alleges, on February 24, 2022, the day after I met with the DoD IG investigator and the day before I was scheduled to provide substantiating documents on the classified system, Mr. Eck used my supposed “breach” of this fake gag order as the official pretext to suspend my security‑clearance access and revoke my SIPRNet token. That action cut me off from the IG investigator, Todd Fattor, and physically prevented me from providing him with the very documents he had requested to prove the Sentinel program’s failures.

Under federal law, specifically the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, it is illegal to implement or enforce any policy that restricts an employee’s right to communicate with the Inspector General or Congress. What I experienced was a direct and documented violation of that law and of my First Amendment rights, used as a tool to obstruct a federal investigation into the largest budget breach in U.S. history.

2. The fabricated security incident

Q. The Air Force initiated a security investigation claiming you mishandled classified information. Then their own Office of Special Investigations concluded the incident was “baseless” and “no classified information was ever sent.” How did they use this false allegation against you even after it was debunked?

Glenanne Johnson:

This is one of the most critical and damning parts of the case, and it goes to the heart of the conspiracy alleged in my federal complaint. The fabricated Classified Message Incident, or CMI, was never about national security. It was a weapon, and they continued to use it long after their own investigators confirmed it was unfounded.

My complaint alleges it was created by Heath Collins, the program manager for the very Sentinel program I was blowing the whistle on. Its first purpose was to create a pretext to obstruct the DoD IG investigation and, as the complaint alleges, to purge evidence of my protected disclosures from government computers all the way up to the Secretary of the Air Force.

When the Air Force’s own Office of Special Investigations investigated and officially concluded that “no classified information was ever sent,” a good‑faith actor would have immediately dropped the matter and corrected the record. The Air Force did the opposite.

Here is how they continued to use the false allegation, even after it was debunked:

They concealed the truth: My complaint alleges that my supervisors, James Eck and Dr. Thomas Spencer, intentionally concealed the exonerating OSI report from me for nearly six weeks. They knew the allegation was false but hid the proof. I only discovered OSI had cleared me by using a phone not associated with me to make the inquiry, then had to create a formal record asking why that decision had been withheld; the only response I received was a demand to know how I had learned that information.

They used it in sworn testimony. Even after they knew it was false, my complaint alleges they continued to cite the debunked “spillage” claim in sworn statements in multiple federal proceedings to attack my credibility and obstruct justice.

They used it to suspend me indefinitely. The most egregious act came on September 24, 2022. My complaint alleges that Dr. Spencer, acting as the deciding official, finalized my indefinite suspension without pay while I was on approved FMLA for scleroderma and what we now know as “Havana Syndrome” AHI events. He did so while willfully ignoring the OSI report exonerating me, which he had in his possession, and he failed to notify human resources, resulting in a lapse of my health benefits and leave accruals during a critical period.

They used it to revoke my clearance. Despite the OSI finding, the debunked CMI remained a central justification in the government’s case to revoke my security clearance in the DOHA hearing.

They used this single false allegation as the foundational pretext for everything that followed. It was the “security” excuse they needed to suspend me, discredit me in court, deny me an earned promotion, a lateral transfer, FMLA protections, and a Schedule A disability appointment, take away my pay, and ultimately force me out of federal service. It proves that the entire process was a sham, designed not to protect national security but to eliminate a whistleblower.

3. The disability discrimination

Q. On June 28, 2021, you notified AFOTEC HR of your disability and requested reasonable accommodation. Instead of accommodation, what happened?

Glenanne Johnson:

What happened after I requested reasonable accommodation is a textbook example of disability discrimination and retaliation, and it is laid out in detail in my federal complaint. Instead of the legally required good‑faith interactive process, I was met with a campaign of systematic obstruction that culminated in the end of my federal career.

Here is the sequence of events alleged in my complaint and detailed in my filings with medical boards and the Department of Justice:

Systematic delay and obstruction. My initial request on June 28, 2021, was met with months of delays. My complaint details how I made eight separate, medically supported requests for accommodation. Each request was either ignored or met with a new, retaliatory personnel action, such as a proposed reprimand.

The sham “medical board.” After nearly a year of obstruction, instead of engaging with the diagnoses from my seven board‑certified specialists, my complaint alleges that Col. Eck conspired to create a fraudulent “medical board.” They solicited a “review” from an individual named Nicolas Ferry, who was demonstrably and dangerously unqualified: he was not licensed to practice medicine in New Mexico, was not a board‑certified specialist in any relevant field, never examined me in person, had an apparent conflict of interest, and mishandled my private medical information. Public records show his Virginia medical license was granted just two days before my coerced start date in 2020 and updated in March 2022, right as this sham review was being orchestrated, suggesting a premeditated scheme.

The sham “job search” and forced retirement. Once my accommodation was denied based on this fraudulent review, they initiated a “job search” that was designed to fail. They limited the search to my previous command—which was directly implicated in my whistleblower disclosures—ignored that I had an earned promotion and a lateral position available, ignored FMLA protections and my eligibility for a Schedule A disability appointment, falsely claimed I had no clearance despite my continued eligibility, and disregarded the fact that my skills were in high demand across DoD.

This entire process left me with no choice. It was a coordinated effort to manufacture a “legitimate” reason to remove a disabled employee who was also a whistleblower. It culminated in my constructive discharge, forcing me into a premature medical retirement at 40% of my pay. They did not just fail to accommodate my disability; they weaponized it and used the security‑clearance sham as a tool to push me out of my career.

4. The “fake medical board”

Q. You mentioned they used a “fake medical board” to deny your rights as a disabled employee. Can you explain what that means?

Glenanne Johnson:

The term “fake medical board” refers to the fraudulent process my complaint alleges the Air Force created to deny my disability rights. But the truth, as detailed in my occupational disease claim with the Department of Labor, is far more disturbing.

After I provided diagnoses from seven board‑certified specialists for my scleroderma, Col. Eck ignored them and arranged a sham review using an unqualified individual. While they orchestrated this to deal with my known disability, I was also suffering from a new, undiagnosed, and severe occupational disease. My medical records show my health decline began immediately after my February 2021 whistleblower disclosure about foreign code in USAF systems.

My claim alleges this is an Anomalous Health Incident (AHI), commonly known as “Havana Syndrome,” caused by exposure to directed energy. The evidence is specific and medically documented:

• On February 2, 2026, I was diagnosed with a specific type of early‑onset cataracts in both eyes that my doctor identified as a known signature of microwave‑radiation exposure.

• I have used calibrated meters to repeatedly measure high levels of pulsed microwave radiation aimed at my person, with readings far above permissible public exposure limits.

• My Mayo Clinic physician confirmed that severe rashes I developed were “not a symptom” of my underlying scleroderma, indicating an external cause.

My medical team has now diagnosed me with AHI and formally referred me and my minor son to the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) at Walter Reed for treatment. Yet, as documented on official DoD forms, the Air Force is actively withholding the simple one‑page administrative referral memo required to schedule us for evaluation. Without that memo, former civilian employees cannot access NICoE. This obstruction is so severe that I have formally requested diplomatic intervention from the German government to protect my American‑German son.

By denying us access to the only DoD facility capable of diagnosing and treating our specific, complex injuries, the Air Force is not merely being negligent—it is perpetuating irreparable harm. Health, once lost, cannot be repurchased.

This makes their actions even more egregious. They were not just violating the Rehabilitation Act for a pre‑existing condition; they were actively ignoring the unfolding symptoms of a new, severe, work‑related injury while fabricating a process to push me out. Their focus was on removal, not care.

There is also a systemic dimension. For civilians like me, the process is governed by the Rehabilitation Act and the goal is reasonable accommodation. For military service members, a condition like scleroderma is often considered “disqualifying” under fitness‑for‑duty rules. My complaint alleges that because Col. Eck was a new civilian manager, he bypassed the mandatory civilian process and imposed a military‑style “medical board” framework on me, with predictable consequences.

Taken together, this raises a disturbing question: if this is how a tenured civilian engineer with documented, service‑related occupational injuries is treated, what is happening to enlisted service members returning with similar conditions from burn pits or other exposures? My experience suggests this may be a window into a systemic problem that is wrongfully ending careers and denying care to our veterans.

The Professional Destruction

5. Two years without rating

Q. You weren’t rated for two performance periods and weren’t included in the pay pool for 24 months. For someone at your level in the Acquisition Corps, what does that do to your career?

Glenanne Johnson:

For a senior member of the Defense Acquisition Corps, it is a career death sentence, executed quietly in a bureaucratic back alley. It is a form of administrative assassination.

In the highly competitive “up‑or‑out” environment of the Acquisition Corps, annual performance ratings are the currency of your career. In my case, it was not just a passive failure to rate me; my complaint alleges it was an active, multi‑stage campaign of administrative fraud designed to create a pretext for my removal.

Here is the sequence of events alleged in my complaint:

They erased my past success. First, my complaint alleges that an “Excellent” performance rating I earned for the 2020–2021 period was deliberately withheld by officials, including James Eck and SES Joe Oder, and never entered into my record.

They fabricated a failure. On May 9, 2022, my complaint alleges that Mr. Eck created a fraudulent “Unacceptable” performance appraisal by deleting my performance inputs and then signing for his own senior rater, who later denied authorizing the action.

They blocked all avenues of appeal. To ensure the lie would stick, my complaint alleges that Mr. Eck and another official, Cynthia Felkins, obstructed and indefinitely suspended my right to grieve this rating, denying me any meaningful opportunity to challenge it.

That “Unacceptable” rating was then used as the official justification to block my Schedule A disability hiring authority, my reasonable‑accommodation rights, an earned promotion to a key position at SAF/AQ, and a lateral transfer to the National Reconnaissance Office. This was not an oversight. It was a deliberate administrative fraud: erase the positive, fabricate the negative, and then block all appeals, creating a false official record that could be used to destroy my career.

6. The promotion block

Q. You documented that you earned a promotion but it was blocked. At the same time, what was happening to the careers of the people responsible for the Sentinel disaster?

Glenanne Johnson:

This is the ultimate evidence of the accountability gap that defines this entire case. My experience and the careers of those I blew the whistle on moved in polar opposite directions.

First, my promotion. My complaint alleges that I had earned and was selected for a promotion to a critical GS‑14/GS‑15 career‑ladder position as Division Chief for Digital Acquisition at SAF/AQ, the headquarters of the Air Force acquisition enterprise. That job would have allowed me to help fix the very systemic problems I had identified.

My complaint alleges that Mr. Eck used the retaliatory reprimand and the fabricated “Unacceptable” performance rating as the official pretext to block that promotion.

Meanwhile, my complaint alleges that:

• Heath Collins, the Program Executive Officer who presided over Sentinel’s record‑breaking breach, was promoted to lieutenant general and given command of the Missile Defense Agency.

• Dr. Thomas Spencer, the deciding official on my removal, was promoted from GS‑15 to the Senior Executive Service.

I have even built an organizational chart showing how many of the individuals tied to the failures and retaliation moved up the hierarchy while my career was shut down.

It reveals a two‑track system of justice:

• If you tell the truth and expose a multi‑billion‑dollar failure, your career is destroyed and your promotions are blocked with fraudulent paperwork.

• If you preside over that failure and the cover‑up, you are rewarded with more stars, more authority, and more prestige.

It proves that in this system, telling the truth about a failure is a career‑ending offense, while causing the failure can be a prerequisite for advancement.

7. The contrast

Q. The Sentinel program manager was promoted from one‑star to three‑star and had been named Acquisition Program Manager of the Year. The official who decided to remove you was promoted to the Senior Executive Service. The Chief of Staff became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. You were medically retired after being destroyed professionally and, you allege, physically. How do you process that?

Glenanne Johnson:

I process it as a perfect, inverted image of what accountability should look like. It is the clearest possible evidence that the system is not just broken, but is operating in reverse.

My complaint alleges that the very individuals who presided over a catastrophic failure, violated the law, and orchestrated a campaign of retaliation were rewarded with the highest honors the Department of Defense can bestow. And I, the engineer whose warnings were later vindicated by RAND and the Nunn‑McCurdy breach, was forced into medical retirement at 40% of my pay.

So I do not process it as a personal loss. I process it as evidence—evidence that the system is not designed to find and fix problems, but to protect itself and the careers of those in power. My lawsuit is my way of forcing that evidence into the public record.

The DOHA Hearing (February 2023)

8. Your own defense

Q. You appeared pro se—representing yourself—at your DOHA security‑clearance hearing. Why didn’t you have an attorney, and what was it like to defend yourself against the entire Department of Defense legal apparatus?

Glenanne Johnson:

Short answer. I appeared pro se at the DOHA hearing not by choice, but as a direct result of the agency’s calculated actions, which amounted to a constructive denial of counsel.

I had retained highly experienced counsel for the preliminary stages. After a significant financial investment, that attorney, with four decades of experience, told me this was the most egregious abuse of the system he had ever seen. But once the Air Force placed me on indefinite suspension without pay—ignoring mitigating factors and my protected FMLA status—it became financially impossible to continue that representation. On paper I still “had the right” to counsel; in reality, I had been rendered unable to pay for it.

The hearing itself was not a forum for due process; it was an exercise in procedural injustice. The Administrative Judge allowed what felt like trial by ambush. The government provided the EEO Report of Investigation—thousands of pages—right before the hearing, making meaningful review impossible. They also withheld a dispositive RAND Corporation report that independently validated my protected disclosures.

Defending myself under these conditions meant confronting a case built on misrepresentation and procedural corruption:

• Reliance on a false pretext. The government’s central justification was the CMI that OSI had already concluded was baseless, officially stating that no classified information was ever sent, yet it was still presented as fact.

• Use of a sham medical review. They leaned on the fake “medical board,” using an unqualified reviewer to override eight board‑certified specialists and undermine my rights under the Rehabilitation Act, even though OPM later found me fully disabled for my position.

• Improper resurrection of old Navy incidents. They revived and distorted decade‑old, already‑contested events from my Navy service—events where subject‑matter experts had testified I was acting as a whistleblower—and repackaged them as evidence of misconduct.

Ultimately, the hearing was the culmination of a multi‑year campaign of reprisal, where the administrative process itself was weaponized to achieve a predetermined outcome. My appearance, pro se, was not a choice; it was the symptom of a system that had already stripped away my income, my health, and my access to exculpatory evidence.

The Physical Retaliation (2024–Present)

The Medical Evidence

1. The stroke

Q. You suffered an ischemic stroke in August 2024. Where were you, what happened, and what do your doctors say caused it?

Glenanne Johnson:

I was at home on August 20, 2024, working to meet a critical deadline in my legal case against the Air Force. I suddenly felt an intense hot spot on my head, and the left side of my face went numb, like a strong dental anesthetic. The paralysis progressed, and I was taken to a local hospital. Unfortunately, the facility was not equipped for stroke protocol, and I was sent home; my neurologist later confirmed that an immediate MRI should have been performed.

Initially, doctors were uncertain of the cause. But subsequent discoveries—radiation‑associated cataracts and verified measurements of high‑intensity microwave radiation at my home—have led us to believe this was not a random medical event. We now suspect it was the result of a directed‑energy attack, what the government calls an Anomalous Health Incident, or AHI.

The temporal proximity is striking: the event occurred as I was preparing legal filings against the agency. A similar neurological event involving loss of feeling in my hands and feet happened in March 2022, immediately after the draft RAND report validating my disclosures was sent to the Air Force for review. At the same time, my physicians referred me to the Walter Reed National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE)—the government’s own facility for treating these injuries—and the Air Force has withheld the simple one‑page administrative memo required to schedule the appointment.

When you put it all together—a massive decline in health after I reported the breach, objective evidence that I am being exposed to microwave energy, and the Air Force withholding standard care while the supervisors involved are the exact types of engineers who design these systems—it raises a disturbing question about what taxpayers are really funding. A foreign adversary has no power to block a referral memo or create a fake medical “expert.” That has to come from inside, and it needs to be investigated.

2. The cataracts

Q. Four days after you measured microwave levels exceeding 10 mW/cm² at your home, you were diagnosed with cataracts. You were 45 years old. What did the ophthalmologist say when they saw them?

Glenanne Johnson:

The ophthalmologist’s reaction was immediate and alarming. He told me he normally only sees these specific types of radiation‑associated cataracts in radiologists with years of high‑level occupational exposure.

He put the radiation levels into stark clinical terms. The FCC’s permissible exposure limit for the general public is 1 mW/cm². The occupational limit for radiologists—who he starts screening at age 35—is 5 mW/cm² averaged over the workday. Four days before my diagnosis, my own calibrated meter recorded pulsed microwave radiation at my home above 10 mW/cm²—more than double the occupational limit for a radiologist and roughly ten times the public limit.

His official letter conservatively diagnosed “early onset cataracts,” but his verbal explanation made the cause clear: in his words and framing, I had been irradiated. This was the turning point. It was the first objectively verifiable medical evidence directly linking extreme energy readings at my home to a concrete physical injury. It corroborated what other specialists, including my rheumatologist at Mayo Clinic, had suspected—that an external factor, not just my underlying autoimmune condition, was driving a severe and rapid decline in my health.

3. “If irradiated”

Q. Your ophthalmologist said these cataracts could only be present “if irradiated.” Did they elaborate on what that meant? Had they seen this before?

Glenanne Johnson:

Yes, and his explanation was chilling. When he used the term “irradiated,” he meant tissue damage from a significant dose of non‑ionizing radiation—in this case, high‑intensity microwaves. It is not a word he uses for everyday, low‑level environmental exposure. It signifies exposure intense enough to physically alter and damage the cells of the eye’s lens.

He told me he had seen this cataract pattern before, but only in a very specific group of high‑risk professionals: radiologists who work around powerful imaging equipment for their entire careers. Even with their occupational limit of 5 mW/cm², he does not typically see this damage until they are older, which is why he starts pre‑screening them at 35.

To see that specific type of radiation damage in a 45‑year‑old member of the general public, knowing that my home readings periodically exceeded 10 mW/cm² and were consistently in the 4–6 mW/cm² range, was completely outside the norm. His use of “irradiated” was a clinical confirmation that my body was being subjected to an external energy source powerful enough to cause cellular damage—something he said he had not seen outside high‑risk occupational settings.

4. The scleroderma

Q. You were diagnosed with scleroderma, a rare autoimmune connective‑tissue disorder, which led to your medical retirement through OPM. When did symptoms start, and what do your doctors say about the timeline relative to your whistleblowing?

Glenanne Johnson:

My first clear symptoms of scleroderma appeared after my whistleblowing on Sentinel and associated disclosures at AFNWC and AFOTEC. I had been healthy enough to pass multiple military‑standard medical evaluations and to work long hours in high‑stress acquisition roles for years. The cascade of symptoms—vascular issues, skin tightening, GI problems, and lung involvement—began in the same window that I was reporting the Nunn‑McCurdy breach and foreign‑code issues to the IG and senior leadership.

Seven board‑certified specialists eventually confirmed the diagnosis and documented how aggressively it was progressing. Those diagnoses were the basis for my Office of Personnel Management medical retirement, which OPM ultimately granted, finding me fully disabled for my position.

My doctors have been careful not to attribute causation to a single factor, but several have noted in writing that the timing and severity of my decline are not typical for idiopathic scleroderma. They have pointed to extreme stress, possible toxic or radiation exposures, and the documented microwave readings as likely exacerbating factors layered on top of a rare underlying condition. The picture they see is not just an autoimmune disease appearing out of nowhere; it is an autoimmune disease rapidly worsening in a context of sustained external assault and institutional denial of care.

Living Under Threat

5. Daily life inside an AHI

Q. What does your daily life look like now, living with these injuries and the fear that they may not be accidental?

Glenanne Johnson:

Every part of my day is shaped by trying to reduce exposure and manage symptoms. I plan my movements around when and where I have recorded the highest microwave readings, and I treat my own home as a potential threat environment.

Physically, I live with constant pain, neuropathy, visual disturbances, and the lingering effects of the stroke. Simple tasks—reading a document, helping my son with homework, even cooking dinner—are now calibrated against dizziness, fatigue, and pressure sensations in my head. Emotionally, there is a constant background question: “Is this flare random, or is someone turning a dial?”

At the same time, I am still litigating a federal case, managing medical appointments, and trying to parent my son through his own symptoms and school attacks. It feels like running a complex program on a damaged system: everything takes more time, more energy, and more recovery, and there is no off switch.

6. Leaving home

Q. Given everything you’ve described—AHI, stroke, cataracts, and hostile activity at your son’s school—what does it feel like to leave the house now?

Glenanne Johnson:

Leaving the house is a risk calculation every single time. At home, I at least have some ability to monitor and mitigate. Once I step outside, I lose most of that control.

There is the normal fear any chronically ill person has—Will I get sick while I’m out? Will I make it back?—but layered on top of that is a second fear: Will something “coincidentally” happen while I am out or while my son is away from any shielded environment? Recent attacks on him at school, combined with the FBI’s refusal to even take a report, have only amplified that.

At the same time, we cannot live our lives entirely indoors. So I plan trips with the discipline of a mission: shortest routes, safest times, lowest‑risk locations, and constant contingency planning for medical or security emergencies. It is not how anyone should have to live in their own country, especially after serving that country in the way I did.

What the Institutions Told Uncovered Investigates

Between May 10 and May 15, 2026, Uncovered Investigates sent detailed right‑of‑reply requests to the Department of War Office of Inspector General (DoW OIG), the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center (AFNWC), the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals (DOHA), Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane, AFOTEC, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and other relevant offices. Each request summarized the specific allegations to be reported and offered an opportunity for an on‑the‑record response by close of business May 15, 2026.

Department of War Office of Inspector General.

In a statement dated May 13, 2026, DoW OIG said it “adheres to all applicable legal requirements when reviewing whistleblower reprisal allegations,” noted that the U.S. Office of Special Counsel has primary jurisdiction over most civilian appropriated‑fund reprisal complaints under 5 U.S.C. § 2302 (except in matters involving security clearances), and stated that it was “aware of a publicly available U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board decision regarding Glenanne Johnson.” The statement did not address any of the specific factual allegations or procedural concerns described in this report.

Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center.

AFNWC public affairs received a right‑of‑reply request via its web portal on May 10, 2026, and a follow‑up email on May 15 that reiterated the allegations concerning Dr. Thomas Spencer, Cynthia Felkins, and Dr. Nicolas Ferry and set a close‑of‑business May 15 deadline for comment. In a May 15 email, AFNWC replied that its “official response is that we do not comment on ongoing litigation” and declined to address the detailed questions about Johnson’s allegations.

Missile Defense Agency.

On May 10, 2026, Uncovered Investigates requested comment from MDA on allegations concerning Lt. Gen. Heath Collins, now director of the agency, including his alleged role in the Sentinel “Classified Message Incident” and subsequent promotion. In a May 15 email, MDA public affairs declined to comment directly and instead referred all questions “to the Air Force” and the SAF/PA press desk. SAF/PA did not provide an on‑the‑record response by the reporter’s stated deadline.

No substantive response by deadline.

As of 6 p.m. Eastern on May 15, 2026, DOHA, NSWC Crane, AFOTEC, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Department of War (outside of the OIG statement above) had not provided any on‑the‑record response to detailed requests for comment sent on or around May 10 and followed up on May 15 with a close‑of‑business deadline.

Conclusion: What This Case Really Shows

This is not just the story of one engineer and one ruined career. It is a case study in how a modern national‑security bureaucracy can quietly turn its tools inward—against the very people it depends on to tell the truth. It shows how classification systems, medical review boards, security‑clearance processes, and even basic access to healthcare can be weaponized to make a single, inconvenient citizen disappear.

At every critical junction in Glenanne Johnson’s story, the system faced a choice: fix the problem or fix the whistleblower. When she reported a looming Nunn‑McCurdy breach and foreign code in a nuclear‑weapons program, the Air Force could have treated her disclosures as an early‑warning system and used them to avert catastrophe. Instead, according to her federal complaint and corroborating records, it chose a different path—fabricating a security incident, enforcing illegal gag orders, creating a sham medical board, and blocking access to the only specialists trained to treat the injuries she and her son now live with.

The pattern that emerges is not one of bureaucratic “mistakes.” It is coherent and repeatable. First, discredit: invent a spill, erase a legitimate performance record, manufacture an “unacceptable” rating. Second, isolate: impose gag orders, cut off secure‑network access, block promotions, and construct a failed “job search.” Third, degrade: ignore documented disabilities, deny accommodation, withhold medical referrals, and allow injuries to compound. Finally, when the target will not go quietly, question their sanity, fixate on their emotional state, and cast them as paranoid rather than as a source of evidence.

If this playbook is allowed to stand, it will not stop with one whistleblower. A system that rewards multi‑billion‑dollar failure with promotions while destroying those who expose it is a system that has inverted its purpose. A system that can tolerate deniable attacks on its own engineers and then block their access to care is a system that has lost its claim to moral or constitutional authority.

The remedies here will not come from hashtags or sympathy. They will come, if they come at all, from concrete acts of power:

• From judges willing to enforce sanctions for obstruction, tampering, and discovery abuse, even when the defendant is the Department of Defense.

• From members of Congress willing to demand full, unredacted production of the RAND report, internal classification guides, and NICoE referral chains—and to legislate real penalties when agencies retaliate against those who come forward.

• From inspectors general and career prosecutors willing to treat fabricated security incidents and sham medical boards not as “internal matters” but as what they are alleged to be: frauds on the court and on the public.

For other would‑be whistleblowers reading this, Johnson’s case is both a warning and a map. It shows the cost of speaking up in an era when failure can be a career path and truth‑telling can be a career‑ender—and it shows what it looks like to keep fighting anyway. For the rest of us, it poses a simpler question: if a system can destroy someone like this in silence, without consequence, what makes us think it will be there when we need it?

What, if anything, will we do about that now?

This report is based on a large body of official records, including redacted Army 15‑6 investigation files, Office of Special Counsel correspondence, OSHA documents, internal “lessons learned” memoranda, clearance and debarment records, and related filings. A curated, fully redacted document set corresponding to the citations in this report is available via secure Dropbox at: https://tinyurl.com/uncoveredinvestigates

All files in that folder have been redacted to remove personal identifiers and other sensitive details while preserving the substance of the underlying records. Readers are encouraged to review the source materials directly to examine the evidence and context for themselves.

Editor’s Note: This investigation was originally reported and published by Uncovered Investigates on April 29, 2026. It has been archived here in The Whistleblower Files as part of our permanent whistleblower repository.

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Back in January, I published an investigative exposé called Hidden in the Open, which detailed a long history of OSHA and EPA violations at Naval Support Activity Crane in Indiana. As a born‑and‑raised Hoosier, I never knew I grew up roughly two hours from one of the world’s largest naval bases — or that it played a central role in the nation’s munitions and national‑security work. When I hit publish, I figured that was the end of it.

This follow‑up is not an argument to shut down Crane, nor is it a simple “Crane bad” story. NSA Crane, CAAA, and NSWC Crane do far more for national security than most of the public will ever see. The problem is not that this installation exists, or that it is important. The problem is how it is run — and how its culture and structures have created conditions where someone like Rick Ward can be right on the facts and still see his life dismantled for saying so.

Three months after Hidden in the Open, the same safety chief I had briefly covered asked if I wanted the real story. This isn’t a report about violations. It’s a report about what happens to the people who report them, and what happens when an agency doesn’t want its problems fixed.

What Was Hidden in the Open

Before we get into Rick Ward’s story, let’s recap that exposé that started it all. Hidden in the Open laid out three interlocking accountability problems at NSA Crane. First, the report traced a pattern of environmental compliance failures: the EPA had cited the base in 2018 for uncontained waste filters and unregistered burn sites, resulting in a consent order and fines.

By 2021 the Navy claimed it had fixed the problems and the EPA closed the case. But in 2023 and 2024, new inspections found the same categories of violations again — mislabeled hazardous waste, storage beyond legal time limits, unsafe mixing of volatile materials, outdated emergency plans, and falsified burn records. In 2025, the EPA formally proposed a $248,243 civil penalty, suggesting that institutional compliance had either never taken root or quickly eroded once oversight eased.

Second, the report centered on Rick Ward, a civilian safety chief at Crane Army Ammunition Activity. Ward had spent years warning supervisors that explosives were being handled with uncertified chains and slings, that safety systems were decades behind, and that the same underlying problems that had led to a 2013 explosion still hadn’t been fixed. He spent roughly one year at CAAA before being fired, then returned for another year supporting NSWC Crane in a USAF uniform. His complaints eventually went to various outside agencies, including OSHA, the Inspector General, and the Office of Special Counsel. After he filed an OSHA complaint and later turned in a critical safety report — a copy of his own investigation into that complaint — CAAA sent him home on administrative leave within an hour, confiscated his phone and computer, took his CAC badge, and escorted him out “like a criminal.” The later consequences did not all happen at once: the NSWC and NSA Crane debarment letters came later, after separate events, while pressure involving his clearance and access continued in parallel. The report framed Ward’s case not as an isolated personnel dispute but as a pattern of retaliation against the one person who tried to force the base to confront its safety culture.

Third, Hidden in the Open showed how deeply the regional economy depends on Crane. The installation spans 62,463 acres, generates over $3 billion in annual regional economic impact, and is the 11th‑largest single‑site employer in Indiana. In Martin County, defense‑sector employment tied to Crane accounts for about 96% of jobs — effectively making it a single‑employer economy. Yet there’s little evidence of contingency planning for base reductions or closures, and current economic development strategies revolve around attracting even more defense contractors instead of diversifying the region’s base. The report treated this dependence as a structural vulnerability: when accountability failures are ignored, an entire community is left hostage to Pentagon decisions made far away.

In short, the exposé argued that NSA Crane isn’t just a technical or bureaucratic problem — it’s an institutional ecosystem where environmental violations keep recurring, safety whistleblowers are punished instead of protected, and an entire region has been built on the assumption that the base will never truly be held to account.

Rick Ward’s story didn’t start with that report — it started before it. But Hidden in the Open gave his experience a frame: here’s what it looks like when someone tries to fix a system that, by design, is more interested in protecting its own image than in protecting its workers or its neighbors.

Part II: What Happened to the Safety Chief

If Hidden in the Open documented what was going wrong inside Crane’s fences, the Ward file shows what happened to the person whose job it was to say so. This is not just Rick Ward’s story as he remembers it. It is a paper trail of Army investigations, Office of Special Counsel findings, OSHA correspondence, and Inspector General letters that together confirm serious safety failures and trace what happened to the safety chief who insisted on putting them in writing.

From a 2013 explosion to a “substantial likelihood of wrongdoing”

The story begins years before Ward ever set foot at Crane Army Ammunition Activity. In 2013, an explosion in a pyrotechnics building injured workers at CAAA, and the fire came after the explosion. Both the Army’s own 15‑6 investigation and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel’s later summary to the President noted that OSHA identified the lack of a proper process safety management program as a contributing factor and that CAAA and its higher headquarters were supposed to implement PSM in the aftermath. Ward has also said that an OSHA inspector involved in the 2013 pyro investigation later told him OSHA had been told to stand down because it was “the Army’s problem,” and that the Army then chose not to fix anything once the outside pressure was gone.

The significance of that 2013 explosion is not just that workers were hurt. It is that the Army’s own internal paperwork shows the agency understood, at least behind closed doors, that Crane had deep systemic problems. An obtained “Lessons Learned” memo dated July 2, 2013 lays them out in blunt terms: no process hazard analysis for cleanup work, no written cleanup procedures, lockout/tagout failures, improperly rated equipment in hazardous areas, poor equipment awareness, incomplete explosive certifications, weak fire-prevention measures, and emergency-exit deficiencies inside the building itself. So while the Army has never publicly stood at a podium and said the 2013 explosion was a preventable institutional failure, its own internal document reads like an admission that it was.

Ward arrives in that context in October 2019, moving laterally into the role of CAAA Safety Chief to gain supervisory experience after not being selected for another safety position — a nonselection he suggests was driven by nepotism. Within months, the relationship between Ward and CAAA management was already strained. A March 5, 2020 memo informs him he has not successfully completed his supervisory probation and will be reassigned from supervisory to non‑supervisory GS‑13 status for alleged performance and conduct issues.

The federal government’s formal involvement escalates in early 2021. After Ward files detailed disclosures about safety hazards, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel reviews his submission and, on February 25, 2021, formally tells him it has found a “substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” at CAAA. Under 5 U.S.C. 1213(c), that is the legal threshold for forcing an agency‑head investigation. OSC refers Ward’s allegations — possible violations of law, gross mismanagement, and a substantial and specific danger to public safety — to the Acting Secretary of the Army for investigation.

Why Ward’s warnings mattered

To understand the weight Ward’s concerns should have carried inside Crane, it is necessary to look at who was raising them. Ward did not arrive at CAAA as an inexperienced outsider. He brought more than two decades of environmental health and safety work, high‑risk assignments across the federal weapons complex, and a performance record that, on paper, tracks closer to promotion material than to the caricature of a problem employee.

Academically, Ward holds a B.S. in Environmental Health with an industrial hygiene minor and an M.S. in Health and Safety with an occupational safety management focus, both from Indiana State University, with GPAs above 3.8 in each program. He later completed a graduate certificate in public management at IUPUI with a 4.0 GPA in a NAVSEA‑sponsored program. Professionally, he is credentialed as a Certified Industrial Hygienist, Certified Safety Professional, Certified Hazardous Materials Manager, and CP‑12 Army Safety certified in explosive safety, with additional training as a radiation safety officer, laser safety officer, and in advanced CBRN consequence management.

His military record tells a similar story. Ward was never a second lieutenant. After six years as an enlisted E‑4 specialist in CBRN, he took a direct commission to first lieutenant because he already had a master’s degree. As of 2025, Ward had more than 25 years of service, nearly 19 of them commissioned, with later promotion to major and a rack of federal and state decorations more consistent with a solidly performing field‑grade officer than a chronic malcontent. Honors include a Meritorious Service Medal, multiple Army and Air Force Commendation Medals, and state awards recognizing humanitarian and volunteer service. At the Air Force’s Bioenvironmental Engineering Officer Course in 2014, he graduated as honor graduate, ranked first of 18 officers, with instructor comments describing him as an “outstanding officer, scholar, and leader” with a “limitless future”.

His civilian safety work before Crane also points in one direction. From 2004 onward he served as an industrial hygienist and later as a physical scientist in occupational health and safety roles supporting NSWC Crane and related Navy activities, conducting safety studies for complex weapon systems, serving as a subject‑matter expert on industrial hygiene programs, and managing programs involving lead, cadmium, asbestos, lasers, fall protection, and indoor air quality. A 2008 letter of appreciation from Naval Health Clinic Great Lakes praised his work as a senior industrial hygienist who “expertly applied [his] extensive knowledge and experience to reduce the potential for occupational illness and disease” and described his professionalism and devotion to duty as exemplary.

Even after his termination at CAAA, employers across some of the most tightly regulated environments in the federal system continued to rely on his expertise. Ward returned to NSWC Crane on active duty as a USAF major, supporting them as emergency manager for exactly a year under a PFI tour that NSWC had requested by name, while the Navy paid him in a USAF uniform. He later worked as an industrial hygiene and safety professional at Los Alamos National Laboratory on nuclear weapons production operations, at the Savannah River Site supporting radioactive‑waste infrastructure, and as a construction safety professional on a major Toyota battery plant project. In parallel, he taught safety engineering as an adjunct professor at Indiana University Bloomington. None of the records in the current file sets show prior disciplinary actions, adverse performance reviews, or documented misconduct in any of his DoD roles before his CAAA tenure. Character letters from military and civilian colleagues describe him as technically strong, deeply committed to safety, and willing to press uncomfortable issues to protect workers.

This is the context in which Ward’s safety warnings landed inside CAAA. The person raising alarms about process safety management, electrical classification, and explosives handling was not a junior hire struggling to meet expectations. He was a decorated safety professional with advanced credentials and a long record of being trusted with hazardous missions and secure environments. The question, then, is not whether he was qualified to identify the risks he reported. It is why a system that had every reason to value his expertise chose instead to treat him as the problem once he insisted those risks be addressed.

What Ward said was happening inside CAAA

The records in Ward’s file draw a sharp line between his allegations and the government’s findings, but taken together they describe a safety program with deep structural problems.

Ward’s documented complaints to supervisors, outside agencies, and investigators alleged that:

Electrical systems in pyrotechnic and munitions areas were not properly classified or built to required hazardous‑location standards where energetic materials were present.

A decade after the 2013 explosion, CAAA still did not have a fully compliant process safety management program for high‑hazard operations, despite both OSHA and Army rules requiring one.

Lockout/tagout procedures existed on paper but were not implemented with the required postings, equipment labels, inspection records, or documented energy‑control procedures.

Fall protection was handled informally and lacked a written program that actually met OSHA and Army standards.

Weight‑handling equipment, including chains and slings, showed lapsed certification tags in buildings tied to explosives handling and movement.

ESAMS data and safety tracking deficiencies were significant enough that Ward emailed his Army commander about them before he ever filed his OSHA complaint.

Ward’s account also includes specific episodes that illustrate how those complaints were handled. In one, he says he emailed his Army commander about options for demilitarizing 16‑inch battleship rounds that, in his view, contained enough explosive to kill everyone in the building if something went wrong. According to Ward, his immediate Army supervisor told him to “stop this now,” and Ward then forwarded that email chain to a Navy manager, who replied that he would not have done anything differently than Ward had done. Ward identifies that Navy manager as the same official who later “blew up” at him in the office after Ward emailed the Navy base commanding officer about previous explosions on and off base — a verbal confrontation Ward describes as a turning point in how his efforts to go up the chain were received.

By October 2020, these were no longer just internal complaints. The Cincinnati OSHA Area Office sent CAAA an October 20, 2020 letter summarizing allegations that chains, hooks, and slings had not been inspected, that electrical systems in specific buildings were not correctly classified, and that pyrotechnic operations lacked required PSM controls. OSHA chose not to conduct an immediate on‑site inspection; instead, it told the Army to investigate itself and report back — a decision that pushed the burden back inside the same chain of command Ward had been fighting against. Ward has also said that when he later called OSHA back, he was told they could not take his complaint because CAAA was “military unique,” that they “never should have taken” the last one, and that “someone on duty that day messed up in our office.” In Ward’s account, CAAA had requested military‑unique status, OSHA approved it, and the request was misleading and designed to circumvent requirements.

What the Army and OSC actually found

Once OSC forced a formal inquiry, the Army appointed a 15‑6 investigating officer in March 2021 and conducted an investigation through June 2021. The redacted 15‑6 report, along with OSC’s October 2022 closure letters, shows that Ward’s core allegations were not brushed aside.

According to those official records:

Hazardous‑location classification concerns were fully substantiated. The Army found some historical classification work, but also concluded there was insufficient evidence that CAAA had evaluated rooms and areas under the correct definitions or that employees understood how those classifications should guide operations as they changed.

Process safety management failures were substantiated. Investigators determined CAAA did not have proper PSM implementation under AR 385‑10 and 29 C.F.R. 1910.119, describing this as part of a broader challenge in military industrial settings but still a real and ongoing deficiency.

Lockout/tagout problems were partially substantiated. A local regulation existed, but investigators could not locate required documentation such as posted procedures, labels, inspection records, and lockout‑device logs across the equipment set.

Fall‑protection gaps were substantiated. The report found some verbal awareness of fall hazards, but no written program that met OSHA and Army requirements, and it recommended that CAAA adopt the Navy’s fall‑protection guide as a tenant on a Navy installation.

Weight‑handling equipment concerns were partially substantiated. Investigators identified equipment with lapsed certification tags even as the report emphasized that uncertified gear was not observed in use during site visits.

Three other allegations — about building inspections, unbolted pallet racks, and outdated postings — were not substantiated, in part because issues had already been corrected or could not be shown to be ongoing.

OSC’s role did not end with the referral. On October 11, 2022, OSC told Ward that the Army’s investigation had substantiated or partially substantiated his allegations and that OSC considered the Army report to meet statutory requirements and to be reasonable in its findings. That same day, OSC sent a summary to the President and the relevant congressional armed services committees, stating that five of eight allegations were fully or partially substantiated and describing corrective steps the Army said CAAA was taking, including a contracted hazard analysis of roughly 2,000 energetic‑activity areas and a review of about 1,500 pieces of equipment for lockout/tagout procedures. Ward’s own whistleblower comments on the report, however, are important context: he has argued that even where the findings were justified, they were heavily “sugar coated” and far softer than the real conditions he reported.

In other words, the federal oversight record does not depict a rogue employee generating baseless complaints. It shows a safety chief raising alarms that were serious enough for OSC to find a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing and for the Army’s own investigators to validate core parts of what he was saying.

How the institution treated him

By the time federal investigators were validating the substance of Rick Ward’s safety concerns, his own position inside Crane was already collapsing. On paper, Crane Army Ammunition Activity (CAAA) and later Navy officials framed their actions as performance management, discipline, and security prudence. Laid out in sequence, the pattern looks much closer to a campaign to remove, discredit, and ultimately neutralize a whistleblower whose disclosures could no longer be dismissed as exaggerated or unfounded.

The first break came in March 2020. CAAA removed Ward from his supervisory Safety and Occupational Health Manager role during his 12‑month probationary period and reassigned him to a non‑supervisory GS‑13 position, citing performance and conduct issues. In his account, the reassignment was both a demotion and an early signal: reporting too many problems would not be tolerated.

According to Ward’s statements and filings, his treatment after that reassignment made the demotion unmistakable. He reports being removed from his office and told to sit in a corner and not talk to anyone because he “brings up too many problems,” banned from conducting building inspections because he “finds too many safety problems,” and reassigned to intern-level work despite being a GS‑13 step 8. These details come from Ward’s own descriptions, but they align with a familiar pattern in retaliation cases: strip the whistleblower of authority, isolate him, and use his marginalization as a warning to others.

The next formal step was a letter of reprimand on August 19, 2020, charging Ward with being absent without leave (AWOL) on July 8, 2020. Ward has consistently described this as a manufactured infraction. He says he followed his normal leave procedure to take four hours off before his son’s birthday party, only to have the leave retroactively denied so it could be counted as AWOL. He also documents that his position description was changed the same day, without his knowledge, to remove union coverage. These claims have not been adjudicated by a neutral body in the present record, but they mark the point where ordinary workplace conflict escalated into formal disciplinary paper.

The retaliation Ward describes sharpened once OSHA became involved. His OSHA complaint was in October 2020. On October 20, 2020, the OSHA Cincinnati Area Office sent CAAA a complaint letter summarizing allegations that tracks, chains, slings, electrical classification, and process safety management were deficient. On October 21, 2020, the new CAAA safety chief emailed Navy Safety acknowledging the OSHA complaint and stating that he “thinks he knows who did it,” identifying Ward as the suspected complainant. That email did not explicitly name Ward, but given that the complaint tracked issues he had been raising for a year and that he had just emailed the colonel about ESAMS deficiencies — after which the colonel refused to meet with him — Ward argues management absolutely knew it was him. Discovery also produced an email from a former coworker saying Ward was talking about filing an OSHA complaint. Because of COVID‑19 restrictions, OSHA instructed CAAA to conduct an internal investigation rather than sending inspectors; Ward was assigned to investigate his own complaint.

On October 28, 2020, within one hour of Ward submitting his investigation report on that OSHA complaint — the same “critical safety report” referenced elsewhere in this story — CAAA sent him home on paid administrative leave. He says his phone and computer were confiscated, his CAC badge was taken, and he was escorted out “like a criminal.” Text messages from the following day show Ward stating that the official reason given was “poor performance over the last few months,” but that, in his view, the real reason was that he kept raising safety problems that made his bosses look bad. The timing is not in dispute: leadership had identified Ward as the likely OSHA complainant on October 21, tasked him with investigating the complaint, and removed him within an hour of receiving his findings.

On November 6, 2020, CAAA proposed his removal from federal service, charging him with seven categories of misconduct. Ward’s attorney responded on November 30 with a detailed legal brief arguing that the charges were duplicative or inflated and that the proposal constituted whistleblower reprisal under 5 U.S.C. 2302(b)(8). Ward says he did not file with OSC until after he had been sent home on administrative leave and management was moving to fire him. On January 5, 2021, CAAA removed Ward from federal service. Those dates are fixed. What remains contested is whether those actions were legitimate responses to genuine misconduct or the culmination of retaliation for protected disclosures and OSHA activity.

Ward has also documented that, while he was still on paid administrative leave and not yet fired, evidence of the very hazards he had been documenting began to disappear. He says his phone was wiped and issued to someone else before he was even fired because he has a text from the person who did it. He is less certain about the computer: he says he cannot prove the machine itself was wiped, only that the computer staffer’s boss “worked late that day,” which is the basis for his suspicion. He also says he cannot say for sure whether a litigation hold was ever placed on his materials at all, and that he believes Crane managers were playing CYA. Those claims are not resolved in the current official record, but they are central to Ward’s view that the institution moved not only to remove him but also to narrow the paper trail he had created.

The conflict did not end with his removal as a civilian. In 2021 and 2022, Ward continued to serve as a Major in the Air Force Reserve supporting NSWC Crane. Ward’s own account, in a sworn statement to the DoD Consolidated Adjudications Facility in November 2023, adds another layer to that period. He stated under oath that in November 2021, his NSWC supervisor told him he was “doing good work and would be extended two more years on active duty.” In early December 2021, after Ward informed his chain of command that a press-release package about his CAAA termination had gone to the Pentagon, that supervisor called him over Christmas break and told him he was no longer being extended.

The contemporaneous record partially corroborates the trajectory, though not the intent. A May 20, 2021 email from Ward to a colleague states that his leadership at NSWC had told him “a week or two ago” they had every intention of keeping him for the full three years if he was interested. Ward’s orders, initially set to end September 30, 2021, were in fact extended to February 28, 2022 by a September 14, 2021 modification. No further extension occurred. Ward says the promised extension was terminated after he said he was going to the press.

In its October 2022 MSPB filing, the Department of the Navy did not dispute that the orders ended when they did. It simply stated that the Personnel Force Innovation program gave the agency “discretion of setting the length of [Ward’s] tour to include not extending his military orders based on mission requirement.” The Navy did not address whether an extension had been verbally offered in late 2021 or whether that offer was withdrawn after Ward disclosed the planned press activity.

He reports that he was eventually denied access to NSWC SCIFs required to perform his reserve duties and that NSWC’s commanding officer contacted his reserve command with concerns about his presence in secure spaces. Ward says he was first told to find an alternate SCIF in January 2021, not February 2022, and points to a January 6 text to his division manager saying he would make up reserve time there when active duty ended. He says he remembers being banned, at least verbally, the next day. By February 25, 2022, NSWC officials were circulating emails referencing “Insider Threat indicators” associated with Ward. Those actions effectively recast a reserve officer trying to perform assigned duties as a potential threat.

Debarment orders cemented his exclusion, but not immediately after his October 2020 removal. NSWC debarred Ward from its facilities in June 2022 after he applied for an NSWC job he had once turned down in 2008. On November 21, 2022, NSA Crane issued a broader debarment order barring him from the entire installation after he had been handing out newspaper coverage of his whistleblower case on base. An internal NSA Navy report characterized him as loud, intimidating, and disruptive, and noted that employees were afraid because he was a “terminated disgruntled employee.” The net result was that the installation whose safety he had spent years trying to improve was now officially closed to him as a perceived security and workplace risk.

While this was unfolding, the national-security clearance system became a second front. On January 7, 2021, CAAA submitted a DISS incident report summarizing the charges used to justify Ward’s removal. Those allegations later appeared in DCSA’s Consolidated Adjudications Services (CAS) materials and in a Statement of Reasons that framed Ward under Guideline E (Personal Conduct) and Guideline I (Psychological Conditions). The effect was to convert disputed employment charges and post-termination conflicts into a narrative of untrustworthiness and instability.

The psychological component of Ward’s clearance saga is one of the most striking. Ward underwent a mental‑health evaluation at Walter Reed that, according to his account, gave him a clean bill of health; he says the Defense Intelligence Agency never forwarded that report to DCSA, leaving his clearance in suspended status while he was mobilized at Nellis AFB. He then received a second evaluation order at his new unit after DIA removed him from his assignment. Ward states that this later evaluation at Tyndall AFB was the one his clearance counsel advised him to stop cooperating with, and that security concerns were ultimately anchored less in a clinical finding of mental illness than in his refusal to continue testing and inferences drawn from his dispute with Crane. In his view, the mental‑health portion of the clearance case rested not on an evaluator identifying a disqualifying condition, but on how his legal posture and history with the command were interpreted after the fact.

Much of the personal-conduct narrative in the SOR derives from the same disputed CAAA misconduct charges and from Ward’s conduct during his ongoing dispute with NSWC. The incident report and supporting forms cite mailing radiation wipe samples without local reading, failing to wear a dosimeter, and emailing a controlled ANSI document as security-relevant behavior. Ward’s attorney argued that these were at most performance issues: that he was unaware of a local mailing procedure for wipe samples that were later found to pose no NRC violation, that he had never been issued the required optically stimulated dosimeter by the command and procured one only after a reminder, and that he inadvertently transmitted an ANSI document without knowledge of Navy licensing markings and immediately corrected course when informed. In that framing, contested performance allegations were repackaged as indicators of broader personal unreliability.

The deepest contradiction in this entire sequence lies between how Ward’s conduct was portrayed in DCSA CAS materials and what federal oversight bodies had already found about his disclosures. On February 25, 2021, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel found a “substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” in Ward’s safety disclosures and referred them to the Acting Secretary of the Army for investigation. The resulting Army 15‑6 investigation substantiated or partially substantiated multiple core allegations: lack of proper process safety management, deficiencies in fall protection and lockout/tagout implementation, hazardous-location classification gaps, and expired weight-handling equipment. OSC later told Ward that the Army report met statutory requirements and appeared reasonable before forwarding it to the President and congressional armed services committees. In short, the government’s own investigative machinery validated the seriousness of the issues Ward had raised.

Yet DCSA CAS materials, as described in Ward’s file, treated his persistence and insistence as evidence of poor judgment, lack of self-awareness, and conspiratorial thinking. The DoD Inspector General’s November 15, 2022 denial of his PPD-19 reprisal complaint further stated that “the evidence does not support that officials submitted any information to the CAS concerning your clearance,” a statement that sits uneasily beside the documented submission of unfavorable-information reporting and the January 2021 DISS incident that helped trigger continuous evaluation. The cumulative effect is that the same system that acknowledged his safety disclosures as valid in one channel treated his efforts to challenge retaliation and exclusion as symptoms of unfitness in another.

Ward ultimately reached an undisclosed settlement with the Army, resolving the formal employment case without a public adjudication on the merits. The clearance process, debarments, and suitability flags, however, continued to shadow his career. After two years at his new reserve unit with a suspended clearance, Ward says that when the clearance status moved from suspended to revoked, he was sent to the IRR in 2025. In practice, the combination of removal, security labeling, and debarment did more than end one job. It marked him in the systems that determine who is allowed to work in the very environments where his expertise has the most value.

From an institutional perspective, this sequence can be described in neutral terms: a supervisor removed during probation, an employee disciplined, a reservist debarred, a clearance questioned, a reprisal complaint denied. From Ward’s perspective — and from the vantage point of the documentary record — it looks like something else: a progression in which each layer of the system was used not to correct substantiated dangers, but to strip credibility, access, and livelihood from the person who refused to stop pointing them out.

Not an isolated case: Johnson and Law

Ward is not the only worker connected to Crane who has alleged retaliation after raising safety or accountability concerns. Another Crane whistleblower, Glenanne Johnson, was not an employee at the ammunition activity. She was an engineer working for the NSWC safety office as a laser safety officer, and her case centers on being punished for refusing to approve what she described as illegal human testing with lasers on enlisted sailors. A third case involves Crane firefighter Jason Law, who was dismissed after a photograph of the 2022 red phosphorus fire reached the media. Law says he was on vacation in Florida at the time of the fire, that a fellow firefighter on base sent him the image, and that he forwarded it to Ward; when confronted about the photograph, he states he took responsibility rather than identifying the colleague who had originally taken it.

These other stories appear in the background of this report rather than at its center, but their existence matters. When a safety chief, an engineer in the safety office serving as laser safety officer, and a firefighter all describe facing career damage after surfacing uncomfortable evidence, it becomes harder to write Ward off as a lone disgruntled employee. More precisely, Ward reported life‑threatening safety issues; Johnson refused to sign off on laser testing she believed was illegal; and Law says he was fired after accepting responsibility for a fire photograph that helped bring a dangerous incident into public view. Ward’s experience sits inside a broader pattern at and around NSA Crane, where pushing hazards toward daylight is repeatedly followed by institutional efforts to push the people who did it out.

What the record proves — and what it cost

Taken together, the official documents and settlement history make a few things clear. They show that Rick Ward’s disclosures were serious enough for OSC to find a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing, compel an Army investigation, and later accept an agency report that substantiated or partially substantiated five of eight allegations. They show that, while those findings were being validated at the federal level, Ward was being removed from his supervisory role, reprimanded, placed on leave, proposed for removal, and ultimately separated from federal service. They show that questions about his security clearance and access followed him into a separate, parallel fight. And they show that the matter ultimately ended in a settlement that Ward and his attorneys are very pleased with — a quiet financial acknowledgment that the institution did not simply dismiss him and move on. What the record cannot capture on its own is the human cost of that process: the lost years, the financial strain, the impact on his family, the career doors that closed once he became “the guy who went to OSC.” That part of the story lives outside the 15‑6 exhibits and OSC letters. It lives in Ward’s own account of what it took to do the job the way he thought it was supposed to be done — and what happened to his life when he refused to stop.

Part III: The Human Cost

The documents in Parts I and II show what happened on paper. Rick Ward’s own words show what it felt like to live inside those decisions — as a safety professional, as a husband, and as a father.

Purpose with a price tag

Ward does not describe himself as religious, but he does describe what happened at Crane as his purpose.

“Even after what I’ve been through. And what my family has been put through. I would do the same thing again tomorrow. Because I honestly think I saved lives. I mean, I personally know 3 times that Crane blew people up and sent them to the hospital since 2004 when I worked on base. 2 times on base, where multiple people up to half a dozen at a time went to the hospital, and one time off base at Bedford Recycling, where a guy got blown up with unexploded ordnance. You only get lucky for so long. And the fact that the OSHA area director called me personally and told me, Rick, you did a great thing. The Army’s going to use all these OSHA findings to get the funding from Congress to fix it. Thank you very much. That, to me, made it all worthwhile.”

For Ward, “purpose” is not abstract. It is bound up in specific people who did not die and in a promise he made to himself when he first moved from environmental work into safety.

“I didn’t start off as a safety guy. I started off as an environmental guy… A gentleman that I worked with on a weekly basis got smashed and killed between 2 trailers. And that shook me up a little bit… My brother had been involved in an industrial accident. And he had put another guy in the hospital… That guy ended up dying too, and my brother killed him on the job at my dad’s business… That really shook me up… I promised myself when I became a safety guy that I would never let somebody die on my watch.”

Administrative exile

On paper, the years after his termination look like a series of new jobs. In Ward’s telling, they were also a form of exile.

“It was a little bit of both, because I excelled in these other positions where I oftentimes doubled and almost tripled my salary… Savannah River Site, working for the Department of Energy, Los Alamos National Labs, working for the Department of Energy… I made substantially more money being fired than I did working at Crane… But I was geographically separated from my family, coming home once, once a month. You know, so that part obviously sucked.”

The retaliation he describes is not limited to a single employer. The same disputed information that started at Crane followed him into other systems.

“When I was hired to work at Los Alamos, I was hired as the senior industrial hygiene and safety professional for the TA‑55 weapons complex… While I was waiting for my Q clearance, I was parked in a wastewater treatment plant… The same made up information that the Army and the Navy at Crane submitted to the Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency… made its way to the Department of Energy, and I never received my Q clearance… I was actually forced to resign from my position or be fired right before Christmas… Because they wouldn’t issue my Q clearance because of the same stuff that was submitted by Crane to the DCSA for my military clearance.”

Asked whether the pattern of distant work was about exhausting him, Ward points to clearance retaliation and the way it cut off the higher‑paying assignments he had been using to support his family.

“To exhaust me financially and emotionally, it was the security clearance retaliation because I was making a ton of money deployed… I’m a bioenvironmental engineering officer, and there’s no shortage of voluntary mobilizations all across the country… The Army attorney found out about it and started sending emails trying to figure out how I could possibly be mobilized without a security clearance… I ended up getting sent home and kicked out of the Defense Intelligence Agency… I then had to find a new reserve unit… until my security clearance was officially finally revoked the day after I had written testimony provided to Congress the first time.”

The family that stayed home

The documents show career moves. Ward’s description centers on the people who did not move with him.

“It was very hard on my children. I have an 8‑year‑old and 11‑year‑old, and they miss their dad. I mean, I miss them too. But, I mean, it was really hard on them. I missed over 3 years of their childhood… that’s the worst thing for me… now that I’ve been home for a little over a year… even though I was offered another job at Savannah River Site, I decided it would be better to come home.”

He describes being home now as the right choice, but not as a cost‑free one.

“It’s been great being home… But the worst part about it is what they went through being away from me… my kids suffered the most… Not having their father around.”

Explaining the contradiction — being validated on the facts but punished in practice — is an ongoing task in his household.

“I did win a settlement against the Army… I do still have an active litigation case against the Navy… It’s good to be able to finally at least say, I told you I’d win eventually. We just had to stick it through… My kids are still pretty young. I try not to tell them too much… They do know that, you know, there was a reason I was away and it was so I could feed my family and pay my mortgage.”

He also connects the difficulty of getting local work directly to his whistleblower status.

“Being on the front page of every newspaper in Indiana and all over USA Today and other online publications, it’s been hard for me to find local employment, even at half pay, third pay of what I’m used to. Because nobody wants to hire a whistleblower. I’ve literally been offered 2 jobs in writing that were later rescinded after they looked at my LinkedIn.”

Suitability flags and the stalled future

Ward summarizes the impact on his career in blunt terms.

“I have roughly 22 years of federal service under my belt. And you need 30 years of service to get your full retirement. So I need 8 more years of federal service to get my full retirement. And the only federal employer around Southern Indiana is Crane. And so the fact that I’ve been blacklisted, and they refuse to even give me job interviews, some for jobs I’ve even turned down 15, 20 years ago. They refuse to even score my resume or give me interviews. And I’m a disabled veteran. That’s against the law and that’s what my current litigation’s about.”

He knew what it might cost when he filed.

“It’s very frustrating because I want to be able to retire. I knew I was going to give it up when I filed the OSHA complaint on the Army. I knew they were going to fire me. I knew they were going to… blacklist me, but that was the price I was willing to pay to potentially save lives.”

The work he is doing now captures the disconnect between his credentials and the roles he can get.

“Professionally, it totally sucks. And the pay sucks. But emotionally, and family‑wise… I’m in a much better place being home with my family, even if I’m not making money.”

Witness to the predicted fire

In 2020, Ward warned repeatedly that inadequate process safety management and storage practices at Crane could lead to a mass‑casualty event. Two years later, more than 114,000 pounds of red phosphorus stored outdoors under a tarp caught fire. When asked what it was like to see that, he described a mix of dread and vindication.

“I honestly initially thought they were probably going to try to pin it on me and say that I did it just to prove my point. But I mean, I know I had nothing to do with it. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they did. And I honestly had that moment of, you know, I hate to say I told you so, but I did repeatedly and you didn’t want to hear it… That was really the first thing that went through my mind… I told them it was going to happen. Something bad was going to happen and here it is. So it was a little bit like vindication, but I’m glad nobody was hurt. I can say that.”

The knock at the door

Ward describes the day Navy CID and local police came to serve his debarment order as a choreographed warning.

“Luckily my family was at school and at work. I was just in the basement, you know, watching TV or something when that Navy CID agent rang the doorbell… When I got outside, and the 2 police officers had their hands on their guns, it was pretty obvious to me. They were just hoping that I did something stupid or said something stupid that they could pull down on me… I’m sure they were told that I was some volatile, just unhinged, crazy person who knows what I might do and who knows if I might show up with a shotgun or whatever. Because that was the narrative that Crane, Army, and Navy both tried to pursue… that I was just some sort of crazy person.”

He contrasts that show of force with how a previous NSWC debarment was handled.

“I actually received a debarment order before that from Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane, the day I applied for an environmental branch manager job that I turned down in 2008. Then the day I applied I was given a NSWC Crane debarment order. That was served to me by certified mail. I still got the letter… The show of force on my front doorstep with the CID agent and the 2 police officers was obviously meant to send a message that I better shut up or I was going to be held accountable. Because they didn’t like me handing out newspapers.”

His relief is that his children did not witness it.

“I’m very thankful they weren’t home. My kids would have been traumatized by it, probably.”

Settlement without restoration

Ward is constrained in what he can say about his settlement with the Army, but he is explicit about how it happened and what it meant.

“I’m allowed to say that in October of 2024, I signed a settlement with Crane Army Ammunition Activity, and my attorneys and I are very pleased with the outcome.”

He is also clear that the Army tried to attach silence as a condition.

“They tried to buy my silence. They’d make me sign a gag order that I couldn’t talk about anything, but I refused to sign that gag order, but I did agree to sign a nondisclosure agreement as to what they actually provided me. I can’t talk about that part… It was very clear that they didn’t want it to go to the hearing because it happened a week before the scheduled hearing. They waited for me to spend the money to get there and do all the depositions and do all the attorney stuff… and then the week before made a real offer.”

He experiences the settlement as partial vindication, but not an endpoint.

“It does feel like vindication. It’s unfortunate that I’m not done yet. I still have active litigation against the Navy at Crane, and I still have a fight for my security clearance so I can get back in the Air Force and possibly get a future good job again. Guys with my education and experience and background need that security clearance to do the high‑level jobs. And if you don’t have the security clearance, you’re not gonna get it.”

Asked whether he would trade the settlement for restoration and a public admission, Ward’s answer is that acknowledgment is already on the record.

“I would not. I mean, the EPA already came in and said, hey, you know, over 100,000 pounds of red phosphorus, these guys are all ate up and all these problems, all the hazardous‑waste violations. The OSC report already justified 5 of the 8 allegations… OSHA even came in later and did a wall‑to‑wall inspection… that also justified dozens more safety violations. I don’t need that.”

Legacy, integrity, and refusal to walk away

Ward is acutely aware of how whistleblowers are framed.

“I want people to understand that I’m not a crazy whistleblower. I tried to fix this internally for a year, beating my head against the wall, fighting my managers, talking to commanders that refused to even meet with me after I sent them emails of all the proof. That’s the reason I filed this OSHA complaint in October of 2020… I sent [my commanding officer] a list of the deficiencies in the database that I created… Then I asked for 5 minutes on his calendar, and he refused to even meet with me. That weekend, I filed the OSHA complaint because I was upset my commanding officer wouldn’t even talk to me. That’s the straw that broke the camel’s back… And I’d do it again tomorrow.”

Asked why he has not simply walked away and started over, he gives two reasons: the work itself and who he believes that work protects.

“First off, I really enjoy safety. And it’s what I went to college for, what I’m certified in, everything under the sun, Certified Industrial Hygienist, Certified Safety Professional, Certified Hazardous Materials Manager, CP‑12 explosive safety Level One, Level Two. I’ve been doing this my entire adult life, and I don’t want to do anything else… I just don’t know how to reinvent myself… And I’m also just very stubborn. And, you know, my dad was a Marine. He didn’t raise a quitter. I continue to fight. If I’d have done something wrong, I’d probably have given up years ago. But I know I didn’t do anything wrong. I know I probably saved lives. I’m going to continue to fight till it’s over.”

His view of Crane as an institution is nuanced and points directly at management culture, not the workforce or the mission.

“One thing I want people to know about Crane in general is most of the people that work there are very qualified engineers and scientists that do a really good job for our warfighter. It’s not a bad place… It was once I went to the Army that my life got destroyed… The problem with Crane, in my opinion, is that the management of Crane is, in my opinion, it’s by far the worst I’ve ever seen in any military installation I’ve ever been to. It is run by civilians that are protecting their empires… They destroy people’s lives and careers for fun is like what it appears to me. They just think they’re untouchable.”

Then he says the part that, more than anything else in this interview, defines who he is for the purposes of this report.

“Even after everything, everything they put me and my family through. Ruining my military career, ruining my civilian careers. Getting my security clearance revoked, all that stuff. Because of my love for human beings and my love for the military and the Department of War and Crane in general, having spent most of my career there. I would go back tomorrow to work for the Navy. And help them fix it. Their safety stuff, their environmental stuff, their hazardous materials issues, everything they’ve been in the news about with EPA reports and in my press and stuff. I would go back and help them fix it. And there is not a single person on that base that is more qualified than me to do that.”

For Ward, the choice was not between hating Crane and protecting his career. It was between accepting an unsafe status quo and insisting it change. The documents in Parts I and II show what that insistence cost him. His own words in Part III show why — even after all of it — he still says he would do it again.

What the institution told Uncovered Investigates

Over more than a decade, Crane Army Ammunition Activity and its higher headquarters have consistently described safety as their top priority. After the March 28, 2013 pyrotechnics explosion that injured five workers, CAAA issued a press release stressing that “the safety of our workforce has to be our number one priority and it is not something that can be left to chance or luck” and that only by “encouraging a culture of safety in the workplace and never being complacent about it” could the command protect “our most precious resource, our people”. The same release highlighted CAAA’s Voluntary Protection Program Star status, described “open dialogue with OSHA,” and framed the post‑explosion work as partnering with OSHA to “bridge the gap between the Department of Army Explosives Safety Regulation and OSHA’s Process Safety Management Standard”.

In 2026, when Uncovered Investigates sent the Army a detailed right‑of‑reply letter summarizing key findings of this report and asking for point‑by‑point confirmation or correction, the institutional language was similar.

On April 27, 2026, Justine Barati, Director of Public and Congressional Affairs for Joint Munitions Command, acknowledged the inquiry and later provided the following statement for publication:

“The U.S. Army takes workplace safety very seriously, especially when it comes to inherently dangerous activities such as ammunition handling and production. At Crane Army Ammunition Activity, the safety and well-being of employees are always top priorities. The matters raised by Mr. Ward were properly investigated by the Army; these investigations did not indicate that any personnel at CAAA were in imminent danger of being seriously injured. However, we always encourage our employees to identify areas where the command can improve, especially in the areas of life, health, and safety. We will continue to do everything we can to protect our most precious asset, our people, and always welcome input on how we can continue to make CAAA indispensable to the readiness of the joint force.”

Barati’s statement, like the 2013 press release, emphasizes three themes: that safety is a top priority, that the Army properly investigated Ward’s concerns, and that no imminent danger to personnel was identified. Those themes are important, and they represent the official position of the command. They also sit alongside a public record that documents something more complicated.

The 2013 pyrotechnics investigation produced an internal Lessons Learned memorandum that identified serious systemic deficiencies at CAAA, including the absence of a process hazard analysis for cleanup operations, a lack of written cleanup procedures, failures in lockout/tagout, improperly rated equipment in hazardous locations, gaps in operator training and explosive qualification, and emergency‑exit deficiencies inside the building itself. The memo is not a press release. It is a technical document written for internal consumption. Read together with OSHA’s 36 notices and CAAA’s own description of the explosion, it shows that the Army understood, at least internally, that the 2013 incident reflected more than a one‑off mishap.

Eight years later, in response to Ward’s disclosures, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel found a “substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” at CAAA and referred his allegations to the Acting Secretary of the Army for investigation. The Army’s subsequent 15‑6 report substantiated or partially substantiated five of eight allegations, including failures in process safety management, deficiencies in lockout/tagout implementation, inadequate fall‑protection programming, gaps in hazardous‑location classification, and the presence of expired weight‑handling equipment. OSC later described the Army’s findings as reasonable and forwarded them, along with Ward’s comments, to the President and congressional armed services committees. Whatever else can be said about Ward, the federal oversight record does not support the idea that his concerns were baseless or that the systems he flagged were functioning as intended.

The timeline surrounding his OSHA complaint also raises questions that generalized assurances cannot fully answer. On October 20, 2020, OSHA sent CAAA a complaint letter regarding safety conditions in pyrotechnic operations. On October 21, CAAA safety leadership emailed Navy Safety acknowledging the complaint and stating they believed they knew who had filed it, identifying Ward as the suspected complainant. Because of COVID‑19 constraints, OSHA directed CAAA to investigate internally; Ward was assigned to investigate his own OSHA complaint. On October 28, within one hour of submitting his internal investigation report, he was sent home on paid administrative leave. In its right‑of‑reply inquiry, Uncovered Investigates asked the Army whether it disputed that this sequence of events occurred. As of publication, the Army has not provided a specific answer to that question.

Barati’s statement stresses that “these investigations did not indicate that any personnel at CAAA were in imminent danger of being seriously injured.” That language echoes the instinct to frame the matter in terms of imminent risk rather than documented deficiency. Yet afterward, the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2023 and 2024 inspections found hazardous‑waste storage violations, mislabeling, mixing of incompatible materials, emergency‑planning failures, and improper storage of moisture‑sensitive aluminum powder in ways that “did not minimize the possibility of a fire or explosion” — as well as a 114,000‑plus pound red phosphorus fire that federal documentation tied to deficient storage practices. The question raised by this record is not whether Crane Army cares about safety in the abstract. It is why the same categories of problems have reappeared, in different forms, despite years of internal and external warnings.

It is also notable what the Army has not yet said. In its right‑of‑reply letter, Uncovered Investigates asked whether the Army disputed this report’s summary of which of Ward’s allegations were substantiated or partially substantiated in the June 2021 15‑6; whether it disputed the specific October 2020 OSHA timeline; and what the current status is of corrective actions described in OSC’s October 11, 2022 letter, including the hazard analysis of roughly 2,000 energetic areas and a review of approximately 1,500 pieces of equipment for lockout/tagout procedures. As of publication, the Army has not provided detailed responses to those questions. If such responses are provided after publication, this report will be updated to reflect them.

The intent of this section is not to suggest that public‑affairs officials in Rock Island or at Crane are “in on” retaliation or coverup. It is to set the institution’s own safety claims alongside the documents the institution itself produced: the Lessons Learned memo after the 2013 explosion, the 15‑6 findings after Ward’s disclosures, the OSC correspondence, EPA’s inspection reports, and the OSHA and DISS timelines. Taken together, those records show an organization that talks about safety as its highest priority, even as its internal and external investigators keep finding the same kinds of failures — and as the safety chief who forced those findings into view pays a price the institution does not yet publicly acknowledge.

Conclusion: What Crane Tells Us

Taken together, the records and the testimony in this report describe more than a troubled installation. They describe a system that has learned how to live with its own alarms. Environmental violations recur in the same categories even after enforcement actions. Internal “lessons learned” memos acknowledge serious failures after explosions, but those lessons do not prevent the next preventable fire. Federal investigators substantiate or partially substantiate safety allegations, yet the people who forced those findings into the light are the ones who end up exiled from the place they were trying to make safer.

Crane is unusually revealing because the stakes are not abstract. A single installation dominates a regional economy, controls the livelihoods of thousands of people, and handles materials that can burn, explode, or poison when management gets it wrong. The same federal government that calls the installation an economic engine and publicly emphasizes its “culture of safety” has also documented repeated hazardous‑waste violations, process‑safety gaps, and emergency‑planning failures on its grounds. When those facts coexist with 96 percent county‑level dependence on defense employment and no visible contingency planning, the choice not to fix problems is itself a kind of policy.

Rick Ward’s story, and the other retaliation cases around Crane, show what that policy looks like at human scale. A safety chief raises concerns that are later vindicated on paper, and then spends years living out of state, and why the person who tried to keep people alive is the one who lost his job. A Laser Safety Officer becomes a formal whistleblower case. A firefighter photographs a dangerous fire and loses his position. The message that sends inside the fence is as clear as any written regulation: the riskiest act is not mishandling explosives, but documenting that they are being mishandled.

The institution’s public statements sit in tension with its own record. After the 2013 pyrotechnics explosion, CAAA told the public that “the safety of our workforce has to be our number one priority” and highlighted its partnership with OSHA and VPP Star status. In 2026, Joint Munitions Command reiterated that “the U.S. Army takes workplace safety very seriously” and that “the matters raised by Mr. Ward were properly investigated” with no imminent danger found. Yet those statements stand alongside an internal Lessons Learned memo cataloguing systemic failures, an OSC finding of a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing, an Army investigation that substantiated or partially substantiated core safety allegations, EPA findings of renewed fire and explosion risks, and a 114,000‑plus pound red phosphorus fire tied to deficient storage. The gap is not just between words and deeds. It is between what the institution says about safety and what its own documents say about how safety actually worked in practice.

This report does not argue that NSA Crane should close. It argues that a facility this large, this central to a region’s survival, and this hazardous when it fails cannot be allowed to police itself in the dark. The patterns documented here — recurring environmental noncompliance, retaliation against safety voices, and a regional economy with no contingency plan — are not just local management problems. They are warning signs for every community whose single largest employer is also its least accountable institution.

The final question is not whether Rick Ward was technically correct about process safety management or hazardous‑waste storage. Federal documents have already answered that. The question is whether a federal system that punishes the people who force those documents into existence can credibly claim to value integrity at all. If telling the truth about preventable dangers leads to permanent career damage, forced migration, and visible shows of force at a whistleblower’s front door, then the real hazard is not only inside the magazines and chemical drums. It is embedded in the way power responds when someone insists that safety rules apply here, too.

What happens at Crane will not stay at Crane. Other installations are watching how this story ends — and so are the workers deciding, today, whether to say something the next time they see a shortcut taken with someone else’s life on the line.

Original Report: “I Probably Saved Lives”— The Rick Ward story

When institutional rot takes root, the official press release is usually the last place you’ll find the truth.

Real accountability almost always starts the same way: with a quiet choice made by someone on the inside. A worker who notices an intentional accounting discrepancy. A regulatory official watching public safety standards get quietly bypassed. A whistleblower who realizes that staying silent makes them complicit.

That is why we created The Whistleblower Files.

Published under the independent journalism ecosystem of Uncovered Investigates, The Whistleblower Files is a dedicated, single-focus publication built to document insider disclosures, analyze primary-source records, and trace the structural mechanics of institutional cover-ups, all while telling the human impact. When humans blow the whistle, we are there to tell their stories.