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Rasheeda Bhagat

"THEY took huge professional and personal risks to blow the whistle on what went wrong at WorldCom, Enron and the FBI — and in so doing helped remind us what American courage and American values are all about," goes the blurb of this week's Time magazine cover story announcing the `Persons of the Year'.

This column celebrates the honour shared by Coleen Rowley, Cynthia Cooper, and Sherron Watkins.

Ms Rowley is the FBI staff attorney who stirred a hornet's nest in May 2002, when she sent a memo to the FBI Director Robert Mueller, on how the FBI had not taken seriously pleas from her field office that Zacarias Moussaoui, who was indicted as a co-conspirator in the September 11 attacks on the WTC, should be investigated.

Ms Cooper, senior vice-president of internal audit at WorldCom, recalls the article, "exploded the bubble that was WorldCom when she informed its board that the company had covered up $3.8 billion in losses through phoney bookkeeping."

Ms Watkins is the Enron vice-president who wrote a letter to Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay in the summer of 2001, to warn him that the company's methods of accounting were improper.

While giving them the honour, Time says: "They were people who did right just by doing their jobs rightly — which means ferociously, with eyes open and with the bravery the rest of us always hope we have and may never know if we do. Their lives may not have been at stake, but they put pretty much everything else on the line. Their jobs, their health, their privacy, their sanity — they risked all of them to bring us badly needed word of trouble inside crucial institutions."

While putting the story together, the magazine brought the three women together in a Minneapolis hotel room, for their first meeting. Asked if any of them had been thanked for what they did, they all burst out laughing! Going through the fascinating story, it is clear that all the three came from pretty humble, middle-class backgrounds and were not really "rebels" in the accepted sense of the word. And, their internal investigations/memos were meant to be secret, and were not exposed by them.

To do what they did — blow the whistle on the wrongdoing within their organisations — required a great deal of courage, persistence and a faith in certain values. It required raw courage for the woman to persist with her investigation on the accounting fraud in WorldCom even after bigwigs in the once legendary Arthur Andersen told her to back off, assuring her — sometimes patronisingly and at others almost menacingly — that nothing was wrong with the company's accounts, making her wonder if her job was safe.

Her investigation began when "a worried executive in the wireless division of WorldCom told her in March 2002 that corporate accounting had taken $400 million out of his reserve account and used it to boost WorldCom's income." But with Andersen executives pooh-poohing the whole thing, it required determination of an extraordinary degree to persist.

Coming to the then Enron Vice-President, Ms Watkins, hers is no mean achievement. A recent issue of Wasington Post quoted from her original letter to Kenneth Lay, while pushing for much needed reform in corporate America, with the following admonition to Mr Harvey Pitt, the current head of the SEC: "As he weighs the various reform options, he should keep in mind one passage from the Watkins letter. `The overriding basic principle of accounting is that if you explain the accounting treatment to a man in the street, would you influence his investing decisions?'

Added the Post editorial, "It is extraordinary that any executive should feel the need to point this out to a corporate chairman. Mr Pitt should not rest until chairmen start to behave differently, until accounts really do convey the information that investors need to make (investment) decisions."

Ms Watkins had told her Chairman that Enron's accounting norms were wrong and warned him of "an elaborate accounting hoax". For this bit of work she almost lost her job, her bosses confiscated her computer's hard-disk, and she was "demoted 33 floors from her mahogany executive suite to a skanky office with a rickety metal desk and a pile of make-work projects. The atmosphere had grown so ominous that she had called office security for advice on self-defence," said the Time article. Later, when she had to make a marathon presentation before the House of Representatives, her pastor was seated directly behind her.

Ms Rowley, the FBI Attorney, had always dreamt of working for an intelligence agency since she was a child, a time when the FBI did not recruit women agents. Her office had zeroed in on the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-Moroccan who spoke poor English and had signed up at a local flight school to train to fly a 747. In May 2002, she sent a memo to the FBI Director, Mr Robert Mueller, about how the bureau had brushed off pleas from her office that Moussaoui was a man who must be investigated. All hell broke loose after this internal memo was leaked and she was criticised for daring to put a question mark on the holiest of holy American organisations — the FBI. But the criticism did hurt, as she told Time magazine. "I'm not the most sensitive female in the world. And the people who are closest to you matter most. But you can't help having your feelings hurt when the retired agents are lumping you with (Robert) Hanssen, (a convicted spy) who betrayed everything we stand for."

An interesting part of the Rowley story is that she is a stickler for the smallest of guidelines laid down by the Bureau for its employees. For example, they cannot accept gifts over $20. "So she refused to accept a ride in a rental car paid for by Time, and she handed over $30 to cover her dinner. When she inadvertently bought a Vanilla Coke recently, she took one sip, declared it awful, then drank it all because she could not bear to pour it out," says the magazine.

She owns only two business suits and they date back to the `80s. After the public hearing she received letters from fashion consultants, hairdressers and ophthalmologists offering to "make her over." Of course she turned them down. But her friends had better success in persuading her to change her glasses; not because of what this would do to her looks, but because they kept falling off and were not too practical during her morning run!

Coming to the all-important question on whether these women were able to pull off what they did because of their gender, Ms Rowley says no. "There are many women who have been co-opted, who don't do the right thing. And there are plenty of men who do."

Added Cooper, "We don't feel like we are heroes. I feel like I did my job."

But Ms Watkins had this comment to make. "I do think there's something to being a woman... men are more reluctant to put their friends in jeopardy. I don't necessarily want friendships in the workplace. I think most men have no friendships outside the workplace. Also, society doesn't ask women what you do for a living. Your ego or self-worth isn't (as) tied to what you do.

Time does also raise and analyse the gender aspect. Wondering what to make of the fact that all the three persons of the year ... with "ordinary demeanour but exceptional guts and sense" were women, it says: "There has been talk that their gender is not a coincidence; that women, as outsiders, have less at stake in their organisations and so might be more willing to expose weaknesses. They don't think so. As it happens, studies have shown that women are actually a bit less likely than men to be whistle-blowers."

Of course they can't escape their gender; like when Cooper said that there was a price to be paid for her stepping out to point the accounting fraud at WorldCom. "There have been times I could not stop crying."

But that is not to say that men don't cry; of course they do. Only, they don't admit it.

Talking about men, two of the husbands are full-time dads, allowing their wives to give a lot of time and attention to their jobs!

(Response can be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in)

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