A dangerous loophole in the security screening of Voice of America (VOA) presenters has finally been revealed.
Poland handed over a suspected Russian spy posing as a VOA freelance reporter in the latest prisoner swap between Russia and the West in which several suspected Russian spies were handed over in exchange for an innocent American journalist who had been arrested and held hostage in Vladimir Putin’s Russia to blackmail foreigners and Russian journalists.
I felt very relieved Ars KurmashebaAmong those released by Russia are journalists from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who had been imprisoned on false charges.
According to the Associated Press reportOne of the released Russians who had been imprisoned in Western countries that Putin met personally at Moscow airport was Voice of America freelance reporter Pablo Gonzalez (also known by his Russian name Pavel Rubtsov). He is a dual Russian-Spanish national, and Ukraine and Poland have accused him of working for Russian military intelligence. When Polish authorities arrested Gonzalez in November 2022, I first reported that VOA had hired him as a freelance reporter and had his reporter page on its main VOANews.com website.
At the time of Gonzalez’s arrest in Poland, Voice of America’s initial reporting stated that there was no connection between Gonzalez and VOA, and in response to the subsequent investigation, Voice of America management did its best to minimize his role and the impact his work had on VOA’s international and domestic U.S. audiences (a significant portion of the web traffic on VOA’s English-language news website comes from the United States).
A Voice of America official was forced to acknowledge that “Pablo Gonzalez was a VOA correspondent at the VOA News Center,” but added that “because he had not applied to VOA since July 2021, his VOA affiliation was not included in VOA’s news reporting.”
In fact, shortly before his arrest, Gonzalez had posted on VOA’s website a video report dated February 4, 2022, that had been submitted to another Spanish freelance journalist also employed by VOA in Russia. VOA later amended its statement to add that Gonzalez had recently “also been offered camera work in Ukraine.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this bogus response from a news organization that claims to be independent and is 100% funded by the U.S. government. I used to work for VOA and want to protect it from mismanagement. It still has great potential. But why would a U.S. institution, a chartered Congress, hire this obviously unvetted propagandist?
Rather than admitting the existence of dodgy employee vetting and security issues, VOA management redoubled efforts to divert attention from its own failures in managing media operations and protecting VOA’s credibility. Gonzalez did more than “camera work” for VOA; he provided full-blown video news reports with his own observations and conclusions. VOA used his name, gave him full credit for his reports, and hired a narrator to dub for him in English, presumably because VOA editors decided his English was not fluent enough.
Why would someone at VOA go to such lengths to provide Mr. Gonzalez with access to an international audience? VOA never released a putative evaluation of Mr. Gonzalez’s work so Congress and taxpayers could assess the management weaknesses that allowed this to happen.
When his connection to Gonzalez became known, VOA simply removed his article from its website out of “erratic caution,” as management claimed. However, VOA subsequently published several news articles presenting him as a victim of unjust detention and mistreatment by Polish authorities. In these articles, VOA published extensive Quote Gonzales’ lawyer said: Gonzalo BoyeHe denied allegations that his client was “part of Vladimir Putin’s secret intelligence service.”
What VOA didn’t report was that Boyet has a criminal record: He was convicted in Spain in the 1990s and sentenced to 14 years in prison for kidnapping. Basque terrorist group ETADuring the Cold War, Russia received covert support from Soviet intelligence, and more recently Mr Boyet served as lawyer for Edward Snowden, the man who leaked classified U.S. government documents and fled to Russia.
When confronted by outside journalists with information about Gonzales’ lawyer and Edward Snowden, information that could be important in pointing to ties to the Russian government, VOA management innocently responded that reporters and editors did not know about it. It’s not that they didn’t know, it’s that they didn’t. They didn’t do basic journalistic checks when quoting someone in a news article. Any reporter could have easily found this information from open sources on the Internet.
Security vetting of Voice of America journalists falls under the jurisdiction of the notoriously mismanaged U.S. Bureau of Global Media. In March 2019, I warned then-Voice of America chief Amanda Bennett, now CEO of USAGM, that VOA Russia in Washington was employing a former Putinist state media TV host who, before being hired by VOA, had produced anti-American propaganda videos containing anti-Semitic comments and footage.
This information was also easily found on the Internet, but VOA management kept this person in his on-air position for months until his contract expired. VOA then hired even more former Putin media propagandists, as if there weren’t enough truly talented exiled Russian dissident journalists available in the West today. After the Washington Post report, Attention was drawn VOA fired one former media employee from Putin’s administration because of the long-running issue.
After a string of security scandals, the U.S. intelligence community stripped USAGM of its ability to vet employees, but VOA management still found a way to hire Gonzalez as a freelancer. It was not surprising then that Polish authorities and an independent Russian news site accused Gonzalez of spying on Russian journalists in the West.
Congress should add the VOA-Gonzales affair to a long list of failures by current USAGM senior management, including Amanda Bennett and other longtime Voice of America leaders.
Another important question that requires urgent investigation by Congress is why so many USAGM journalists – a record number – have been arrested by rogue regimes or placed in extreme danger in Afghanistan in recent years, both under current and former agency custody.
The security of your organization and your employees is too important to be left in the hands of failed government executives.
Ted Rypien served as VOA’s Poland bureau chief during the successful period of Poland’s democratic struggle and later served as VOA’s acting deputy bureau chief and president of Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty.
