How Not to Leak
An odd kind of transparency at the World Bank.
Saturday, September 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
In April, World Bank Managing Director Graeme Wheeler earned his 15 minutes of media fame when he publicly called on Paul Wolfowitz to resign for "the fantastic damage [Mr. Wolfowitz had done] to the bank's reputation and effectiveness." Mr. Wheeler may yet see those words turned against him.
Mr. Wheeler is among the bank employees behind a bureaucratic putsch against Suzanne Rich Folsom, the director of the bank's antigraft unit (known internally as the INT). Toward that end he's supported an independent "review" of INT practices by the Government Accountability Project, a self-described "whistleblower protection organization" that is part law firm and part left-wing shakedown operation. Curiously, GAP decided to go ahead with its report despite the fact that Paul Volcker had already been appointed to oversee an official review of INT practices.
This week GAP released its report--a week ahead of Mr. Volcker's--along with a link to "supporting documentation." As expected, the report is a thinly veiled tirade against Ms. Folsom, accusing her, among other sins, of issuing too many "excessively critical" performance reviews.
That assertion is based on an internal memo written by Aulikki Kuusela, the bank's senior vice president for human resources. The memo, marked "strictly confidential," was posted on GAP's Web site on Thursday morning until the link to the supporting documentation mysteriously went cold. Why? We called GAP communication director Dylan Blaylock yesterday morning, and he promised to get back to us "in just a minute." We heard back from someone else at GAP just before deadline that no one at the group would answer our questions. So much for transparency.
As readers can see for themselves here, the memo includes a reference at the top of an email that it was "Forwarded by Graeme Paul Wheeler," with the note "FYI--the memo that I asked Aulikki to circulate..graeme." The whizzes at GAP missed that detail when they posted the documents, even as they blacked out other names and email addresses. Only later did GAP take the link down.
We called Mr. Wheeler for an explanation, and he replied via email through a spokesman that "I did not share this document outside of my office--nor would I." We also asked if he thought such a leak would violate bank disclosure policy, and he agreed that it would. He did not explain how a note including "graeme" could have found its way onto an email forwarding the memo.
Whoever did the leaking, the ugly infighting at the World Bank has clearly reached epidemic proportions. New President Robert Zoellick needs to get rid of the protectors of the status quo, or they'll be after him next.
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