 The Sam Adams Award is given annually, usually, but not always, to an intelligence professional who's demonstrated a commitment to truth and integrity no matter what the consequences. The award's named for Samuel A Adams, a CIA whistleblower during the Vietnam War. Previous recipients of the award have included the former NSA senior analyst Thomas Drake, he's going to be speaking at this conference, former British intelligence translator Kathleen Gump, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, former NSA analyst Edward Snowden, former FBI officer Colleen Rowan, also speaking at this conference, and many more. Join us as we celebrate the winner of the 2020 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence and its former MI5 intelligence officer, Annie Mashron. I'm Elizabeth Murray. I'm a former deputy national intelligence officer for the Near East and the National Intelligence Council, and a member of the Sam Adams Associates. I'm honored to introduce our very distinguished guest speaker who will read aloud the Sam Adams citation for the great Russia scholar and historian Stephen F. Cohen, and who better to pay this tribute to Stephen than his partner in adventure and marriage, Katrina Vanden Hubel. Katrina Vanden Hubel is editorial director and publisher of The Nation magazine. She served as its editor from 1995 to 2009. Katrina writes a weekly column for the Washington Post and is a frequent television commentator on U.S. and international affairs. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Boston Globe, among others. Katrina is the author of several books, including one co-written with her husband, Stephen, entitled Voices of Glossnosed, Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers. Indeed, Katrina and Stephen held front row seats to witness those heady years of Glossnose and Perestroika under then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. They lived and worked in Russia for extended periods between 1987 and 1992, and they enjoyed a close friendship with Mikhail Sergeyevich, who by the way just turned 90. Katrina and Stephen didn't always see eye to eye on Russia policy or other political issues, but their love and respect for one another trumped everything else. Ladies and gentlemen, Katrina Vanden Hubel. I want to thank the Sam Adams Award for integrity for honoring my husband, my late husband Stephen Cohen. Let me read the citation. Know all ye by these present that Sam Adams associates honors Professor Stephen F. Cohen with a posthumous tribute for his exemplary scholarship, courage, and integrity. Stephen Cohen is still with us in the hearts of those who knew him and try to emulate his courage. The word comes from core, Latin for hard. It means quote to speak one's mind and heart. Aristotle saw courage as a sine qua non for all other virtue, and plain speak doesn't matter how much you know if you lack courage. Stephen knew a lot about Russia, but at his courageous core, he was also a mensch, influencing hearts as well as minds, whether the hearts of kids playing school year basketball on the Upper West Side or the hearts of presidents in Washington and Moscow. And it was Steve's courageous commitment to historical truth that set him apart from self-styled specialists on Russia bowing to prevailing Russophobic winds. Though Steve often was an outlier, his scholarship and advice were valued by top U.S. and Russian leaders. Three weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, we were with President George H. W. Bush at the summit in Malta, at which Bush reassured Mikhail Gorbachev that the U.S. would not take advantage of the tumult in Eastern Europe. Under Bush's successors, NATO crept east, right up to Russia's border, despite the great diplomat George Kennan's warning that this court would restore the atmosphere of the Cold War. Ever the historian, Steve, put both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin in context, showing that Putin assumed power in a country on the verge of collapse, Yeltsin having allowed the looting and plundering of Russia's wealth, its people's wealth. After the February 2014 coup on Russia's doorstep in Ukraine, Steve quickly explained, with a candor deeply unwelcome in Washington, why Russia reacted the way it did. Steve was controversialized and put in court Putin's pocket. But we, many of you here today, better than Russia watchers, took encouragement in knowing that Steve's analysis was congruent with our own, with your own. Particularly welcome was the seal of approval given by Steve, and I joined to the newly coined acronym enumerating the main forces behind the campaign to portray Russia as enemy. Mickey Mapp, the military industrial congressional intelligence media academia, academia think tank complex, don't forget it. Fortunately, Steve did not have to resort to some of the stuff he had in me, an ally of heart and mind, at the nation, America's oldest, still thriving, weekly opinion magazine of politics and culture and one known for its welcoming of serious scholarship and to views often shunned elsewhere. Our deepest thanks go out not just to the nation, but to the nation, and to Steve who faced into the prevailing war and used a platform for his uniquely astute views on Russia, the country he had, we had come to know so well. Thank you. I just want to say a few words about Steve, if I could. Again, he would have been deeply honored to receive this award. He's would be honored to be with any mushroom with many of those who received this award. He was supremely independent, courageous in his fellowship. He never checked his integrity at the door. He would have been honored to be in your company. Integrity, we spent one night trying to figure out how to say it in Russian. Bariatichnist, on Bariatichnichelovic, he's a man of integrity, a person of integrity. He refused, he did to accept the conventional unwisdom. Steve's work refused to be, he challenged one to be critical minded, to seek alternatives, often stagnant status quo, to stay true to one's beliefs, even if they weren't popular, and to ask unpopular questions of even the most powerful. These are values I carry with me to this day as editorial director of the nation, which Steve introduced me to in Bariatichnist from 1982 to 1987. Many articles and essays beginning in 1979, his last book War with Russia is a collection, question mark, was a collection of dispatches almost all posted at the nation.com. Distilled from Steve's weekly radio broadcasts beginning in 2014, on John Bachelor's radio show, a show very important to Steve, every Tuesday for an hour, if he spoke on WABC and John Bachelor, never pushed him, never changed a word, accepted and welcomed Steve's unconventional views. Steve could sometimes seem like a tough guy, but those who won his trust knew he was a person of generosity, loyalty, kindness. He was known in our neighborhood, on the Upper West Side, as your citation acknowledges, as an infracereal organizer, long-time supporter of basketball tournaments for local, often poor kids. In the US and Russia, Steve mentored and supported young scholars. In the last decade, he set up fellowships for young scholars of Russian history, political science. At the several universities where he studied and taught, Indiana, University of Princeton, Columbia, NYU. He lent his support to the establishment of Moscow State Museum of the History of the Bullone, and to its young director and team who greatly admired him. Life with Steve was never boring. He was a true radical in our family. He had a CD with a dozen variations of my work from Billy Drag to Frank Sinatra. And as the Chronicle of Higher Education subtitled its 2017 profile of Steve, he quote was the most controversial Russia expert in America. Through all our years together, Steve was my backbone, fortifying me for the battles nation editors must wage, often with their own writers, sometimes including Steve. He gave me the personal and political courage to do the right thing, but never more so than when we entered what might be called the Russiagate era. Well, Steve liked to say it's healthy to do research, to have more questions and answers. There was a wise consistency to the historical and political analysis he brought to bear. For example, it is clear in as many articles in the nation and elsewhere in these last decades, he unwaveringly opposed America's Cold War, both during the first, second, and since the end of the Soviet Union. He was consistent in his refusal to sermonize, lecture, or moralize about what Russia should do. He preferred to listen rather than preach, to analyze rather than demonize. Such a stance was no recipe for popularity, which Steve professed to care little about. He was fearless and continued to question the increasingly rigid orthodoxies about the Soviet Union and Russia. But in the last months, such criticism did take its toll on him. Along with others who sought to avert a new and more dangerous Cold War, Steve despaired that the public debate so desperately needed had become increasingly impossible in mainstream politics and media. The months before his death, Steve had been working on a short article about what he called the criminalization of daytime and consistent with that theme, the organization he established, which I'm currently working to revive the American Committee on East-West Accord now on U.S.-Russia Accord, tried mightily to argue and revive reason, dialogue, and a more sane U.S. policy to emotion. Steve was also fearless, courageous, and challenging in confronting the controversies which surrounded him since 2014, in reaction to his views on Ukraine, Putin, collection interference, and more. Physicians he took often elicited slurs and scurrilous attacks. How many times could he be labeled Putin's puppet? Endlessly, it seemed, but Steve chose not to respond directly to the toxic attacks, believing, as he told me many times when I urged him to respond, that they offered no substantive criticism of his arguments, merely ad-harmony attacks. He was increasingly concerned about a younger generation of scholars, though the danger of what we and he thought of as 24th century Republicans and the smearing of those who thought differently about U.S. policy toward Russia. Silence and skeptics and contributing to the absence of a much-needed debate in our politics media academy. He spoke clearly about the media malpractice that was Russia's news, and he worked closely with evidence and documents to reveal the false narrative behind it. But as we know, there has, as of yet, even now, been no reckoning for this media kill, because when it comes to Russiagate, it truly has become too big to fit. I think Steve stayed young, and I know I did, because we continued our walks in nearby Riverside Park as long as possible. Walks full of loving, spirited argument and talk. Perhaps it's because, while Steve was a very serious person, he didn't take himself seriously. On the Saturday after Steve passed, Gorbachev sent these words. Quote, he was one of the closest people to me in his views and understanding of the enormous events that occurred in the 1980s, late 1980s in Russia, and events that changed the world. Steve was a brilliant historian and a man of democratic convictions. He loved Russia, the Russian intelligentsia, and believed in our country's future. For 40 years, Steve was my partner, companion, co-conspirator, sysglutnik, best friend, mentor, husband for 32 years, co-author. I will be forever grateful to him for how his courage shaped all of our work, inspired a new generation. Thank you for honor. I'm honored to read the citation for the Sam Adams Award for Annie Matron. The citation goes with a Oscar, kind of an Oscar. The Sam Adams Associates Oscar is a corner brightener Kindle stick holder, which Colleen Rowley has already assured is in Annie Matron's hands. The citation, no need for all these presents that Annie Matron is hereby honored with the traditional Sam Adams corner brightener Kindle stick holder for shining light into very dark places. If you see something, say something. Long before that expression came into both, Annie Matron took it to heart. MI5, the equivalent of the FBI, recognized how bright and enterprising unflappable Annie was and recruited her as soon as she had finished her studies in Cambridge. Now, the good old boys in MI5 apparently counted on Annie being more malleable, like them, less conscious person, such that she would have no qualms about, for example, the secret monitoring of government officials whose task it was to monitor MI5. Annie would not be quiet about the secret abuse. Her partner and officer in MI6, the British equivalent of CIA, was a person of similar integrity and respectful law, and he became aware of a rogue operation to assassinate Omar Gaddafi of Libya. Now, they decided to blow the whistle on all this and had to flee to France. Many years later, a woman of high station but lower integrity openly bloated when Gaddafi was assassinated. Now, Annie was never charged with a crime, but her partner was put in the now notorious Belmarsh prison. There he was subjected to the kind of abuse Julian Assange is still suffering today on the priest text that he would fly away to Mexico if he were granted bail. Annie Matron has been a very prominent and strong supporter of Julian, and she has also been a much admired mentor to even younger women and men as they seek to become better informed and better advised on issues of integrity and courage, and as Annie puts it, helping them meet interesting people. Annie knows a lot of interesting people. Now, we would be remiss today were we not to call to mind the courageous example of our first two awardees starting 2002-2003. They are Colleen Rowley of the FBI and Katherine Gunn of GCHQ who took great risks in exposing malfeasance and trying to head off the attack on Iraq. And as Julian Assange did when he won the award, we again honor his treasured source, Chelsea Manning, for her continuing courage and her scarcely believable integrity. At Snowden, our Sam Adams awardee in 2013, noted that we tend to ignore some degree of evil in our daily life, but as Ed put it, quote, we also have a breaking point, and when people find that they act. Annie is still acting as one one can see from the role she's playing here as the world ethical data form unfolds. Presented this 17th day of March at the World Ethical Data Form forum by admirers of the example said by the late CIA analyst Sam Adams. In introducing Annie now, I just like to touch on a couple of things that most people probably don't know. She is out of Cambridge, of course, and yet she swallowed her pride and set up two, not one, but two, Sam Adams award ceremonies at the Oxford forum. Besides that, she shared one of our festivities here in Washington that was about four or five years ago. Now, another thing I'd like to say has to do with mentorship. One of the young women that she mentored had the marriage or the courage to ask Sir Richard Dearlove, OBE, more on that later, why he lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. She asked him that openly at Cambridge. Pretty nice deal. Now, where does she get the courage to do that? Well, for me, and she's just one of a legion of younger men and women who take courage and take an example from Annie. On the OBE, I did a little research last night on Richard Dearlove, who was the head of MI6 and who famously told Tony Blair that the CIA was, the US was going to flinch the facts and just use false information to justify the attack on Iraq. The OBE designation I found was very heartening to me because here in America it's overtaken by events. But there in Britain, it means something quite different. I even copied it down somewhere. It's the officer of the most excellent order of the British Empire. So here was one of Annie Machelon's protégés challenging an OBE, not overtaken by events, but an officer of the most excellent order of the British Empire. Well, I'd like to give Annie the designation OMG for how she felt when she saw the abuses of the MI6, MI5. Oh my God. So Annie Machelon, OMG. Thank you. Thank you so much for that kind citation. And I'm so proud to be awarded the Sam Adams Award this year for my work in advocacy and trying to protect and promote whistleblowers and protect and promote the concept of whistleblowing. It's something I felt very passionately about. I had a very strong sense of injustice that I cannot let go of for the last 25 years. And it's been a pleasure working with the Sam Adams Associates as well with some of the other MLDs and some of their events where we've applauded them too. So it feels quite strange for me to be sitting here being applauded by my favourite. Thank you. The reason I feel so strongly about this and retouched upon this is because, of course, I was involved in the whistleblowing case, but a long time ago, way back in the late 1990s. And in fact, I wasn't even a prime whistleblower. It was my partner and colleague David Shaler, also a British intelligence officer, who saw so many things going wrong and to grace them internally and be told just to shut up that we decided to go public and to blow the whistle, to create a bit of a scandal in the hope that there would be an inquiry that would follow that could reform the work of the British spies who were running a mock at that time. Of course, looking back at hindsight, we all know that whistleblowers usually have quite a bad deal. And it's been amazing over the last two decades working with so many other intelligence whistleblowers to hear the similarities. It doesn't matter which country you come out of, we're all treated just as badly. But with the Shaler case, and I do want to raise this because his courage was exemplary. And if it hadn't been for him, I wouldn't now be sitting here being given the Sam Adams Award. So I do want to give him the accolade too and say that his courage isn't astonishing. And the risk he took was astonishing. And the price he paid was astonishing. Because when we do the whistle way back in 1997, we knew that automatically we would face a prison sentence for exposing the crimes of others within the spy agency. And because of that, we went on the run literally around Europe for a month. We had to live in hiding in a remote French farmhouse for a year. We had to then live in exile in Paris for another two years. And David went to prison not once, but twice. First of all, when the French failed to extradite him back in 1999, sorry, the British failed to extradite him back in 1998. And secondly, after David had returned voluntarily to face the music and to stand trial in 2000. And he went back to prison because he was sentenced automatically under the draconian terms of the British Official Superstates Act. So it was a very, very high price to pay personally. Not only did we lose our professional reputations, we lost, of course, our social circle. We hurt our families. And of course, David lost his liberty twice. And we knew the risks when we took this on. But we thought that the risks were worth it because we really felt that what we had witnessed, what we had seen was so bad, so human. And yet bear in mind, we were working in MI5 in the 1990s, which was, I think, probably the most ethical era of their 110-year history. And I say that because up until 1989, they hadn't officially existed. And they could go around breaking whatever laws they wanted to. And of course, after 9-11, the Western Intelligence Guards came off. And all our intelligence agencies went wildly out of control, getting involved with things like extradition, kidnapping, torture, and of course, illegal train strikes around the world. So despite that, despite that, in the 1990s, things were still so bad because there was absolute secrecy protecting the spies within the UK, that the states could be brushing the carpet, the government could be lying to, even though they thought they knew what the spies are doing up to. And lessons went unlearned. So in fact, by not learning lessons from the states, the spies were not protecting us as well as they could have. From this experience as well, I mean, I whistled in a case that David and I were involved in, went on from 1996 when we started planning it, through to 2003, when he'd finally finished his sentence in prison for these three-monthly pages set to society for seven years, a long time to live through. And there are some interesting lessons that I learned during that time as well. One, of course, is having to go through all the machinations of the law and seeing how that can be skewed, even though, you know, British law has always seemed to be one of the best systems in the world. Saki was how the media pushback could be controlled to a large extent by government and by the intelligence agencies. But maybe as well was the idea of living without privacy. So when we were on the run, when we were living in hiding, when we were living in exile, when we went back to the UK, we were definitely considered to be high-level targets by MI5. So we knew exactly what they could do to our privacy. We knew exactly how they would be investigating us. And that lack of sense of privacy, down to not being able to talk freely on the telephone, or knowing that your email is going to be intercepted, or knowing your home is going to be bugged, or even that some of your friends have been pressurized into reporting to the police, is very debilitating, very difficult concept to live with year on year. And of course, you pay the personal price. And that's been difficult. David, particularly, having gone to prison twice and being targeted and attacked by the media, is a very, very sad story. So I do want to give a shout out to him as a whistleblower and as the key whistleblower in this case, and just say congratulations for your courage to be the shareholder. Also, I'd like to point out as well, for learning those lessons, of course, this is how I got involved in all sorts of other activities, things like activism, stop the war, and even the naughty. I had the pleasure of meeting Ray McGovern and Cody Rowley, the famous FBI whistleblower, way back, I think in 2009, it was 2008, when we were all speaking at a conference in New York. And this is how I became acquainted with the Sam Adams associates. And this is why I've also helped them whenever I can in terms of organizing events and raising awareness and raising publicity for other whistleblowers who have come out. And how many of them have come out over the last couple of decades, particularly in America? And their courage is astonishing. Not least, the NSA whistleblowers, people like me and Billy, the former technical director, Kirk Weedy, and of course, Thomas Drake, who went through all the official channels as dictated by US law, and was still threatened with 35 years in prison. And this would very great pleasure as well. I mentioned Tom Drake because he will be speaking at the WEDF, and I will be in conversation with him live at the WEDF, and very much looking forward to it. But despite all this, and despite the fact that the US has learned some very nasty tricks from the UK in terms of using secrecy legislation to persecute whistleblowers rather than persecute spies and traitors, there have still been two notable whistleblowers to have come out over the last 15 years. First Ray mentioned as well is Chelsea Manning, and her integrity and the scale of the war crimes that she allowed for him to publish is astonishing. And the fact that not only did she face 35 years in prison, and even though she was given clemency by President Obama at WEDF, she has then had to go back to prison because she refuses to testify against Julian Assange if he gets extradited to America. So I assume to her bravery, I really do. And of course, probably the most famous whistleblower to come out with the intelligence agency since Daniel Ellsberg is, of course, Edward Snowden. And I followed his case right from the beginning. I remember the first story broke, I think it's the prison program. And I was just thinking, this is astonishing. This has given absolute collaboration to all the darkest beings of geeks around the world about how the American and UK and Five Eyes Network are spying on our spy, the tech corporation. And this is even before he came out and said he was. But then the fact that he did, and the fact that he knew he'd be facing at least 35 years in prison if not life, there are calls even at one point for his assassination. And yet he still did this and exposed so much information of such vital importance to all the world system. I have to say I salute him and I hope for the best of him. And it's so fantastic as well that not only is he a laureate of St. Adam's, but I am now part of that group too. So I feel very proud of that. Looking at the courage of all these previous whistleblowers, is it surely not the time to make sure that they are protected, not persecuted? There is a need for proper accountability of the spy agency for a proper oversight by the governments that are supposed to be holding these spy agencies to account. And also we should set up proper channels where intelligence officers can go through if they have legitimate ethical concerns. And this would be a win-win because it means that the officers do not have to turn their lives inside out and upside down, lose their professional way of life, lose friends and potentially family and also lose their liberties, but actually be lauded for highlighting ethical concerns and improving the work of those spies. This also means of course that as the spies learn from their mistakes, improve their work, they can also better protect us and better protect our way of life against all these multitudinous threats out there. So I think there does need to be a serious discussion about the role of whistleblowers within society and their very value to the core foundations and core values of our democratic society. So just to conclude, I want to thank Samadans for this award. I feel very proud, but also for their friendship and the fun I've had working with them over the years. So thank you for that. And my final thanks will go to my parents. My dad who was an investigative journalist, Nick Mashall, and he actually encouraged me to call the number when I got this very obscure question, a letter from MI5 saying there may be other jobs you'd find more interesting. He needs to ring this number. I said, it's MI5, it's MI5. He said, well, just pull up and see for you. So 10 months later, I walked in and started working as an intelligence officer. So I've always joked ever since with him. It's all your fault dad. So thank you. And finally, finally, I want to pay tribute to my mother who died last year. And some of you in Samadans have met her, of course, particularly at the Berlins that we held. And she thought you're wonderful. And she was really proud of my involvement with your group. And I just want to say thank you, mom. She would have been so proud to have seen this. Here you come, mom.