10 kilometers above the atlantic ocean off the coast of cape canaveral, florida, when it disintegrated. it was the 1st fatal accident involving an american spacecraft in flight. almost immediately, investigators began to suspect that the culprit with something called an o ring, which experienced a catastrophic failure in flight. and oh, ring very simply is a rubber seal both primary and back up on the joints of a solid rocket booster. the o rings prevent hot gases from escaping through the joints of the rockets for segments. but that's what happened in video that became famous almost immediately around the world. a flash of fire can be seen wearing a ring should have prevented that. and in a fraction of a 2nd, the space shuttle was destroyed. as it turned out, many people inside the national aeronautics and space administration or nasa had been worried about the o rings. engineers at martin cya call. the defense and space contractor that manufactured the o rings, knew that something was wrong, and that there was

a good chance that they could fail. they were in the process of redesigning them and had intended to install new o rings later in 1986. so, but as in most whistleblower cases where the public has a right to know the government keeps the information secret. our next guest is the one who told us what the truth was surrounding the challenger disaster. richard cook was a budget analyst at nasa for mid 1985 until early 1986. that's not a long period of time. what is important is that almost immediately after assuming his position. richard warren has supervisors about the safety of the solid rocket booster used on the space shuttle. he wrote specifically about the o rings saying this quote. there is little question that flight safety has been and is still being compromised by the potential failure of the seals. and it is acknowledged that failure during flight would certainly be catastrophic, unquote. richard cook,

we are so grateful to have you with us. thanks for being here. thank you. right. glad to be here. john. richard, this is such a fascinating story. and one that changed the course of the us based program. i want to start from the beginning of your time at nasa. you were a young man. you were new to the job, but you had the background to see a problem right off the bat and the presence of mind frankly, to warn your superiors. how did that happen? how was it that you were able to determine so quickly that there was a problem? well, let me, let me just say one that young i was 39 years old. but i had been working for the federal government since 1970 really. so over 15 years and i had quite a variety of assignments. i started with the us civil service commission. uh, and then from there i worked at the food and drug administration and i had

a pretty good career trajectory going off. i went into the commissioner's office at the food and drug administration and i was trained as a technical writer as well, but very quickly, i began to work with the scientists of doctors. people had a pretty high level. so i had an extra talking to the expiration and for understanding what was going on. and then i very for 2 of the slay, i got an assignment to the jimmy carter white house where i was there a working in the office of consumer affairs on the issues having to do with consumer economics. so uh, i had a quite a variety of experience and i, i went out of the government for a couple of years. uh, and then came back uh after i had spent some time working for a defense contractor. uh, the t r w a company in

a project that was going on. i don't know, washington dc suburbs. so this is my introduction to the high tech as it were. and nasa picked me up to yard. that'd be offer me a job of the national pick me up and i was immediately assigned to the space shuttle program. i in the comptroller's office and i was suppose to be looking at space shuttle hardware from the standpoint of cost analysis, particularly because there was showing the cost overruns going on. so i got a very rapid orientation to space shuttle hardware because in, in that office you had to work with the engineers, you had to talk to people and find out what was going on. we visited all of the nasa steel centers, including the kennedy space center where i was down there a week before the challenger disaster. but i had the ability, i guess,

to talk to engineers and understand what they were saying. and as soon as i began to work with the headquarters engineers or in the solid rocket booster program, they began telling me the of the potentially disastrous problems with the solid rocket boosters. and being an experience analyst, i wrote it all down. i passed it up to my superiors, was a whole series of memos that i was writing throughout the the fall of 1985 and then uh i saw on the tv monitor at on a nasa headquarters uh, the explosion of challenger and the speculation began immediately uh that day that it looked as though on the films that the solid rocket boosters

were the cause of the disaster as if there had been an explosion. uh and uh, the national meanwhile was putting out the stories. i had no idea of what was going on, the investigation could take months and might never discover the exact clause. but i went back to my notes, to my documents and to the engineers who had been given me all this information. and everybody knew at nasa headquarters exactly what happened and days went on and finally i got tired of trying to raise awareness of this. uh, she sure various channels. so i just said, well, happy with it. i'm gonna take these papers to the newspapers. so i called the new york times and they said, yeah, this looked pretty interesting come on down. and that sunday the or ring papers were published. so that's,

that's kind of how i got into it. another thing that you had, the presence of mind to do was to consult nasa engineers. they to told you that they were worried about the o rings. one engineer told you that he was so worried about the o rings, that every time the space shuttle lifted off, he would hold his breath. why were these warnings discounted wherever they ignored, by the national bureaucracy, habits something like that happened a? well, that's a long story and i didn't really understand the whole story at that time. but i left nasa of the week after i gave testimony to the presidential commission. they did call me to the stand and i did try as best i could to explain. the things that i had written and to point out to them that nasa had known about this problem for many years. so, subsequently i began to collect documents. i published

a couple of newspaper articles including one of the washington posting, got quite a pretty good readership. and it wasn't until i retired from the government in 2007 that i put all the information together to truly, really, really and truly try to understand what has happened. and the primary conclusion that i reached was the space shuttle. and i could see this one i was there, and the space shuttle was in the process of being and george into the department of defense. there was even speculation that at some point it was going to be shifted over a wholesale to the air force. and what was driving there was what was known at the time as the star wars program. this was the president reagan's a weapons in space program that he claimed was a defensive

a system. but in reality, there was a whole series of studies and experiments that were gonna go on in order to use the space shuttle as a delivery platform for putting weapons into space and uh of the budget for the space shuttle was increasingly dependent upon reimbursements from the department of defense and as somebody said to me at one point during less research, you don't tell the department of defense story, we can do this. uh, we gotta stop for a couple of years and fix them do since they couldn't do that. uh, it was, uh uh, the whole uh, it was like a jug or not. uh and, and it was hiding behind this facade that nasa was perfect. the space shuttle was all completely understood, nothing whatever go wrong. all of that was lies. and the little people down in the

system. i mean, i don't mean that disparagingly, but i mean the g s 14 g s 15 engineer is pretty small potatoes when it comes to the entire drift of the federal government into the department of defense. and the white house to do something. and so nobody had the ability to just pull the spoken the wheels and say no, this has to stop the whole, the whole system was railroaded into acquiescence in what the real insiders knew was potentially catastrophic. you argued in an op ed in the washington post in early 1986. the nasa culture was such that it contributed to the disaster. that's something i hear from whistle blowers all across the us government . and especially in the intelligence community. can you explain what you meant by that? what was it about? nasa is culture that made it so difficult to report on

a problem that was in the end. deadly. well, yeah, you're, you're, you know, the phrase, gung ho. uh, i was put on a half that i bought when i was working at treasury and it said us treasury department and this guy came up. so what do you go? uh, everybody in the system, particularly when you get into the military and intelligence side of things, is expected to be going home. and uh, what that means is you are provided by an atmosphere of fear. your whole career, your whole livelihood, your whole self image all depends on whether or not you're going to salute when they run some crazy policy up the flagpole. and if you salute and you're, you're going to make it in the system. if you don't salute is career suicide and

that's the way nasa was. it was the most gun ho atmosphere i had ever seen. i had not seen this and some of my other assignments, including the carter white house. we used to say stuff there, the disagreed with the with a policies and they might even talk to you about it, but no, not a nation. thank you, richard. as we're speaking with was the blower, richard cook, about the events leading up to the destruction of the space shuttle challenger in january, 1986. and the story doesn't end their state to we're going to talk about richard's federal whistle blowing. the release of russian states never is as tight as i'm one of the most sense. community invest ingles, all sense and the same assistance

must be the one else calls question about this, even though we will then in the european union, the kremlin move. yep. mission. the state on the rush of putting s r t spoke neck, keeping our video agency roughly all the band on youtube. the tv service was for the question, did you say you requested the problem was that the name was what i mean? got it. yeah. in order for the lower ability, when, when is the check, i can see where we drove. you have to go to one of

the like what the issue is utah. those are, you know, see going from me to choose what he's already on the policy, you know, in syria, in the most, it won't be seen by easy. it isn't what is it going to get? no, no, and i'm of course it only opened was he got a gun that would allow us to send anyone at all? no, not the

same rom, just don't have to shape out the application and engagement equals the trails. when so many find themselves will support. we choose to look for common ground, the welcome back to the was a close. i'm john to reaku. we're speaking with richard cook about his experience blowing the whistle at the national aeronautics and space administration or nasa just before the failure of an old ring destroyed the space shuttle challenger. that was exactly what richard warren,

his superiors would happen. good to have you with us, richard. thanks for staying. good to be here. thank you. so one more question about the space shuttle richard in 1986 after the challenger broke apart and that's a tried to keep its own fault in it at bay by providing misleading or even dishonest information to the, to the media. you contacted the new york times and let them print key documents that you had collected over time. along with that, you also testified before the roger's commission, which was investigating the disaster and you became instrumental in exposing the white house as cover up regarding the explosion. you only worked at nasa for about 7 months, leaving in february of 1986 the month after the incident. but you still managed to be honest and to do the right thing. what was the fallout from doing that? what was the reaction from your colleagues at nasa, from your superiors and, and even from the white house? well, as i said,

i left national right after i testified before the presidential commission. but i continued to be involved in the aftermath. i gave interviews to the commission staff. i gave interviews to the national office of inspector general, where i discussed a whole lot of other issues having to do with the space shuttle. some of which made her get into the commission's report with many of which did not. and i was also doing press interviews. when i got to treasury or they pulled me into a meeting with the treasury department headquarters. i are taking a job with uh, one of the component agencies which in treasury the financial management service. uh, nobody's heard of them. they process trillions of dollars of government payments every year. and that's a pretty big project that i was starting to work on. but i

was labeled as a whistle blower. in fact, my new supervisor was quite angry at me, but he got a job somewhere else and left. so i was able to, to work and to do my job. but a point came where i actually gave a press conference, where i said that it looked to me as the white house was involved in the flood launch decision. uh, well, uh. as i was told later, the white house contracted the treasury department and told them to fire me. uh, and of course that would have been a personal disaster. but the head of our agency, uh username, was there any douglas? and he was an old, hard bitten career treasury guy earning actually told

the net a treasury headquarters. no, i'm not gonna fire this guy. he's done nothing illegal. and that was the stance that they took when, when the rubber hits the road. because my, with my whistle blowing from that point on, i was always a suspicious character. but i was still a pretty good analyst. and uh uh, i think there was a, a kind of a grudging respect for me that i had one down in the, in the bureaucracy. and so i actually got on pretty well for the next 20 years. retired with distinction. a richard i have to say, and i hope i'm not embarrassing you, but you were something of a whistle blower. superman. you were only on the job at nasa for 6 months and you became a major whistleblower. and then you left nasa and went to the us department of the

treasury. it was there that you exposed serious problems in the monetary system. so tell us what that means, what, what was it that you exposed? well, um okay, that was kind of a uh and evolving process. uh, i did a lot of different kinds of things at treasury. i was an analyst. i was assigned to all kinds of different projects. but later on i began to develop training courses on the history of the treasury department and under us monetary system. and so we ran into at that time, was that there were 2 parts of the government. the 2 never were supposed to criticize. one was the defense department, they had their own a financial system in the course. during that period,

the defense department came up with some many trillions of dollars that were missing. and that's never been explained, but we weren't supposed to go there. same with the federal reserve, the federal reserve was a treasury fiscal agent, and that means they handle all of the x journal funding relation, fisher treasury, including the sale of, of treasury bonds to bills all that and to manage the federal government debt. well, as i began to study this more and more, i began to realize the age that the federal reserve was really not a federal government agency. the federal reserve was a banking conglomerate that was literally owned by the wall street banks. and as i began to investigate just further and, and got into the origin of the federal reserve system,

a more or more began to see the creation of the federal reserve in 1913 as a, almost an insurer rection by them. uh, the money trust against the congressionally mandated for variety of, of, of congress an n and a federal executive branch to create and manage the monetary system of the us. and i began to realize it was this whole federal system that was a federal reserve system with the banks being increasingly due regulated lead to the catastrophes that we've seen over and over again a over the decades of wisdom monetary system including the sea normal financial collapse of 2008, 2009. and so when i began studying this, i began to realize that the monetary authority of the united states had been taken

away by wall street and the big banks, and that it had to be restored. if we were to gain any kind of stability or sanity in our monitor assistant and i still believe that i am still writing about that. you had a long, proud career of 32 years in federal service and you made news more than once you went to treasury already having a reputation is a truth teller, ronald reagan was still president. then the people at the white house who had tried to cover up nasa's and their own involvement in the challenger disaster were still around. so what were things like for you at treasury? was life easier? or did you have to constantly defend yourself because you were a nasa whistle blower? it was a lot easier. and, and, you know, i have a great fondness and respect for the career civil service. and i really began when i joined the government in 1970 with the us civil service commission,

the men or women that i work with. and we're, we're tremendous in professionals with integrity, with confidence and, and it continued that way. uh, to most of my federal career and it was that way of treasury. i really liked it. there. people treated me well. i did my but i moved up the career ladder. i had a lot of interesting projects. and i had a had an honorable retirement when the time came in 2007. and then i continued to write articles and books afterwards. uh, with no rep precautions. i have a tremendous respect for the federal workforce and still do. uh and uh, i had that way all through my treasury career and i, i just really loved it. richard, thank so much for being with us. it was a pleasure president calvin coolidge, one said,

doing the right thing never requires subterfuge. it's always simple. indirect coolage was famously a man of few words, but these words are quite clear. sometimes issues are clear cut, they're right or wrong. doing the right thing is always, always best. just look at richard cook. his truth was in service of the american people. it's as simple as that and history will smile on him because of it. thanks for joining us for another episode of the whistle blowers. i'm john kerry. yahoo! we'll see you next time. 2 2 2 2 2 2 the acceptance, and i'm here to plan with you whatever you do. do not watch my new show. seriously

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