Edmonds made headlines in the wake of September 11, 2001 after she came forward with claims that Bush Administration officials Douglas Feith and Richard Perle helped pass defense secrets to foreign agents, or provided names of knowledgeable Pentagon officials who were vulnerable to blackmail or co-option, during the 1990’s.

Feith became head of the Office of Special Plans, and Perle would become chairman of the Defense Advisory Board during the Bush Administration.

Edmonds’ claims quickly became bogged down in partisan bickering as some Democrats used the revelations to attack neo-conservatives and the new Republican administration.

However, her August 8th testimony circumvents that by including the powerful Democrat congressman, who just happened to be a Holocaust survivor, as well as the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), a bi-partisan group, in the espionage scandal.

“They were 100 percent directly involved,” Edmonds told Military.com. “They were not in the Pentagon [in the late 1990s] but they had their people inside the Pentagon.” One of those people, she said, was Larry Franklin, an Air Force officer assigned to the Office of Special Plans who, in 2003, passed classified information to representatives of the American Israel Public Affairs Office, or AIPAC. By then Feith was leading the OSP.

Edmonds, who has degrees from George Washington University and George Mason University, speaks Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani. She got into the world of FBI investigations and counter-intelligence after 9/11, when the FBI contacted her about coming to work as a Turkish translator. In short order she was on the job and translating documents going as far back as the mid-90s, as well as assisting special agents in the field who were monitoring both “foreign entities” and the public officials linked to them.

But not long after she joined the bureau another Turkish translator came on board – Malec Can Dickerson. And in December 2001 Dickerson and her husband, Douglas, then an Air Force major, tried to recruit her to join American Turkish Council — an organization that was actually being monitored by the FBI. Also, according to Edmonds, Douglas Dickerson had previously worked with Grossman in Turkey and, though assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency, was working for Feith’s OSP and also as a coordinator with the State Department on the Turkey Republics in Central Asia.

Edmonds reported the attempted recruitment, but no action was taken. She said she soon found evidence that Malec Can Dickerson included false information on her FBI job application. Again, no response from officials, she said.

When the FBI finally did act, in March 2002, it was to fire her. When she appealed her termination and eventually sued, the Justice Department, then under John Ashcroft, invoked a “state’s secret’ privilege to prevent her from talking about what she knew. When Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, looked into her case and found it credible, Ashcroft invoked the same gag order on them.

The Justice Department’s own Inspector General’s report was barred from release by Ashcroft, though when an unclassified version finally became available in 2005 it concluded that “many of Edmonds’s core allegations relating to the co-worker [Malec Can Dickerson] had some basis in fact and were supported by either documentary evidence or witnesses other than Edmonds.” And though the Justice Department’s IG found the evidence didn’t prove that the co-worker had disclosed classified information, it said the FBI should have investigated the claims more thoroughly.

Both Feith and Perle denounced Edmonds as “bizarre” and a “nutcase”. Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Eric Butterbaugh said any investigation into the allegations would be carried out by the FBI, although the bureau would not confirm or deny the existence of any such investigation.