How Voice of America’s poor leadership entangled it in a spy scandal

The dangerous loopholes in security vetting of Voice of America (VOA) talent have finally come to the fore.

Poland, in the latest Russia-West prisoner swap, handed over an alleged Russian spy posing as a VOA freelance journalist. The exchange gave up several alleged Russian spies in exchange for innocent American journalists arrested and held hostage in Vladimir Putin’s Russia to intimidate foreign and Russian journalists.

I was greatly relieved to see Alsu Kurmasheva, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist imprisoned on false charges, among those released by Russia.

As the Associated Press reported, one of the released Russians imprisoned in the West, whom Putin personally met at a Moscow airport, was a Voice of America freelancer, Pablo González, also known by his Russian name Pavel Rubtsov. He is a dual Russian-Spanish citizen whom Ukraine and Poland had accused of working for Russian military intelligence. When Polish authorities arrested González in November 2022, I was the first to report that VOA used him as a freelance reporter and had his reporter page on the main VOANews.com website. 

At the time of his arrest in Poland, the initial Voice of America news report indicated no association whatsoever between González and VOA. In response to a subsequent inquiry, the Voice of America’s management tried its best to minimize his role and the impact of his work on VOA’s international and U.S. domestic audience. (A substantial portion of VOA’s English news website’s web traffic comes from the U.S.) 

Voice of America officials had to admit that “Pablo González was a VOA stringer for the VOA News Center,” but they added that since “he had not filed for us since July 2021, his VOA affiliation was not included in the VOA news coverage.” 

González, in fact, had a video report on the VOA website from February 4, 2022, filed shortly before his arrest with another Spanish freelance reporter also used by VOA in Russia. VOA then modified its statement by adding that more recently, González “also provided some camera operator work…in Ukraine.”

I did not know whether to laugh or cry when I saw this deceitful reply from the 100 percent U.S. government-funded news organization which claims to be independent. I used to work for VOA and want to protect it from mismanagement. It still has great potential. But why would an American institution, chartered Congress, hire this obviously unvetted propagandist? 

Instead of admitting the existence of a dangerous employee-vetting and security problem, VOA management doubled down to deflect attention from its own failure to manage its media operations and protect VOA’s credibility. González had done much more than “some camera work” for VOA. He had provided full-fledged video news reports with his own observations and conclusions. VOA used his name, gave him full credit for his reports, and even offered a narrator to voice them for him in English, presumably because VOA editors judged his own English not sufficiently fluent.

Why would someone at VOA go to such great lengths to give González access to its international audience? VOA never made its presumed review of González’s work public so that Congress and taxpayers could assess the management weaknesses that made this possible. 

With the link to González revealed, all VOA did was remove his reports from its website “out of the overabundance of caution,” as its management claimed. However, VOA then produced several news reports presenting him as a victim of unjust detention and mistreatment by Polish authorities. In these reports, VOA extensively quoted statements from González’s lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, denying that his client is “a part of Vladimir Putin’s secret service.” 

What VOA failed to report was that Boye has a record. He was convicted in the 1990s in Spain and sentenced to 14 years in connection with a kidnapping by the Basque terrorist group ETA, which during the Cold War enjoyed covert support from Soviet secret services. More recently, Boye was a lawyer for Edward Snowden, who leaked classified U.S. government documents and fled to Russia. 

When confronted by an outside journalist with information about González’s lawyer and Edward Snowden that was possibly significant for pointing to a link to the Russian government, the VOA management innocently said that its reporters and editors did not know about it. It is not what they did not know but what they did not do. They did not perform basic journalistic checking when quoting someone in their news reports. Any reporter could have easily found this information from open sources on the internet.

The security vetting of Voice of America journalistic talent is the purview of the infamously mismanaged U.S. Agency of Global Media. In March 2019, I warned Amanda Bennett, the then Voice of America Director and now CEO of USAGM, that the VOA Russian Service in Washington was employing a former Putinist state media television host who, before being hired by VOA, had produced anti-U.S. propaganda videos that included anti-Semitic statements and visuals. 

This information was also easily found on the internet, yet VOA management let this individual continue in his on-air role for months until his contract expired. Subsequently, VOA hired even more former Putin media propagandists, as if there were not more than enough truly outstanding exiled dissident Russian journalists for hire in the West today. After the Washington Post called attention to the long-existing problem, VOA dropped just one former Putin media employee. 

After many security-related scandals, the U.S. Intelligence Service revoked USAGM’s authority to conduct employee background investigations. Even then, VOA’s management found a way to hire González as a freelancer. It came as no surprise when both Polish authorities and an independent Russian news website accused González of spying on Russian journalists in the West.

Congress should add the VOA-González matter to the long list of failures by the current USAGM senior management, which includes other former longtime Voice of America leaders in addition to Amanda Bennett.

Another crucial matter requiring urgent congressional investigation is why so many USAGM journalists — a record number — have been arrested in recent years by rogue regimes or left stranded in extreme danger in Afghanistan under the current and previous agency management.

Organizational and employee security is too critical to be left in the hands of failed government executives. 

Ted Lipien was chief of Voice of America’s Polish service during Poland’s successful struggle for democracy. He later served as VOA’s acting associate director and president of Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty.