On the evening of April 3, 2013, a battered blue pickup truck slowly crossed a bridge from International Falls, Minnesota, to the border station at Fort Frances, Ontario. The family inside — a clean-cut middle-aged couple and their dark-haired 28-year-old son — looked like any other vacationers heading north. The father handed over their IDs to the border guards. “We need the protection of the Canadian government under the U.N. convention against torture,” he said. “Because our son was tortured by the FBI.”
It sounded like something out of a Soviet-era spy thriller. Yet the family making the request couldn’t have been more all-American. Paul DeHart, a church pastor, was a retired Air Force intelligence analyst whose work was overseen by the National Security Agency. His wife, Leann, was a former Army voice interceptor. Paul explained that Matthew, their only child, had followed in their footsteps, poring over spy data gathered by drones in the Middle East for the Indiana Air National Guard. They had just driven through the night from their home in Indiana, Paul said, because they were fleeing the country they had once pledged to serve.
Matt, he explained, was a member of the hacktivist collective Anonymous and had created a repository on the Dark Web for leaked government files. After stumbling on a file that he believed detailed an FBI investigation into the CIA, Matt, the family was convinced, was subject to what Paul described as an elaborate and increasingly frightening ruse: raided and tortured by the FBI, hit with bogus child porn charges, shuttled between prisons for nearly two years.
Paul told the agents that his family had evidence to back up their account: court documents, medical records, and affidavits — along with the leaked FBI document Matt had found that exposed an explosive secret. It was all on two encrypted thumb drives, which Matt later pulled off a lanyard around his neck and handed to the guards.
DeHart family in Canada, 2013.
Courtesy of Paul and Leann DeHart
But Matt, as one federal prosecutor had put it, was “your classic child predator.” In order to flee the country and avoid charges, Matt — a seasoned hacker with military ties — had, according to the FBI, tried to become a spy for the Russians.
Today, Matt sits in a prison in Oklahoma after being deported from Canada earlier this month, waiting to face the child porn charges. But he has a high-profile team of believers and backers behind him, including Tor Ekeland, an attorney famous for representing hacktivists, and Jesselyn Radack, the former ethics adviser to the Justice Department who exposed the FBI’s interrogation of John Walker Lindh, the American sentenced to 20 years for joining the Taliban. On March 2, he was named the third beneficiary of the Courage Foundation, an international organization that defends whistleblowers, whose advisers include Daniel Ellsberg, the former United States military analyst who released the Pentagon Papers, and former NSA executive Thomas Drake, who revealed post-9/11 mass surveillance. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange recently said, “The abuse of the law in DeHart’s case is obvious, shocking, and wrong. Matt DeHart and his family have suffered enough.”
If Matt is, in fact, wrongly accused, answers could be on the thumb drives taken by the Canada Border Services Agency, which have yet to be returned to the DeHarts. But without access to the leaked files Matt claims to have seen, there is no way to verify whether he was actually in possession of them, and, if he was, whether they’re authentic. If Matt DeHart is a government whistleblower, he has yet to produce the whistle, let alone blow it.
Back at the Canadian border, as the processing dragged on into the next day, the guards had the DeHarts each write a statement explaining their request for political asylum. “I have loved the United States of America since I was old enough to understand what it meant to be a citizen,” Paul wrote with a shaky hand. By the time he finished the story 11 pages later, he could barely read his words through the tears in his eyes. “What happened to my country?” he concluded. “I plead for your help and protection of our lives. Please help us!!!!”
Air National Guard
Matt DeHart’s earliest childhood memory is walking underground. He’s around 5. The long, dark tunnel spans two mountains. Deep inside there are red flashing lights, and men with briefcases. When he reaches daylight, there’s a little bird outside the entrance. If the carbon monoxide in the tunnel gets too high, his father explains, the bird dies.
The tunnel was part of a bunker at Wheeler Air Force Base in Oahu, Hawaii, where Paul had been stationed by the Air Force in 1986. As a signal intelligence lieutenant who oversaw five other analysts, he was responsible for intercepting radio and telephone transmissions that made their way back to the NSA. Paul’s security clearance prevented him from telling Matt what he did for a living, so the boy was left to his own imagination.
“I thought it was cool,” Matt tells me one morning last June at the Central East Correctional Centre, the maximum security prison in Lindsay, Ontario. Matt has been here since April, following several months of house arrest at his parents’ apartment in Canada. “It was like my dad was a secret agent,” he says.
The past four years have taken a toll: His unkempt black hair droops low over his eyes. This conversation, like each we have in person or on the phone over the course of months, is being monitored. As Matt takes a seat behind the glass and picks up a phone to speak, he apologizes for being sluggish. “I’m groggy all the time from the meds,” he says, referring to a prescription for Seroquel, prescribed for his mood disorder. On a few occasions, Matt has tried to harm himself — pounding his head against the ground, tying his shirt around his neck to choke himself. He insists that his actions weren’t suicide attempts, but his way of calling attention to his case. “There are not many ways to protest if I'm locked up in jail,” he says.
Courtesy of the DeHart Family
Born at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, not far from where his parents worked at Fort Meade, Matt came from a long military line. Paul, whose parents and grandparents had been in the service, and Leann, whose father and brothers served, were conservative, religious, and patriotic. Leann had left her position as a voice interceptor in the Army six years before Matt was born. Paul prided himself on working to protect American citizens without invading their privacy. “You do not intercept anything on Americans, ever,” Paul, a 57-year-old with short gray hair, a goatee, and glasses, recalls being trained. He tells me this one morning last summer over coffee in Ontario, where he and Leann were living at the time.
After retiring as an Air Force captain in 1994, Paul became a pastor in Randolph, New Jersey, where the family lived in the parsonage. Matt was a bright, loquacious kid who played soccer and joined the school’s snowboarding club. But he found his true rebel mojo online, where he played first-person shooters and taught himself to code. He was soon listening to Rammstein and showing up to school sporting a trench coat and a giant Afro. “I wanted to get attention,” Matt tells me with a sheepish grin. “I wanted to be a badass.”
Though Matt shared his parents’ religious beliefs, his teenage rebellion had a darker side. One night, he joked to a friend about bombing his junior high, which earned him an appearance in juvenile court. Paul and Leann chalked it up to the youthful indiscretion of a gifted but harmless boy. Eventually, Matt was diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was prescribed Adderall and Zoloft.
“He was a quirky guy, brilliant, very extroverted,” recalls Josh Weinstein, a classmate of Matt's. “He walked around school like he owned it.”
In Maui, 2004.
Courtesy of the DeHart Family
He also was becoming a hacktivist. Online, Matt identified with the so-called “anti-sec movement,” which opposed the computer security industry profiting from fearmongering. He soon started his own Robin Hood-style hacker crew, nicknamed KAOS (for Kaos Anti-security Operations Syndicate), to crack commercial security software and distribute it online for free. During his senior year, after Matt had another run-in with the school administration, his parents agreed to let him be homeschooled. “He was frustrated because he didn’t fit in the mold,” Leann, a no-nonsense woman with wavy blonde hair and rectangular glasses, tells me.
The next few years were tough for Matt. The family had moved to Indiana, where Paul continued his work as a church pastor. But Matt floundered, dropping out of community college and sinking further into depression. To shake himself out his rut, he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps. In 2008, at age 23, he joined the Air National Guard. “I respect the military a lot,” he says, “and I wanted to impress my dad.”
With Matt’s high test scores and computer skills, the Air National Guard assigned him to the 181st Intelligence Wing in Terre Haute, Indiana, a military unit that has been reported to collect and analyze data from drones flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan, though they would not officially confirm this. Matt was in training to become an all-source intelligence analyst — the same job held by Pvt. Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley Manning), who would later use her high-level access to leak classified government videos and logs about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Once complete, he would receive a top-secret security clearance from the Department of Defense.
The kid who dreamed his dad was James Bond felt like he was becoming a secret agent himself: He couldn’t discuss his job with his family, his friends, even the others on base. “You’re trusted with something and you have this access,” Matt says. “It’s very rewarding.”
DeHart, 2009, Indiana Air National Guard
Air National Guard
In early 2009, Matt claims, he was in the unit’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility when some new colleagues showed up: a half dozen or so liaisons from the Central Intelligence Agency. At the time, the Obama administration was rapidly expanding the CIA's secret drone war. “They were doing the target selection,” says Matt, who at the time didn’t know that the nonmilitary agency was assuming such a role.
But this is one of the many points where Matt’s account diverges from the U.S. government's: Lt. Col. Francis Howard, spokesperson for the unit, tells me that Matt would not have been around this sort of thing during training. “He would not have access to classified information nor would he have been allowed into where missions are conducted,” Howard says.
Matt insists that he had been ordered to analyze images to identify enemy military installations; he says he was told to scrutinize photos of drone strikes and determine how many people had died by counting the number of shoes on the ground. According to a 2014 study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 61% of all drone strikes during the CIA covert war in Pakistan “targeted domestic buildings, with at least 132 houses destroyed, in more than 380 strikes.”
Matt says he was forced to confront the human toll of his work as well as questions about how many innocent civilians were being killed. Like other military people exposed to the trauma of war, he needed somewhere to share his feelings. So he turned to the only real community he had: Since 2004, he had frequented 4chan, the underground image board that gave rise to Anonymous, the global subculture of hackers, activists, and geeks. Matt shares the group’s ideology of what he calls “fighting for information freedom.” The worldview of Anonymous, as he sees it, is as simple as it is uncompromising: “Anybody who hides information is an enemy.”
Concerned about his privacy on base, Matt wanted to create a safe, secure place online where he and his fellow anons and disgruntled airmen could organize and vent. And he had just the solution: the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. In his spare time, Matt would cruise 4chan, quietly recruiting members of Anonymous and other disgruntled airmen to join his Warcraft guild, Viral. To facilitate their communications and maintain privacy, Matt created a secret server using Tor, the online privacy software, and called it the Shell. Using the Shell, Matt and his recruits could freely and securely chat with one another and store sensitive files.
Matt had formed close, intense relationships through the game. Among them, he claims, was Allen Jaycob Deal, a friend and fellow airman at the Indiana Air National Guard. Matt says he was immediately drawn to Deal, who had long hair and seemed to share his concerns about government secrecy. Matt says Deal was a Warcraft gamer who frequented 4chan. “He was a lot like me,” Matt recalls.
In addition to seeking the solace of these others, Matt also sought medical help for his mounting anxiety. That spring, according to the DeHarts, the base doctor found him to be suffering from depression. (Lt. Col. Howard tells me he cannot release the reason for Matt’s discharge due to confidentiality laws.) According to the DeHarts, Matt had disclosed his history with depression from the time he enlisted and the Air National Guard had waived it. However, they say, the extensive background check required for his security clearance raised questions regarding whether his depression was sporadic or chronic. On June 5, 2009, the military honorably discharged him.
Matt was devastated. When Paul recalls hearing the news from his son, as he and I drive back to his apartment in his blue pickup, he chokes back tears. “It’s hard not to get emotional about it,” he says. “Matt was driving back from Terre Haute, and he’s on the phone and he’s crying.”
PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images
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