Tim Ferner carried a gun at all times in Las Vegas but says these days his biggest worry is making sure the gate to the alpacas' paddock is closed. Photo / Otago Daily Times
As Tim Ferner tells it, from his rural home in deep Otago, after 27 years with the US Air Force he had it made. A Lieutenant Colonel, he'd been tasked to help establish a brand new, lavishly funded unit based in Las Vegas, dedicated to finding new ways to win the Global War on Terror.
Funding for the freshly minted Coalition and Irregular Warfare Center was hinted as coming from a slush fund of billions tasked for "black ops". Members were issued with custom-made body armour and commercial lasers, and undertook weekly hand-to-hand combat training.
Now based in Mosgiel and balancing a lifestyle block and a handful of Alpacas with writing a doctorate thesis at the University of Otago on whistleblowing, Ferner recounts fun times taking expensive instruction from a former Mossad operator on how to operate sniper rifles, drive motorcycles in combat and throw knives.
The key takeaway from knife-throwing class? "You cut the distance between whatever you're trying to hit, and make sure the knife spins only once," he says.
Training in Improvised Explosive Devices saw unit members, partly out of boredom, turn each others' desks into crude booby-traps. "Someone would come in and open their desk drawers, and wires would touch and set off firecrackers and scare the shit out of them," Ferner says of CIWC hijinks.
The problem was this job was a lie, and Ferner knew it.
He knew his unit would never see active duty - one member was a diabetic former pilot who'd been stripped of his wings - and the Rambo training and equipment seemed designed almost entirely as a money sink to ensure budgets were drained before the end of each financial year.
The vast majority of people surrounding him at the CIWC were unaccountable private contractors whose main job - if they showed up - appeared to be playing computer games. "It wasn't even Call of Duty, it was Solitaire," Ferner says of the electronic entertainment that was counted as work.
It was 2009, a cancer diagnosis had just seen Ferner undergo a course of chemotherapy, and he returned from treatment with an uncertain diagnosis to find his initially-modest unit had mushroomed like a malignant tumour.
In the two years since it had been founded with the intent of employing around a dozen military staffers and a handful of contractors, it now had a contracting staff of 75 doing little of any practical value.
Ferner found more than $250,000 had been spent preparing a report he considered was less valuable than the one page it was written on.
He'd earlier been trying to raise concerns with his superiors that no one appeared to be providing oversight or accountability for what was becoming a major budget item, but this single-page report ("It was a mind map with about nine bubbles!" he says) was enough to push him over the edge.
"I had cancer and didn't know what the outcome was. I was thinking of my kids, and thought 'If I die right now, and five years down the road this thing explodes and they find out that their father knew the Government was wasting money like this? They're going to think I'm a total dirtbag'.
"So I said 'Screw it, I'm going to go tell the FBI.'"
And with that, Ferner, 53, set in motion a chain of events that would see him spat out of the military to land in Mosgiel. Despite his claims being largely accepted - he received a cheque for more than $1 million as part of a fraud bounty scheme that entitles whistleblowers to up to a quarter of funds recovered - no one has been prosecuted and everyone except Ferner has stayed in the game.
The experience left Ferner, who said he enlisted with high ideals, with plenty of regrets."This is not what I signed up for. I feel like I've wasted my life in an organisation that is corrupt," he says.
Contractor Science Applications International Corporation paid US$5.75 million ($8.97 million) and their former employee Steven Stallings paid US$100,000, to settle government claims of US$42 million in overcharging and using false credentials. Neither admitted any liability, but Stallings was also barred from military contracting for 18 months. That ban has since expired.
Ferner's former superior, the head of the now-disbanded CIWC, was allowed to retire and ended up working for Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii. (In a remarkable coincidence, this is the same office that employed high-profile whistleblower National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.)
Ferner, meanwhile, ended up in Southland, a world away from the sun and gloss of Las Vegas or Hawaii. He says after he blew the whistle he was threatened with being posted to Iraq or Afghanistan, and only avoided this fate after his medical problems allowed him to secure an early retirement.
He now downplays his cancer worries - "blood tests are still abnormal, but if it comes back they can always cut it out," he says - and credits his wife Liz, a Mosgiel native, with the landing in New Zealand with their two teenage sons.
The couple met just prior to Ferner's 1991 Gulf War posting to Saudi Arabia. She worked as a nurse at the King Fahad Hospital, while he trained Saudi pilots how to use C-130 transport aircraft to drop giant daisy-cutter bombs.
He loves his adopted country, and loves the South Island even more. He says he felt he had to carry a gun at all times in Las Vegas, but now has less existential problems. "Now my biggest worry is 'Did I close the gate so the alpacas don't get out?'"
He served at the sprawling Nellis Air Force Base, nearby to tracts of desert where Seal Team Six trained for their most famous mission on a full-scale mock-up of the Abbotabad compound where Osama bin Laden was hiding, and the rumour-attracting Area 51 testing grounds.
Ferner says there aren't any UFOs at Area 51, despite claims by the X-Files to the contrary, but he himself wasn't immune to the draw of the place and once took a hike up a hill overlooking the secret site to check it out.
"They actually do have the camo dudes with guns patrolling the area. They asked us what the hell we thought we were doing," he recalls. He never made it to the top of the hill.
He's also fallen in love with rugby, the proof of which comes from being star-struck by New Zealand celebrities. His former work life saw him brief generals and rub shoulders with then-First Lady Laura Bush, but he recounts a moment of genuine tongue-tied excitement at a chance encounter with Ma'a Nonu. "I didn't know what to say to him!" he says.
Ferner has joined the University of Otago political science department, and found himself at home among a variety of interesting exiles.
The department includes academics who previously served as intelligence officers with the South African military, and even a former foreign minister of Afghanistan.
The head of this international band, Professor Robert Patman, says Ferner is a "man of enormous integrity".
"I don't think he would have put himself through what he has put himself through without basic fearless honesty," he says.
His new student would likely prove a gold mine for helping to tease out corruption and malfeasance among the explosion of military spending after September 11, but the professor was trying to keep his student focused on completing his thesis.
"I think there will be, and we're trying to downplay it at the moment, tremendous potential in non-academic areas. His story and what he's been though has major lessons - not just for New Zealand but for many countries around the world," Patman said.
The Serious Fraud Office, keenly aware that many cases of white-collar wrongdoing can only be exposed by insiders, approached Ferner last year with some questions. He responded with a multi-hour presentation sketching out the scale of unreported government procurement fraud and also why so few were willing to put themselves through the ordeal of complaining about it.
The topic of whistleblowing is something Massey University senior lecturer in journalism James Hollings says New Zealand also needs to take more seriously.
Hollings did his own PhD on the topic and concluded current legislation protecting those seeking to expose wrongdoing in their places of employment - the Protected Disclosures Act - was rarely used as it was not fit for purpose.
"A review of the act found, if you read closely between the lines, the Act is a failure. They interviewed a few people who used the Act and invariably found it was a disaster. You'd be crazy to put your protection in the hands of that Act."
Hollings said New Zealand had a "silence problem" that extended towards suppressing discussion of matters ranging from corruption to mental health, although attitudes were slowly changing.
Pointing to the recent revelation of deceptive conduct at Volkswagen, Hollings said: "Bad business ethics lose you money. Maybe not in the short term, but definitely in the long term."
The shift to academic life, where Patman said Ferner produced his first draft in "record time", has also given the former Air Force officer something to focus on since becoming a civilian, as he acknowledges his foray as a novelist is unlikely to trouble the best-seller lists.
With good humour he says his first effort, Men of the Coin, published as an e-book in February, netted "about $4.31 in royalties so far".
He says the book is "about time-travel, and Nazis using a bell to erase the existence of religion".
And if Ferner himself had a chance to go back in time, would he still have made the same decision to go to the FBI, now knowing it would mark an ugly end to his career?
I've been asked that a zillion times, and it's difficult to answer. I was the guy by myself, on the tightrope, staring into the abyss. In the end, I didn't get justice. The generals got promoted. The only one that got hurt in the end was me.
Perhaps stubbornly, he concludes he'd probably do it all over again.
But he has words of advice for others who are contemplating something similar: "Make sure you know what you're doing."
This recovery is making us sweat, but that might be a good thing in the long run.