Dispelling the Falsehoods of Washington Monthly Magazine
by
Major Joseph M. Bail, Jr. (ret.)
Chester, Pennsylvania Police SWAT Commander

Recently, the Washington Monthly published an article entitled, “How We Train Our Cops to Fear Islam,” by Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze. In it, the authors maligned the reputations of Sam Kharoba; John Giduck; retired Marine Lt. Col. Joe Bierly; and retired Army Major Richard Hughbank. I’m going to explain how the authors told portions of the truth, twisted to convey false impressions, and how the information they were given was obtained under false pretenses.
Giduck has a law degree, a master’s degree in Russian studies, and a Ph.D. in Middle East studies. He was contacted by Craze who said he was writing an article on the need for American police to be better prepared to respond to terror attacks. In response to questions about how Giduck knew Russian spetsnaz soldiers whom he interviewed after the Beslan school siege in September 2004 for his book, Terror at Beslan, he explained that years before he had known the former director of the KGB for the St. Petersburg region, Anatoli Kurkov. With Kurkov’s help he met and trained with Russian spetsnaz hand-to-hand combat instructors, and over time met with others from different units. Giduck said he knew men in Alpha, Vityaz, SOBR, Rus and others. However, in the article they say that they called Rus and Vityaz. Rus supposedly said that they never heard of John, and Vityaz confirmed that he had attended some type of “commercial” course, but not any counter-terror training.
To think that Russian spetsnaz units can be called by looking up their numbers in a phone book is ridiculous. Even if they had somehow gotten a number, would anyone really believe that they would tell these unknown people the truth about anything, if they even talked to them at all? Giduck said, “They obviously didn’t want confirmation. If they had, they could have simply asked me and I would have put them in touch with the right people.” Retired Green Beret Sergeant Major John Anderson was given permission to accompany John on some training programs. “They did everything John said. This included counter-terror hostage-rescue and close quarters battle,” he said.
Yuri Ferdigalov was a spetsnaz commando and war veteran. He traveled to Beslan with John as the siege was happening, then on two more trips interviewing those involved in the operation. Yuri confirms that they spent a great deal of time with officers from Alpha, SOBR and Rus. I can verify the same thing as I accompanied them on their final trip. We did days of interviews of Rus commanders on their base. I also met an Alpha officer John wrote about in his book.
Professor Emeritus Walt Copley destroys Stalcup and Craze’s intimation that John did not know a KGB chief. After retiring from the Air Force as an intelligence officer, he became the head of a college criminal justice department. “I had tried for years to get a study abroad in Russia put together, but with no success,” he said. When he met Giduck they immediately flew to St. Petersburg to set it up. One of the first people he met was Kurkov. “Director Kurkov even got us into the Lubyanka, the KGB’s headquarters in Moscow,” he said.
Anderson says Kurkov visited John in Colorado. During one visit Anderson held a dinner for Kurkov. “In all my years in Special Forces I never imagined I would have a KGB head in my own house,” he said.


Giduck flanked by KGB Director Kurkov and his wife Nina,
at Anderson’s house.

The authors also attacked John’s book for reporting the rapes of teenage girls inside the school. “When we first got there all everyone was talking about were the rapes,” Ferdigalov said. “[Everyone was] telling us about how the terrorists brutalized these girls.” “Then somewhere along the line the story from the media changed,” Giduck said. He points out that sometimes the political needs of both sides coincide. “The terrorists and the liberal western press don’t want the world to hear that they are rapists. But also the Russian government recognizes that it appears incapable of protecting its citizens when people think that they stood outside while girls were being brutalized.”
Russian speakers Igor Livits, Lisa Tongren and Lance Alred confirmed that a year ago a spetsnaz colonel visiting John said: “The official position of my government now is that no rapes occurred.”
Stalcup and Craze cited journalist C.J. Chivers who wrote an article about Beslan for Esquire in 2006, and who also insisted that no rapes occurred. Giduck said:
Chivers suffers from the same problem as the rest of us. He wasn’t inside the school either. So just like me, he is left to report what others tell him. In their article Chivers challenges me to give the name of one girl who was raped at Beslan. Two hundred thousand females are raped in America every year, but I bet he couldn’t give the name of a single one of those either. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen to them.
Bierly says, “They misrepresented themselves to me. I was honest in trying to answer their questions and they lied. They said that I did ten years of ‘black ops’ after the Marine Corps. I never said that.”
Hughbank, a decorated veteran with two tours in Afghanistan, insists Craze interviewed him under the pretext that he was a doctoral student conducting research for his dissertation. Hughbank is columnist for Inside Homeland Security magazine, and has written two books on terrorism. He has a master’s degree and graduate certificate in terrorism studies, and is a doctoral candidate in homeland security.

Clearly the targets of the article are experienced Americans providing much needed training to law enforcement. Many statements in the article were false, or skewed to create false impressions. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that we need to stop trusting people like Craze and Stalcup who say they’re on our side.
To see the complete rebuttal, go to www.archangelgroup.org.