re: The Federalist is reporting the Whistleblower’s name: Eric Ciaramella

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Eric Ciaramella 04 describes his first trip out of the United States as being equivalent to a child thrown into the deep end of the pool. Rather than wetting his feet with a long weekend in Montreal or a family vacation to the Bahamas, Eric s first glimpse of foreign soil was a three-foot deposit of snow outside of the Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg.

It was during his freshman year at Chase, in the spring of 2001, that Eric was invited on a church-led trip to Russia with the goal of delivering gifts and funds to an orphanage. The trip itself was fraught with ups and downs I remember, as a 15 year old, the joy of discovering a certain Russian chocolate, brimming with vodka. Equally vivid a memory was the horror I felt when presented with a particular Russian delicacy, pickled cow tongue but his journey to Russia instilled in Eric a nearly insatiable passion for traveling to foreign lands and learning foreign languages.

Anywhere else my zeal for different cultures would have gone unnoticed or unfulfilled, but at Chase there were few limitations to what I could pursue.

My initial interest in traveling to Russia was a direct result of our Russian segment in Jim Wigren s World Cultures course. Though reading Crime and Punishment may have encouraged some students to avoid Russia, it was the stark difference between Raskolnikov s life and my own that made me want to travel there.

Upon returning from his trip, Eric immediately set to work learning Russian. Chases art teacher, Rusty Brockman, had been studying Russian for years and was rather proficient, so I asked if he could teach me. It was this first, informal brush with Russian that would end up dictating so much of Eric s academic future. He would later major in Russian and East European Studies at Yale and, at the graduate level, at Harvard.

In addition to his Russian independent study at Chase, Eric enrolled in Spanish, French and Greek, and he took a distance learning course in Norwegian, moderated by college counselor Tina Segalla Grant. In his junior year, he traveled with the School to Spain, and in his senior year, to Italy.

Upon his graduation from Chase, Eric entered his freshman year at Yale. Wasting no time, he immediately enrolled in Russian, Italian and Arabic. In a way, Yale really allowed me to access the rest of the world from my backyard. He soon developed a knack for promoting unique language studies among his college friends, convincing two people to accompany him to Tunisia for a summer-long intensive Arabic course, and to Turkey for a several-week foray into the Turkish language.

After he returned to Connecticut, he became a research assistant for a professor of Middle Eastern Politics at Yale and friends with a Yale linguistics professor, with whom he would later travel to Ukraine in order to help document the endangered Crimean Tatar language. During his four college summers, only one was not spent abroad.

For the summer of 2007 Eric had accepted a job at the U.S. Justice Department s Office of Special Investigations, a branch that was first established to investigate Nazi war criminals, but has since expanded to include modern cases of genocide in Europe, Africa and Asia. It was here that he found the first practical application of his language skills outside of academics and traveling.

The world-wide scope of the office s investigations required the use of foreign records and newspapers, work that was normally contracted out to other translation services. Eric, believing this to be a waste of time, offered to do some of the translating personally, and soon found himself working with documents in Russian, French, Swedish, Danish

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