The Coast Guard Used Me to Lie to Victims of Sexual Assault at the Coast Guard Academy as Part of their Operation Fouled Anchor Coverup. I Can No Longer Be Part of this System.
** Since resigning from the USCGA and becoming a whistleblower, Shannon has established a YouTube channel where she will continue to blow her whistle **
June 9, 2024
By: Shannon Norenberg
For the past 11 years I have served as the Sexual Assault Response Coordinator (SARC) at the United States Coast Guard Academy. It has been the greatest honor to serve in this role, and to be blessed with the opportunity to work with victims and survivors of sexual assault at the Academy. While someone who experiences this unique trauma will be changed forever, I have been fortunate to help guide many survivors on their journey back to living lives of happiness and peace by encouraging and empowering them towards places of healing. Until recently, I believed this would be my life’s work, and that I would work at the Academy until I retired, content to know that I had made some small difference in the world. However, it deeply pains me to have arrived at a place where I feel morally and ethically compelled to resign from my position at the Academy.
The Coast Guard lied to me. Worse than that, they used me to lie to victims, used me to silence victims, and used me in a coordinated effort to discourage victims of sexual assault at the Academy from speaking to Congress about their assaults and about the Coast Guard’s investigation of their cases. The Coast Guard deceived me into violating a basic principle of my profession, which is to never lie to victims. Although I did not realize what I was doing at the time, I cannot allow this to stand. The least I can offer as an apology to the victims I misled is to tell them the truth, and to ask Congress to finally make these victims whole.
It never occurred to me that my career might end this way, or that I would be forced to come out as a whistleblower against the agency I’ve dedicated my life to serving, and the agency I intended to retire with. Only a few years away from retirement, I’m not sure where I go from here, because I have no back up plan for my career. What I am certain of, however, is that I can no longer in good conscience be part of an organization that would betray me, betray victims of sexual assault, and betray the system I helped set up to hold perpetrators at the Academy accountable. I am absolutely sick about this, and I’m sickened that the Coast Guard has forced me into this position.
My career with the Coast Guard began in 2013 when I was hired to become the Academy’s first full time Sexual Assault Response Coordinator (SARC). The Coast Guard Academy was the first unit in the Coast Guard to have an employee dedicated full time to sexual assault prevention and response. It was an honor to be chosen for this role. At the time, I believed that I could make a positive difference at the Academy by working within the system to create an environment where everyone in the Academy community would be free from the fear of sexual violence.
When I was hired, Coast Guard leaders told me they were serious about ending sexual violence at the Coast Guard Academy, and that they had a genuine desire to hold offenders accountable and change the Academy’s culture surrounding sexual assault. At that time, I believed them.
In my mind, a big part of my job as SARC was to be an advocate for the sexual assault reporting system set up by the Coast Guard. By offering and promoting a viable and trusted way to report, I believed those who had experienced sexual assault at the Academy would have a legitimate pathway for accountability and recovery. From my prior experience serving as a SARC in the U.S. Marine Corps, and from my own military sexual trauma, I knew firsthand that finding accountability could be a vital part of the healing process for survivors. I believed the system set up by the Coast Guard could work if people understood it and were willing to use it.
In late 2018, after more than 5 years at the Academy, I received a call from someone in my chain of command at Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C. They told me that they needed me to come to Headquarters, and that I would be helping out with a case they had been working on concerning a sexual assault that occurred at the Academy years earlier. It was at this time I would learn I was about to become involved with what would become known as “Operation Fouled Anchor (OFA).”
A few weeks after I received that first call in late 2018, I was flown from the Academy to Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C. for a briefing. It was all very secretive and highly unusual. There were only a few people in the meeting. Aside from myself, one of my civilian supervisors who worked at Headquarters was present. There was also a special agent from the Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS), and a higher ranking active-duty Coast Guard attorney.
They began the meeting by telling me that I was prohibited from speaking to anyone about our work and stressed that I was required to keep everything strictly confidential. This part was not that unusual, because most of my work of dealing with survivors is kept confidential. But in that first meeting there was a unique emphasis on the importance of confidentiality surrounding this particular case. “You can’t talk to anyone about this,” they told me. Years later, after the coverup of Operation Fouled Anchor became public, I would learn that the Coast Guard required many people who were aware of Operation Fouled Anchor to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs). However, for whatever reason, I was never asked to sign an NDA.
In that first meeting at Headquarters, I still expected to be working on one case when the Coast Guard attorney opened a file on the table we were sitting at. It was a list with the names and other personal information of dozens of people, both men and women. At that point the attorney began to explain to me than an ongoing and still-active four-year criminal investigation by the Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS) had uncovered dozens of victims of sexual assault at the Coast Guard Academy. These assaults, I was told, had occurred years earlier, prior to my arrival at the Academy, and all had been potentially mishandled by the Command at the time the assaults occurred.
“This investigation had been going on for over four years, involved investigations into dozens of sexual assaults at the Academy where I was the SARC, and yet I’d never heard about it?,” I asked myself.
I was absolutely stunned, and suddenly slightly uneasy, because this was not what I had been expecting. Normally, any sexual assault reported in my Area of Responsibility (AOR), which meant the Academy, would be mine to manage. Managing a sexual assault case involved me entering details of the sexual assault report into a military-wide sexual assault case management system known as the Defense Sexual Assault Incident Database (DSAID). However, I had never been asked to enter any of these Academy sexual assault cases in DSAID, and I knew that no one else had entered the Operation Fouled Anchor sexual assault cases into the DSAID under the Academy’s AOR, either.
DSAID is a centralized case-level database used to collect and maintain information on sexual assaults involving members of the Armed Forces, including tracking and reporting on sexual assault-related retaliation data. As the central location for storing and managing all sexual assaults reported within the entire Department of Defense and within the Coast Guard, DSAID was where the Coast Guard collected and maintained information and statistics about sexual assaults. These statistics were also used in periodic and annual reports to Congress regarding the prevalence of sexual assaults in the military, including within the Coast Guard.
Since becoming the Coast Guard Academy’s SARC five years earlier, it had been my job to manage all of the sexual assault cases occurring at the Academy, and I was responsible for managing the cases within DSAID. When I learned in that first meeting at Coast Guard Headquarters in late 2018 that dozens of Academy sexual assault victims had been uncovered in a large criminal investigation, one of my first thoughts was to wonder if they had been entered into DSAID under a location code that was not mine, or if they had been entered at all.
Even though these dozens of Academy sexual assaults I had just learned about may have occurred years earlier, sexual assault cases are required to be entered into DSAID based on the year the sexual assault is reported, not the year the assault occurred. So, in that first meeting at Headquarters, I knew immediately that these older Academy sexual assault cases involved in Operation Fouled Anchor were being handled in a highly unusual manner.
After showing me the list with the names of dozens of Academy sexual assault victims, the Coast Guard attorney explained what I was going to be helping with. I was told that the three of us, meaning myself, the attorney, and the CGIS agent, would be making phone calls to all of the Coast Guard Academy sexual assault victims who had already been interviewed as part of Operation Fouled Anchor. Through these many phone calls, we would be attempting to set up in-person visits with the victims. Then, the three of us would travel around the country meeting with all of the victims who agreed to in-person interviews.
The way it was pitched to me was that this would be a kind of “apology tour,” where we would apologize in-person to the victims for what happened to them, update them on the outcome of their cases, offer them some closure, and offer services to help them heal. Apology was not the term the Coast Guard used, however. Instead, we were to offer the victims an “Official Expression of Regret.”
Victim Recovery & Disposition Notification Talking Points (Page 1 of 5)
For the next 2 to 3 days, I sat in a room at Headquarters with the Coast Guard attorney, the CGIS agent, and a big calendar. We made phone call after phone call and tried to set up in-person meetings with the Operation Fouled Anchor victims. I was never read into any of the cases and knew nothing about the specifics of the individual cases.
Either at that first meeting at Headquarters, or right before our first trip to meet with victims in-person, I was given a five-page “talking points” document titled, “Victim Recovery & Disposition Notification Talking Points.” The document contained talking points for the Coast Guard attorney, the CGIS agent, and me.
Victim Recovery & Disposition Notification Talking Points (Page 1 of 5)
There were only four “SARC Talking Points” in the document specifically directed at me:
SARC Talking Points:
1. Briefly describe the role of the SARC as a support and resource for victim recovery.
2. Provide and explain Recovery Assistance document and Resources/POCs document.
3. Offer CG-6095 (Victim Reporting Preference Statement) for signature as an Unrestricted Report that will be entered into DSAID as an open case. The form can be used to obtain available services from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
4. Ask the victim, “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Victim Recovery & Disposition Notification Talking Points (Page 3 of 5)
I was told that a big part of my role in the meetings with survivors would be to tell them that things had changed at the Academy regarding the way allegations of sexual assault were handled. My job was to assure the victims that we were doing things differently now, and that some good had come out of what they had endured during the investigation. Also, I could see that I would be offering each victim the CG -6095, which was the official form used to report sexual assault to the Coast Guard. But I did wonder why we were giving this to the victims just now if the investigation was already four years old.
After getting over the initial shock of what I had been suddenly roped into, I actually felt good about what we were doing. It seemed like the Coast Guard was not only willing to invest the resources to investigate all these older sexual assault cases at the Academy, but the agency cared so much about these victims and survivors that they were willing to send a team of us around the country to meet in person with the victims, offer “official expressions of regret,” and let them know how the system at the Academy had changed. I was initially honored to be a part of it.
Not long after that initial briefing at Headquarters, I hit the road with the Coast Guard attorney and the CGIS agent. For the next four to five months, the three of us traveled all over the country meeting with victims who had been named in Operation Fouled Anchor. As I recall, we started doing the meetings in early 2019, and by the summer of 2019 the visits were completed. Most of the victims we reached out to did not agree to in person meetings, but I remember we ended up meeting with about 25-30 of the victims over that four-to-five-month period. To my knowledge, there may have been other “teams” of Coast Guard personnel who also visited with OFA victims, but I don’t know any specifics about their activities.
We would try to group the meetings geographically in order to get as many meetings done as possible in one trip. Often, the individual trips lasted about two weeks. We flew out to Seattle once, for example, rented a car, and spent the next two weeks driving around meeting with victims and sleeping in hotel rooms in the Pacific Northwest. We flew and drove all over the country, and we met the victims wherever they would agree to meet us, including at their houses, in restaurants, hotel lobbies, and other places. Eventually, we held several meetings with OFA victims on the grounds of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.
The meetings were very emotional. Many of the victims we met with cried throughout the meetings. One of the things the victims were most angry about was that none of their perpetrators had ever been held accountable for the crimes they’d committed. That anger at the lack of accountability was a consistent theme during the meetings. Some victims were upset that the Coast Guard had ripped open the wounds they had received at the Academy all those years ago, only to take no action against the perpetrators in the end.
Some talked about having to relive trauma that had been long buried. Some talked about the pride they still felt at having served despite what happened. Some of the victims couldn’t bear to meet with us but sent their parents instead. Some were glad to at least hear something back from the Coast Guard and to receive some acknowledgment. They had many questions for us about the investigation and what had been found.
The Coast Guard anticipated these questions and had prepared talking points for them. In the “Potential Questions” section of the Victim Recovery & Disposition Notification Talking Points document we were given, one of the questions we were told to be prepared for victims to ask was: Is anyone being held accountable? How about the people that ran the Academy and allowed this to go on?
Talking Points:
1. Yes, but since criminal proceeding are unavailable, only personnel actions are available and Privacy Act prevents disclosure of personnel actions taken against other people
2. May be asked how many faced any kind of action against them, administrative or otherwise-will need to be able to provide answer
3. General statement that actions of Academy officials from the time are under review
Even though the Talking Points said I would be offering CG-6095’s to victims, just prior to our first meetings with victims I was told that I was in fact not going to be offering the CG-6095 to the victims. I felt so uncomfortable and troubled about this, because I knew this is the official form we use when people report sexual assault. And if I was originally told to offer this, I assumed no one else had offered the CG-6095 to the victims up to that point, either.
The CG-6095 is proof for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (“VA”) that the victim reported a sexual assault that occurred while they were in the military. Having this form makes it much easier for survivors of Military Sexual Trauma (“MST”) to obtain services from the VA to deal with their trauma. As the apology tour’s SARC, one of my primary responsibilities was to refer the victims to resources that could aid them in their recovery. However, the Coast Guard never actually gave me anything to offer them. I felt terrible about that. I continually asked if there was something I could offer the victims from the Coast Guard, but was never given anything. I ended up having to advise the victims to go on their own to visit their local Veterans Affairs office for MST assistance. We offered the victims zero assistance in accessing this critical support.
It was actually much worse than that. It seemed to me that the Coast Guard actually intentionally denied Veteran’s Affairs MST assistance to the victims as part of their coverup of Operation Fouled Anchor. According to the Victim Recovery & Disposition Notification Talking Points document we referenced during each meeting, I was supposed to offer each victim a CG-6095 and would be entering their case into our DSAID database. According to the Talking Points, this CG-6095 form could then be used by the victim “to obtain available services from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).”
However, the form can also be very helpful when survivors of MST attempt to obtain disability benefits from the VA. This form is so important that I always make sure to offer cadet victims of sexual trauma who are separating from the Academy following their assaults a CG-6095. Even when they don’t want to report and sign the form I tell them, “you may want to report and sign this CG-6095, because this is your proof you reported assault to the Coast Guard, and it can be used to determine disability and to obtain services for military sexual trauma from the VA.”
The Coast Guard leaders who planned this apology tour knew exactly how important the CG-6095’s were. One of the anticipated questions from the Talking Points document was, “How do I get more information about the investigation so I can take it to the VA for benefits?”
Talking Points:
1. Reiterate that the victim can take the form given to them by the SARC [CG-6095] to the VA and that will assist in them getting available services/benefits from the VA
2. If the victim would like a copy of the investigation that pertains to her/him, that information can be obtained from CGIS. Explain that some information about other people named in the investigation will likely be redacted
Victim Recovery & Disposition Notification Talking Points (Page 4 of 5)
Now I realize why the Coast Guard decided at the last minute not to offer the victims of Operation Fouled Anchor CG-6095’s. If we had given the victims the CG-6095’s to sign, the forms would have been in my possession, and I would have been legally obligated to enter every one of those sexual assault cases into DSAID for 2019—the year they were signed as reported. Entering dozens of sexual assault cases into DSAID would have led to a huge spike in cases at the Coast Guard Academy, and this massive spike in reported cases of sexual assault at the Coast Guard Academy would have been seen by everyone, but especially by Congress.
The inevitable result would have been Operation Fouled Anchor being discovered by Congress. To prevent Operation Fouled Anchor from being discovered by Congress, Coast Guard leaders deliberately withheld VA military sexual trauma benefits and services from the survivors we were sent around to meet with. Worse, we offered them absolutely nothing to replace those lost benefits and services. We just left the victims to fend for themselves.
Another reason I believe the Coast Guard did not offer the victims CG-6095’s is because they did not want the victims to have any proof that their cases even existed or had ever been investigated. We gave them absolutely nothing in writing, and that was deliberate. At the time, it did not occur to me that all of this was being done to hide the existence of Operation Fouled Anchor from Congress. That’s because we explicitly told the victims that the Coast Guard had already notified Congress and DHS about OFA and about the victim’s cases.
This is laid out clear as day in the Victim Recovery & Disposition Notification Talking Points document we referenced during each meeting with OFA victims. Under the “CGIS Agent Talking Points” section, highlighted in yellow, the CGIS agent was instructed to say, “Members of Congress and staff, and DHS, have been briefed on the general outline of the investigation, what was found, and what disposition decisions were made. Names of victims were not provided.”
There were more lies told to the victims about notifying Congress under the “Potential Questions” section of the Talking Points document we took with us to every meeting with victims. If a victim asked, “When do you plan on telling the public?” we were instructed to answer, “We have briefed DHS and Congress and anticipate the investigation will become public.”
When the Operation Fouled Anchor coverup and concealment from Congress was exposed by CNN in June of 2023, I was absolutely stunned. My world was spinning, and I could not make sense of things. I could not remember if we had been instructed to tell victims that Congress had been notified; it had been four years since those meetings, which all ran together in my mind. I thought we may have, but I had no proof that we had lied to the victims about the fact that Congress had been notified about the existence of Operation Fouled Anchor, and I questioned if perhaps I had misremembered. But something just didn’t add up.
Then, a couple weeks ago, I was going through some old files and old travel records and I found the Victim Recovery & Disposition Notification Talking Points document. I hadn’t seen the Talking Points in four years, and as I read through the document I was shocked. I saw the boldface lies we told to the victims staring right back at me, and everything about my involvement in that Official Expression of Regret tour to meet with the victims flipped on its head within my mind.
We weren’t sent out there to help these people, I realized. We were sent out there as part of an elaborate coverup of Operation Fouled Anchor designed to hide the existence of the investigation from Congress and the public. Suddenly everything that didn’t make sense originally now made sense: the decision not to give the victims the CG-6095s or any other paperwork, the lies that we had notified Congress, the total lack of support and services that we offered to victims, and the intentional failure to enter the reports of sexual assault into DSAID. The whole thing was a cruel coverup at the expense of the victims, with the entire purpose being to preserve the image of the Coast Guard and avoid scandal. And the Coast Guard used me as part of their plan.
When all of this information sorted itself out in my brain, I literally became sick. After that, it took me a few days to really come to understand and accept the evil that I had been a part of. But it did not take me long to realize what I had to do next. I had to resign, because I could no longer be part of an organization that knowingly lied to me, to the team I was with, and to the victims of OFA. The leadership of the Coast Guard did all of this with forethought, with malice towards the victims, and they used me personally as a part of their cover up.
They say, “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover up,” and that is truly what we have here. When I recently discovered that the Coast Guard had used me as part of a plan to silence the victims of OFA, dissuade the victims from contacting their Members of Congress about their cases and about OFA, to deny the victims basic VA benefits to deal with their military sexual trauma, and to hide the sexual assault reports from DSAID and Congress, I realized that I had to leave my role at the Academy and set out on my own to attempt to atone for what I had been part of.
To all of the OFA victims I reached out to and met with:
I want to personally apologize to each and every one of you. I hope that my publicly exposing the way you were treated by the Coast Guard brings you some small measure of justice. And I want you to know that I feel your pain, because I am also a survivor of military sexual trauma. It was my own healing journey that led me to do this work in the first place, and I want to share a bit of it with you to show you that I truly care.
When I was 18 I joined the U.S. Army and went to boot camp at Fort Jackson, North Carolina. When I finally graduated from boot camp with my class, I felt stronger and more capable than I had ever thought possible. I truly felt like I was on top of the world, and the whole world seemed open to me.
The last night before I was to leave boot camp and get on a bus for my occupational training, a group of us who didn’t have family in town for the graduation got a hotel room together. This was all most likely set up by my lead drill instructor. To make a long story short, I woke up in a strange hotel room being raped by this drill Sergeant. After he was done with me, he drove me back to Fort Jackson and put me on a bus to my next destination.
I was stunned to say the least and decided to never speak a word of it to anyone, ever. Who would I even tell, I wondered? I lived with this secret trauma for about 15 years, and then one day I decided to change my life by disclosing my assault to a rape crisis counselor. That intervention then started me on the path of helping others who had experienced military sexual trauma find their own way to healing. Eventually, I ended up as the first SARC at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.
Again, to all the victims of OFA and of the Academy, I apologize from the bottom of my heart for the part I played in this. From this point on I will do everything I can to make this right.
To the leaders of the U.S. Coast Guard:
I ask you, “Where is your Honor? Where is your Respect? Is your duty not to serve and protect the innocent and those who cannot protect themselves?”
What actions are you going to finally take to do right by these victims you have so horribly mistreated?
To the leaders of the U.S. Congress:
I ask you, “Will you hold the Coast Guard accountable for Operation Fouled Anchor, and for so many other terrible responses to sexual assault within the U.S. Coast Guard? Will you finally push for real and fundamental change?”
I also ask you, “What specific actions are you going to finally take to do right by these victims of OFA and of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy who have been so horribly mistreated by their service?”
I urge you to rectify this matter immediately.
Sincerely,
Shannon Norenberg
* Note:
Press inquiries can be directed to Shannon’s attorney Ryan Melogy: Ryan@JusticeForMariners.com