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But Whitacre made a fateful decision. "I did not feel comfortable lying to the FBI," Whitacre said. Instead, he blurted the truth to special agent Brian Shepard, "a very trustworthy guy" who ran the Decatur office. Whitacre soon agreed to carry a recorder hooked to his inside coat pocket while working in the office and to tote a briefcase rigged with a taping device to sessions between ADM representatives and those of other companies. He also tipped the FBI to meetings where prices might be discussed with representatives of other companies so the agents could videotape the proceedings. "It's amazing, some of the stuff that came up on the tapes," Whitacre said. "There were meetings where agree ments on worldwide volume were reached as well as prices. And it was important to get tapes showing that I wasn't leading this activity.''
Whitacre's cover was blown after the FBI raided ADM offices on June 27. By prearrangement, agents interviewed Whit acre along with other executives to make it appear that he was no different. The FBI warned Whitacre to get an attorney without ties to ADM. But the advice was given casually, and Whitacre did not keep it in mind. As a result, Whitacre spent four hours talking to attorney John Dowd, whom ADM had hired. The next morning, Whitacre said in his magazine account, "someone at ADM called me and said, 'Hey, Dwayne told me your attorney just told him that you're the mole. You're the one who caused all this.' " (Dowd has said Whitacre okayed notifying ADM about his role as an informant.)
The outcry stunned Whitacre, who had seen himself as a hero. "I really believed I was doing a good deed," he says. "I thought I'd be able to fix the problem and stay with the company." Such thinking can be typical of whistle blowers. "[They] often claim to be more loyal than management to the best interests of the company," notes Columbia University professor Alan Westin, who has written a book about corporate informers.
The discovery of Whitacre's role has made him a villain in Decatur, the home of ADM, where residents like Earl Gates argue in the local newspaper that Whitacre "violated the code" by going "public with internal problems." But Whitacre's neighbors in Moweaqua have rallied to his side, painting him and his wife as an unpretentious couple who give away a garageful of toys at Christmas and spend a lot of time with their children. Insists attorney Robert Allison, who works out of an office behind Mayor George Forston's barbershop: "The only codes that mean anything in this country are those duly passed by the governing authorities and the codes of God. I fail to see where Mark Whitacre violated any of those codes. In fact, it appears to me that he upheld those codes to his peril."
Until he emerges from his current silence, Whitacre will continue to mystify--as the man intolerant of deception who spent two years deceiving his colleagues, and as the hyperambitious ADM executive who seemed to think he could expose his company and still end up on top.
--Reported by James L. Graff/Moweaqua