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Dear Doug Collins

Operation Fouled Anchor: The Investigation the Coast Guard Hid From Congress

The Coast Guard investigated itself, and then hid the investigation. Beginning in 2014, the Coast Guard Investigative Service spent years examining 102 reported incidents of sexual assault at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut — assaults from the late 1980s to 2006, implicating 43 individuals. Its final report, summarized in January 2020, concluded that Academy leaders had failed to protect cadets, had not treated the allegations as serious crimes, and had let reputation take precedence over the victims. Then senior leaders made a second decision, documented in their own emails: they would not tell Congress, and they would not tell the public. Operation Fouled Anchor stayed secret for more than three years after it closed — until CNN reported it on June 30, 2023. This page is the record of both failures: what was done to cadets across two decades, and what was done with the truth afterward.

The service and the promise

The Coast Guard Academy is the service’s only officer-producing school. Founded in 1876 as the Revenue Cutter School of Instruction, it sits on 103 acres in New London, and every Coast Guard officer’s career begins there — four years of discipline, academics, and sea training aboard the barque Eagle, ending in a commission. Women were first admitted in 1976. Cadets live under an honor concept, in a single great dormitory, Chase Hall, under rules set entirely by the institution: when they may leave, what they may drink, and — a detail that would matter terribly in the record that follows — whether they may lock their own doors. For the period this page covers, they could not. The rule kept rooms unlocked, a policy the survivors’ legal complaints identify as the physical mechanism of assault after assault: classmates entering sleeping cadets’ rooms at night, unimpeded.

The promise is the reciprocal of that total control. The institution governs nearly every hour of a cadet’s life; in return it owes protection — safety in the barracks, a system that treats an assault as a crime rather than an embarrassment, leaders who put the victim ahead of the institution’s reputation. Operation Fouled Anchor is the Coast Guard’s own finding, in its own words, that the Academy broke each part of that promise, repeatedly, over roughly eighteen years — and the record since 2023 is the story of the leadership breaking it once more by concealing what its investigators had found.

What happened

Operation Fouled Anchor began, per its final report, in September 2014, when the Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS) opened a case after an officer disclosed she had been raped while a cadet seventeen years earlier. Pulling that thread, investigators found others. By the end, some seventy CGIS personnel had spent roughly 20,000 hours, by the House’s account, examining 102 reported incidents at the Academy from the late 1980s through 2006, implicating 43 individuals.

The original handling is stated most plainly in the summary memorandum of January 31, 2020, from Vice Admiral Michael McAllister, quoted by Senators Blumenthal and Johnson in their September 2023 letter. The Academy, the memo recorded, had known of the allegations against 30 of the 43 implicated individuals at the time — and only five of the cases were reported at the time to investigative services or law enforcement. Its central sentence deserves to stand as written: “This investigation revealed that organizational and [Academy] reputation during this period often weighed against initiation of a criminal investigation and took precedence over concern for the victim.” Its conclusions about Academy leadership followed: leaders “often failed to undertake sufficient action to ensure a safe environment — particularly for female cadets — and instill a culture intolerant of any form of sexual misconduct; they did not promote and maintain a climate conducive to reporting incidents of sexual assault; and they did not adequately investigate alleged offenses as serious criminal matters and hold perpetrators appropriately accountable.”

The pattern underneath, as CGIS described it and the House memorandum repeated, was administrative substitution: in the House’s words, a “disturbing pattern of conducting internal administrative investigations and/or initiating disenrollment for sexual misconduct instead of referring the matter for criminal investigation.” CNN, reviewing internal documents, described what that meant: punishments could be as minor as extra homework or lowered class standings. Former CGIS Director Michael Berkow testified that most Fouled Anchor cases had not been properly handled when they first came to light, and that the Academy had not properly stored its records. The House also found CGIS itself “was not a properly functioning law enforcement agency” in the period — the referral path led to an agency unequal to the work.

The asymmetry ran in one direction. CNN reported that some of the accused rose to senior roles in the Coast Guard and other agencies; Senators Cantwell and Baldwin wrote in June 2023 expressing concern that perpetrators might hold security clearances and that two had been allowed to retire honorably, pensions intact. Many victims, by contrast, left the Academy after reporting — their careers ended, their assailants’ untouched. Most of the assaults were beyond criminal limitations periods when CGIS documented them. The investigation that proved the pattern could not, by itself, prosecute it.

What the institution did afterward

What the institution did with its own report is the second documented wrong — documented, this time, in the institution’s own hand.

In the fall of 2018 — while the investigation was still running — Commandant Admiral Karl Schultz decided the Coast Guard would not affirmatively disclose Operation Fouled Anchor to Congress or the public. He later owned it personally in a transcribed interview with House Oversight investigators: “That was a decision by me to not make a notification [to Congress]. I own that exclusively.” The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), in its bipartisan interim report of December 20, 2024 — built on more than 18,000 pages of documents and fifteen interviews — published the paper trail. A 2018 public-affairs memorandum had argued against notifying Congress because disclosure would “risk the initiation of comprehensive congressional investigations, hearings and media interest,” and had noted that reporting rates had not appreciably changed, “calling into question impact of Coast Guard actions taken over the past decade to change CGA climate.” Handwritten notes attributed to then–Vice Commandant Admiral Charles Ray read, in part: “Problem is one of the past…” The subcommittee also reported that the service removed references to Operation Fouled Anchor from communications produced to Congress in a separate inquiry.

Schultz has disputed the word “cover-up.” To CNN in December 2024 he explained the decision differently — he feared Congress would not protect victims’ privacy: “I made my decision, and I stand by that. There are people who feel wronged by that, and I truly in my heart feel terrible about that. But I don’t think that changes my calculus.” The subcommittee’s judgment, stated jointly by Blumenthal and Ranking Member Johnson, was that the evidence showed “the highest levels of Coast Guard leadership engaged in a purposeful and long-term cover-up of widespread sexual assault and harassment allegations at the Coast Guard Academy.” Blumenthal’s own summary was blunter: the December report “confirms and provides additional powerful evidence that the cover-up of sexual assault in the Coast Guard was deliberate and purposeful and longstanding.”

Instead of disclosure, the Coast Guard sent officials out to meet victims identified in the investigation. Shannon Norenberg, the Academy’s Sexual Assault Response Coordinator from 2013, blew the whistle on her own part in it. In a public statement on June 9, 2024, she said she had been tasked in 2018 with contacting victims for meetings framed around an “official expression of regret” — the word “apology” was not to be used — and that the forms that would have let victims access VA military sexual trauma care were withheld, by her account because offering them might have produced a visible spike in assault reports and exposed the investigation. “The Coast Guard lied to me,” she wrote. “We weren’t sent out there to help these people, I realized. We were sent out there as part of an elaborate cover-up of Operation Fouled Anchor designed to hide the existence of the investigation from Congress and the public.” The survivors’ FTCA complaints make parallel allegations — victims pressed to sign nondisclosure agreements, falsely told Congress had been informed. Those are allegations, not adjudicated findings; Norenberg’s account of her own instructions is a participant’s, given in her own name.

CNN broke the story on June 30, 2023 — reporters Melanie Hicken and Blake Ellis, working from internal documents — and followed it on August 8, 2023, with reporting that the former Coast Guard head had covered up the secret investigation. The same day the first story ran, Commandant Admiral Linda Fagan and Master Chief Petty Officer Heath Jones apologized to the workforce: “By not taking appropriate action at the time, we may have further traumatized the victims, delayed access to care and recovery, and prevented some cases from being referred to the military justice system for appropriate accountability. We own this failure, and on behalf of the United States Coast Guard, MCPOCG and I apologize to each victim and your loved ones.” That August, Fagan wrote to the workforce that past leaders had lacked the “courage and discipline” to act transparently and that the concealment had “shattered” trust. On July 17, 2023, she ordered a 90-day Accountability and Transparency Review; its November report directed 33 actions. GAO later tracked the follow-through: by March 2024, five of the 33 had been implemented.

Congress then did, in public, what the 2018 memo had feared. PSI opened its inquiry in September 2023. On December 12, 2023, it heard four whistleblowers across four decades of the Academy: Commander Jennifer Yount (Ret.), Class of 1981; Caitlin Maro, who left the Academy in 2005 after repeated assaults, including groping in front of dozens of witnesses; Lieutenant Melissa McCafferty (Ret.), Class of 2011, who testified that an older cadet raped her repeatedly over three days on a trip to New York, that she did not report it for fear of retaliation, and that she attempted to end her life in 2017; and First Class Cadet Kyra Grace Holmstrup, Class of 2024, speaking for the present tense. McCafferty’s summary: “I have repeatedly witnessed senior leaders dismiss substantiated reports of harassment, assault, abuse and retaliation in order to shield their fellow officer and friends from any form of discipline.” In June 2024 senators confronted Fagan over a “culture of concealment”; the December report concluded the Coast Guard had “repeatedly failed to comply” with the inquiry. On August 7, 2024, PSI’s majority staff published A Pervasive Problem, drawn from more than 80 whistleblowers spanning the 1970s through the 2020s: their stories “detail systemic sexual assault and harassment, including a culture of silencing, retaliation, and failed accountability.” A New London field hearing the next day heard five more witnesses, including enlisted survivors from the fleet.

The House Oversight Committee, which had opened its own inquiry in December 2023, released its interim memorandum on December 13, 2024. Its findings ran parallel: a “cognizant decision” to withhold; Schultz’s admission; an Academy that declined to notify CGIS as required; a CGIS unequal to its mission in the era under review.

On January 21, 2025 — the new administration’s second day — Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Benjamine Huffman relieved Admiral Fagan, the first woman to lead a U.S. military branch, as Commandant: “She served a long and illustrious career, and I thank her for her service to our nation.” A senior DHS official cited leadership deficiencies, operational failures, border deployment, recruiting shortfalls, acquisition mismanagement, an “excessive focus” on diversity, equity and inclusion policies, and an “erosion of trust” over Operation Fouled Anchor. The removal was thus officially multi-causal, Fouled Anchor one named cause among several — a distinction this page keeps, because it is the distinction the record supports. Vice Commandant Kevin Lunday led the service acting and was confirmed as Commandant in December 2025.

Where it stands now

As of October 2026, the fight has moved from exposure to two slower arenas: the claims process, and reforms Congress has written into law but that the government’s auditors say are not finished.

The legal track runs through the Federal Tort Claims Act: an administrative complaint to the agency first, a six-month wait, then suit in federal court. On September 5, 2024, Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight, with Maritime Legal Solutions as co-counsel, filed thirteen FTCA complaints for thirteen former cadets — twelve women and one man, styled Jane Does 1–12 and John Doe 1 — each seeking $10 million, in what the firm described as the first known collective action by sexual violence survivors against a U.S. service academy. Nine more followed on October 30, 2024, and seven more on March 13, 2025 — 29 documented; the firm reports further filings through 2025, 34 in all. The complaints allege the Coast Guard failed to implement adequate policies, condoned and concealed the violence, and placed cadets in danger knowingly — and they return, again and again, to the unlocked doors: claimants assaulted in their sleep by classmates who walked in, one who took to sleeping in a sleeping bag cinched shut against the next entry. As of this page’s writing, no payout, settlement, or judgment has been verified in public sources; the claimants’ argument that the limitations clock could not start before CNN revealed the concealment in 2023 remains untested in any ruling this page can cite.

The legislative track moved faster than expected. The Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025 was introduced in February 2025, passed the Senate unanimously that March (S. 524) and the House that July by 399 to 12 (H.R. 4275), and was enacted on December 18, 2025, as Division G of the FY2026 NDAA, Public Law 119-60. For the Academy, it does in statute what survivors had asked for over a quarter-century. Section 7248 requires an electronic locking mechanism on every cadet room within two years, tested every six months, access limited to the room’s cadets and staff in emergencies, every entry logged. Senators Cantwell, Cruz, Baldwin and Sullivan noted why: “Unauthorized room entries were a factor in the majority of incident cases in Operation Fouled Anchor that occurred on campus. Allowing cadets to lock their doors has been recommended by victims and individuals in the Coast Guard for more than 25 years.” The same law, as Blumenthal’s office summarized it, establishes concurrent jurisdiction with Connecticut over Academy grounds, opening the civilian justice system to survivors; codifies safe-to-report; requires fifty-year retention of sexual-misconduct records; permits discharge downgrading for anyone found by clear and convincing evidence to have committed sexual assault or harassment; permits reopening retired grades for members who knew of misconduct and failed to report it; and requires annual Academy misconduct reporting. Separately, the Academy completed a $10 million electronic security upgrade in May 2025 — 500-plus locks centered on Chase Hall, 300-plus cameras — begun in February 2024, before the statute required it.

The auditors caution against reading the statute book as the finish line. GAO reported in April 2025 (GAO-25-107481) on reporting failures and the service’s inability to evaluate whether its reforms work, and again in January 2026 on missed deadlines; its September 2026 report (GAO-26-109302) — “Actions to Address Sexual Misconduct Underway but Incomplete” — found the actions incomplete as of August 2026. That month the Coast Guard released a seventeen-step action plan running to early fiscal 2028, the implementation plan GAO had recommended. Blumenthal, marking the enactment: “There is still significantly more work that needs to be done to combat the Coast Guard’s culture of coverup, but these provisions are an important first step.”

What no arena has yet produced is individual accountability for the concealment itself. The December 2024 Senate report named the decision and the decision-maker; Schultz’s stated defense is on the record; no disciplinary action, referral, or finding against any individual leader for the nondisclosure has been verified in public sources as of October 2026. If you or someone you know is a Coast Guard member or veteran dealing with sexual assault, the DoD Safe Helpline is available around the clock at 1-877-995-5247, and the Veterans Crisis Line is at 988, press 1.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Fouled Anchor became public in moving pictures as much as in print: CNN’s segment, survivors under oath in December 2023, the Academy’s response coordinator blowing the whistle, the Commandant answering two days later, and the first claims. Six films, in order.

The exposé. CNN's segment of July 1, 2023, carrying the June 30 investigation by Hicken and Ellis: the secret probe, the history it found, and the years of silence at the top. (CNN.)

The survivors, under oath. CBS Evening News on the December 12, 2023 Senate hearing — Yount, Maro, McCafferty and Holmstrup telling the subcommittee what the Academy did with their reports. (CBS Evening News.)

The demand for accountability. Extended footage from the December 2023 hearing: survivors pressing the subcommittee on why no one who covered up their cases has answered for it. (Forbes Breaking News.)

The whistleblower. WTNH News8, June 10, 2024: Shannon Norenberg, the Academy's response coordinator for eleven years, says leaders directed her to lie to victims and Congress. (WTNH News8.)

The Commandant answers. PBS NewsHour's full recording of Admiral Fagan's June 11, 2024 testimony, two days after Norenberg's statement — senators pressing her on the "culture of concealment." (PBS NewsHour.)

The claims. NBC Connecticut, September 2024: the first thirteen FTCA complaints are filed — the survivors moving from hearing rooms into the legal process. (NBC Connecticut.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.