Don't wait for heroes to emerge at Enron. (Commentary).

ONE of the high points of my day is reading the mail I receive from current and former Enron Corp. employees.

If you are in the middle of a big media story and have some feel for its nuances, the coverage of that story always seems ridiculously inadequate. A lot of Enron's employees seem to feel the press doesn't fully understand what has happened to them.

At any rate, a number of Old Enronians have felt compelled to call or write to me. Thanks to them I know that the now notorious Raptor partnership, into which Enron's top executives stuffed many bad investments, got its name because raptors ate garbage.

Thanks to them I understand that the documents Arthur Andersen shredded were probably butt-covering memos from junior accountants to their bosses that spelled out the tacit understanding between the junior accountants and Enron that enabled Arthur Andersen to turn a blind eye to Enron's deceits.

Thanks to them I know that Jeffrey Skilling was widely regarded as the shrewdest of the top executives and, by resigning for "personal reasons," signaled to everyone else that Enron was doomed.

But these letters from Enron's employees -- especially the ones from people still working at Enron -- are frustrating, because they usually come with a request that I avoid contacting them for further discussion. They don't want to be famous, just understood.

Unanswered questions

With no one on the inside to quiz, I still don't understand the story as it demands to be understood. Big questions remain about Enron, including:

1) Why did Enron make so many really stupid investments?

At the heart of the company's problems were a lot of inexplicable purchases of Indian power plants and Brazilian pipelines and so on. As one especially acute Enron correspondent put it, "it really takes a ton of people to flush billions down the toilet. Popular wisdom would have us believe that it was just a few bad apples at the top (but) at the very least hundreds of employees knew about a couple of bad deals they worked on. Why weren't they wondering who was making all the money?"

Enron's investment decisions were so inept as to suggest an ulterior motive. But the best explanation I've received -- that Enron bought power plants in far-flung places to gain access to information about supply and demand in those markets that it could use in trading -- still rings hollow.

2) Why didn't Enron's former chief financial officer, Andrew Fastow, sell his Enron stock on the way down? Kenneth Lay and Skilling and other top executives clearly knew that they had to get out while the getting was good and sold millions of dollars of Enron shares.

Lay was more or less hand-selling his private holdings to his employees. But Fastow, who knew as much about the rot as anyone, held on when he must have known the stock was likely to collapse. Why? Even as he functioned as Enron's CFO was he grooming himself for the courtroom? Is that why he was so quick to hire crack trial lawyer David Boies?

3) Why isn't it considered strange that Enron lent millions of dollars to its already rich chairman? Lay's lawyer has claimed that Lay sold some of his Enron stock simply to repay personal loans the company made to him. But why was the company lending him money in the first place?

4) Why was Sherron Watkins, author of the now famous letter to Lay, reprinted recently in The New York Times, regarded within Enron as a deeply moral person?

Her letter has been waved about in the media as a weapon against Lay, as evidence that the boss ignored warnings from below, and that there was at least one good woman inside Enron who was deeply, deeply disturbed by the bad behavior.

But Watkins' letter was not a work of moral philosophy. Her chief concern was not that Enron was breaking the law and cheating its investors, but that people outside Enron might find out that Enron was breaking the law and cheating investors -- and that, as she put it, "my eighty years of Enron work history will be worth nothing on my resume."

5) Why do people continue to work for compani es even after they've concluded the people who run them are dishonest?

Watkins' letter quotes a fellow employee saying "I know it would be devastating to all of us, but I wish we would get caught. We're such a crooked company."

Many of Enron's employees now claim to have been equally cynical about their enterprise. None of the many I've heard from has risen to the defense of Lay, Skilling, Fastow, et al. But all of these people seem to believe that their cynicism absolves them from any personal responsibility. Many of them apparently see themselves as innocent victims. Were they?

Michael Lewis, whose books include "Next: The Future Just Happened" and "Liar's Poker," is a columnist with Bloomberg News.