Looking back, John C. Kiriakou admits he
should have known better. But when the
FBI called him a year ago and invited him
to stop by and "help us with a case," he
did not hesitate.
In his years as a CIA operative, after all,
Kiriakou had worked closely with FBI
agents overseas. Just months earlier, he
had reported to the bureau a recruiting
attempt by someone he believed to be
an Asian spy.
"Anything for the FBI," Kiriakou replied.
Only an hour into what began as a relaxed
chat with the two agents did he begin to
realize just who was the target of their
investigation.
Finally, the older agent leaned in close
and said, by Kiriakou's recollection, "In
the interest of full disclosure, I should tell
you that right now we're executing a
search warrant at your house and seizing
your electronic devices."
On Jan. 25, Kiriakou is scheduled to be
sentenced to 30 months in prison as part
of a plea deal in which he admitted
violating the Intelligence Identities
Protection Act by emailing the name of a
covert CIA officer to a freelance reporter,
who did not publish it. The law was
passed in 1982, aimed at radical
publications that deliberately sought to
out undercover agents, exposing their
secret work and endangering their lives.
In more than six decades of fraught
interaction between the agency and the
news media, John Kiriakou is the first
current or former CIA officer to be
convicted of disclosing classified
information to a reporter.
Kiriakou, 48, earned numerous
commendations in nearly 15 years at the
CIA, some of which were spent
undercover overseas chasing al-Qaida and
other terrorist groups. He led the team in
2002 that found Abu Zubaydah, a terrorist
logistics specialist for al-Qaida, and other
militants whose capture in Pakistan was
hailed as a notable victory after the Sept.
11 attacks.
He got mixed reviews at the agency,
which he left in 2004 for a consulting job.
Some praised his skills, first as an analyst
and then as an overseas operative; others
considered him a loose cannon.
Kiriakou first stumbled into the public
limelight by speaking out about
waterboarding on
television in 2007, quickly becoming a
source for national security journalists,
including this reporter, who turned up in
Kiriakou's indictment last year as
Journalist B. When he gave the covert
officer's name to the freelancer, he said,
he was simply trying to help a writer find
a potential source and had no intention or
expectation that the name would ever
become public.
In fact, it did not surface publicly until
long after Kiriakou was charged.
He is remorseful, up to a point. "I should
never have provided the name," he said
Friday in the latest of a series of
interviews. "I regret doing it, and I never
will do it again."
At the same time, he argues, with the
backing of some former agency colleagues,
that the case - one of an unprecedented
string of six prosecutions under President
Barack Obama for leaking information to
the news media - was unfair and ill-
advised as public policy.
His supporters are an unlikely collection
of old friends, former spies, left-leaning
critics of the government and
conservative Christian opponents of
torture. Oliver Stone sent a message of
encouragement, as did several professors
at Liberty University, where Kiriakou has
taught.
Whatever his loquaciousness with
journalists, they say, he neither intended
to damage national security nor did so.
The leak prosecutions have been lauded
on Capitol Hill as a long-overdue response
to a rash of dangerous disclosures and
defended by both Obama and his
attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr.
Neil H. MacBride, the U.S. attorney for
the Eastern District of Virginia, hailed
Kiriakou's conviction in a statement,
saying: "The government has a vital
interest in protecting the identities of
those involved in covert operations.
Leaks of highly sensitive, closely held and
classified information compromise
national security and can put individual
lives in danger."
The leak case is a devastating turn for
Kiriakou, a father of five who considers
himself a patriot, a proud Greek-American
from Pennsylvania steel country.
After he was charged last January, his
wife, though accused of no wrongdoing,
resigned under pressure from her CIA job
as a top Iran specialist. The family had to
go on food stamps for several months
before she got a new job outside the
government. To make ends meet, they
rented out their spacious Arlington, Va.,
house and moved to a rented bungalow a
third the size with their three young
children (he has two older children from
his first marriage).
Their financial woes were complicated by
Kiriakou's legal fees. He said he had paid
his defense lawyers more than $100,000
and still owed them $500,000; the
specter of additional, bankrupting legal
fees, along with the risk of a far longer
prison term that could separate him from
his wife and children for a decade or
more, prompted him to take the plea
offer, he said.
After Kiriakou first appeared on ABC,
talking with Brian Ross in some detail
about waterboarding, many Washington
reporters sought him out. I was among
them. He was the first CIA officer to
speak about the procedure, considered a
notorious torture method since the
Inquisition but declared legal by the
Justice Department in secret opinions
that were later withdrawn.
Kiriakou, who has given The New York
Times permission to describe previously
confidential conversations, came across as
friendly, courteous, disarmingly candid -
and deeply ambivalent about what the
CIA called "enhanced interrogation
techniques."
Kiriakou seemed shellshocked, and
perhaps a little intoxicated, by the flood
of publicity his remarks on ABC had
received and the dozens of interview
requests coming his way. We met for
lunch a couple of times in Washington and
spoke by phone occasionally. He
recounted his experiences in Pakistan -
the CIA later allowed him to include
much of that material in his 2009 memoir,
"The Reluctant Spy."
From court documents and interviews, it
is possible to piece together how the
case against Kiriakou took shape. When
he first spoke on ABC in 2007, the CIA
sent the Justice Department a so-called
"crimes report" - a routine step to alert
law enforcement officials to an apparent
unauthorized disclosure of classified
information. At least half a dozen more
referrals went to Justice as he continued
to grant interviews covering similar
ground.
Then, in 2009, officials were alarmed to
discover that defense lawyers for
detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had
obtained names and photographs of CIA
interrogators and other counterterrorism
officers, including some who were still
under cover. It turned out that the
lawyers, working under the name of the
John Adams Project, wanted to call the
CIA officers as witnesses in future military
trials, perhaps to substantiate accounts of
torture or harsh treatment. But initial
fears that al-Qaida might somehow be
able to stalk their previous captors drew
widespread coverage. FBI agents
discovered that a human rights advocate
hired by the John Adams Project, John
Sifton, had compiled a dossier of
photographs and names of the CIA
officers; Sifton had exchanged emails with
journalists, including Matthew A. Cole, a
freelancer then working on a book about a
CIA rendition case in Italy that had gone
awry; and Cole had exchanged emails
with Kiriakou. The FBI used search
warrants to obtain access to Kiriakou's
two personal email accounts.
According to court documents, FBI agents
discovered that in August 2008, Cole -
identified as Journalist A in the charging
documents - had asked Kiriakou if he
knew the name of a covert officer who
had a supervisory role in the rendition
program, which involved capturing
terrorist suspects and delivering them to
prison in other countries.
Kiriakou at first said he did not recall the
name, but followed up the next day with
an email passing on the name. (Sifton,
Cole and federal prosecutors all declined
to comment.)
Kiriakou and his wife, Heather, struggled
with how to explain to the children that
he is going away, probably in mid-
February. They settled on telling the
children that "Daddy lost a big fight with
the FBI" and would have to live
elsewhere for a while. Max cried at the
news, Kiriakou said. He cried again after
calculating that his birthday would fall on
a weekday, so it would be impossible to
make the trip to prison to share the
celebration with his father.
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