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Ex-CIA officer sentenced in leak case

John Kiriakou will serve 30 months in prison as part of an October plea deal. The judge calls it 'way too light,' saying he damaged the agency.

January 25, 2013|By Shashank Bengali, Washington Bureau
  • Former CIA officer John Kiriakou reached a plea deal in October in the leaking of a covert officer's name to a reporter. He will serve 30 months in prison.
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou reached a plea deal in October in the leaking… (Cliff Owen, Associated…)




Kiriakou's lawyers and civil rights advocates portrayed the 48-year-old former counter-terrorism officer as a whistle-blower who helped expose CIA torture of detainees then held in secret prisons. The CIA and its defenders denied using torture, which is illegal, referring instead to "enhanced interrogation techniques."

U.S. District Court Judge Leonie M. Brinkema said Kiriakou had damaged the agency. She called the 21/2 -year sentence, the result of a plea arrangement with prosecutors, "way too light."

Kiriakou helped lead the CIA team that captured Abu Zubaydah, believed to be a senior Al Qaeda facilitator, in Pakistan in 2002. Five years later, after he had left the agency, Kiriakou said in media interviews that Zubaydah and other detainees were waterboarded while in CIA custody, offering among the first insider accounts of the agency's use of simulated drowning.

Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times, divulged valuable intelligence on key Al Qaeda figures, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But he was also subjected to conventional questioning, making it difficult to determine whether the harsher techniques were effective.

Kiriakou initially defended the use of waterboarding and said it persuaded Zubaydah to reveal important details. But his views "evolved," he said, and eventually he decided the technique constituted torture.

Later, in emails with a freelance journalist, Kiriakou disclosed the name of a former CIA colleague who had taken part in the interrogations but who remained undercover. The freelance reporter then passed the name to a researcher who was working with lawyers representing terrorism suspects at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

When the CIA officer's name appeared in the lawyers' legal filings, federal prosecutors launched a leak investigation and traced its disclosure back to Kiriakou.

Kiriakou pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, making him the first person convicted under that law in nearly three decades.

Critics of government secrecy lamented that the Obama administration was criminalizing conduct that had been commonplace between journalists and government sources for decades.

"Is it is a very sad event in U.S. intelligence history, especially since they chose an individual who by all accounts, during his tenure at the agency, was a top-flight officer," said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and author of "Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror."

In court papers, Kiriakou's lawyers noted that he had earned the CIA's Exceptional Service Award 10 times. They said he was duped into revealing the covert officer's name by the freelance journalist, who didn't reveal that he had ties to the Guantanamo Bay inmates' lawyers.

The 30-month sentence matched that handed down to former Vice President Dick Cheney's aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, after he disclosed the name of a covert CIA officer, Valerie Plame, to journalists. Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice and other charges in June 2007, but President Bush commuted his prison sentence a month later.

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