Former CIA officer charged with leaking secrets to reporters

The Washington Post/  Greg Miller

The Justice Department on Monday charged a former CIA officer with repeatedly leaking classified information, including the identities of agency operatives involved in the capture and interrogation of alleged terrorists.
The case against John Kiriakou, who served as a senior Senate aide after ending his CIA career, extends the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on disclosures of national security secrets to journalists.

Kiriakou, who was among the first to go public with details about the CIA’s use of water-boarding and other harsh interrogation measures, was charged with disclosing classified information to reporters and lying to the agency about the origin of other sensitive material he published in a book.

In its criminal filing, the Justice Department obscured many of the details of Kiriakou’s allegedly illegal disclosures. But the documents suggest that Kiriakou, 47, was a source for stories in 2008 and 2009 about some of the agency’s most sensitive operations after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including the capture of alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah and the interrogation of the self-proclaimed mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

CIA Director David H. Petraeus issued a statement to the agency’s workforce on Monday afternoon saying that he could not comment on the details of the case against Kiriakou but warning that “the illegal passage of secrets is an abuse of trust that may put lives in jeopardy.” 

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