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National Security

Former CIA officer charged in leaks case

By Greg Miller,January 23, 2012

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But Kiriakou’s credibility was damaged when it emerged that Abu Zubaida had actually been waterboarded at least 83 times. Kiriakou subsequently acknowledged that he had no firsthand knowledge and that he had “relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”

Naming interrogators

The Justice Department alleges that after the ABC News interview Kiriakou continued to serve as a source for other stories, including a lengthy 2008 piece in the New York Times that revealed the name of the CIA’s interrogator of Mohammed.

Kiriakou “disclosed or confirmed” the identity of the interrogator to New York Times reporter Scott Shane as well as other journalists, according to the Justice Department filing. Shane declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the New York Times.

The Washington Post quoted Kiriaku several times between 2007 and 2009 but Monday’s charges make no reference to Post articles.

The Kiriakou investigation appears to have been triggered by a CIA referral to the Justice Department as well as a separate probe into how photographs of CIA operatives ended up in the possession of high-value detainees at Guantanamo Bay in 2009.

Investigators believe that defense attorneys obtained the photos after learning the identities of CIA operatives from a journalist who had been in contact with Kiriakou. The photographs, which included shots taken surreptitiously outside CIA employees’ homes, were shown to the detainees as part of an effort by defense attorneys to identify participants in CIA interrogations and potentially call them as witnesses in terrorism trials.

In an interview with FBI officials last week, Kiriakou denied disclosing the names of covert officers and expressed dismay that defense attorneys, let alone detainees, had learned CIA officers’ names, according to the Justice Department complaint.

The document also cites an e-mail that Kiriakou allegedly sent to the CIA interrogator after the New York Times story was published, denying that he had talked except to warn the reporter that naming the interrogator “might not be illegal” but “would certainly be immoral.”

Despite the denials, the Justice Department said, Kiriakou had talked to the reporter extensively and even provided the CIA interrogator’s phone number and personal e-mail address.

The Guantanamo defense teams, which included attorneys from the ACLU, have been cleared of any wrongdoing in obtaining or sharing the photos, according to the Justice Department complaint.

After leaving the CIA, Kiriakou worked as an investigator on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a year before leaving in 2010.

Staff writers Julie Tate and Justin Jouvenal contributed to this report.

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