A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, unveiled a five-count indictment against John C. Kiriakou, who gained attention for publicly expressing misgivings about the efficacy of waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning.
According to the indictment, Kiriakou disclosed the identity of a colleague to journalists and divulged information about the part a different colleague played in the capture of suspected al-Qaida financier Abu Zubaydah. According to the Justice Department, some of the information provided to a journalist later surfaced in a case presented by attorneys representing prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.
Kiriakou is the sixth whistleblower that the Obama administration has charged under the Espionage Act for the alleged mishandling of classified information – more than all past administrations combined. In a rare move, the indictment was sealed until today.
Kiriakou is also charged with telling a journalist that Zubaydah was pursued with the help of a “magic box” — a device that can track a cell phone’s location, according to the New York Times story that allegedly uses information gleaned from Kiriakou — and subsequently lying about the “magic box” when he submitted a draft of his book to a CIA review board. He allegedly told his co-author Michael Ruby that he planned to tell the board, “we’ve fictionalized much of it, even if we haven’t.”
Kiriakou is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) veteran who headed counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11, organized the team operation that captured suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, and refused to be trained in torture interrogation tactics. In December 2007, Kiriakou gave an on-camera interview to ABC News in which he disclosed that Zubaydah was “waterboarded” and that “waterboarding” was torture. Kiriakou was one of the first CIA officers to label waterboarding as torture, and his interview helped expose the CIA’s torture program as policy, rather than the actions of a few rogue agents. Kiriakou further exposed the CIA’s torture program and the CIA’s deception about torture even to its own employees in his 2009 book, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror.
Whistleblower Blues 