John Kiriakou, an ex-CIA officer, was the first official to speak publicly about waterboarding and was later convicted of revealing the name of a colleague. Image by Troy Page/Alex Pasternack
A decade ago, long before Edward Snowden trolled the depths of a classified government surveillance program, John Kiriakou was learning about a government practice as secret and troubling, and a good deal more gruesome.
On the night of March 28, 2002, Mr. Kiriakou, then a decorated officer at the Central Intelligence Agency, led a team that raided a suspicious house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, and made America's first post-9/11 capture of a major al Qaeda leader, Abu Zubaydah. After a shoot-out that almost killed him, Zubaydah was rushed to a hospital and nursed back to life by the CIA. During subsequent interrogations at a "black site" in Thailand and at the Guantanamo Bay prison, he was waterboarded 83 times.
In January of this year, the 15-year CIA veteran was sentenced to two and a half years in prison on charges of revealing classified information, including the name of a covert CIA operative. But he and his supporters claim that the government's case against him was being built in secret since he began speaking to the press about waterboarding.
His prosecution, they say, was really payback for disclosing a secret program, and one that Kiriakou would argue was ineffective and wrong. The disclosure of a CIA officer's name was illegal, but given numerous other leaks, he said it did not merit the government's aggressive approach. "I've never believed my case was about a leak," the father of five said in January after his sentencing. "I've always believed my case was about torture."
In 2007, during an interview with ABC News, Kiriakou described Zubaydah's initial treatment, and so became the first person to reveal the CIA's waterboarding program. While his knowledge of the waterboarding program was secondhand, at the time he offered reluctant support, though he would discover later that he had been lied to about its efficacy. But in 2007, in his soft tenor, Kiriakou told reporter Brian Ross that Americans and Congress needed to be talking about this stuff. "Because I think as a country this is something we have to decide that we want to do as a matter of policy. It shouldn't be secret. It should be part of a national conversation."
ABC News interview with John Kiriakou, 2007.
Kiriakou is considered to be the sixth government employee to be charged with disclosing secret information under the Obama administration, which, despite the President's signing of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act last year, has carried out more whistleblower indictments than any other administration in history. (Snowden was the seventh whistleblower to be charged with spilling state secrets.)
"The people who ordered the torture, the lawyers who justified it, the people who carried it out, and those who destroyed the videotapes of it—none of them are being held accountable," Jesselyn Radack, John Kiriakou's attorney, said recently. "The only person going to jail in connection with this is the person who blew the whistle on it. In fact, if John had actually tortured someone, I don't think he would be going to jail."
In a June 16 letter from Loretto, Pennsylvania, where Kiriakou is a few months into his two year sentence, the ex-spy made clear his contempt for the FBI, which had tried and failed to entrap him in a 2010 sting operation. He also made a more unexpected claim: that he wasn't just the victim of political vengeance, but of a journalist who failed to protect him.
“Cole emailed me in late 2007 saying that he would 'never reveal your identity to anyone at any time,'" Kiriakou wrote, referring to a former ABC News producer named in the indictment as Journalist A, and whose real name is Matthew Cole. "That was a lie. He never had any intent to protect my identity… In the end, Cole was a coward who sought only to protect himself. I have nothing but contempt for him.”
According to Kiriakou and to government evidence, it was Cole who, while working on a book about a disastrous CIA rendition in Italy, asked Kiriakou if he could identify the CIA officer in charge of the rendition program. Kiriakou said he couldn't remember. The next day, he wrote back with the name, saying "It came to me last night." Cole then sent that name to a defense investigator at Guantanamo Bay. When the name ended up in a classified court filing, the FBI's attentions were aroused.