HUFFINGTON
07.01-08.12
SQUELCHING SECRETS
was extremely specific,” Kiriakou
told ABC. “No one wanted to get in
trouble by going overboard. So it
was extremely deliberate.”
The ABC interview, Kiriakou’s
supporters said, was the most
significant of many ways in which
he made enemies within the intelligence community.
More ill will resulted when, after leaving the CIA, Kiriakou spent
a year as an investigator for the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Then, in March 2010, he published a book, The Reluctant Spy:
My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on
Terror, which included scathing
depictions of the run up to war,
the torture program, and FBI lapses immediately after 9/11.
“Even if torture works, it cannot be tolerated — not in one case
or a thousand or a million,” he
wrote. “If their efficacy becomes
the measure of abhorrent acts, all
sorts of unspeakable crimes somehow become acceptable ... There
are things we should not do, even
in the name of national security.”
The same month Kiriakou’s
book came out, Fitzgerald was put
in charge of an already long-running investigation into how military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay obtained names and
“If their efficacy
becomes the measure
of abhorrent acts, all
sorts of unspeakable
crimes somehow
become acceptable.”
photographs of CIA personnel.
The attorneys had submitted
the names and pictures in sealed
court filings and had given them
to detainees, in an effort to help
them identify their interrogators.
They were never made public. Yet
CIA officials were reportedly livid,
and demanded that the Department of Justice investigate.
Fitzgerald eventually cleared
the Gitmo defense attorneys of
wrongdoing. But on April 5, 2012,
a team of prosecutors working under his direction persuaded a Virginia grand jury to indict Kiriakou
on five criminal counts.
Kiriakou was accused of disclosing the identity of a covert
CIA officer to independent investigative reporter Matt Cole,
and disclosing the identity and
other “national defense” information about non-covert CIA officer
Deuce Martinez to Cole and New
York Times reporter Scott Shane,
both of whom were investigating
the torture of detainees under the