I began working at the CIA in January 1990. After a week of orientation, I was assigned to an office in the Directorate of Intelligence (DI)—the Agency’s analytic arm—that focused on doing long-term psychological profiles of foreign leaders. My assignment was to cover Iraq and Kuwait, which I was told were “training accounts.” As a senior analyst explained to me, “Nothing ever happens in Iraq or Kuwait. They’ve had the same leaderships since the nineteen sixties. The same cabinets are still in place. Learn your analytic tradecraft and you can move onto something interesting, like Romania.” That was eight months before Iraq invaded Kuwait and started the Gulf War.
The Gulf War made me a star in the DI. I became one of the Agency’s “go to” analysts on Iraq. I was Saddam Hussein’s biographer for the Intelligence Community, and I was called on to brief presidents, cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, and foreign leaders. I traveled to more than sixty countries and wrote analyses that helped to form the basis for US policy in the Middle East.
But I got bored. By 1997 it was clear that Saddam Hussein wasn’t going anywhere. I wanted to go back overseas, where I had served in the early 1990s. I spoke both Greek and Arabic, which was unique in the Agency, and I decided that I wanted to switch to counterterrorism operations.
A move from analysis to operations was highly unusual at the time. There was normally a Chinese wall between the CIA’s two most important functions. But the Counterterrorism Center thought that I showed promise and my language skills were unique, and they allowed me to make the switch.
I didn’t have to do interim one-month assignments around headquarters, what people call CIA 101, because my colleagues and I in the Special Operations Training Course (SOTC) were all mid-career officers. Instead, I dove right into operations, first at a secret facility in northern Virginia, and then in the CIA’s famous training facility known as “the Farm.”
SOTC was a deep, involved, and difficult course. It was also the most fun I’ve ever had. Besides learning the fundamentals of operational writing, clandestine meetings, disguises, and other espionage basics, there were other components. These included “Crash and Bang,” a course on how to avoid kidnappings and car-borne terrorist attacks; weapons training with a variety of handguns, long guns, and even some heavy weaponry; surveillance, countersurveillance, and surveillance detection; and parachute jump school.
But it was the other courses that I really took to. The most interesting and professionally important one was how to spot, assess, develop, and recruit spies. Unless you plan to make your career as an ass-kicker in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan, recruitment skills would be the most valuable for a career in CIA operations. These skills proved to be the most valuable to me in prison.
Operational meetings could be held anywhere—in a restaurant, in a hotel, in a car, literally anywhere. I’ve even done operational meetings in a men’s restroom and behind a garbage dumpster. The idea at first is to spot a target and to assess his access to protected information. Once you find the right person, you cultivate and develop a friendship so that, over time, the target becomes more and more comfortable speaking openly with you. The final phase in the relationship is recruitment. Here you establish a formal relationship between the CIA and the target. There are lots of reasons people would consent to being recruited. These are called vulnerabilities. Maybe the target needs money—he can’t afford his lifestyle, he can’t afford to send his kids to college, or he has large medical bills. Revenge is a good motivator. Maybe the target has been passed over for promotion or has a beef against his bosses. Another motivator may be patriotism. The target loves the US and wants to help. Whatever the motivation, though, every recruitment comes down to the relationship.
In this kind of clandestine relationship, trust and a personal “connection” are paramount. After all, the goal is to convince someone to commit espionage—treason, even—for you. Why? Because he likes you, he believes he can work with you, and he gets something that he needs out of the relationship—money, revenge, even just a shoulder to cry on. This is the very foundation of CIA operational work.
I had no idea at the time, of course, but it was these skills that would allow me to protect myself and my interests in prison. I learned in my CIA training that almost everybody has a vulnerability. Almost everybody or every situation can be manipulated. I honed these skills in the Middle East and Europe virtually as soon as I finished training.
I had to live by my wits while serving overseas. There were two assassination attempts made against me abroad—one in Greece, where a terrorist group called Revolutionary Organization 17 November set out to kill me, but murdered my neighbor, the British Defence Attaché, instead. The second was in a Middle Eastern country where I was handling a double agent. The enemy country he was working for ordered him to kill me in our final meeting. We were tipped off, we grabbed and disarmed him, and we cracked his organization.
Then the September 11 attacks occurred. Like everybody else at CIA headquarters, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan and fight. That wasn’t really my thing—I have no military experience—but patriotism dictated that I do my part. I volunteered repeatedly, and finally, after making enough of a pest of myself, I was sent to Pakistan to run counterterrorist operations. I spent most of 2002 there.
The highlight of my time in Pakistan was the late-March 2002 capture of Abu Zubaydah and dozens of al-Qaeda fighters at a string of safehouses in Faisalabad. This was a major catch. Our government thought at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the third-ranking official in al-Qaeda. But that turned out to be untrue. While Abu Zubaydah had certainly done a lot of logistical work for al-Qaeda, and he created and ran the group’s training camps in southern Afghanistan, he had never actually joined al-Qaeda. He had never pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden, and he knew less about al-Qaeda’s leadership than we thought he did.
I didn’t have any idea at the time how important Abu Zubaydah would be to my life over the next decade. Frankly, I wish I had never been in Pakistan that night. You can keep the medals and awards. In the end, as you’ll see, it wasn’t worth it to me.
When I got back to CIA headquarters in the summer of 2002, a senior officer in the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center asked me if I wanted to be certified in the use of what he called “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” I didn’t know what that meant, so I asked. He told me, “We’re going to start getting rough with these guys,” and he explained the various torture techniques that had recently been approved by President George W. Bush. I told this officer that “this sounds like torture to me,” and I said that I had a visceral opposition to it. Count me out.
But just to make sure I was thinking correctly, I went to a very senior CIA officer and asked for his guidance. He said, “First, let’s call it what it is. It’s torture. Second, somebody is going to go too far and they’re going to kill a prisoner. Third, there’s going to be a Congressional investigation and somebody’s going to go to prison. Do you want to go to prison?” I said no and I went back to the Counterterrorism Center and said in no uncertain terms that I didn’t want to be involved. In the end, I was the only person with any connection to the CIA’s torture program that went to prison, not because I tortured anybody, but because I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program. I aired the Agency’s dirty laundry in public.
On August 1, 2002, CIA interrogators began torturing Abu Zubaydah. At first he was slapped, punched, kicked, stripped naked, and humiliated. Later he was chained to an I-bolt in the ceiling and kept awake for weeks at a time, while ice water was thrown on him. Abu Zubaydah exhibited an irrational fear of insects, so he was put in a dog cage with cockroaches to see how crazy he could become. Most famously, or infamously, he was waterboarded eighty-three times. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said in its torture report in 2014 that none of these techniques resulted in Abu Zubaydah ever giving the CIA any actionable intelligence that disrupted terrorist attacks or saved a single American life.
While all of this was going on, CIA officers speaking out of school were telling me and others that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded once, that he had cracked, and that he had provided actionable intelligence that foiled terrorist plots and saved lives. This was a lie. But it was what was being circulated around CIA headquarters. It was a lie that helped to perpetuate the torture program.
I resigned from the CIA in 2004. I was divorced and I had remarried—this time to a CIA officer—and I wanted to be able to spend quality time with my two sons from my first marriage. I was tired of going overseas, and my boys were young at the time, eleven and eight. They needed me in their lives and I needed them. So I left the CIA and went into the private sector.
Things were going gangbusters for me until December 2007. At the beginning of that month I received a call from Brian Ross, the senior investigative reporter for ABC News. Ross said that he had a source who had told him that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah. “Absolutely untrue,” I said. “I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah.” Indeed, after we had captured him, I sat at Abu Zubaydah’s side for fifty-six consecutive hours. We talked about religion, poetry, our families, even the September 11 attacks. At one point, in tears, he asked me to smother him with his pillow.
I told Ross that his source was dead wrong. “Well, you’re welcome to come on the show and defend yourself,” he answered. I had no idea that this was an old reporter’s trick. I should have hung up on him. Instead, I went to my boss, and my boss’s boss, and asked what to do. “Go on the show, but don’t mention the firm or any of the firm’s clients” was the answer. So I went on the show.
I had honestly stopped following news about al-Qaeda after I left the CIA. I was burned out and I was excited to start a new life. I was vaguely aware that the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch had issued a report saying that Abu Zubaydah had been tortured and that Amnesty International had issued a report saying the same thing. So in my mind, the news was out there. Everybody knew we were torturing prisoners, right? Wrong. Brian Ross asked me directly during the course of the interview whether the CIA had tortured Abu Zubaydah. Yes, I said. Was he waterboarded? Yes. Were others? Yes. I told the whole story.
Ross went on to ask me for my own feelings about waterboarding. I said that I thought it was torture and that as Americans we shouldn’t be in the business of torture. I made three major revelations during that interview. I said the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official US Government policy, and that the policy had been approved personally by the president. By saying that, I became the first CIA officer, past or present, to confirm the torture of prisoners. The CIA was enraged.
The next morning, the CIA filed a “crimes report” against me with the FBI, saying that my revelations were illegal, and asking the FBI to begin a criminal investigation. I read about this filing in the newspapers, and I hired an attorney.
The FBI took a full year to investigate me. In the end, they elected not to charge me with a crime, finding that I had not revealed any classified information. The case against me was officially closed. But the CIA was livid. Four weeks after the case was closed, Barack Obama, the self-professed “most transparent president in history,” was inaugurated. The CIA asked him secretly to reopen the case against me. He did, and the secret investigation proceeded for another four years. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but the FBI was all over me—carrying out surveillance against me, collecting my telephone metadata, even intercepting and reading my emails. Again, I didn’t know it at the time, so I just continued on with my life.
Despite having my bosses’ permission to go on ABC in 2007, I was asked to resign from the private company I was working for. I hired another attorney and, after the provision of a generous severance package, I offered my resignation. Still, the timing could not have been worse. I left my job just as the worst recession since the Great Depression hit the country. I was out of work for all of 2008, other than a little consulting work here and there, until finally in February 2009 I got an offer.
A friend with ties to then–Senator John Kerry offered me a job as the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. It was a senior position on the most prestigious committee on Capitol Hill and I was thrilled at the prospect. I just had to get through an interview with Kerry, who had just been elevated to the Committee’s chairmanship.
I met with Kerry in his office in February 2009. I was immediately struck by his friendliness and informality. Kerry gets a bum rap for his reputation as a stiff patrician politician. I liked him. He was very intelligent, accomplished, and a bona fide war hero. I was struck by a couple of things during that meeting. First, he had his medals—a Silver Star and three Bronze Stars—in a shadow box on a credenza. (The press had reported in great detail in the 1970s that Kerry had thrown his medals over the White House fence to protest the Vietnam War. That was a publicity stunt. He threw copies over the fence and kept the originals.) He also had pictures of himself with John Lennon, Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, & Mary, and a wide variety of 1960s- and 1970s-era celebrities. It was a fun office.
Kerry and I had a great conversation about the Middle East and South Asia. He asked my opinion on the Iraq War, on the occupation of Afghanistan, and on strategies for getting out of both of those countries. The interview went exceedingly well. At the end, I got up and shook his hand, and I thanked him for not asking me about waterboarding. “I hate being ‘the waterboarding guy,’” I told him. Kerry smiled and said, “Nobody in this country has taken it on the chin from the press like I have. I know the truth of your story. I’m happy to have you onboard.” I started working two weeks later.
I was blessed with great leadership for the first year of my stint at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We tackled some important issues, and I took very seriously our oversight responsibilities. I thought that hard work and tough investigations were what was expected of me. I was wrong, wrong, wrong, and all I did was stir up a hornet’s nest of troubles.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but even before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff I was ruffling feathers at Langley. First, before I joined the SFRC, I had written an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times saying that the next president, whether it was Barack Obama or John McCain, should work to improve US relations with South America because Iran already was doing that. I sent it to the CIA’s Publications Review Board (PRB) for clearance before submitting it to the Times, and it was cleared quickly. My sources for the piece were two reports from United Press International’s Spanish-language service and the Foreign Ministry website of one of the countries I mentioned in the piece.
A couple of days after the op-ed ran, my wife was called into the CIA’s Office of Security as part of an “inquiry.” The officer, who videotaped the interview, said, “I noticed that your husband had an op-ed run in the LA Times over the weekend.” My wife responded that I had had the op-ed cleared. “Well,” the officer continued, “that op-ed contained highly classified information.” My wife answered calmly that I did not have access to classified information. “But you do,” the officer retorted.
My wife and I had a hard-and-fast rule at home. We never talked about Iran. Ever.
The officer told her that we could dispense with the entire episode if she would fax him my sources. I emailed them to her immediately and told her to pass the CIA a message from me: First, apparently nobody at the CIA spoke Spanish. Second, they appeared to have a source who was selling them press and calling it intelligence. She forwarded the source material to the officer, and she never heard anything about it again. In retrospect, I should not have just put this incident behind me. I should have assumed that the Agency was paying intensely close attention to me, even through my wife. But I didn’t. And I continued to poke that hornet’s nest.
Soon after I started working on the Committee, I got a call from a human rights activist who said he had some explosive information to give me. We met later that day in a small classroom at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington.
The activist asked if I had ever heard of the Dasht-i-Leili massacre. I had. On November 30 and December 1, 2001, the US-backed Northern Alliance captured two thousand Taliban soldiers near Dasht-i-Leili outside Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. It just so happened that December 1 was the same day that John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” was captured nearby during an uprising at the Qalat e-Jhangvi fort. CIA officer Johnny Michael Spann was killed in the uprising.
US forces were preoccupied with what was happening at Qalat e-Jhangvi. Northern Alliance leaders, meanwhile, did not know what to do with the two thousand Taliban prisoners, all of whom had given up peacefully. The Northern Alliance leader, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a man who had repeatedly switched sides in Afghanistan over the years and who had an absolutely dismal human rights record, ordered that the prisoners be loaded into shipping containers and trucked out into the desert until somebody could figure out what to do with them. The trucks drove eight hours into the desert. When they finally stopped, and the drivers opened their containers, “the bodies fell out like sardines from a can,” according to one of the only sixteen survivors. Nearly everybody was dead.
Whether on purpose or by accident, no air holes were made in the containers. There was no food or water, either. General Dostum hated the Taliban. Had he suffocated these soldiers on purpose? I wanted to find out. And my human rights activist source was offering me an eyewitness. The eyewitness was twelve years old at the time of the “box-up,” and had hidden behind a rock when the prisoners were loaded into the containers. He had seen the entire thing happen, and he said that there were two other people there—two “white men,” wearing blue jeans and black shirts, and speaking English. CIA? I wanted to know.
I began by calling a contact who had been a senior State Department official during the George W. Bush administration and asking if he knew anything about the allegation that the CIA may have known about the Dasht-i-Leili box-up. He referred me to a retired ambassador who would have known something if the box-up had occurred the way the witness said it had. I interviewed him at his law firm in Washington. He said that he had heard the allegations, but had never seen any proof. He referred me to a retired assistant secretary of state, who was happy to speak on the record. He recalled the massacre and said that he had “assumed Agency folks were in the area,” but there was no smoking gun.
The assistant secretary, in turn, referred me to one of former secretary of state Colin Powell’s closest advisors. The advisor sat with me in the Foreign Relations Committee’s conference room and told me a story about US acquiescence in the massacre that infuriated me. He suggested that I call Secretary Powell personally, which I did the next day. I never got through to Powell, but his secretary called me back a day later to say that “Secretary Powell stands behind whatever (the senior advisor) said.”
That was good enough for me. I decided to begin a formal investigation into what was probably indirect US involvement in the Dasht-i-Leili massacre. But before I could even make my first appointment one of Senator Kerry’s top aides called with a message: “kill this investigation right now.” There would be no explanation. To me it was obvious that word had gotten back to the CIA. I was looking into things that shouldn’t be looked into. The investigation was over.
A year passed. I received a call from a national security journalist who said a source had told him that the CIA was placing officers associated with the torture program undercover with a certain government entity in order to shield their identities from journalists. If true, this would have been a violation of the cover agreement that the CIA had with this entity.
I sent a letter to the CIA, under Senator Kerry’s signature, asking for clarification. About six weeks passed without any response. Finally, one of my colleagues walked into my office and said nonchalantly, “The Agency sent a response to your letter.” I told him that I hadn’t seen any response, and that I had just checked my mail an hour earlier. He told me that the response had been marked “Top Secret.” At the time, I had only a “Secret” security clearance. I asked what the letter said. “It said ‘Go fuck yourself,’” my colleague responded. Well, I thought. I guess I’m not the most popular guy at CIA headquarters.
One of the nice things about a job like the one I had on the Foreign Relations Committee is that you get to meet diplomats from all over the world. And one of the perks is that you get to have lunch with these interesting people, within the confines, of course, of the Senate Ethics Committee rules. One day I got a call from a Japanese diplomat inviting me to lunch at a nearby restaurant on Capitol Hill. We got together and talked about the Middle East, Turkish elections, and Afghanistan. I remember it being a very nice lunch. Just before we finished, the diplomat asked what I thought I would be working on in the coming months. I told him that I thought I might resign from the Committee. “I promised Senator Kerry that I’d give him two years. It’s been two-and-a-half. I’m ready to move on.” “No!” he responded excitedly. Then in a whisper, he said, “I can give you money if you give me information.”
I was stunned at this bold operational approach. This is what we intelligence officers call a “cold pitch.” It is when an intelligence officer just goes up to a target without even trying to develop him, and says, essentially, “I’m an intelligence officer and I want you to work for me.” I responded to the pitch, “Shame on you. Do you have any idea how many times I’ve made that pitch?” I thanked him for lunch, got up, and walked out.
I went directly to the office of the senate security officer, a secure facility underneath the new Capitol Visitors Center, on the east lawn of the Capitol building. I told him that a foreign intelligence officer had just pitched me and that I wanted to report it. The senate security officer listened to my story, and then asked me to write it as a memo to the FBI on a standalone computer in his office. I did that, and he said he would get back to me in the next couple of days.
The security officer called me two days later and said that two FBI agents were coming to talk to me. Could I come to his office in an hour? So an hour later, I walked to the Senate Security Office and met two young FBI agents. They asked me to repeat what had happened with the Japanese. When I finished the story, one of them said, “Here’s what I want you to do. Call him back and invite him to lunch. Tell him that you’re thinking about his offer. Then try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much money he’s willing to pay you for it.” He went on to say that the FBI would put two agents at a nearby table so they could listen to the conversation.
I called the diplomat, who readily agreed to get together. But on the morning of the lunch, one of the FBI agents called me to say that something had come up and the FBI would be unable to send two agents to the restaurant. I should just do the lunch without them, and then write them another memo. I did that. And they asked me to do it a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth. Finally, after lunch at an out-of-the-way Georgetown café, the Japanese diplomat said that he was being transferred to Cairo. He went on and on about what a great move this was for his career and how much he was looking forward to it. I congratulated him, shook his hand, and left. I never saw him again.
It wasn’t until a year later, four months after my arrest, that I learned from a friend in the FBI that there never was any Japanese diplomat. He was an FBI agent, and the whole “pitch” was a setup. The FBI was trying to trap me into committing espionage—real espionage. But I kept foiling their efforts by repeatedly reporting the contact, not only to the senate security officer but also right back to the FBI. So they abandoned the operation.
In the meantime, I was confronted with the most obvious red flag. I received an email from a reporter for a conservative national newspaper. I had heard bad things about this reporter and I simply deleted his email. But he was persistent, and he emailed me three times. I finally went to my boss, who was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist earlier in his career. “I’ll authorize the contact,” he said. “Have lunch with him and see what he wants.”
I got together with the reporter at a small, nearly empty restaurant just off Capitol Hill. Even though the place was practically deserted, he spoke in a whisper. “I have a source in the FBI,” he said. “You’re under surveillance.” My heart began to race. “Why?” He continued in a whisper. “The FBI thinks you’re the source for the John Adams Project.” I leaned in toward him. “What’s the John Adams Project?”
The reporter just sat there looking at me. “That’s not really the response I expected.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t know what the John Adams Project is.” He explained that the John Adams Project was an effort by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) to support the attorneys representing Guantánamo defendants. I told the reporter that his source was wrong. I had never had any contact with anybody from the John Adams Project or anybody having anything to do with Guantanamo defense attorneys. I thanked him for lunch and went back to the office.
I found my boss in his office and I told him what had happened. He was puzzled by the approach and repeated what I had heard about the reporter’s reputation. He put me at ease by saying that if I had been under FBI investigation, Senator Kerry would have heard about it. And if Senator Kerry had been told, then he, too, would have been told. Still, I conducted a sophisticated surveillance detection route home that evening, even utilizing the extensive network of tunnels under the Capitol building. I saw nothing.
On January 16, 2012, I got a call at home from the FBI. “Remember that [Japanese diplomat] case you helped us out with last year? Well, we need your help again.” Remember, I didn’t know yet that the Japanese diplomat was a fake. So the first thing that came to mind was that the FBI needed my help to expose his replacement. It was my patriotic duty to help them. I agreed immediately to meet with them at the FBI’s Washington Field Office on January 19. It wasn’t until we were an hour and twenty minutes into the interview that I realized that the investigation was of me. One FBI agent finally looked me in the eye and said, “You should know that we are executing a search warrant on your house as we speak.” I responded with, “I want to see my attorney.”
That was the only thing that kept me from being arrested that day. I went directly from the FBI’s office to my attorney’s office. On Monday, January 23, I turned myself in to the FBI. I was arrested, booked, photographed, and taken to the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, for processing. I was charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, one count of making a false statement, and one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
I had the best attorneys in Washington; “legal titans,” The Washington Post called them. They recognized the charges for what they were—political. The CIA never forgave me for saying that it was torturing prisoners. The espionage charges, especially, were ridiculous on their face. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a press conference announcing my arrest that I had exposed “Top Secret information that has been declassified solely for the purpose of Mr. Kiriakou’s prosecution.” What was that “Top Secret” information? It was that the CIA had a program after the September 11 attacks to kill or capture members of al-Qaeda. Seriously.
The other two espionage charges were equally ridiculous. A reporter from The New York Times and another from ABC News had asked me how to get in touch with a former CIA colleague of mine. This colleague had resigned and had taken a job with the two psychologists who had created the CIA’s torture program. He had given me his business card several years earlier, and I gave the reporters the contact information from the business card. This colleague had never been undercover. The business card was unclassified. But the Justice Department made me defend myself against two espionage charges for that business card.
All three of the espionage charges were eventually dropped, as was the false statements charge. I was never actually clear about what the false statement was that I had supposedly made. It had something to do with my first book. But it was eventually dropped, too.
My problem was with the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. In the summer of 2008 I received an email from Matthew Cole, a freelance reporter who was writing a book, he claimed, about the CIA’s rendition, detention, and interrogation program. He sent me a list of names and asked if I could introduce him to anybody on the list who might agree to an interview. I didn’t know anybody. He followed up with a second list, and then a third. I wrote back that he obviously knew this issue much better than I did. I didn’t know a single name on any of the lists.
Finally, Cole wrote, “What about the guy you wrote about in your first book?” There was a passage in my first book, The Reluctant Spy, in which I said that I had run into an old boss of mine on the tarmac of an airport in Pakistan. He was there to take Abu Zubaydah to a secret prison for interrogation and, it turned out, torture. Cole said, “Wasn’t his name [John]?”
“Oh, you mean, [John Doe],” I said. I don’t know what happened to him. He’s probably retired and living in Virginia somewhere. That conversation was a felony. I should never have provided John Doe’s last name to Cole. It was a mistake that I’ll regret for the rest of my life.
To compound my problems, although I didn’t know it at the time, Cole was the source for the John Adams Project. Cole wasn’t writing a book about the CIA. He was collecting as much information as possible about the CIA’s rendition, detention, and interrogation program, especially names, and passing that information secretly to a John Adams Project investigator. Cole, in turn, had had another CIA source, a disgruntled former employee who gave him the names and photos of ten more undercover CIA officers. My attorneys and I knew this because our investigator was able to procure personal notes on these officers written by one of Abu Zubaydah’s attorneys after a conversation with Cole. Why hadn’t this other CIA officer been arrested and charged with espionage and with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act? Because he hadn’t blown the whistle on torture.
In my case, Cole passed Doe’s name to the John Adams Project investigator, who passed it to the Guantanamo defense attorneys. The attorneys filed a classified motion with the court asking to interview Doe. When the judge received the motion, he called the FBI. How the FBI tied the name back to me is still something of a mystery. The conventional wisdom is that the FBI got into the Guantanamo defense attorneys’ emails and traced the name to the investigator. They then either got into the investigator’s emails or the investigator cooperated, and they traced the name to Cole. The FBI then either went into Cole’s emails or Cole cooperated with the FBI to incriminate me. So either the FBI spied on a journalist or Cole turned rat. He’s never spoken about it publicly.
I wanted to go to trial. In fact, that’s exactly what I prepared to do until October 2012. But it came down to an economic decision. I had given my attorneys everything I had, and I still owed them $880,000. A trial would have added another $2–$3 million. I would never have that kind of money. I could never pay the bill. In the meantime, the government was offering me a sentence of thirty months in prison. If I had gone to trial and had been convicted, I would have received a likely sentence of twelve to eighteen years. That would have been generous. I was actually facing forty-five years. It would have been a death sentence.
I concluded that this could be a blip in my life or the defining event of my life. I elected to take the blip. I would likely do about two years. With the help of friends and family, my wife and five children could make it two years without me. I had to cut my losses.
So on October 22, 2012, I took a plea to one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. I was formally sentenced in January 2013 and arrived at the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania to begin my sentence on February 28.
A few nights before my departure, the peace group Code Pink held a going away party for me on the roof of Washington’s storied Hay-Adams Hotel. Nearly two hundred people attended, and they even serenaded me with a personalized version of Peter, Paul, & Mary’s 1960s-era hit “Have You Been to Jail for Justice?” I told the crowd that I didn’t fear prison. I was tougher than the CIA thought I was. I would not be broken. I would not be institutionalized. Here’s what I said:
Good evening and thank you for coming.
Last month I was sentenced to thirty months in a federal correctional institution for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The prosecutors—and the judge—insisted that my case was about leaking. It was not. I was targeted for prosecution for protesting torture before opposition to torture was kosher. The government’s purpose in prosecuting me was to frighten critics into silence.
As every American knows, leaking classified information by marquee executive branch officials is as routine as the rising and setting of the sun. If my case was about leaking, we would have seen simultaneous prosecutions of people like former CIA director David Petraeus1, who provided classified information to his girlfriend; like Defense Department Undersecretary Michael Vickers, who federal investigators say leaked classified information to the producers of the film Zero Dark Thirty; like the Navy Seals who divulged classified information for profit to the makers of a video game; and like Seal Team Six member Matt Bissonnette, who profited by publishing his classified account of the Osama bin Laden killing without clearance. But none of them uttered a single word critical of the government.
My attorneys also found documentary evidence that another former CIA officer provided the names of some ten covert officers to journalist Matthew Cole, and classified information on counterterrorist operations. But the FBI declined to investigate, and the Justice Department declined to prosecute him. Why? Because he didn’t blow the whistle on torture.
A year ago, the Justice Department, at the insistence of the CIA’s leadership, charged me with three counts of espionage, in addition to other felonies, despite admitting privately that I had not committed espionage. I became the sixth person charged by President Obama under the Espionage Act, double the number of prosecutions made under all previous presidents combined. So far, every espionage case that has found its way into a courtroom has either been dismissed or has crumbled, but the targets have still been destroyed in their careers and lives by the ordeal and the staggering expense of investigation and accusation.
Former Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson warned of cases like mine more than seven decades ago when he said, “With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense—that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies.”
Let me be clear: I am a patriotic American. I love our great country. I love the CIA. I always will. I believe that the CIA is largely made up of dedicated men and women who want nothing more than to protect the country. But a true patriot, as Thomas Paine wrote, saves his country from his government.
Certainly Congress has neglected its oversight duties. Where are the voices of outrage when the new CIA director designee maintains a “kill list” with American citizens on it? Where is the outrage when those citizens are denied their Fifth Amendment rights to due process and instead are vaporized by drones without even a formal accusation of a crime? Didn’t even the Nuremburg defendants receive a trial, and Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem?
At the CIA, we are taught that everything is a shade of grey, that nothing is black or white. But this is wrong. Torture is black and white, and we as Americans should not be involved in it. Torture is a crime, both in the US and according to international law. There is no excuse for it. Its use is never appropriate for civilized peoples.
But today, I will be the only person to go to prison for any crime related to torture. The torturers are free. The men who conceived of the torture are free. Those who implemented the torture policy are free. And those attorneys who justified the torture with warped legal opinions are free.
I took a plea to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for five reasons: their ages are nineteen, sixteen, eight, six, and one. My wife and children are proud of me, and that is what matters.
My whistleblowing also accomplished something very important. Despite the fact that I was prosecuted, my protest against torture is now the law of the land. I’m glad that I had a role in that.
I would like to thank my wife and family, my attorneys, my advisors Jesselyn Radack and Bruce Fein, and the dozens of former and current CIA officers, FBI agents, and assistant US attorneys who both publicly and privately encouraged me to stand up and fight. Thank you for your emails, calls, cards, and donations to my defense fund.
My journey has just begun. Thirty months is not a long time. When my sentence passes, I will continue to speak out against torture and in support of the civil rights and civil liberties that we as Americans have fought and died for at Valley Forge, Cemetery Ridge, Omaha Beach, and elsewhere.
As President Obama so eloquently said earlier this week, “We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to posterity.”
Thank you.
My wife Heather was and is my strongest supporter and a never-ending source of level-headed wisdom for me. On the day of my arrest, she said, “You have to embrace this. You are not a criminal. You’re a whistleblower. They are doing this to you because you’re a champion of human rights. You embarrassed them. You have to fight back.” She said later, when I was thinking about doing something to myself that I’m too ashamed to even discuss here, she said, “You’re strong. You’re tough. You can fight them. They have consistently underestimated your toughness. You can get through this and we’ll be stronger for it on the other side.”
It was because of Heather’s support and steadfastness that I decided to fight. And I would do other things, too. Heather and my friend and attorney Jesselyn Radack said that I should work hard while in prison to remain “relevant” to the national debate on torture. They said that I had a unique, experienced, and respected voice on the issue, despite the fact that the government had worked so hard and had spent millions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money to silence it. I should write, they said.
I already had success writing for the Los Angeles Times and The Huffington Post. I should keep that up, they said, and I decided to continue writing for major publications, even if I had to do it by hand. One night, in the week before I went to prison, I was at an informal dinner at the home of firedoglake.com publisher Jane Hamsher. Jesselyn, NSA whistleblower Tom Drake, journalist Kevin Gosztola, and godfather of all whistleblowers Daniel Ellsberg also were there and all urged me also to write about my prison experience. After all, they said, Americans really don’t have any idea what prison life is like, other than what they see on television, and that is so skewed toward violence that it’s not a comprehensive or truly honest picture.
I agreed and decided to write an open letter to my supporters that Jane would publish on her website. I would do that as soon as I felt comfortable enough to sit down and collect my thoughts. I figured it would take only a few minutes and it would give me something to do to pass the time. A few months later, I was left speechless by the response.
But in the near term, I had one final goal. I made one last-ditch attempt to avoid prison about a week before I was due to turn myself in. I wrote Senator Kerry a long, heartfelt email and sent it to his personal email account. I asked if he would speak to the president for me and ask him to commute my sentence. The conviction would still be on my record, but I could stay home with my family and work to support them. I received his terse reply a few days later: “Do not ever attempt to contact me again.”
1 Petraeus eventually took a plea to a misdemeanor charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified information. He was sentenced to eighteen months of unsupervised release and a fine of $100,000. He did not lose his security clearance, and the day after his sentencing he traveled to Iraq on a consultation contract for the White House.