A former CIA officer was indicted Thursday on charges of leaking secrets to journalists, including the name of a covert agent and the role of another CIA employee in classified operations. John Kiriakou, who had previously revealed the CIA's use of waterboarding of Al-Qaeda suspects, was charged in January with leaking secrets. The indictment allows the case to proceed to trial without an evidentiary hearing.The indictment returned by a grand jury in Virginia charged Kiriakou with one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and three counts of violating the Espionage Act. The indictment also charged him with making false statements to the CIA in an unsuccessful attempt to trick the agency into allowing him to include classified information in his 2010 book, "The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror."
Kiriakou first came to public attention in an interview with ABC News in December 2007 in which he became the first US official to describe how top Al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding, a technique widely viewed as torture.
The former CIA operative acknowledged later in his memoir, however, that he was not present when the interrogation took place.
A CIA intelligence officer between 1990 and 2004, Kiriakou was accused in the indictment of leaking information to reporters anonymously identified as "Journalist A" and "Journalist B."
The charges stem from an investigation into classified information, including photographs of a CIA official, that found its way into classified filings by defense lawyers representing detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, the US naval base in southern Cuba.
The indictment claims Kiriakou was a source of information for a June 2008 New York Times article that identified a CIA operative and revealed other classified information.
Kiriakou also was alleged to have lied to a CIA review board while he was seeking permission to publish a book about his experience.
| But we're supposed to believe him now. Enjoy trying to defend yourself on the cross-examination, sir... |
He told the CIA review board that he had "fictionalized" that information when in fact he had not. The "magic box" technique was also described in The New York Times.
The charges of leaking secrets each carry a potential prison term of 10 years, while the false statements charge carries a possible five-year prison sentence.