CIA Fires Officer For Leaking Classified Information to Media

Fox News ^ | April 21, 2006

[Howlin]

Just breaking on Fox...

No details, but the agent was caught dead to rights leaking....

Update: CIA Officer Fired for Leaking Classified Info to Media

WASHINGTON — A CIA officer has been relieved of his duty after being caught leaking classified information to the media.

CIA officials will not reveal the officer's name, assignment, or the information that was leaked. The firing is a highly unusual move, although there has been an ongoing investigation into leaks in the CIA.

One official called this a "damaging leak" that deals with operational information and said the fired officer "knowingly and willfully" leaked the information to the media and "was caught."

Excerpt.

[Peach]

I really like Hitchens; thanks for the ping, Txsleuth. I'll go read it.

[tobyhill]

On MSNBC.com there's an article stating she is denying being the leak.

[Peach]

Please read Jane's #2693. This convinces me more than ever that Clinton planned a shadow government to bring down the new president.

[Fedora]

Sounds a whole lot like Wilson's slip-up about seeing the documents.

Very much so.

[prairiebreeze]

Shadow government...quite possible. Regardless, Clinton did everything he could to tie the hands and build the walls for those who want to keep national secrets a secret.

Between him and Gorelick...we got 9-11.

Are you going to see the United 93 movie?

[pinz-n-needlez]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1526309/posts

Get a cup of coffee, or a beer. Or just check to see you've plenty of ink and paper for your printer. :-)

Pinz

[Peach]

I don't want to see it in the movie theater for various reasons, not the least of which is if I become emotional, I would prefer that happens at home. So I'll wait for the DVD.

Good point about the Gorelick walls too.

[Fedora]

The SHIFTY EYED guy on 60 minutes last night

Tyler Drumheller? I didn't watch it but I think I heard he was going to be on.

[Suzy Quzy]

YES!! Tyler Drumheller!!! Mr. SHIFTY EYES!! What do you know about him other than he LIES???? He mentioned the forged docs and that Bush KNEW they were forged..blah, blah, blah...but he never mentioned that Joe Wilson said they were forged BEFORE anyone saw them!!

[Suzy Quzy]

Thanks.

[ScaniaBoy]

A MUST READ:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12466719/site/newsweek/

April 24, 2006 - A former CIA officer who was sacked last week after allegedly confessing to leaking secrets has denied she was the source of a controversial Washington Post story about alleged CIA secret detention operations in Eastern Europe, a friend of the operative told NEWSWEEK.

The fired official, Mary O. McCarthy, “categorically denies being the source of the leak,” one of McCarthy’s friends and former colleagues, Rand Beers, said Monday after speaking to McCarthy. Beers said he could not elaborate on this denial and McCarthy herself did not respond to a request for comment left by NEWSWEEK on her home answering machine. A national security advisor to Democratic Party candidate John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, Beers worked as the head of intelligence programs on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council staff and later served as a top deputy on counter-terrorism for President Bush in 2002 and 2003. McCarthy, a career CIA analyst, initially worked as a deputy to Beers on the NSC and later took over Beer’s role as the Clinton NSC’s top intelligence expert.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano re-affirmed on Monday that an agency official had been fired after acknowledging “unauthorized contacts with the media and discussion of classified information” with journalists. Gimigliano and other administration spokespersons said they were prohibited by law from disclosing the identity of the person who was fired. But government officials familiar with the matter confirmed to NEWSWEEK that McCarthy, a 20-year veteran of the CIA’s intelligence—or analytical— branch, was the individual in question.

The officials, who asked for anonymity because they were discussing sensitive information, said that McCarthy had been fired after allegedly confessing during the course of a leak investigation based heavily on polygraph examinations that she had engaged in unauthorized contacts with more than one journalist regarding more than one news story. The only journalist so far identified by government sources as one of the unauthorized persons with whom McCarthy admitted contact is Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, who last week won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing details of a secret airline and prison network that the CIA operates to detain and interrogate high-level Al Qaeda suspects.

Priest’s most contentious story, published by the Post last November, alleged that the CIA had been “hiding and interrogating some of its most important Al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe.” Even though the Post said it decided, in response to administration appeals, not to identify the Eastern European countries involved in secret CIA detention operations, intelligence officials said at the time that the story caused potentially serious damage to agency activities. The officials said the CIA would filing a “crime report” with the Justice Department regarding possible leaks of classified information. (Eric C. Grant, public affairs director of the Washington Post, says none of the paper’s reporters has been subpoenaed or talked to investigators in connection with this matter.)

CONTINUED

HAT TIP: tobyhill

[ScaniaBoy]

PIng to link at post # 2751

[Peach]

I thought I read that Mary took a polygraph, flunked it and then confessed?

[Suzy Quzy]

Thanks.....Rand Beers is the one who says Mary McCarthy is Innocent!!! LOL!!! Beers is up to his geeky neck in this crap.

[ScaniaBoy]

Yes, she did - and that is acknowledged in the article.

I guess this is what you call a "muddying the waters" exercise.

[Enchante]

If the issues involved were not so serious this would merely be hilarious. Here we have PMS-NBC relying upon the words of charlatan Larry Johnson to tell the world that it is the BUSH administration that has injected partisan behavior into intel and national security issues!! What a CROCK of.....

"Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who got into a dispute with McCarthy in the late l980s when she was his supervisor and remains critical of her management style, nonetheless says that he “never saw her allow her political [views] to cloud her analytical judgment.” Johnson maintains the Bush White House is “really damaging the intelligence community” by sending a message to career officials that “unless you are a partisan of the party in power, you cannot be trusted.” This message, Johnson says, is destroying the intelligence community’s “professional ethos.”

[pinz-n-needlez]

So if she is innocent of giving Dana *this* story, there are other stories that she has given to reporters. And there is another spook giving info to Dana. Someone who is caught up in this sting, too.

Sounds win/win to me whether she is innocent or guilty of giving Dana this particular story.

We uncovered the vipers nest by following Dana's connections.

When we find out what reporter she worked with on other stories, we can uncover *that* network too.

Let's give Mary the benefit of the doubt here. ;-) Get your sleep while we can, kids. We may be called to the mattresses again at any moment. Uncle Porter will give us our cue. LOL

Pinz

[pinz-n-needlez]

Maybe Beers couldn't say more because *he* was the one dictating this particular story... ;-)

Pinz

[pinz-n-needlez]

lol

[Suzy Quzy]

I hope that little Hitler look-alike Larry Johnson gets caught up in this net.