Ex-CIA Officer Indicted for Leaking Classified Info to New York Times Reporter

Gawker ^ | January 6, 2011 | Staff

[lbryce]

Ex-CIA Officer Indicted for Leaking Classified Info to New York Slimes Reporter

Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer, was indicted today for leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen. The indictment shows that the federal government had access to their e-mail and phone contacts going back several years.

Sterling served on the Iran desk of the CIA in the 1990s, and oversaw a classified program aimed at sabotaging the development of its nuclear programming. He left the CIA in 2000 and sued for racial discrimination (he is African American) in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which dismissed the suit on the grounds that litigating it could reveal state secrets. Sterling later battled the CIA over a memoir he hoped to write after the agency heavily redacted his proposed drafts.

The indictment accuses Sterling of leaking information and documents about a highly classified program to "Author A," who is almost certainly New York Times reporter James Risen, over the course of three years from 2001 to 2004. The program involved someone described as "Human Asset No. 1," a CIA operative managed by Sterling during his time at the agency, and the indictment says Sterling's disclosures to Risen about the program jeopardized the asset's cover.

The indictment shows, chillingly, that the federal government had been monitoring Risen and Sterlings' communications going back years. (Either that, or the feds recently grabbed copies of archived e-mails from Risen or Sterling's computer.) It quotes extensively from their e-mails to one another—including one in which Risen sent Sterling a copy of the proposal for his 2006 book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration—and notes

[Rembrandt]

“Hope you weren’t a spook on our side.”

Score one for you, I WASN’T a spook for your side, I was a spook for the Naval Security Group/NSA, a contingent supporting the interests of the USA.