Leon Panetta
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Leon Panetta was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Obama from 2009 to 2011, and Secretary of Defense from 2011 to 2013. John Kiriakou's assessment: "I never really liked Panetta just because he's not a nice guy. But Panetta was right to shut [the Blackwater assassination program] down."

The Blackwater shutdown and the Erik Prince outing

On arrival at the CIA in 2009 Panetta terminated the Blackwater-operated worldwide assassination program. In his memoir, and subsequently in testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Panetta described the program and in the course of doing so publicly identified Erik Prince by name as a CIA non-official-cover officer. Per Kiriakou: "That's why Erik Prince lives in Dubai now and not in the United States."

The IIPA double standard

Kiriakou's recurring point in interviews is that Panetta, alongside General David Petraeus, disclosed the identity of covert CIA personnel without ever being charged under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the same statute under which Kiriakou himself was prosecuted and sentenced to 30 months. Per Kiriakou: "Leon Panetta, who outed the Osama bin Laden shooter to Hollywood writer Mark Boal and Hollywood producer Kathryn Bigelow, never charged with a crime."

The Hollywood briefings + the book advance

Per John Kiriakou: "What about Leon Panetta, who after the bin Laden killing, not only told his deputy director and all of the associate deputy directors to cooperate with a Hollywood screenwriter and a Hollywood director, Katherine Bigelow and Mark Boal, and gave them classified briefings over a classified mockup of the bin Laden compound, but then revealed the undercover names of the Seal Team 6 operatives who had killed bin Laden, and then you said, 'oh my bad, sorry.' There was no prosecution for Leon Panetta. Got a nice little book deal out of it too, a six-million-dollar advance with his nice little book deal."

Six names, no charge

John Kiriakou says Leon Panetta revealed the names of six covert CIA operatives and was never charged, one of the comparisons he uses to argue his own imprisonment was punishment for whistleblowing rather than for any leak.

The bin Laden award ceremony

Kiriakou uses Panetta's accidental disclosure of the name of the special forces ground commander who led the bin Laden operation as the central example in his argument that Espionage Act enforcement is selective. Panetta did not know that a Hollywood screenwriter was among the audience cleared to hear him speak, and a spokesman later said Panetta had assumed everyone present held the proper clearance.

When the transcript of the speech was released, more than 90 lines had been redacted, which Kiriakou reads as implying that a great deal more than one name was disclosed. He also cites the CIA's own Office of Security, which concluded that agency security policy and administrative procedures were not followed in allowing a member of the media access to the classified ceremony.

See the Panetta bin Laden disclosure for the full argument.

The room of uncleared people

Setting out the cases that produced no charges alongside his own, Kiriakou put Panetta's disclosure in the same category as David Petraeus's: "Leon Panetta did exactly the same thing to a roomful of uncleared people, including journalists." He wrote about it at the time in the LA Times.

The room also contained the filmmakers then preparing Zero Dark Thirty, a film that, in Kiriakou's summary, ended up praising the agency and "suggesting that torture, erroneously, lying, really, that torture was critical to the capture of bin Laden." The implicit bargain he describes: "if you defend torture, then you will be given the names" of the team that carried out the raid.

See also

- Blackwater
- Erik Prince
- John Kiriakou
- Mort Halperin
