CIA crimes reports against Kiriakou
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A crimes report is a referral from the CIA to the Justice Department asking that a criminal investigation be opened. In John Kiriakou''s case the mechanism was used repeatedly over five years, and he describes the pattern rather than any single filing as the substance of the retaliation against him.

The first one

Within twenty-four hours of the December 2007 interview in which Kiriakou told Brian Ross that the CIA was waterboarding prisoners and that it was official United States government policy, the agency filed a crimes report against him with the Justice Department, saying he had revealed classified information, the torture program, and asking for an investigation "with an eye toward prosecuting me." The Justice Department decided at the time that he had not revealed classified information, on the ground that the information was already in the public domain.

Then every time he spoke

The first referral was not the last. "Every time I would write an op-ed, every time I would give a television interview or give a speech at a university, the CIA would file a crimes report against me accusing me of leaking additional classified information." Each time, Kiriakou says, the Justice Department determined that he had not leaked anything, a finding made easier by the fact that he had submitted the op-eds and the speeches to the agency''s own Publications Review Board for clearance in advance.

The book drafts

The clearest instance of the pattern, in a 2017 telling, is the manuscript of The Reluctant Spy. Kiriakou says he went "completely by the book": each time he finished a draft he sent it to the Publications Review Board, which either returned it with passages blacked out or wrote back to say it looked good. He did this eleven times, and the board redacted about ninety pages, turning what would have been a 310-page book into a 220-page one.

What he did not know was that the submissions were themselves being treated as offences. "Every time I was sending in a new draft they were filing a crimes report, it's called, against me with the FBI saying that I was violating the law by putting this stuff on paper."

He sets that against how the process is meant to work: when the board objects, the author deletes the passage and negotiates different language. "Instead, they set out to target me pretty early on in the book process."

Extension to his wife

The referrals then reached Heather Kiriakou, at the time a senior CIA officer. The agency accused her of leaking classified information to her husband for the purpose of an op-ed he had written. His answer was that the material in the piece had come from two United Press International reports and from a South American foreign ministry''s website, at which point "they would back off."

What the pattern amounted to

Kiriakou describes the cumulative effect as a life rather than a case: surveillance by the FBI, his wife summoned to the CIA''s office of security, and difficulty obtaining a security clearance when he went to work on Capitol Hill. "It just became this pattern of harassment." Asked why he did not simply stop, he answered that torture was a subject about which the country should be having a national debate, that writing an op-ed and giving a speech are not against the law, and that "I didn''t want to be cowed, I didn''t want to be frightened into silence by the CIA."

See also

- Publications Review Board
- Espionage Act
- Brian Ross
- Heather Kiriakou
- The chilling effect of whistleblower prosecutions
