Sharon Scranage
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Sharon Scranage was a Central Intelligence Agency secretary stationed at the U.S. embassy in Ghana in the 1980s. She is the only other American besides John Kiriakou to have been criminally charged under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. Her case is invoked by Kiriakou in his account of his own prosecution as the precedent against which the federal government's choice of forty-five years as the appropriate sentence for him should be measured.

Disclosure and consequence

Scranage was having an affair with a member of the Ghanaian intelligence service. "In the course of pillow talk, she revealed the names of all of the CIA officers in the station and the names of the sources they were running. And so the Ghanaians executed these guys."

Sentence

Scranage received nine months in prison.

The comparison Kiriakou drew

In the period during which Kiriakou and his wife stayed up overnight considering the Justice Department's plea offers, the Scranage precedent was the principal data point shaping their thinking. The disproportion, nine months for a disclosure that produced executions versus forty-five years for whistleblowing on the CIA torture program, was, in Kiriakou's framing, definitive evidence that his prosecution was political: "They offer me 45 years for blowing the whistle on the torture program."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Plato Cacheris
