The thirty-seven analysts
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Of all the stories available to him on the day, John Kiriakou said this was the one he was most interested in, and the reason was that it recapitulated his own case with the roles reversed.

The firings

Kiriakou said Tulsi Gabbard had "fired 37 CIA analysts, all of whom had something to do with the national intelligence estimate saying that the Russians had interfered in the presidential election." He interjected his own view that they did not interfere, and noted that she fired all thirty-seven.

He had already called the action career-ending on an earlier broadcast, and explained why: "not only did she fire them, she revoked their security clearances." Without a clearance, in his account, there is no reason to remain in Washington at all, "just leave, go back to whatever part of the country you came from."

The names

The second step was the one that created a legal problem. "She listed those 37 people," Kiriakou said, "and the names were carried everywhere in the media." He recognised a few of them himself, most he did not, having been "out of it for 20 years", but a couple were senior officers who had been his contemporaries at the CIA.

One of the named officers, it emerged, was undercover. "And so by releasing their name," Kiriakou said, "Tulsi violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981, which is exactly why I went to prison. I was accused of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981."

The position he takes

Kiriakou did not call for a prosecution. His two sentences on the point are consecutive and deliberately so: "Tulsi is not going to be prosecuted. Nobody should be prosecuted for that." He regards the statute itself as defective, "probably illegal, unconstitutional, because it squelches free speech", and says it survives only because it has never been challenged, including by him: the choice he faced was "take the deal for two and a half years or get 12 to 18 years."

He contrasted this with the treatment he received, quoting the judge in his own case: "Mr. Kiriakou, you either did it or you didn't do it. And I think you did it." Intent, he says, was held to be irrelevant.

The officer

Asked what became of the burned officer, Kiriakou said flatly that they had been fired. He described the result as a double blow: cover blown, and no ability to describe the cover job on a résumé, because "you actually were managing the mutual fund," without being paid for it.

See also

- Tulsi Gabbard
- Intelligence Identities Protection Act
- Leonie Brinkema
- Valerie Plame
- Suing The Cia
