The Scooter Libby deposition
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The Scooter Libby deposition is John Kiriakou's account of appearing as a witness in the prosecution arising from the exposure of Valerie Plame, and of the moment the CIA's own lawyer cut him off. He tells it to establish how far outside normal practice a public presidential announcement of a covert action programme sits.

The room

"I was a witness in the Scooter Libby trial in 2006 or 2007, I guess it was, and I had to go before the special prosecutor, who ironically prosecuted me a couple of years later."

The room was crowded with counsel. "So I'm meeting with the special prosecutor, and the CIA general counsel's office is represented, and Scooter Libby's attorneys are there, and the Justice Department has its people there."

The question and the interruption

"And he asked me a question: did I ever see these two senior CIA people talking to each other? And I said, well, they're not friends, if that's what you're getting at. I mean, the only conversation I ever saw them have was about a covert action program."

The reaction was immediate. "And the CIA general counsel jumps up and he's like, 'Stop.' And I said, 'I wasn't going to say anything about covert action.' He's like, 'You can't even say the words covert action. We don't even acknowledge that there is such a thing as covert action.' And I said, 'Okay, sorry.'"

He repeated the constraint in a second telling a month earlier: "when I was being called to testify in the Scooter Libby case, I was told that I wasn't even allowed to say the words. Covert action. Wasn't even allowed to say the words, let alone to talk about a program."

The comparison he draws

The anecdote exists in his telling only as a measuring stick. Against it he sets a sitting president announcing such a programme from a podium: "now the president's going on national television to talk about the covert action program that he just approved at, you know, six levels above top secret."

In the October version he made the same contrast in the language of career experience rather than protocol: "here the president of the United States is publicly announcing a covert action program. I never saw anything like it in my life."

The detail Kiriakou marks as ironic, that the prosecutor who took his testimony in the Libby matter would later prosecute him, he states once and does not develop.

See also

- Covert action programs
- Valerie Plame
- Central Intelligence Agency
- John Kiriakou
