The threat to testify
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Recounting how a case that began with five felony charges and an exposure of forty-five years ended in a sentence under two years, John Kiriakou has described a specific move he made in the negotiation.

The offer

Over the course of ten months, he says, the negotiations had brought the Justice Department down to ten years. They wanted him to serve ten years in a federal penitentiary, and this was what they called their best and final offer. He turned it down.

The two answers

He gave two reasons. The first was flat: "I haven't done anything wrong, and because I haven't done anything wrong, I'm not doing ten minutes, let alone ten years in prison."

The second was the operative one. He was a very longtime former CIA officer, he told them, and in his fifteen years at the Agency he had witnessed "hideous crimes against humanity, war crimes." He was going to have to testify in his own defence, and "I might accidentally say something about these horrible crimes that I've witnessed my colleagues perpetrate over the years, and it might slip out in the course of my testimony."

The response

The answer came back quickly. "And so the CIA came back and said, 'All right, dude, two and a half years. You'll end up serving under two.'"

Kiriakou says he turned that down as well, and that what changed his mind was not the offer but his own counsel. One of his eleven attorneys, the one he liked and respected most, pulled him aside and told him he did not get it: the case was not about innocence or guilt but about cutting his losses and inflicting the least possible pain on himself and his family.

What the gambit was

The move Kiriakou describes is the classic problem a national security prosecution creates for the government: a defendant with clearances who intends to testify. He does not use a term of art for it, and he presents the warning as a statement of fact about what his defence would require rather than as a threat. The sequence he reports, refusal, warning, a four-fold reduction in the offer, is the whole of his evidence for its effect.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Federal plea coercion
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Eastern District of Virginia
