Suing the CIA
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The question arose from a concrete case. An undercover CIA officer had been publicly named and then dismissed, and Ted Rall asked whether such a person could sue to be compensated for a destroyed career and lost income.

The double blow

John Kiriakou first set out what the officer had actually lost. They were fired, he said, which he called "a double whammy." Not only is the cover gone; the officer cannot even put the cover job on a résumé, because the cover work was genuinely performed. "You actually were managing the mutual fund," Kiriakou said, without being paid for it.

Rall's conclusion was that they should sue. Kiriakou's immediate reply was two words: "Good luck."

The record

Asked outright whether anyone has ever successfully sued the CIA in civil court, Kiriakou answered: "Not that I know of."

He qualified this only slightly, and the qualification is unusually precise about what kind of win is available. "There have been small, you know, sort of picky kind of victories," he said, "like you sue for the right to sue, that kind of thing."

That is a claim about the shape of the case law rather than its volume. A litigant may win the threshold question of whether a claim can be brought at all, and Kiriakou knows of no one who has then gone on to win the claim.

Why it matters to his own account

The answer belongs to a wider pattern Kiriakou returns to repeatedly: that the asymmetry between the agency and the individual is not principally about evidence or merits but about the near-total absence of a forum. He gives the same account of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a statute he thinks unconstitutional that survives because the cost of contesting it is a decade in prison, and of his own decision to take a plea rather than test the charge.

On this reading, the officer burned by an official disclosure has no more practical recourse than the officer prosecuted for one. The conversation moved on immediately; Kiriakou offered no route by which the case might be brought.

See also

- The thirty-seven analysts
- Intelligence Identities Protection Act
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Ted Rall
