The pillow-talk disclosure case
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The pillow-talk disclosure case is John Kiriakou's illustration of how unauthorised disclosures used to be handled inside the CIA, told about a colleague who sat next to him.

She was having an affair with a former senior CIA officer who had become a commentator on CNN. In the course of the relationship she told him something classified; he repeated it on air. "The CIA immediately began an investigation, and they very quickly zeroed right in on her. They called her into security and they asked: did you give this information to this guy who then broadcast it on CNN? She said yes I did."

The punishment

"What they did with her is they suspended her for four weeks without pay, and they put a very strongly worded memo in her file saying that she did this. And that was it."

Kiriakou endorses it without qualification: "now, that's how they should have dealt with it. She didn't commit espionage, she did something stupid. Was there any harm to the national security? No, there wasn't. But by God, she'll never do it again, because of that punishment."

The benchmark

What the case gives him is a measure of drift. "Now today she would be charged with espionage", and, taking the Reality Winner case as the most recent comparison, "she would do about five years in prison."

The question he draws from it is left open: "how did we get, in 20 short years, from this sane approach to the disclosure of classified information, to just wantonly charging everybody with espionage? It doesn't make sense to me."

See also

- Espionage Act
- Central Intelligence Agency
- The 2023 classified documents scandal
