The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (IIPA) criminalizes the intentional disclosure of the identity of a covert intelligence officer to any person not authorized to receive it.
John Kiriakou was ultimately convicted of one count of violating the IIPA, which he has described as arising from a single conversation in the summer of 2008. A journalist writing about the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program emailed him lists of names, asking if he could introduce the journalist to any of them; Kiriakou said he knew none of them. In a third email, the journalist asked about a person referred to only by the first name “John” in a passage of Kiriakou’s own book — a short story about running into a former colleague on the tarmac as Abu Zubaydah was loaded onto a plane. Kiriakou confirmed the surname, adding that the man had probably retired and was living somewhere in Virginia: “That was it. I confirmed the surname of a former colleague. That was it.”[1][2][3]
The journalist, it later emerged, was not writing a book — he was working as an informal investigator for Guantanamo defense attorneys, without disclosing that relationship. He passed the name to Human Rights Watch; Human Rights Watch passed it to the Guantanamo defense attorneys; the defense attorneys filed a classified motion asking to interview the named officer; the Guantanamo judge flagged the name as possibly classified; and the information was routed back through the FBI to the CIA to John Brennan, completing the chain that led to Kiriakou’s charge.[4]
Kiriakou noted that the name he confirmed was never published or made public by anyone in the chain: “Nobody was harmed. Literally, the name that I confirmed was never made public. Never.”[4]
Five felonies, one conviction
Kiriakou says he was ultimately charged with five felonies: three counts of espionage — arising from his 2007 ABC News interview and a subsequent interview with the New York Times — one count of making a false statement his attorneys said was never clearly specified, and the single IIPA count.[5] He notes he was only the second person in American history ever charged with violating the IIPA, and that the case had no precedent to draw on; the first person charged, he says, was a woman who was “actually a traitor.”[6][7][8] He and his attorneys found only a couple of Harvard Law Review articles arguing the law itself was unconstitutional, but with no prior defendant, no one had standing to challenge it in court.[8] A related charge accusing him of outing an “overt” CIA employee — one publicly listed on LinkedIn as a CIA employee — was thrown out by the judge.[9]
Prosecutors held their sentencing demand at 45 years for ten months before beginning to negotiate down, ultimately reaching a “best and final” offer of 30 months, of which he would serve 23.[10][7] One of the assistant U.S. attorneys on the case — who Kiriakou says later became assistant attorney general for the criminal division under the Biden administration — told him to take a deal so that he might “live to meet your grandchildren, Mr. Kiriakou.”[10] Kiriakou says the threat behind the plea was explicit: refuse, and prosecutors would refile the espionage charges, add obstruction-of-justice charges, and seek 45 years.[11] He weighed that against a ProPublica study published in November 2012 finding the federal government wins 98.2% of its cases; married with five children at home, he took the plea.[11] Attorney Mark McDougall of Akin Gump Strauss told him bluntly that his problem was thinking the case was about justice rather than “mitigating damage,” warning that a trial loss meant realistically 12 to 18 years.[12][13] He ultimately accepted the deal — two and a half years, of which he served 23 months — and, though he had 11 attorneys, could afford to pay only six of them, filing for bankruptcy owing $1.15 million.[14]
Kiriakou blew the whistle during the Bush administration, but it was the Obama administration that ultimately prosecuted him; he was sentenced in January 2013 and reported to prison in February 2013, losing his pension and his civil rights and unable to vote again until 2023.[15][16]
In a separate telling, Kiriakou frames the charge itself as retaliatory: because he had exposed a crime, he says, the Obama administration secretly reopened the case against him, tapped his phones, and collected years of his emails, putting FBI surveillance teams on him before arriving at the IIPA violation.[17] He again notes that the author whose inquiry prompted the charge never made the confirmed name public, so no actual danger to the officer was ever created, yet the Justice Department prosecuted him regardless.[18]
As an expert witness
Kiriakou has since served as an expert witness in a federal trial, testifying about whistleblowing as a defense in a case invoking his own IIPA conviction as precedent; he says the jury, watching by Zoom, could reportedly be seen laughing at the prosecutor during his testimony.[19]
The single-person pension amendment
John Kiriakou recounts that the amendment John McCain’s staff drafted to restore his pension was written to cover “all Americans convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981 between October 1st and October 31st of 2012” — a description that, he notes, fits only himself.[20]