Jeffrey Sterling was a Black CIA officer who filed a racial-discrimination lawsuit against the agency after being passed over for promotion. According to John Kiriakou, a CIA supervisor explicitly told Sterling the promotion had been denied because of his race: “When did you realize I was black?” Sterling reportedly responded.[1]
Sterling gave an interview to the New York Times about the discrimination lawsuit. He was subsequently charged with nine felonies — seven counts of espionage — despite no allegation that he had provided classified information to any foreign government or that any national-security harm had resulted.[2]
Daniel Ellsberg asked Kiriakou to go to trial so the Espionage Act’s constitutionality could be litigated from a conviction; Kiriakou declined because of his five children. Ellsberg then made the same request of Sterling. Sterling went to trial, was convicted, and was sentenced at the Eastern District of Virginia by Judge Leonie Brinkema, who announced she was giving Sterling “Kiriakou plus 12 months.”[3] Kiriakou notes Sterling, like Edward Snowden and later Julian Assange, was prosecuted in the Eastern District of Virginia — a venue where, per Kiriakou, no national-security defendant has ever won a case.[4] Sterling, a fluent Farsi speaker who had been the top-rated fraud investigator in the state of Missouri before joining the CIA, was ultimately given three and a half years in prison at Englewood, Colorado after falling afoul of the Obama administration’s use of the Espionage Act.[5] Sterling’s wife told Kiriakou that, despite his education, prison racial segregation barred Sterling from socializing, watching TV, or eating with white inmates because he was Black.[6]
Kiriakou says Sterling called him four times the day before Kiriakou left for prison, each time saying he was going to kill himself that day.[7]
The posting that was taken away
In a 2026 account, Kiriakou fills in the qualifications and the reversal that produced the lawsuit. Sterling had a law degree “from a terrific school,” spoke fluent Farsi, and came through training “certified at or near the top of his class.”[8]
He had been assigned to the Middle East and had already shipped his belongings when the agency changed its mind: “Oh, listen, Jeffrey, we decided not to send you to the Middle East. We’re going to send you to Europe instead.” He asked why — “All my stuff is gone.” The reason he was given was that it “would just look weird for a big black guy” to be posted there.[9]
Kiriakou’s legal point is that this was not merely offensive but actionable: reassigning an officer away from the Middle East “because you happen to be black — well, that’s a violation of the law.” So Sterling sued. James Risen of the New York Times wrote about the lawsuit, and he and Sterling spoke occasionally about it thereafter.[10]
The prosecution came after Risen published a book containing a chapter on a failed operation to disrupt the Iranian nuclear programme. Sterling was arrested and charged with nine felonies, including seven counts of espionage.[11]
Kiriakou reads the sentence as the tell. Sterling was convicted on all counts, and Leonie Brinkema — whom he calls “a hanging judge, my judge” — gave him three years. On seven espionage counts, three years, “because even the judge didn’t believe he had done anything” of the kind charged.[12]
He places the case in a wider pattern: it is one thing to tell transactional lies in the belief that you are serving a greater good, and another to hunt down the people who decline. See CIA culture of lying.[13]
A harsher yardstick
John Kiriakou says he attended the sentencing hearings of fellow whistleblowers including Jeffrey Sterling and Daniel Hale, where a judge used his own light sentence as a baseline — offering “Kiriakou plus 12 months” — because the Justice Department was angry his attorneys had negotiated so short a term.[14][15]
Standing to challenge the Espionage Act (Scott Horton, 2021)
John Kiriakou says Jeffrey Sterling was one of only two people — with Chelsea Manning — who had legal standing to appeal an Espionage Act conviction to the Supreme Court, because both had gone to trial and been convicted. Sterling “was excited about it for a short while,” Kiriakou recalls, then found “the whole process was so depressing he just wanted to get past it”; once he lost at the appellate level in the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, “that was the end of it.”[16][17]
One judge’s docket
Kiriakou cites Sterling’s prosecution as part of a pattern about the court rather than about the defendants. Judge Leonie Brinkema, he says, reserves all national security cases for herself, and he lists Sterling’s case beside his own, the Snowden case and the Assange case — with Zacarias Moussaoui added to the same docket.[18]
The point of the list is the record it produced: on Kiriakou’s account no national security defendant has ever won a case in that courtroom.[18]
Counted among the Intercept five
In a January 2026 broadcast Kiriakou included Sterling in the roster of whistleblowers he says The Intercept’s reporters were “personally responsible for sending to prison”: “Reality Winner. Jeffrey Sterling. Me. Daniel Hale. And who’s the fifth? I can’t remember.”[19]
The inclusion is recorded as he gave it. In his other accounts of the same five, the names are Winner, Terry Albury, himself and Hale, and Sterling is absent.