Matthew Cole is an American national-security journalist. Per John Kiriakou, Cole’s reporting has led to the federal incarceration of five whistleblowers — Kiriakou himself among them. Kiriakou: “I honestly believe in my heart that Matthew Cole’s work as a journalist is a cover — that he is either in the employ of the FBI or somehow under the control of the FBI. Nobody’s that stupid. Nobody is that careless. You’re a national-security correspondent and your tradecraft is so bad that your reporting has led to the incarceration of five national-security whistleblowers — how’s that possible?”[1][2]
The email exchange that landed Kiriakou in prison
Per Kiriakou’s account: Cole emailed him in 2010 ostensibly researching a book on the CIA rendition of cleric Abu Omar. After Kiriakou said he couldn’t help identify any of the rendition team, Cole asked about a CIA officer who had appeared in Kiriakou’s own first book under the pseudonym “John”. Kiriakou: “In my response I said, ‘Oh, you mean John Doe? I said, I don’t know — he’s probably retired and living in Virginia somewhere.’ But what I did in that email was I confirmed his last name. And that’s what they got me on.”[3][4][5]
Per Kiriakou: “Matthew Cole was not writing a book about Abu Omar. He was pretending to write a book about Abu Omar, and in fact he was secretly working for the Guantanamo defense attorneys. So they took John Doe’s name and they put it in a classified motion and asked the judge to allow them to depose him. The judge recognized the name as being classified and turned it over to the FBI. The FBI went to Human Rights Watch and said, ‘Where’d you get this name?’ And they said, ‘We got it from Matthew Cole.’ So they went to Matthew Cole, ‘Where’d you get this name?’ ‘I got it from John Kiriakou.’ And then they arrested me, charged me with five felonies including three counts of espionage.”[5][6]
Three espionage charges were eventually dropped; Kiriakou pleaded to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 — “for confirming the name. Now the name was never made public — never made public — and nobody had ever been prosecuted for this crime in American history. I was the first person.”[6][7]
See also
- Mort Halperin — author of the IIPA; wrote Obama defending Kiriakou after the conviction
- Leon Panetta — Kiriakou’s example of a senior official who leaked covert CIA names and was never prosecuted