Terry Albury was a special agent in the FBI’s Minneapolis field office whom John Kiriakou describes as “a courageous FBI agent.”[1] Albury had filed a racial discrimination case against the Bureau, which Kiriakou calls “notoriously racist”, after being passed over for promotion despite being, in Kiriakou’s assessment, more competitive than white agents promoted ahead of him.[2]
The disclosure
An internal study of racism at the FBI was subsequently carried out — a “barely classified memo saying that there was systemic” racism in the Bureau.[3][4] Albury photographed the document on his screen with his phone and sent an encrypted copy to The Intercept, where it was received by Matthew Cole.[2][5] “And Matthew Cole outed him to the FBI. And Terry Albury was arrested and charged with espionage and convicted and sent to prison.”[5]
Kiriakou gives the mechanics of the identification: the Bureau “went back and looked at the security camera footage from every computer that had accessed the memo, and they identified FBI agent Terry Albury as the person who had taken the picture.”[6] In his accounts of The Intercept’s national-security desk he names two journalists rather than one — Cole and Richard Esposito, the pair he also holds responsible for his own imprisonment.[7][6]
The length of the sentence varies slightly across Kiriakou’s tellings: most often “three and a half years,” once “four years.”[8][6][9] Albury was released around the end of November 2020.[10][11]
Kiriakou’s response
Kiriakou’s response at the time was public. He tweeted at the publication directly: “Hey Intercept, serious question. You guys aren’t really that stupid, are you? You aren’t really that bad at journalism, are you? You’re really just a front for the FBI, right?”[5][12][13] A contemporaneous version of the tweet names the casualties and demands an accounting: “Do you secretly work for the FBI? Daniel Hale, Reality Winner and Terry Albury are in prison because of you. Incompetence, or are you compromised? You owe a lot of people an explanation and an apology.”[14]
His rule of thumb about the pattern is stated as an escalating series: “once is an accident, twice is a terrible coincidence, three times you’re secretly working for the FBI.”[15] He is careful not to make the accusation absolute — Cole “did great work on the Navy SEALs war crimes in Afghanistan” — but the list he recites is consistent: Reality Winner, Albury, Daniel Hale and himself.[15][16][17]
The ladder of sentences
Kiriakou uses Albury as one rung in an argument about prosecutorial escalation: “every time one of these cases comes up, they ask for a longer sentence. So I got thirty months. Sterling got forty-two months… There was an FBI whistleblower, Terry Albury, that got four years. Reality Winner got five years, four months. And then it came time for Daniel Hale.”[9]
He notes one line the Justice Department did not cross in these cases. Winner, Hale and Albury were not given the terrorism enhancement that the department’s national security division sought against Julian Assange, and that Chelsea Manning received — Manning having additionally been accused by the military of aiding the enemy.[18]
Afterwards
Kiriakou stayed in contact with Albury throughout the sentence, and describes the effort as seasonal triage: “I’ve remained in touch with a lot of guys still in prison, including Terry Albury, the FBI whistleblower. And I’ve tried to sort of help them get through Christmas.” New Year’s Eve in prison, he says, was fine; “Christmas is the only holiday that people really start to sink emotionally.”[19] He now counts Albury and Winner among his friends.[1]