# "The government is the biggest leaker"

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
>
> Cite as: ""The government is the biggest leaker"," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-government-is-the-biggest-leaker/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*John Kiriakou's answer, given on the eve of his imprisonment, to the argument that leaks make clandestine work impossible — that the United States government is itself the largest leaker of classified information in the country, sanctioning disclosure whenever it suits, as with the makers of Zero Dark Thirty and with drone-strike details given to the New York Times during an election campaign.*

- **Claim:** The government is the biggest leaker in the United States
- **Example 1:** Details of the bin Laden raid given to the makers of Zero Dark Thirty
- **Example 2:** Drone attacks and targeted killings detailed to the New York Times mid-election-campaign
- **Context:** Given days before beginning a 30-month sentence

Put to him on the eve of his imprisonment was the administration's own case: that if such disclosures are allowed, the clandestine service can no longer operate clandestinely. [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou) rejected it flatly.

## The answer

"I do not," he said, when asked whether he bought the argument at all. "The government is the biggest leaker in the United States. This administration seems to sanction leaks and indiscretion whenever it suits them."[1]

## The two examples

He named two. The first was the cooperation given to the makers of *Zero Dark Thirty*, who were told "some of the details of the raid on Osama Bin Laden." The second was the provision of details of drone attacks and targeted killings to the New York Times "in the middle of last year's heated election campaign."[1]

The pairing is deliberate: one disclosure served a film that presented torture as productive, the other served a president's re-election. Neither, in his account, was investigated.

## The contradiction he draws from it

The conclusion Kiriakou reaches is not that classification is meaningless but that its enforcement is selective. Set against the same administration's record — more leak prosecutions than all prior administrations combined — the pattern he describes is one in which the same act is a crime or a communications strategy depending on who authorises it.

It is the same asymmetry he applies to his own case, in which he was prosecuted over a single name that was never published while, by his account, [a second officer who gave the same reporter ten](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-second-officer-in-the-same-case) was never investigated.

He has made the point about the film more than once, since *Zero Dark Thirty* — released weeks before his sentencing — argued in public that torture had produced the intelligence that found bin Laden, a claim he had helped put into circulation in 2007 and had since retracted as untrue.

## See also

- [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou)
- [Zero Dark Thirty](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/zero-dark-thirty)
- [The second officer in the same case](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-second-officer-in-the-same-case)
- [Espionage Act](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/espionage-act)
- [Official leaks](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/official-leaks)

## Sources

1. CIA whistleblower faces jail term (2013-01-24), at 04:12. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdnU_2u_FY4&t=252s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2013-01-24-channel-4-news-cia-whistleblower-faces-jail-term/

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