The supporters who could not be public are the constituency John Kiriakou singled out in the short statement he gave on the day of his sentencing — colleagues and officials inside the system that was prosecuting him.
The statement
Speaking as the sentence was handed down, Kiriakou said: “I would like to thank the dozens of former and active duty CIA officers and FBI agents and assistant us attorneys who rallied to my side although most of them had to do so privately I thank them for their their cards their emails their donations to my defense fund it was their friendship and the support of my friends and family that uh really got me through this.”[1]
The qualifier — “although most of them had to do so privately” — is the load-bearing part of the sentence. The support Kiriakou describes came from people employed by the CIA, the FBI and the United States Attorney’s offices, who could not say so on the record.
The setting
The statement was made against a public prosecutorial position of the opposite character. Prosecutors told reporters outside the courthouse that leaks of the sort charged “go to the heart of the nation’s intelligence Service,” and that the sentence should serve as a reminder to every government employee holding sensitive information or the identity of a covert officer.[2]
The same broadcast noted that the case closed one of six prosecutions the Obama administration had brought against alleged leakers of classified information, and that the sentence was the first imposed for disclosing a covert officer’s identity in twenty-seven years.[3][4]
The pattern of quiet support is one Kiriakou returns to elsewhere in accounts of the professional cost of association, and it sits against the family and personal ruptures recorded in his own biography.