news “[Ellsberg] said he had read all the news accounts of my arrest and he wanted to offer up a legal suggestion,” Kiriakou says. “He said, ‘Is it a crime to reveal the name of someone who is committing a crime? The answer is no, it’s not a crime.’” Ellsberg has said since that whistleblowers like Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Jeffrey Sterling were aggressively punished, while former CIA director David Petraeus — who leaked classified military information to his biographer and mistress, Paula Broadwell, in 2012 — was given a virtual “hand slap” with two years probation and no jail time. Ellsberg wasn’t the only person in Kiriakou’s corner — Jesselyn Radack, who disclosed what she believed to be an ethics violation in the FBI’s interrogation of John Walker Lindh, took on Kiriakou’s case pro bono. Thomas Drake, the former senior executive director of the National Security Agency who openly challenged how the NSA collects information on U.S. citizens, also openly supported Kiriakou. Kiriakou makes a point to note that John Cusack called his wife regularly to check on her, and that Roseanne Barr gave him $5,000 for legal fees. But despite the support, there was no getting out of jail for Kiriakou — at least not in the EDVA. “There’s a saying that a jury in the EDVA would convict a bologna sandwich,” Kiriakou says. He was advised to take a plea bargain, a compromise that left Kiriakou feeling defeated, but he had little choice. “I’ve got five kids at home, I have a million dollar legal bill. I still owe them $880,000, which I’ll never be able to afford to pay,” he says. “But I lost my house, I lost my pension. My wife lost her job; she was a CIA officer and she was fired the day of my arrest just because she was married to me. This is something the Justice Department counts on. They know you can’t pay these legal bills.” So he took the plea bargain and served his time. (Kiriakou says, for the record, that no one who actually tortured a detainee was charged, nor was the CIA executive who destroyed videotapes of torture.) He gave interviews from prison, but says he found “very little support from the mainstream media.” Instead of calling him a whistleblower, Kiriakou says he was often referred to as a “leaker,” a term that “infuriates” him. But it took time for Kiriakou to see himself as a whistleblower. When Jesselyn Radack, who specializes in whistleblower cases, accepted his case pro bono, Kiriakou told her he saw Boulder Weekly
himself as “just an idiot.” “‘There’s a legal definition of whistleblowing,’” Kiriakou says Radack assured him. “It’s bringing to light any evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality or threat to the public health or public safety. And she said, ‘That’s exactly what you did.’” • • • • Today Kiriakou works as an associate fellow at the Washington-based think tank institute for Policy Studies. He adds his experiences to analysis on
ethics and international affairs, intelligence and current events in the Middle East, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. He also travels as a speaker, presenting his perspective on whistleblowing, torture policy (he now says there’s no place for it in American intelligence techniques) and prison reform (there’s more to it than mandatory minimum sentencing). But one of his main messages is more broadly aimed at getting Americans to stand up and fight for
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their rights. “It’s up to us to make sure our government acts ethically, morally and legally and we’re not doing that,” he says. “If elected officials won’t do it, then we need to do it and we need to do it by being litigious. We need to sue at every opportunity and we need to clog the courts up with these issues. We’ve given away so many of our rights incrementally and we need to get them back. God knows government’s not gonna give ’em back to us.”
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