How Jeffrey Sterling Took On The CIA - And Lost Everything |
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How Jeffrey Sterling Took On The CIA - And Lost Everything |
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ost-everything/
How Jeffrey Sterling Took On The CIA - And Lost Everything
Screen Shot 2015-06-22 at 12.21.31 AM
THIS IS HOW it ended for Jeffrey Sterling.
A former covert officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, Sterling sat
down in a federal courtroom with a lawyer on either side, looking up at a
judge who would announce in a few moments whether he would go to prison for
the next 20 years. A few feet away, three prosecutors waited expectantly,
hoping that more than a decade of investigation by the FBI would conclude
with a severe sentence for a man who committed an "unconscionable" crime, as
one of them told the judge.
In Sterling's blind spot, behind his left shoulder, his wife tried not to
sob so loudly that the judge would hear. A social worker, she had been
interrogated by FBI agents, her modest home was searched, she had been made
to testify before a grand jury, and she had given up her hopes for an
ordinary life - a child or two rather than the miscarriages she had, a
husband who could hold a job, a life that was not under surveillance, and
friends who were free of harassment from government agents asking for
information about her and her husband.
One of Sterling's lawyers stood up to ask for leniency. Sterling was a good
person, the lawyer said, not a traitor. He was the first in his family to
graduate from college. After leaving the CIA, he worked as a healthcare
investigator and won awards for uncovering millions of dollars in fraud. He
loved his wife. He did not cause any harm and did not deserve to be locked
up until he was an old man for talking to a
New York Times reporter about a classified program that he believed had gone
awry. Please let the sentence be fair, the lawyer said.
It was time for Sterling to say a few words. His lawyers followed him to the
lectern, standing a half step behind, as though to steady him if he wavered.
A tall man with a low voice, Sterling thanked the court for its efforts to
conduct the trial and thanked the judge for delaying its start so he could
attend the funeral of one of his brothers. He did not say whether, as the
jury had decided, he was guilty of what they had convicted him for -
violating the Espionage Act and other laws related to disclosing classified
information.
Sterling's battle against the government had begun more than 15 years
earlier, when he was still at the CIA. After he lodged a racial
discrimination complaint, he was fired by the agency and filed two federal
lawsuits against it, one for retaliation and discrimination, another for
obstructing the publication of his autobiography. He also spoke as a
whistleblower to Congress. Soon, his savings ran out and he became all but
homeless, driving around the country, lost in despair. He eventually
returned to his hometown near St. Louis and rebuilt his life, finding the
woman who became his wife and landing a job he thrived at.
His new life was torn apart when FBI agents came to his workplace in 2011,
placing him in handcuffs and parading him past his colleagues. A few days
later, still in jail, he was fired because he had not shown up for work. The
drama ended in a wood-paneled courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia on a warm
afternoon in May, after Sterling finished his brief statement to the judge.
Sterling's case has drawn attention primarily for two reasons: it was part
of the Obama Administration's controversial crackdown on leakers and
whistleblowers, and prosecutors had tried to force the
Times reporter, James Risen, to divulge the name of his source, whom the
government believed was Sterling. The case, known as
United States of America v. Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, was treated mainly
as a freedom-of-the-press issue, with Risen as the
heroic centerpiece. Lost in the judicial briefs about the First Amendment
was the black man in the middle.
This is Sterling's story.
DURING HIS LAST year of law school in St. Louis, Sterling was reading a
newspaper between classes. He noticed an advertisement that showed a man
standing at the edge of a body of water and looking at the horizon in an
inspirational way. See the world, the ad said. Serve your country. Join the
CIA.
It got him.
As a teenager, Sterling had become fascinated with the rest of the world.
When he arrived home from high school, he would watch the MacNeil/Lehrer
Report on PBS. Attending a racially mixed high school, he didn't fit in. He
remembers being called an Oreo, black on the outside and white on the
inside, because his interests didn't coincide with some people's concept of
what a black kid should do or think or say. Within hours of reading the CIA
ad he began working on his application.
His first day at Langley - what people at the agency call their "EOD," or
Entrance On Duty - was May 13, 1993. He was told to park behind the main
building and enter through the back doors used by most employees. But
Sterling made a detour around the long sides of the building to walk through
the grand entrance - the one with the shiny CIA emblem on the marble floor,
where you walk by a wall that has stars for each CIA officer killed in the
line of duty.
"That was a thrill," he told me. "I actually did that for the first few
days. It meant that much to me, to be able to walk in that front door
knowing that I was part of something special. I was so proud of it."
I met Sterling in April, at his home in O'Fallon, on the outskirts of St.
Louis. It had been three months since the jury
convicted him, and he was waiting for the hearing at which he would find out
whether he would receive the term recommended under federal sentencing
guidelines - between 19 to 24 years in prison. He was surprisingly tranquil,
occasionally stroking his gray-flecked goatee as he talked about his long
fight with the government. Other than discussing his case in a
short documentary directed by Judith Ehrlich and produced by Norman Solomon,
Sterling has not talked publicly about it. The Justice Department, asked to
respond to his account, refused to provide any comment.
IT
DID NOT take long, apparently, for the color of Sterling's skin to set him
apart at the CIA.
Once he had completed the agency's version of basic spy training, Sterling
was assigned to the Iran Task Force and dispatched to language school to
learn Farsi. In 1997, just before he was to leave for his first overseas
post in Germany, he was told that somebody else was going instead.
"We're concerned that you would stick out as a big black guy speaking
Farsi," Sterling recalls his supervisor saying.
Shocked, he responded, "Well, when did you figure out I was black?"
The agency did not have a good
record on diversity. At the time, all of its directors, deputy directors and
chiefs of espionage operations had been white men. In 1995, the agency had
agreed to pay $990,000 to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by female case
officers who accused the agency of sex discrimination. The agency promised
to do better on both racial and gender diversity - but it wasn't, as far as
Sterling could tell.
"I seriously considered leaving the agency," he told me. "But I believed in
what I would be able to do. I believed in the career I could have there."
A few months later, he accepted a different overseas assignment. Shortly
before he was to leave, a supervisor said he would instead go to the
position in Germany that he had previously been turned down for, because the
officer they were planning to send had pulled out. Sterling, a proud man,
said he didn't want to take a position for which he had been deemed
second-best.
"You either go where we want or you're going nowhere," Sterling says he was
told.
He went.
"I was like, OK, I can deal with this, I at least have an assignment,"
Sterling told me. "I'll prove to them how I'm a great case officer."
Sterling recalls being the only black officer at the agency's station in
Bonn. His cover was as an Army logistics officer rather than a State
Department officer, and he says this made it more difficult to gain entry to
the social and political circles where foreign spies are recruited; doors
that open for diplomats are closed to logistics officers. He believes his
bosses thought the color of his skin meant he wouldn't do as well as other
officers, so they didn't bother giving him a good cover.
"I couldn't get into a janitor's convention," he said.
Sterling returned to the U.S. and was assigned to the counter-proliferation
division at the agency's headquarters before being dispatched to the New
York station, where he says that once again he was the only black officer.
Things did not go smoothly. He was
given an unusual ultimatum - start recruiting three new spies, hold three
meetings with each of them, or leave New York. He felt singled out, asked to
do more than other officers while lacking the cover they had.
"That was the last I could take of it," Sterling recalled. "I just said 'No,
I don't accept this and I'm going to file a complaint.'"
He was transferred back to Langley, where he was given a closet-sized office
that he and the co-worker he shared it with jokingly called "the penalty
box." He filed an internal racial discrimination complaint that didn't
succeed, and soon he was fired. John Brennan, who at the time was the
agency's deputy executive director and is currently its director,
told the
New York Times that "it was an unfortunate situation because Jeffrey was a
talented officer and had a lot of skills we are looking for, and we wanted
him to succeed. We were quite pleased with Jeffrey's performance in a number
of areas. Unfortunately, there were some areas of his work and development
that needed some improvement."
In O'Fallon, Sterling and I met at the single-story home he shares with his
wife and two cats in a community of nearly identical red-and-white houses.
"We're really outside the beltway here," he joked at one point. He has a
voice that's made for radio - deep and fluid, a bass that usually stays in
the same comfortable register. He was dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved
shirt, with sandals on his feet. On the wall, there was a
print by Salvador Dali of two butterflies dancing in the air. His tone
varied only once or twice, when his steady voice sharpened into a knife.
"I had dedicated myself to that agency," he said, when I asked why he chose
to confront the CIA rather than, as many people might have done, carry on
quietly or resign without filing a lawsuit. "I couldn't just walk away from
something that was so vital to me and that I knew I was good at, proved I
was good at. That was it for me . No, you are not going to treat me that
way."
IN 1972, JIM CROCE came out with a hit song, "You Don't Mess Around with
Jim," that had several lines about the things a sensible person never does,
such as spitting into the wind, pulling off the mask of the Lone Ranger, and
tugging on Superman's cape. Sterling pointed to that last bit of advice -
not tugging on Superman's cape - to describe the path he took. He challenged
the CIA, and it probably wasn't a sensible choice.
In 2001, as he was leaving the agency, he filed a federal lawsuit that said
the CIA retaliated against him for making an internal discrimination
complaint, and that he had indeed faced a pattern of discrimination there.
The suit was dismissed by a judge after the CIA successfully argued in
pre-trial motions that a trial would expose state secrets by disclosing
sources and methods of intelligence-gathering. An appeals court upheld that
ruling, though it
notedthat the dismissal "places, on behalf of the entire country, a burden
on Sterling that he alone must bear" by being deprived of his right to a
trial. The dismissal spared Sterling's supervisors from testifying about
their interactions with him. The government has not provided specific
responses, in court or to the media, about his accusations of racial
discrimination, other than to generally state that he faced none.
He tugged on the CIA's cape in other ways. He wrote a memoir, tentatively
titled
Spook: An American Journey Through Black and White, and submitted chapters
for pre-publication review. According to a lawsuit Sterling filed in 2003,
the CIA determined that his manuscript contained classified information that
should not be published, and demanded that he add information that, his suit
said, was "blatantly false." Facing a tough legal battle with a presiding
judge who seemed sympathetic to the CIA, Sterling eventually agreed to drop
the suit. His manuscript has not been published.
Also in 2003, Sterling met staffers from the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence to let them know his concerns about the mismanagement of a
classified program he worked on at the agency. Merlin, as the program was
called, involved the CIA giving Iran faulty nuclear blueprints. If the
blueprints were used, Iran's nuclear program would be delayed. The
blueprints were given to the Iranians by a Russian scientist who lived in
the United States, and Sterling was his CIA handler. The CIA has said the
program worked well, but Sterling told the committee staffers it was botched
and that the Iranians learned the blueprints were flawed; the Iranians might
have gained nuclear insights from the accurate parts.
By the time he talked to the Senate staffers, Sterling had become
radioactive by Washington standards. This is the usual whistleblower's fate.
He applied for jobs with the private-sector contractors that tend to eagerly
recruit experts like him, and they initially seemed quite interested,
Sterling recalls, but their attention vanished suddenly, presumably when
they learned about his disputes with the CIA. His descent began in full.
Running out of money, he sold his belongings on Craigslist, gave his cats to
a woman who had a farm, and packed a few things into his car and took off.
The idea was to drive to his mother's house in Missouri, but he wandered,
parking at truck stops at night and sleeping in his car. "I had nowhere to
go," he recalled. "I had worked hard and it all fell apart." He eventually
visited friends in St. Louis who had a newborn and they made a deal -
Sterling cared for their baby and lived rent-free in their house. "It was
very humbling to go from being a case officer with the Central Intelligence
Agency to now I'm a manny," Sterling noted.
Then, as things do, his life turned around. In 2004 he landed a job as a
healthcare investigator at WellPoint, and he also met a woman, Holly Brooke,
and after a few months moved into her house. He now had a job, a life
partner, a home. Everything was great until, on the morning of New Year's
Eve in 2005, the CIA's top lawyer, John Rizzo, was woken up at home by a
phone call on his secure line.
RIZZO GROGGILY ANSWERED the phone and was told by an official at the
National Security Council that a book was about to be published that
disclosed one of the CIA's most sensitive intelligence programs. The book,
by James Risen, was called
State of War, and it described the Merlin program as perhaps "one of the
most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA." Risen's book did
not identify who his source, or sources, were.
Rizzo, who described the day's events in his
memoir, threw on his clothes and drove into town to get the book from the
NSC official, then drove to Langley to share it with senior officials who
had been dragged from their homes to figure out what to do. The White House
wanted to take the extraordinary step of stopping the book from being
published. President Bush's top lawyer, Harriet Miers, asked Rizzo to call
Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, which owned Simon & Schuster, the
book's publisher. In the end, Rizzo didn't call Redstone, but he made a
mental note to file a crimes report with the Department of Justice; the
leaker had to be found.
Within a month, two FBI agents were at Sterling's house outside St. Louis.
They claimed they were concerned that an Iranian was on the loose who might
do harm to him. Sterling sensed it was a ruse; he told the FBI agents he'd
be able to spot someone following him, particularly an Iranian because there
were no Iranians where he lived. The agents then asked if they could come
inside and Sterling refused. They had a copy of Risen's book and asked if he
knew about it.
"I was like, 'I don't know anything about that book. That was the first I
had ever seen of that,'" Sterling told me.
This wasn't the first time Sterling was questioned by the FBI. Risen had
interviewed Sterling in 2002 and
published a story about his discrimination lawsuit. The next year, Risen
reported a story about the Merlin program, but it wasn't published. Risen
asked the CIA for pre-publication comment on the story and was soon summoned
to the White House, along with his editor. They were told by then-National
Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice that the story, if published, would reveal
a valuable covert program and could cost lives. The
Times decided to
kill it.
The Justice Department launched a criminal investigation in 2003 and FBI
agents questioned Sterling that year. However, until the agents showed up at
his doorstep in 2006 with Risen's book, Sterling thought his struggles with
the government were behind him.
After that visit, Holly was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. She
was questioned for seven hours at FBI headquarters in Washington and, she
told me, the next day she spent three hours before the grand jury in
Alexandria, Virginia. When she returned to St. Louis, she got a call from
her lawyer, who said the FBI was coming to search her home. More than a
dozen agents soon showed up to confiscate some of the couple's belongings.
"They left and I had a meltdown," Holly said during lunch at a pub near her
home, as easy-listening rock music played in the background. "I was sobbing
and crying and couldn't understand this. I attempted to go to work the next
day and I just lost it. My boss came to me and she said, 'You need to leave.
I think you are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.'"
Then, as mysteriously as it had intruded into their lives, the FBI's
investigation seemed to dissipate. In the fall of 2010, Sterling's lawyer
called him to say the case appeared to be winding down.
ON JANUARY 6, 2011, Sterling was asked to attend a meeting at his office. He
was on medical leave after a knee-replacement operation, so he hobbled into
work with a cane, and after checking on the mail that had piled up on his
desk, a colleague told him the security staff needed to see him because
there was a problem with his badge. It was urgent, Sterling was told. When
he visited the security staff he was confronted, he says, by several FBI
agents and police officers who placed him under arrest. His cane was taken
away, his arms were handcuffed behind his back, and he was marched out of
the building, limping, as his co-workers gaped. The
indictment accused him of leaking to Risen out of "anger and resentment" at
the CIA.
The timing of his arrest was unusual. The exchanges between Sterling and
Risen began in 2001 and finished in 2005, according to records of their
phone calls and emails that were listed in the indictment. Why was Sterling
arrested six years after he last communicated with Risen and five years
after his home was searched by the FBI? If, as the government claimed, he
had caused so much harm, why did prosecutors wait so long to press charges?
The answers appear to be political. Until Barack Obama was elected
president, the Department of Justice rarely prosecuted leakers. Obama
promised, as a candidate, to create the most transparent administration
ever, but he has presided over more leak prosecutions under the Espionage
Act than all previous administrations combined. Dennis Blair, the director
of national intelligence during Obama's first term,
told the
Times that a decision was made in 2009 to "hang an admiral once in a while,"
as Blair put it, to show would-be leakers they should not talk to the press.
The Justice Department did not charge high-level officials, however;
mid-level officials were the
principal targets, and it appears that Sterling's all-but-shut case was
brought back to life as part of the crackdown.
Sterling, detained for weeks, became despondent.
"All of it came crashing down on me, sitting in that jail cell," he said.
"So many years, so many struggles, and I had gotten to a point where I had
picked myself up and was just moving on. But this behemoth of anger, of
retaliation, was having its way. It was an extremely low feeling that I was
going through, disbelief, shock."
He stopped eating until Holly was allowed to visit.
"Just seeing her face shocked me back into knowing that here's this woman
who loves me and she's been with me through thick and thin," he said. "I
made a promise to her that I would stay alive, I won't try to hurt myself."
RELEASED FROM JAIL, Sterling no longer had a job and could not find a new
one, due to the taint of an Espionage Act indictment, and he had to wait
four years for his trial to begin. A large part of the delay was due to a
legal battle between the prosecution and Risen - the prosecution wanted
Risen to name his source, whom the government believed was Sterling, but
Risen refused to cooperate, raising the prospect of a journalist going to
jail for defying the government. The Obama administration, criticized for
violating First Amendment protections, backed off just before the trial
began.
On January 13, the trial opened with the lead prosecutor, James Trump,
telling the jury that Sterling was a traitor.
"The defendant betrayed his country," Trump
said. "He betrayed his colleagues. He betrayed the CIA and compromised its
mission. And most importantly, he betrayed the Russian asset, a man who
literally placed his trust and his life into the defendant's hands."
Trump addressed the question of motive.
"And why?" he asked. "Anger, bitterness, selfishness. The defendant struck
back at the CIA because he thought he had been treated unfairly. He had sued
the agency for discrimination and demanded that they pay him $200,000 to
settle his claim. When the agency refused, he struck back with the only
weapon he had: secrets, the agency's secrets."
The government's case consisted mostly of records of emails and phone calls
between Sterling and Risen that began in 2001 and continued into 2005. The
emails were very short, just a line or so, and did not reference any CIA
programs. The phone calls were mostly short too, some just a few seconds,
and the government did not introduce recordings or transcripts of any of
them.
Sterling was represented by two lawyers, Edward MacMahon Jr. and Barry
Pollack. In his opening statement, MacMahon pointed to the lack of hard
evidence against his client.
"Mr. Trump is a fine lawyer," MacMahon
said. "If he had an email with details of these programs or a phone call,
you would have heard it, and you're not going to hear it in this case .. Mr.
Trump told you that [Sterling] spoke to Risen. Did you hear where, when, or
anything about what happened? No. That's because there isn't any such
evidence of it whatsoever .. You don't see a written communication to Mr.
Risen from Mr. Sterling about the program at all, no evidence they even met
in person."
After a two-week trial that included some CIA witnesses testifying from
behind a screen, so that their identities would not be revealed, the jury
convicted Sterling, based on what the judge, Leonie Brinkema, described at
the sentencing as "very powerful circumstantial evidence." She added, "In a
perfect world, you'd only have direct evidence, but many times that's not
the case in a criminal case."
Sterling sat motionless as she explained the reasoning behind the sentence
that she was about to announce. I had asked Sterling, when we met in St.
Louis, what he expected would happen.
"This process has destroyed a lot of me," he began, his voice shifting in
the halting way that means anguish has broken loose. "The thought that I'm
going to be sent to prison, I can't and haven't been able to deal with that.
I don't know where to put it or how to deal with it because it doesn't make
any sense. I'm dreading going to jail. Maybe some miracle will happen and I
won't. But I still have to be realistic and prepare for the worst."
A few minutes before three in the afternoon, Judge Brinkema said that
Sterling would go to prison for three and a half years. This was far below
the sentencing guidelines - and was seen as a
rebuke of the prosecution's portrayal of Sterling as a traitor who had to be
locked away for a long time. But that wasn't much comfort for Sterling or
his wife, because he would nonetheless be locked away. After the hearing
ended, Sterling walked to the front row of seats to console his sobbing
wife. You could hear her wails in the courtroom.
His lawyers requested that he be allowed to serve his sentence in his home
state of Missouri, so that his wife and other family members could easily
visit him. Earlier this week, Sterling reported to the prison that wHow
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How Jeffrey Sterling Took On The CIA - And Lost Everything
Screen Shot 2015-06-22 at 12.21.31 AM
THIS IS HOW it ended for Jeffrey Sterling.
A former covert officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, Sterling sat
down in a federal courtroom with a lawyer on either side, looking up at a
judge who would announce in a few moments whether he would go to prison for
the next 20 years. A few feet away, three prosecutors waited expectantly,
hoping that more than a decade of investigation by the FBI would conclude
with a severe sentence for a man who committed an "unconscionable" crime, as
one of them told the judge.
In Sterling's blind spot, behind his left shoulder, his wife tried not to
sob so loudly that the judge would hear. A social worker, she had been
interrogated by FBI agents, her modest home was searched, she had been made
to testify before a grand jury, and she had given up her hopes for an
ordinary life - a child or two rather than the miscarriages she had, a
husband who could hold a job, a life that was not under surveillance, and
friends who were free of harassment from government agents asking for
information about her and her husband.
One of Sterling's lawyers stood up to ask for leniency. Sterling was a good
person, the lawyer said, not a traitor. He was the first in his family to
graduate from college. After leaving the CIA, he worked as a healthcare
investigator and won awards for uncovering millions of dollars in fraud. He
loved his wife. He did not cause any harm and did not deserve to be locked
up until he was an old man for talking to a
New York Times reporter about a classified program that he believed had gone
awry. Please let the sentence be fair, the lawyer said.
It was time for Sterling to say a few words. His lawyers followed him to the
lectern, standing a half step behind, as though to steady him if he wavered.
A tall man with a low voice, Sterling thanked the court for its efforts to
conduct the trial and thanked the judge for delaying its start so he could
attend the funeral of one of his brothers. He did not say whether, as the
jury had decided, he was guilty of what they had convicted him for -
violating the Espionage Act and other laws related to disclosing classified
information.
Sterling's battle against the government had begun more than 15 years
earlier, when he was still at the CIA. After he lodged a racial
discrimination complaint, he was fired by the agency and filed two federal
lawsuits against it, one for retaliation and discrimination, another for
obstructing the publication of his autobiography. He also spoke as a
whistleblower to Congress. Soon, his savings ran out and he became all but
homeless, driving around the country, lost in despair. He eventually
returned to his hometown near St. Louis and rebuilt his life, finding the
woman who became his wife and landing a job he thrived at.
His new life was torn apart when FBI agents came to his workplace in 2011,
placing him in handcuffs and parading him past his colleagues. A few days
later, still in jail, he was fired because he had not shown up for work. The
drama ended in a wood-paneled courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia on a warm
afternoon in May, after Sterling finished his brief statement to the judge.
Sterling's case has drawn attention primarily for two reasons: it was part
of the Obama Administration's controversial crackdown on leakers and
whistleblowers, and prosecutors had tried to force the
Times reporter, James Risen, to divulge the name of his source, whom the
government believed was Sterling. The case, known as
United States of America v. Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, was treated mainly
as a freedom-of-the-press issue, with Risen as the
heroic centerpiece. Lost in the judicial briefs about the First Amendment
was the black man in the middle.
This is Sterling's story.
DURING HIS LAST year of law school in St. Louis, Sterling was reading a
newspaper between classes. He noticed an advertisement that showed a man
standing at the edge of a body of water and looking at the horizon in an
inspirational way. See the world, the ad said. Serve your country. Join the
CIA.
It got him.
As a teenager, Sterling had become fascinated with the rest of the world.
When he arrived home from high school, he would watch the MacNeil/Lehrer
Report on PBS. Attending a racially mixed high school, he didn't fit in. He
remembers being called an Oreo, black on the outside and white on the
inside, because his interests didn't coincide with some people's concept of
what a black kid should do or think or say. Within hours of reading the CIA
ad he began working on his application.
His first day at Langley - what people at the agency call their "EOD," or
Entrance On Duty - was May 13, 1993. He was told to park behind the main
building and enter through the back doors used by most employees. But
Sterling made a detour around the long sides of the building to walk through
the grand entrance - the one with the shiny CIA emblem on the marble floor,
where you walk by a wall that has stars for each CIA officer killed in the
line of duty.
"That was a thrill," he told me. "I actually did that for the first few
days. It meant that much to me, to be able to walk in that front door
knowing that I was part of something special. I was so proud of it."
I met Sterling in April, at his home in O'Fallon, on the outskirts of St.
Louis. It had been three months since the jury
convicted him, and he was waiting for the hearing at which he would find out
whether he would receive the term recommended under federal sentencing
guidelines - between 19 to 24 years in prison. He was surprisingly tranquil,
occasionally stroking his gray-flecked goatee as he talked about his long
fight with the government. Other than discussing his case in a
short documentary directed by Judith Ehrlich and produced by Norman Solomon,
Sterling has not talked publicly about it. The Justice Department, asked to
respond to his account, refused to provide any comment.
IT
DID NOT take long, apparently, for the color of Sterling's skin to set him
apart at the CIA.
Once he had completed the agency's version of basic spy training, Sterling
was assigned to the Iran Task Force and dispatched to language school to
learn Farsi. In 1997, just before he was to leave for his first overseas
post in Germany, he was told that somebody else was going instead.
"We're concerned that you would stick out as a big black guy speaking
Farsi," Sterling recalls his supervisor saying.
Shocked, he responded, "Well, when did you figure out I was black?"
The agency did not have a good
record on diversity. At the time, all of its directors, deputy directors and
chiefs of espionage operations had been white men. In 1995, the agency had
agreed to pay $990,000 to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by female case
officers who accused the agency of sex discrimination. The agency promised
to do better on both racial and gender diversity - but it wasn't, as far as
Sterling could tell.
"I seriously considered leaving the agency," he told me. "But I believed in
what I would be able to do. I believed in the career I could have there."
A few months later, he accepted a different overseas assignment. Shortly
before he was to leave, a supervisor said he would instead go to the
position in Germany that he had previously been turned down for, because the
officer they were planning to send had pulled out. Sterling, a proud man,
said he didn't want to take a position for which he had been deemed
second-best.
"You either go where we want or you're going nowhere," Sterling says he was
told.
He went.
"I was like, OK, I can deal with this, I at least have an assignment,"
Sterling told me. "I'll prove to them how I'm a great case officer."
Sterling recalls being the only black officer at the agency's station in
Bonn. His cover was as an Army logistics officer rather than a State
Department officer, and he says this made it more difficult to gain entry to
the social and political circles where foreign spies are recruited; doors
that open for diplomats are closed to logistics officers. He believes his
bosses thought the color of his skin meant he wouldn't do as well as other
officers, so they didn't bother giving him a good cover.
"I couldn't get into a janitor's convention," he said.
Sterling returned to the U.S. and was assigned to the counter-proliferation
division at the agency's headquarters before being dispatched to the New
York station, where he says that once again he was the only black officer.
Things did not go smoothly. He was
given an unusual ultimatum - start recruiting three new spies, hold three
meetings with each of them, or leave New York. He felt singled out, asked to
do more than other officers while lacking the cover they had.
"That was the last I could take of it," Sterling recalled. "I just said 'No,
I don't accept this and I'm going to file a complaint.'"
He was transferred back to Langley, where he was given a closet-sized office
that he and the co-worker he shared it with jokingly called "the penalty
box." He filed an internal racial discrimination complaint that didn't
succeed, and soon he was fired. John Brennan, who at the time was the
agency's deputy executive director and is currently its director,
told the
New York Times that "it was an unfortunate situation because Jeffrey was a
talented officer and had a lot of skills we are looking for, and we wanted
him to succeed. We were quite pleased with Jeffrey's performance in a number
of areas. Unfortunately, there were some areas of his work and development
that needed some improvement."
In O'Fallon, Sterling and I met at the single-story home he shares with his
wife and two cats in a community of nearly identical red-and-white houses.
"We're really outside the beltway here," he joked at one point. He has a
voice that's made for radio - deep and fluid, a bass that usually stays in
the same comfortable register. He was dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved
shirt, with sandals on his feet. On the wall, there was a
print by Salvador Dali of two butterflies dancing in the air. His tone
varied only once or twice, when his steady voice sharpened into a knife.
"I had dedicated myself to that agency," he said, when I asked why he chose
to confront the CIA rather than, as many people might have done, carry on
quietly or resign without filing a lawsuit. "I couldn't just walk away from
something that was so vital to me and that I knew I was good at, proved I
was good at. That was it for me . No, you are not going to treat me that
way."
IN 1972, JIM CROCE came out with a hit song, "You Don't Mess Around with
Jim," that had several lines about the things a sensible person never does,
such as spitting into the wind, pulling off the mask of the Lone Ranger, and
tugging on Superman's cape. Sterling pointed to that last bit of advice -
not tugging on Superman's cape - to describe the path he took. He challenged
the CIA, and it probably wasn't a sensible choice.
In 2001, as he was leaving the agency, he filed a federal lawsuit that said
the CIA retaliated against him for making an internal discrimination
complaint, and that he had indeed faced a pattern of discrimination there.
The suit was dismissed by a judge after the CIA successfully argued in
pre-trial motions that a trial would expose state secrets by disclosing
sources and methods of intelligence-gathering. An appeals court upheld that
ruling, though it
notedthat the dismissal "places, on behalf of the entire country, a burden
on Sterling that he alone must bear" by being deprived of his right to a
trial. The dismissal spared Sterling's supervisors from testifying about
their interactions with him. The government has not provided specific
responses, in court or to the media, about his accusations of racial
discrimination, other than to generally state that he faced none.
He tugged on the CIA's cape in other ways. He wrote a memoir, tentatively
titled
Spook: An American Journey Through Black and White, and submitted chapters
for pre-publication review. According to a lawsuit Sterling filed in 2003,
the CIA determined that his manuscript contained classified information that
should not be published, and demanded that he add information that, his suit
said, was "blatantly false." Facing a tough legal battle with a presiding
judge who seemed sympathetic to the CIA, Sterling eventually agreed to drop
the suit. His manuscript has not been published.
Also in 2003, Sterling met staffers from the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence to let them know his concerns about the mismanagement of a
classified program he worked on at the agency. Merlin, as the program was
called, involved the CIA giving Iran faulty nuclear blueprints. If the
blueprints were used, Iran's nuclear program would be delayed. The
blueprints were given to the Iranians by a Russian scientist who lived in
the United States, and Sterling was his CIA handler. The CIA has said the
program worked well, but Sterling told the committee staffers it was botched
and that the Iranians learned the blueprints were flawed; the Iranians might
have gained nuclear insights from the accurate parts.
By the time he talked to the Senate staffers, Sterling had become
radioactive by Washington standards. This is the usual whistleblower's fate.
He applied for jobs with the private-sector contractors that tend to eagerly
recruit experts like him, and they initially seemed quite interested,
Sterling recalls, but their attention vanished suddenly, presumably when
they learned about his disputes with the CIA. His descent began in full.
Running out of money, he sold his belongings on Craigslist, gave his cats to
a woman who had a farm, and packed a few things into his car and took off.
The idea was to drive to his mother's house in Missouri, but he wandered,
parking at truck stops at night and sleeping in his car. "I had nowhere to
go," he recalled. "I had worked hard and it all fell apart." He eventually
visited friends in St. Louis who had a newborn and they made a deal -
Sterling cared for their baby and lived rent-free in their house. "It was
very humbling to go from being a case officer with the Central Intelligence
Agency to now I'm a manny," Sterling noted.
Then, as things do, his life turned around. In 2004 he landed a job as a
healthcare investigator at WellPoint, and he also met a woman, Holly Brooke,
and after a few months moved into her house. He now had a job, a life
partner, a home. Everything was great until, on the morning of New Year's
Eve in 2005, the CIA's top lawyer, John Rizzo, was woken up at home by a
phone call on his secure line.
RIZZO GROGGILY ANSWERED the phone and was told by an official at the
National Security Council that a book was about to be published that
disclosed one of the CIA's most sensitive intelligence programs. The book,
by James Risen, was called
State of War, and it described the Merlin program as perhaps "one of the
most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA." Risen's book did
not identify who his source, or sources, were.
Rizzo, who described the day's events in his
memoir, threw on his clothes and drove into town to get the book from the
NSC official, then drove to Langley to share it with senior officials who
had been dragged from their homes to figure out what to do. The White House
wanted to take the extraordinary step of stopping the book from being
published. President Bush's top lawyer, Harriet Miers, asked Rizzo to call
Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, which owned Simon & Schuster, the
book's publisher. In the end, Rizzo didn't call Redstone, but he made a
mental note to file a crimes report with the Department of Justice; the
leaker had to be found.
Within a month, two FBI agents were at Sterling's house outside St. Louis.
They claimed they were concerned that an Iranian was on the loose who might
do harm to him. Sterling sensed it was a ruse; he told the FBI agents he'd
be able to spot someone following him, particularly an Iranian because there
were no Iranians where he lived. The agents then asked if they could come
inside and Sterling refused. They had a copy of Risen's book and asked if he
knew about it.
"I was like, 'I don't know anything about that book. That was the first I
had ever seen of that,'" Sterling told me.
This wasn't the first time Sterling was questioned by the FBI. Risen had
interviewed Sterling in 2002 and
published a story about his discrimination lawsuit. The next year, Risen
reported a story about the Merlin program, but it wasn't published. Risen
asked the CIA for pre-publication comment on the story and was soon summoned
to the White House, along with his editor. They were told by then-National
Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice that the story, if published, would reveal
a valuable covert program and could cost lives. The
Times decided to
kill it.
The Justice Department launched a criminal investigation in 2003 and FBI
agents questioned Sterling that year. However, until the agents showed up at
his doorstep in 2006 with Risen's book, Sterling thought his struggles with
the government were behind him.
After that visit, Holly was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. She
was questioned for seven hours at FBI headquarters in Washington and, she
told me, the next day she spent three hours before the grand jury in
Alexandria, Virginia. When she returned to St. Louis, she got a call from
her lawyer, who said the FBI was coming to search her home. More than a
dozen agents soon showed up to confiscate some of the couple's belongings.
"They left and I had a meltdown," Holly said during lunch at a pub near her
home, as easy-listening rock music played in the background. "I was sobbing
and crying and couldn't understand this. I attempted to go to work the next
day and I just lost it. My boss came to me and she said, 'You need to leave.
I think you are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.'"
Then, as mysteriously as it had intruded into their lives, the FBI's
investigation seemed to dissipate. In the fall of 2010, Sterling's lawyer
called him to say the case appeared to be winding down.
ON JANUARY 6, 2011, Sterling was asked to attend a meeting at his office. He
was on medical leave after a knee-replacement operation, so he hobbled into
work with a cane, and after checking on the mail that had piled up on his
desk, a colleague told him the security staff needed to see him because
there was a problem with his badge. It was urgent, Sterling was told. When
he visited the security staff he was confronted, he says, by several FBI
agents and police officers who placed him under arrest. His cane was taken
away, his arms were handcuffed behind his back, and he was marched out of
the building, limping, as his co-workers gaped. The
indictment accused him of leaking to Risen out of "anger and resentment" at
the CIA.
The timing of his arrest was unusual. The exchanges between Sterling and
Risen began in 2001 and finished in 2005, according to records of their
phone calls and emails that were listed in the indictment. Why was Sterling
arrested six years after he last communicated with Risen and five years
after his home was searched by the FBI? If, as the government claimed, he
had caused so much harm, why did prosecutors wait so long to press charges?
The answers appear to be political. Until Barack Obama was elected
president, the Department of Justice rarely prosecuted leakers. Obama
promised, as a candidate, to create the most transparent administration
ever, but he has presided over more leak prosecutions under the Espionage
Act than all previous administrations combined. Dennis Blair, the director
of national intelligence during Obama's first term,
told the
Times that a decision was made in 2009 to "hang an admiral once in a while,"
as Blair put it, to show would-be leakers they should not talk to the press.
The Justice Department did not charge high-level officials, however;
mid-level officials were the
principal targets, and it appears that Sterling's all-but-shut case was
brought back to life as part of the crackdown.
Sterling, detained for weeks, became despondent.
"All of it came crashing down on me, sitting in that jail cell," he said.
"So many years, so many struggles, and I had gotten to a point where I had
picked myself up and was just moving on. But this behemoth of anger, of
retaliation, was having its way. It was an extremely low feeling that I was
going through, disbelief, shock."
He stopped eating until Holly was allowed to visit.
"Just seeing her face shocked me back into knowing that here's this woman
who loves me and she's been with me through thick and thin," he said. "I
made a promise to her that I would stay alive, I won't try to hurt myself."
RELEASED FROM JAIL, Sterling no longer had a job and could not find a new
one, due to the taint of an Espionage Act indictment, and he had to wait
four years for his trial to begin. A large part of the delay was due to a
legal battle between the prosecution and Risen - the prosecution wanted
Risen to name his source, whom the government believed was Sterling, but
Risen refused to cooperate, raising the prospect of a journalist going to
jail for defying the government. The Obama administration, criticized for
violating First Amendment protections, backed off just before the trial
began.
On January 13, the trial opened with the lead prosecutor, James Trump,
telling the jury that Sterling was a traitor.
"The defendant betrayed his country," Trump
said. "He betrayed his colleagues. He betrayed the CIA and compromised its
mission. And most importantly, he betrayed the Russian asset, a man who
literally placed his trust and his life into the defendant's hands."
Trump addressed the question of motive.
"And why?" he asked. "Anger, bitterness, selfishness. The defendant struck
back at the CIA because he thought he had been treated unfairly. He had sued
the agency for discrimination and demanded that they pay him $200,000 to
settle his claim. When the agency refused, he struck back with the only
weapon he had: secrets, the agency's secrets."
The government's case consisted mostly of records of emails and phone calls
between Sterling and Risen that began in 2001 and continued into 2005. The
emails were very short, just a line or so, and did not reference any CIA
programs. The phone calls were mostly short too, some just a few seconds,
and the government did not introduce recordings or transcripts of any of
them.
Sterling was represented by two lawyers, Edward MacMahon Jr. and Barry
Pollack. In his opening statement, MacMahon pointed to the lack of hard
evidence against his client.
"Mr. Trump is a fine lawyer," MacMahon
said. "If he had an email with details of these programs or a phone call,
you would have heard it, and you're not going to hear it in this case .. Mr.
Trump told you that [Sterling] spoke to Risen. Did you hear where, when, or
anything about what happened? No. That's because there isn't any such
evidence of it whatsoever .. You don't see a written communication to Mr.
Risen from Mr. Sterling about the program at all, no evidence they even met
in person."
After a two-week trial that included some CIA witnesses testifying from
behind a screen, so that their identities would not be revealed, the jury
convicted Sterling, based on what the judge, Leonie Brinkema, described at
the sentencing as "very powerful circumstantial evidence." She added, "In a
perfect world, you'd only have direct evidence, but many times that's not
the case in a criminal case."
Sterling sat motionless as she explained the reasoning behind the sentence
that she was about to announce. I had asked Sterling, when we met in St.
Louis, what he expected would happen.
"This process has destroyed a lot of me," he began, his voice shifting in
the halting way that means anguish has broken loose. "The thought that I'm
going to be sent to prison, I can't and haven't been able to deal with that.
I don't know where to put it or how to deal with it because it doesn't make
any sense. I'm dreading going to jail. Maybe some miracle will happen and I
won't. But I still have to be realistic and prepare for the worst."
A few minutes before three in the afternoon, Judge Brinkema said that
Sterling would go to prison for three and a half years. This was far below
the sentencing guidelines - and was seen as a
rebuke of the prosecution's portrayal of Sterling as a traitor who had to be
locked away for a long time. But that wasn't much comfort for Sterling or
his wife, because he would nonetheless be locked away. After the hearing
ended, Sterling walked to the front row of seats to console his sobbing
wife. You could hear her wails in the courtroom.
His lawyers requested that he be allowed to serve his sentence in his home
state of Missouri, so that his wife and other family members could easily
visit him. Earlier this week, Sterling reported to the prison that w
