JOHN KIRIAKOU: What was this CIA Officer Thinking?
September 30, 2019
Given Langley's intolerance for whistleblowing, the current case now in the
headlines has a couple of curious features.
By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News
The news is dominated by "the whistleblower," the CIA officer who reported
to the CIA Inspector General (IG) that President Donald Trump may have
committed a crime during a conversation with the president of Ukraine. I've
been fascinated by the story for a couple of reasons.
First, as a whistleblower and a former CIA officer, I know what must have
been going through the guy's mind as he was coming to the decision to make a
report on the president of the United States. That is, if he is a real
whistleblower.
If he's a whistleblower, and not a CIA plant whose task it is to take down
the president, then his career is probably over. Intelligence agencies only
pay lip service to whistleblowing. A potential whistleblower is supposed to
go through the chain of command as the current whistleblower did. If an
employee has evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the
public health or public safety, he is supposed to go to the Inspector
General. The IG, then is supposed to go to the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence (DNI). And when the DNI investigates and finds the
complaint credible, he then takes it to the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees. That sounds straightforward, but it's not.
The Case of Thomas Drake
Thomas Drake. (Rob Kall/Flickr)
Look at the cautionary case of Thomas Drake, a senior NSA officer who blew
the whistle on warrantless wiretapping of American citizens in the aftermath
of the Sept. 11 attacks. Drake went to the NSA inspector general, where he
got no satisfaction. He then went to the NSA general counsel and then to
the Defense Department inspector general. The DOD IG actually destroyed the
evidence that Tom had brought to them. So, when nothing happened there, he
went to the House Intelligence Committee. All of this was done through the
proper channels.
For his trouble, Drake was rewarded with 10 felony indictments, including
five counts of espionage. Of course, he hadn't committed espionage, and the
case eventually fell apart, but not until his life was ruined - personally,
professionally and financially.
So even if he is a legitimate whistleblower, the CIA officer who contacted
the IG on Trump will never be trusted internally again. The view in Langley
will be, "If he's willing to rat out the president of the United States,
he'd be willing to rat out all of us."
(In my own case, where I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program, I
didn't - and couldn't - go through the chain of command because my chain of
command had created the torture program. I couldn't go to Congress because
Congress was in on the program. They had approved it and financed it. My
only alternative was to go to the media.)
Odd Choice of Attorneys
The second thing that interests me is the officer's hiring of Mark Zaid to
represent him, rather than one of more than a dozen A-list national security
attorneys at three or four major law firms in Washington. Zaid is literally
the worst possible choice for any whistleblower in national security. Zaid
briefly represented CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling, who was accused of
leaking classified information to The New York Times' James Risen. But
while the FBI was looking at three different people as Risen's possible
source, Zaid sent a letter to the FBI saying, "I think my client is guilty."
The FBI dropped the other two investigations and focused only on Sterling,
who went to trial, consistently protested his innocence, was convicted, and
spent three-and-a-half years in prison.
CIA headquarters. (Central Intelligence Agency via Flickr)
Zaid briefly represented me in 2007, immediately after I blew the whistle.
But I fired him after two weeks because he was impulsive, unnecessarily
confrontational and untrustworthy. Four years later, he was representing
Matthew Cole, the "journalist" who was secretly working for the Guantanamo
defense attorneys, the man who ratted me out to the FBI, which led to my
arrest and to two years in prison. Cole told the FBI that I was his source
who told him the name of a CIA officer involved in the torture program.
Not only did Zaid represent Cole, but both he and Cole testified against me
in grand jury proceedings in 2012. How this man still has a law license is
an utter mystery to me.
But he's thrived in Washington. He makes most of his money representing
people who have books jammed up in the CIA's pre-publication review process.
He handles a lot of "insider issues" like security clearances and trying to
smooth ruffled Intelligence Community feathers. But he's clearly an inside
man. That Zaid is involved in this case leads me to believe that the CIA
whistleblower is either an idiot who has no idea what he's gotten himself
into or he's been directed to make his "disclosure."
Experts always say that when you want to know what is really being discussed
in a complicated and sensitive report, you must read the footnotes. Well, if
you really want to know what's happening in this impeachment scandal, look
closely at the peripheral players. That's where the real story is.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior
investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the
sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage
Act-a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a
result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
