Reality Winner worked for an NSA contractor and has been arrested for
allegedly leaking a top secret NSA document. (photo: Facebook)
What Reality Winner Did Was Heroic
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
08 June 17
The arrest this week of NSA contractor Reality Winner on Espionage Act
charges of providing national defense information to The Intercept is the
clearest evidence to date that President Donald Trump intends to continue
former president Barack Obama's war on whistleblowers and transparency. It
also calls into question the professionalism of The Intercept's journalists,
as well as the professional integrity of reporters Richard Esposito and
Matthew Cole.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have a history with both Esposito and
Cole. Esposito and I were friends for many years, and we worked together at
ABC News from 2008 to 2009 and again from 2011 to 2012. My history with Cole
is far more sordid. Cole approached me in 2008 to say that he was writing a
book on the CIA's rendition program. He sent me a list of a dozen names and
asked if I could introduce him to anybody on the list. I told him truthfully
that I was not involved in renditions and that I did not know anybody on the
list. He followed up with a second list, and then a third. I finally said
that he obviously knew the issue far better than I did and that I just
couldn't be helpful. Finally, he said, "What about the guy you mentioned in
your [first] book? I think his name was 'John.'" I said, "You're talking
about John Doe. He must be retired by now and living somewhere in Virginia."
That conversation was a crime. I confirmed the name of a former colleague to
Cole. Even though I had no idea that colleague was still undercover, it was
still a felony.
But the story gets much worse. As it turned out, Cole was never working on
any book. Instead, he was secretly acting as an investigator for the
Guantanamo defense attorneys. He took John Doe's name, sent it to a fellow
investigator, John Sifton, and Sifton sent it to the attorneys. The
attorneys then put the name in a sealed, classified motion asking the judge
for permission to interview Doe. The Guantanamo judge immediately recognized
that the name was classified and he called the FBI. The FBI subpoenaed the
defense attorneys' emails and traced one back to Sifton. Sifton either
cooperated with the FBI (he later testified against me in the grand jury) or
the FBI subpoenaed his emails, and traced the information back to Cole.
The next step is still a mystery. The FBI either subpoenaed Cole's emails -
those of a working journalist - or Cole ratted me out to the FBI. Neither
Cole nor the FBI have ever said what happened.
And it wasn't just me who Cole manipulated. In the course of my case, my
investigators found ten pages of handwritten notes from Cole, provided to us
by a friendly attorney, wherein Cole had spoken with a disgruntled former
CIA employee who had eventually given him the names of ten different
undercover CIA officers. Cole also passed these names to the Guantanamo
defense attorneys, whose investigators then photographed these officers at a
secret CIA site so that the Guantanamo detainees they represented could
identify them. That's not journalism. It's activism. It's also highly
unethical.
Fast-forward seven years. The Intercept promotes itself as the go-to place
for national security whistleblowers. The outlet even has its PGP encryption
keys on its website, where it encourages national security professionals to
send in classified documents. That's a great idea and one that I support
fully. Apparently, that's what Reality Winner did. She sent The Intercept an
NSA analysis of Russian involvement in hacking related to the 2016
presidential election. Esposito and Cole, however, in an ill-advised attempt
to "authenticate" the document, sent it to one of their "NSA contacts," who
immediately alerted authorities. Winner was arrested mere hours after the
Esposito/Cole article was published.
How did the FBI zero in on Winner so quickly? Admittedly, she made mistakes.
She initially contacted The Intercept from a work computer. And when she
finally sent the document in, she left identifying information on it. More
importantly - and this is something that every journalist who purports to be
a specialist in national security ought to know - NSA marks every single
document with microscopic tags. When an NSA employee prints a document,
there are tiny markings indicating that that specific employee has printed
it. When Esposito and Cole showed a copy of the original document. to their
NSA contact, they had sealed Winner's fate.
And now Winner faces charges under the Espionage Act, a 1917 law designed to
combat spies and saboteurs. It's like using an iron fist to kill a fly. As
recently as the Clinton administration, such revelations of classified
information were dealt with administratively and internally. When I was at
the CIA, I worked with a woman who was accused of providing classified
information on Iran to a CNN reporter with whom she was having an affair.
The leak was traced to her, she admitted passing the information, and she
was suspended without pay for six weeks and barred from promotion for three
years. Her career eventually recovered, and she was promoted into the Senior
Intelligence Service. There was no Espionage Act prosecution for her.
We now know where Trump stands on whistleblower issues. He stands with
Obama. He stands as an enemy of transparency. Let me be clear: Reality
Winner is a whistleblower. I don't care what her motivation for disclosing
the document was. It's irrelevant. What is relevant is that the American
people have a right to know what she revealed. Why is it a secret that the
Russians were working to elect Donald Trump? There is a public interest in
disseminating that information.
Winner faces the possibility of many years in prison. But what she did was
heroic. The American people will come to recognize that. And in the
meantime, she's going to take her place in a long line of truth-tellers.
Esposito and Cole, meanwhile, should see the unemployment line.
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.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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