Ex-CIA officer indicted for leaking classified information

John Kiriakou, 47, was charged with one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for allegedly disclosing the identity of a covert officer and with three counts of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly disclosing national defense information to individuals unauthorised to receive it.

In a statement, the US Department of Justice said, the indictment also charges him with one count of making false statements for allegedly lying to the publications review doard of the CIA in an unsuccessful attempt to trick the agency into allowing him to include classified information in a book he was seeking to publish.

Kiriakou was a CIA intelligence officer between 1990 and 2004. He remains free on bond and is expected to be arraigned on April 13.

The charges of leaking secrets each carry a potential prison term of 10 years, while the false statements charge carries a possible five-year prison sentence. The charges result from an investigation that was triggered by a classified defense filing in January 2009, which contained classified information the defense had not been given through official government channels, and, in part, by the discovery in the spring of 2009 of photographs of certain government employees and contractors in the materials of high-value detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The investigation revealed that, on multiple occasions, one of the journalists to whom Kiriakou is alleged to have illegally disclosed classified information, in turn, disclosed

that information to a defense team investigator, and that this information was reflected in the classified defense filing and enabled the defense team to take or obtain surveillance photographs of government personnel.

The indictment alleges that Kiriakou made illegal disclosures about two CIA employees and their involvement in classified operations to two journalists on multiple occasions between 2007 and 2009.

In one case, by revealing an employee's name as a CIA officer, Kiriakou allegedly disclosed classified information -- as the employee was and remains covert (identified in the indictment as "Covert Officer A").

In the second case, Kiriakou allegedly disclosed the name and contact information of another CIA employee, identified in the indictment as "Officer B," whose participation in an operation to capture terrorism subject Abu Zubaydah in 2002 was then classified.

Kiriakou's alleged disclosures occurred prior to a June 2008 front-page story in The New York Times disclosing Officer B's alleged role in the Abu Zubaydah operation.