WASHINGTON: A former CIA official was indicted Thursday on charges of leaking secrets to journalists, including the name of a covert agent and revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities, officials said.
John Kiriakou, who had previously revealed the CIA's use of waterboarding of Al-Qaeda suspects, had been charged in January with leaking secrets. The indictment allows the case to proceed to trial without an evidentiary hearing.
The indictment returned by a grand jury in Virginia charges Kiriakou with one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and three counts of violating the Espionage Act.
The indictment also charges him with making false statements to the Publications Review Board of the CIA in an unsuccessful attempt to trick the CIA into allowing him to include classified information in a book he was seeking to publish.
Kiriakou first came to public attention in an interview with ABC News in December 2007 in which he became the first US official to describe the waterboarding of top Al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, a technique widely viewed as torture.
He acknowledged later in his memoir, however, that he was not present when the interrogation took place.
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