Jeffrey Sterling - Unwanted Spy: The Persecution of an American Whistleblower

W HERE AM I? H OW DID I GET HERE? T HOSE ARE THE KINDS of thoughts you have when your ultimate nightmare comes true.

It was January 26, 2015, my second long day of waiting in a small, windowless, soundless conference room just outside courtroom number five on the fourth floor of the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. Over the past two weeks, I had been on trial, accused of violating the century-old Espionage Act.

As an undercover officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, Id been involved in Operation Merlin, a covert scheme to derail the Iranian effort to build a nuclear bomb by providing their scientists with fake, flawed blueprints for warheads, channeled through a Russian scientist. Operation Merlin had ultimately backfired when the Iranian experts detected the fraud, as revealed in the book State of War by reporter James Risen.

Agency leaders were furiousnot at themselves, for launching a risky and ill-conceived scheme, but at the author whod dared to expose their incompetence. In their eagerness to punish someone for their embarrassment, they looked around for a scapegoat. They found me. A compliant US attorney dutifully filed an indictment charging me with Unlawful Retention and Unauthorized Disclosure of National Defense Information, Mail Fraud, Unauthorized Conveyance of Government Property, and Obstruction of Justicenine criminal charges in all, based on the claim that Id supposedly leaked classified information about Operation Merlin to James Risen.

The truth is that I did not leak any classified information related to CIA operations to James Risen, or to anyone else. But I am a whistleblower. Id blown the whistle by suing the CIA for discriminating against me when I was an employee there. Id also attempted to blow the whistle about the dangers of Operation Merlinnot by leaking, but by submitting my warnings to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Sadly, those warnings were ignored. Id been forced to accept some disheartening truths: that neither blatant discrimination nor a dangerous operation related to weapons of mass destruction were matters of real concern to the powers that be at the Agency or among the members of Congress charged with oversight of intelligence matters.

Even before the trial had begun, Id known that my prospects werent good. The world had witnessed the cases of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, and a series of other whistleblowers whose prosecutionsome said persecutionhad been pursued by President Barack Obama with an eagerness that almost suggested a personal vendetta. In the atmosphere created by these cases, the mere accusation of having leaked classified information was enough to automatically condemn someone. In refusing to plead guilty and instead insisting on my right to go to trial, I knew I was facing an uphill battle. But I could not and would not confess to something I did not do.

During the trial, the government did not present a shred of hard evidence to validate the charges against me. Even Judge Leonie Brinkema summarized the case against me as being based on very powerful circumstantial evidence rather than on hard proof.

But there was one incriminating fact about which there could be no doubt. The CIA had paraded a whole host of current and former agents in front of the jury, and I didnt look like any of them. I was a black man whod dared to try to build a career serving my country as an officer of the CIA.

The trial had lasted a week and a half. Now I was enduring the most excruciating part of the whole ordeal: waiting for a verdict.

How the hell did it all come to this?

Id grown up as a true believer in the American dream. Work hard, do your duty, and stand up for yourselfthose were the rules of the game, or so Id been taught. I knew Id done nothing wrong, and I knew that fighting against wrongs is what an American hero is supposed to do. Thats all I knew how to do. Thats why I was now clinging to hope and continuing to fightunable to comprehend how defending my rights could somehow get me branded a traitor.