theintercept | Jeffrey Sterling, the former CIA agent convicted under the
Espionage Act for talking to a New York Times reporter, has been
released from prison after serving more than two years of his 42-month
sentence, and is now in a halfway house.
Sterling’s case drew nationwide attention because the Obama-era
Department of Justice unsuccessfully tried to force the reporter, James
Risen, to divulge the identity of his sources for “State of War,”
a book in which he revealed the CIA had botched a covert operation
against Iran’s nuclear program. Risen reported that instead of
undermining the Iranians, the CIA had provided them with useful
information on how to build a nuclear bomb. (Risen is now The
Intercept’s senior national security correspondent and directs First
Look Media’s Press Freedom Defense Fund.)
The case had a racial dimension, too. Sterling, who had joined the
agency in 1993, was one of the few black undercover operatives at the
CIA. After several years of what he believed was discriminatory
treatment, he filed a complaint against the agency, and then a lawsuit.
The CIA fired Sterling in 2002, and his lawsuit was blocked by the courts after the government argued successfully that proceeding with the suit would expose state secrets.
Sterling subsequently met with Senate investigators as a
whistleblower about the mismanagement of a classified program he worked
on at the agency, the same Iranian program that Risen wrote about in his
book. Risen had interviewed Sterling in 2002 for an article
about his discrimination lawsuit — but Sterling has denied talking to
Risen about the Iranian program. In 2011, when Sterling was arrested,
the government’s indictment accused him of leaking about Iran out of “anger and resentment.”
Previously on the Sterling matter at Subrealism:
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