Washington, Jan 24 (IANS/EFE): A former CIA agent has been accused of repeatedly disclosing classified information to the press, including the name of an undercover agent, the Justice Department said Monday.
John Kiriakou, 47, worked for the Central Intelligence Agency between 1990 and 2004, the department said in a communique.
Kiriakou is charged with breaking the law protecting the identity of members of US intelligence services when he leaked the identity of an undercover agent, and with two counts of violating the espionage law by revealing national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it.
He is also accused of lying to the CIA's publication review board to win its approval to include confidential information in a book he was about to publish.
The complaint filed Monday before the federal court for the Eastern District of Virginia says that Kiriakou made illegal disclosures about two CIA agents and their role in classified operations to two journalists on several occasions between 2007 and 2009.
The charges are the result of an investigation that was opened after the defense counsel for Al Qaida suspect Abu Zubaydah presented a brief containing classified information that was not released through official channels, the Justice Department said.
What set off the alarm were various photos that turned up in the spring of 2009 among documents of the defense in which a number of government employees and contractors appear.
The investigation found that several times the reporter, to whom Kiriakou allegedly gave the information, passed the same information on to an investigator working for Zubaydah's defense team.
Kiriakou came to prominence after a 2007 interview with ABC News in which he claimed that Zubaydah, who was known to have been subjected to waterboarding, began cooperating with interrogators within "30, 35 seconds" of first being subject to simulated drowning.
He repeated the assertion - which was seized upon by defenders of the use of torture against terror suspects - to other media outlets, but it later emerged that he had no first-hand knowledge of Zubaydah's interrogation.
Kiriakou worked for a time as a paid consultant to ABC News before obtaining a staff position with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.