CIA fires senior officer over news leaks

The Central Intelligence Agency dismissed senior career officer Mary O. McCarthy this past week for disclosing classified information to reporters, including material for Pulitzer Prize-winning articles in the Washington Post about the agency's secret overseas prisons for terror suspects. McCarthy was a veteran intelligence analyst who until 2001 was senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council, where she served under President Bill Clinton and into the Bush administration. At the time of her dismissal, McCarthy was working in the agency's inspector general's office. The Justice Department has separately opened preliminary investigations into the disclosure of information to the Post, for its articles about secret prisons, as well as to the New York Times, for articles last fall that disclosed the existence of a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants supervised by the National Security Agency. Those articles were also recognized this week with a Pulitzer Prize. Several former veteran CIA officials said the dismissal of an agency employee over a leak was rare and perhaps unprecedented. The CIA's inquiry focused in part on identifying McCarthy's role in supplying information for a Nov. 2, 2005, article in the Post by Dana Priest. The article reported that the intelligence agency was sending terror suspects to clandestine detention centers in several countries, including sites in Eastern Europe. The stories triggered a fierce reaction in Europe, including investigations into whether governments were secretly cooperating by allowing the CIA to use European facilities and airstrips to detain and transfer prisoners to other countries known to engage in torture. "This was a very aggressive internal investigation," said one former CIA officer with more than 20 years' experience. "[CIA Director Porter] Goss was determined to find the source of the secret jails story." In February, Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee that "the damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission." He said it was his hope "that we will witness a grand jury investigation with reporters present being asked to reveal who is leaking this information." Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. said people who provide citizens the information they need to hold their government accountable should not "come to harm for that." "The reporting that Dana did was very important accountability reporting about how the CIA and the rest of the US government have been conducting the war on terror," Downie said. "Whether or not the actions of the CIA or other agencies have interfered with anyone's civil liberties is important information for Americans to know and is an important part of our jobs."