I’ve Got A Secret

This is the story of Thomas Drake, winner of the 2011 Ridenhour Truth-Telling prize.

Climate Science Watch is a sponsored project 
of the Government Accountability Project.

Sometimes we turn our attention from the climate change problem when it is timely to take a position, said Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency (NSA).

Drake faces some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen.

On June 13th, the fifty-four year old former government employee is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen.

The former senior executive at the NSA, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state.

According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants.

In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.”

The aim of this scheme, the indictment says, was to leak government secrets to an unnamed newspaper reporter, who is identifiable as Siobhan Gorman, of the Baltimore Sun.

Gorman wrote a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal practices in NSA counterterrorism programs.

Drake is also charged with obstructing justice and lying to federal law-enforcement agents.

If he is convicted on all counts, he could receive a prison term of thirty-five years.

The government argues that Drake recklessly endangered the lives of American servicemen.

“This is not an issue of benign documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel who is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010.

The NSA, he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the field.

So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our intelligence goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.”

Top officials at the Justice Department describe such leak prosecutions as almost obligatory.

Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General who supervises the department’s criminal division, told me, “You don’t get to break the law and disclose classified information just because you want to.”

He added, “Politics should play no role in it whatsoever.”

When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistleblowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.”

But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness.

Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined.

The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a conservative political scientist at the Hudson Institute, who, in his book “Necessary Secrets” (2010), argues for more stringent protection of classified information, says, “Ironically, Obama has presided over the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history—even more so than Nixon.”

One afternoon in January, Drake met with me, giving his first public interview about this case.

He is tall, with thinning sandy hair framing a domed forehead, and he has the erect bearing of a member of the Air Force, where he served before joining the NSA, in 2001.

Obsessive, dramatic, and emotional, he has an unwavering belief in his own rectitude. Sitting at a Formica table at the Tastee Diner, in Bethesda, Drake—who is a registered Republican—groaned and thrust his head into his hands.

“I actually had hopes for Obama,” he said.

He had not only expected the President to roll back the prosecutions launched by the Bush Administration; he had thought that Bush Administration officials would be investigated for overstepping the law in the “war on terror.”

“But power is incredibly destructive,” Drake said. “It’s a weird, pathological thing.

I also think the intelligence community coöpted Obama, because he’s rather naive about national security.

He’s accepted the fear and secrecy.

We’re in a scary space in this country.”

The Justice Department’s indictment narrows the frame around Drake’s actions, focusing almost exclusively on his handling of what it claims are five classified documents.

But Drake sees his story as a larger tale of political reprisal, one that he fears the government will never allow him to air fully in court.

“I’m a target,” he said. “I’ve got a bull’s-eye on my back.”

He continued, “I did not tell secrets.

I am facing prison for having raised an alarm, period.

I went to a reporter with a few key things: fraud, waste, and abuse, and the fact that there were legal alternatives to the Bush Administration’s ‘dark side’ ”—in particular, warrantless domestic spying by the NSA.

The indictment portrays him not as a hero but as a treacherous man who violated “the government trust.”

Drake said of the prosecutors, “They can say what they want; but the F.B.I. can find something on anyone.”

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, says of the Drake case, “The government wants this to be about unlawfully retained information.

The defense, meanwhile, is painting a picture of a public-interested whistleblower who struggled to bring attention to what he saw as multibillion-dollar mismanagement.”

Because Drake is not a spy, Aftergood says, the case will “test whether intelligence officers can be convicted of violating the Espionage Act even if their intent is pure.”

He believes that the trial may also test whether the nation’s expanding secret intelligence bureaucracy is beyond meaningful accountability. “It’s a much larger debate than whether a piece of paper was at a certain place at a certain time,” he says.