Did She Say Too Much?

This much is known: On April 20, career CIA analyst Mary McCarthy was fired from her job 10 days before retirement. McCarthy admitted to having undisclosed contact with reporters, and a CIA spokesperson says, without identifying McCarthy, that the fired CIA officer also admitted disclosing classified information to the media. Sources said this includes the Washington Post's Dana Priest, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for writing that the CIA secretly detained terrorists in Eastern Europe who hadn't been charged with a crime. Beyond that, the case gets murky. Government sources tell TIME that McCarthy might have helped inform the prisons story. Through her attorney, she denies the allegation and denies that she leaked classified information about the detention program or any other topic. Although much remains unresolved, the McCarthy case has sparked heated debate, not least among current and former members of the intelligence community. Should CIA officers be fired for talking to reporters? Is leaking ever justified? And who decides? TIME asked four retired career CIA officials to weigh in.

MILT BEARDEN

former CIA spy

MARY MCCARTHY HAS BECOME a metaphor for an existential drama enveloping the CIA. On the surface, the question is whether CIA employees may take it upon themselves to reveal CIA secrets to the media. The answer is no. There is, in the first quarter-inch of every CIA employee's personnel file, an ironclad secrecy agreement forbidding such. It is the law--and properly so. One can easily defend the need for unyielding discipline when it comes to guarding the nation's secrets. And one can point to legitimate internal channels for dissent. But all that may be irrelevant in today's charged atmosphere, in which the policies of the agency--alleged torture, slapstick renditions, secret detention centers, wrongful-death investigations--have divided the CIA population as sharply as they have the American people.

CIA employees are an astute lot. They know that "city hall" has a lock on policy and dissent. Thus today's issues of conscience and morality will inevitably lead to Washington newsrooms. It is equally inevitable that the CIA will take stern steps to stop the hemorrhaging. Hence the dilemma and the fear of the CIA and the Administration--not only that CIA employees may go public but also that some will be prepared to take the consequences. The American people will not be indifferent to the moral issues involved. Americans may view the legalities involved as irrelevant in the face of acts of defiance that force a broad and unwelcome challenge to the policies involved.

ROBERT BAER

former CIA spy

YOU CANNOT HAVE CIA employees deciding what should be classified and what shouldn't. That's the beginning of the end. Bob Baer can't be at the CIA and decide that the Clinton Administration is screwing up on whatever and then go to the press. He can go to the inspector general or to Congress.

But I'm of two minds.

The fact that McCarthy met a journalist is not reason enough to fire her if that's the fact and if she didn't leak a real secret about the prisons, for example. I ran into all sorts of journalists, and I usually said I was whatever my cover was. But you were not obligated to write back and say, "I ran into X journalist in Damascus, and we were at a cocktail party, and we are going to get together for lunch." It was not something you had to report. Unauthorized contact with a journalist is a new standard. You cannot be assigned overseas and not run into a U.S. journalist. You're just completely isolating the CIA. You use journalists to get information, to trade at a very low level on what's happening in Hong Kong or whatever. That's the way it used to work. Now the message that's going out to employees at the CIA is "She had unauthorized contact with an American." It used to be that we had to report foreign contacts. But now we're talking about reporting on your contacts with fellow Americans. That's a bit Stalinesque for my taste.

RAY MCGOVERN

former CIA analyst

FORGET WHETHER MCCARTHY was one of the several sources who gave the Washington Post the story about secret CIA-run prisons abroad; some people did. And thanks to those who shared that information, we know that the Bush Administration set up the prisons to hold "suspected terrorists" incommunicado, with no due process or the required notification of the Red Cross, and that some have been subjected to torture as defined by international treaties that the U.S. has signed and thus are the law of the land.

What do you do when the secrecy agreement you were required to sign in order to work for the CIA is at odds with your oath to defend the Constitution of the U.S. and your obligation under international law, articulated at the Nuremberg Tribunal, to do what you reasonably can to prevent crimes like torture and kidnapping? That should be a no-brainer, and I believe we owe a debt of gratitude to those who could see that the Constitution and Nuremberg trump any secrecy oath.

Young people often ask me whether I would recommend that they apply for a job at the CIA. I used to say, Only if you have high degrees of integrity and courage. Now I tell them that when they are asked to sign the secrecy agreement, they should emulate President George W. Bush by adding a signing statement--the same kind of disclaimer the President issues when he signs legislation. Theirs might read, "None of the above shall be construed as impinging on the undersigned's duty under U.S. and international law to do what s/he can reasonably do to prevent war crimes." That it should seem necessary speaks volumes.

RICHARD KERR

a career analyst who once was deputy director of the CIA

OFFICERS OF THE intelligence community or officers of the CIA cannot take it upon themselves to make a judgment that one particular activity is O.K. but another isn't--and then take it upon themselves, if they can't convince people inside, to go to the press and expose it. The duty of an analyst or operator is to weigh in during internal debate or planning on a given topic.

Once a decision is made, it seems to me your options are rather limited. You can continue to argue against it inside the system. In my experience, you can walk your way up the line to various people in positions of authority and argue against it. You can go to the inspector general and say, "I think this is immoral, wrong and illegal." Or you can go to the general counsel and say, "I don't think this is legal, and I object to our being involved in it, and I objected to being involved in it personally." And I guess if that doesn't work, you can go to the oversight committees in Congress.

There are just a lot of other ways to express your unhappiness with the program than going to the press, and before that, you should resign and then argue against it from the outside. As a serving officer, I think it's more than inappropriate. There is zero doubt in my mind that the director can fire someone who takes that into their own hands. And the polygraph is quite a legitimate way to find out whether you have leakers.

Maybe the CIA needs to give officers more ways of coming to terms internally with a serious and legitimate question, How do you protect American values, and how far do you go down the line of changing your own values? I think the CIA should look at some of its internal debate channels. We have kind of come full circle. But that does not mean an officer can make an independent judgment and then go to the media.

With reporting by Compiled by Timothy J. Burger/Washington