It seems that the CIA has fired one of its officers for leaking information about them.

from CNN

The officer admitted to "unauthorized discussions with the media in which the officer knowingly and willfully shared classified intelligence including operational information," said spokeswoman Michelle Neff.

A U.S. official said the person's name has been turned over to the Justice Department, where a determination will be made on whether to file criminal charges.

A senior government official said the dismissal was related to a story in The Washington Post about the United States holding terror suspects in secret prisons overseas.
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Is it illegal for a CIA official to leak information about secret prisons we don't have?

Colleagues Say C.I.A. Analyst Played by Rules

WASHINGTON, April 22 — Mary O. McCarthy, the intelligence officer dismissed on Friday after being accused of leaking information to reporters about the Central Intelligence Agency's overseas prisons, once was responsible for guarding some of the nation's most sensitive secrets.

But on Thursday she was stripped of her security clearance and escorted out of C.I.A. headquarters, government officials said, after failing a polygraph examination and confessing that she had disclosed classified information to reporters, including material for The Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning articles about secret C.I.A. facilities in Eastern Europe used to interrogate captured Al Qaeda members and other terror suspects.

Ms. McCarthy, who has not been charged with any crime, did not respond to telephone calls and an e-mail message. But former colleagues who worked with her at the C.I.A. and the White House say they had trouble fathoming her as a leaker. Some said they flatly refused to believe the accusations.

Others said it was possible that Ms. McCarthy, who began attending law school at night several years ago and had announced her intention to retire from the C.I.A., had grown disenchanted with the methods that the Bush administration used for handling Al Qaeda prisoners since the September 2001 terror attacks and felt she had no alternative except to go to the press.

"I have no idea what her motive was, but there is a lot of dissension within the agency and it seems to be a rather unhappy place," said Richard J. Kerr, a former C.I.A. deputy director. Mr. Kerr called Ms. McCarthy "quite a good, substantive person on the issues I dealt with her on."

Government officials said that after Ms. McCarthy's polygraph examination showed the possibility of deception, the examiner confronted her and she disclosed having conversations with reporters.

But some former C.I.A. employees who know Ms. McCarthy remain unconvinced, arguing that the pressure from Mr. Goss and others in the Bush administration to plug leaks may have led the agency to focus on an employee on the verge of retirement, whose work at the White House during the Clinton administration had long raised suspicions within the current administration.

"It looks to me like Mary is being used as a sacrificial lamb," said Larry Johnson, a former C.I.A. officer who worked for Ms. McCarthy in the agency's Latin America section. - New York Times
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First, it was career people in departments like FEMA, the Inspector Generals, and the like. Then people started leaving the military, and now it is the CIA. Because of bush and his policies, the US is losing the people who know how to run things in the government, and we are ending up with people like Bremer (misplaced a billion dollars or so and gets a medal, Franks (marched so closely behind Rumsfeld and bush that, if they stopped, he broke his nosw), the neice of someone who became an assistant secretary with absolutely no knowledge of what she was assigned to do, Brown (FEMA "fashion god" who did a "heck of a job"), Chertoff (was warned about Katrina, but did little, and followed up not at all), etc.

'I am struck by the irony that Mary McCarthy may have been fired for blowing the whistle and ensuring that the truth about an abuse was told to the American people. There is something potentially honorable in that action; particularly when you consider that George Bush authorized Scooter Libby to leak misleading information for the purpose of deceiving the American people about the grounds for going to war in Iraq. While I'm neither a fan nor friend of Mary's, she may have done a service for her country. She was a lousy manager in my experience, but she is not a traitor and has not betrayed the identity of an undercover intelligence officer. That dirty work was done by the minions of George Bush and Dick Cheney. It is important to keep that fact in the forefront as the judgment on Mary McCarthy's acts is rendered.' The Firing of Mary McCarthy