Espionage charges dropped against ex-NSA manager

A former National Security Agency manager accepted a plea deal Thursday that cleared him of espionage charges stemming from the alleged leak of classified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter.

Thomas Drake had been charged with 10 felonies but will plead guilty to a misdemeanor: exceeding the authorized use of a computer. If convicted of the felonies, he could have faced 35 years in prison. Under the plea bargain, he is not expected to serve any time.

Drake, a former Air Force officer, had been charged under the Espionage Act even though he allegedly leaked information to a newspaper, not an enemy power.

"He feels a profound mixture of emotions after five years of investigation and one year of being under indictment," said Jesselyn Radack, a supporter and a director at the Government Accountability Project, which seeks to protect whistle-blowers. Drake is not allowed to comment until after his court appearance in Baltimore on Friday, she said.

The onetime senior NSA manager was indicted last year on charges of taking classified information from the Fort Meade, Md.-based agency for the purpose of leaking it to then-Sun reporter Siobhan Gorman, who wrote a series of articles about waste and mismanagement at the nation's largest spy agency, which monitors electronic signals such as phone calls and emails.

Gorman, who was not named in the indictment, now works at the Wall Street Journal. Spokeswomen for the Sun and the Journal declined to comment on the plea deal.

Drake has insisted he did not provide the reporter with any classified information.

The case is one of five that the Obama administration has been pursuing against those accused of leaking government secrets, a trend that alarmed advocates of greater transparency in government.

Gorman wrote articles for the Sun in 2006 and 2007 about flawed programs at the NSA, including an expensive antiterrorism technology called Trailblazer that was embraced by the agency but later abandoned.

"This whole thing was to shut people up," said former NSA mathematician Bill Binney, a Drake ally whose home was raided by federal agents as part of a leak investigation in 2007. Binney, who was not charged, contends that the probe was in retaliation for a complaint to the NSA's inspector general about what he viewed as mismanagement related to contracts for a massive surveillance program.

But others rued the outcome of the Drake case.

"I think it's sad. It sends all the wrong signals," said Robert Turner, co-founder of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. "I think what he did was a betrayal of trust, and he's essentially walking on it."

Allowing government employees to leak secrets without facing strong penalties has serious consequences for national security, he said. "If we cannot keep secrets, we will not get many secrets," said Turner, a former intelligence advisor for the White House and Congress.

Drake had rejected two settlement offers because he was "adamant that he would not plea-bargain with the truth," Radack said.

The case could have established "a horrible precedent" if Drake had been found guilty of espionage, she said, because whistle-blowers who reveal government wrongdoing are not spies.

"If you paint someone with the word espionage," Radack said, "you paint them with the brush of being a traitor to their country."