A Media Mole Unmasked

By Timothy J. Burger

After complaining for nearly a year about intelligence leaks to the press, CIA Director Porter Goss last week fingered his first alleged media mole. The agency fired a senior analyst for allegedly discussing secret information with the press, including the Washington Post's Dana Priest, whose story on a network of covert CIA prisons for suspected terrorists was informed by this source and won a Pulitzer Prize last week. CIA spokesmen refused to name the analyst, but other officials confirm that she is Mary McCarthy, a CIA veteran who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Government insiders say McCarthy, who did not return calls to her home, was dismissed after irregularities in a polygraph test led her to admit that she had made unauthorized disclosures to the media.

McCarthy, 61, a historian who wrote a book on British power in 19th century West Africa, had spoken of retiring as early as this spring. She had privately expressed grave doubts about how the CIA and the Bush Administration handled Iraq and terrorism. In 2004 she gave $2,000 to the presidential campaign of Senator John Kerry as well as $5,000 to the Democratic Party in the swing state of Ohio.

McCarthy was assigned to the office of CIA inspector general John Helgerson. If the allegations against her prove true, they will be especially embarrassing to the I.G., who is the agency's in-house watchdog. For McCarthy, the ramifications could go beyond losing her job. The Justice Department is pursuing an investigation into leaks about the CIA's secret detention network and could fold McCarthy's case into that inquiry. A law-enforcement official says Justice was contacted by the CIA about this case late last week.

Goss told TIME last June that "virtually every day I can pick up a paper and find somebody who is an anonymous source. That is willful. And it seems to me there ought to be a penalty for that." McCarthy's firing shows that Goss is acting on that frustration. "Every person who works at the CIA signs a secrecy agreement," says CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, who declined to identify the leaker. "This individual violated that agreement."