The Unwanted Spy

True Spies, Episode 182: The Unwanted Spy

NARRATOR: This is True Spies. The podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you’ll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You’ll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I’m Daisy Ridley and this is True Spies from SPYSCAPE Studios.

JEFFREY STERLING: I guess I do consider myself a patriot. To me, a patriot is someone willing to sacrifice everything for what he or she believes in. 

NARRATOR: It’s 2011 and Jeffrey Sterling, a fraud investigator for a health insurance company, is taking some time off work. He’s recovering from knee surgery.

JEFFREY STERLING: So one day, as I'm nearing the time when I'm going to return - this was early January - my supervisor calls and asked if I was able to come down to a meeting at the office.

NARRATOR: Eager to get back to work, Jeffrey obliges. He’s using a cane to get about but he can still drive.

JEFFREY STERLING: I get down to the office. She says, “We're going to have a meeting.” We did. “And we're going to go out to lunch,” sort of thing. 

NARRATOR: On his way out to lunch, the office’s security guard asks him if he can spare a moment for a chat.

JEFFREY STERLING: Well, we're on our way out. I'll stop by on the way out. They were persistent and it was confusing to me. So I hobbled on my cane up to security. 

NARRATOR: As he enters the security office, Jeffrey’s stomach drops. In an instant, he knows that he has walked into a trap. 

JEFFREY STERLING: And there were the FBI agents that had visited me years before and placed me under arrest. 

NARRATOR: Jeffrey Sterling has a complicated past. Part of him always suspected that, one day, it would come back to haunt him. But not like this.

JEFFREY STERLING: Again, I had gone through knee replacement surgery. Everyone in the world knew exactly where I was. But the FBI had to have their grandstanding and they made a spectacle of it. There were crowds outside the building as I'm being led out in handcuffs. It was humiliating. 

NARRATOR: The public spectacle of his arrest throws up another kind of trauma. One that runs much deeper.

JEFFREY STERLING: And then I learned afterward that some of the local newscasters had wondered why I was limping. And their speculation was that there was a physical altercation as they were arresting me. “Well, of course, there's a physical altercation. There's a black guy being arrested.” So I'm just falling into that just racist BS even under that circumstance. So it was hell for me. I thought I had moved on. I thought I had finally found peace. And anything but.

NARRATOR: Meet a man with a unique perspective on the intelligence community.

JEFFREY STERLING: My name is Jeffrey Sterling. I was a former CIA officer wrongfully convicted of violating the Espionage Act. 

NARRATOR: In 2015, Jeffrey was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in federal prison for a crime he insists that he didn’t commit. In this episode of True Spies, we’ll follow his rise, fall, and recovery, and learn about the challenges that he claims he faced inside America’s most secretive workplace. Jeffrey was found guilty of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 - a piece of legislation that he believes was misused in his case, and continues to be misused today.

JEFFREY STERLING: The government is using the Espionage Act to target whistleblowers, to quiet dissent. And the dangers of it now are becoming so paramount, the US government is using the Espionage Act beyond the borders of this country. 

NARRATOR: Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden are household names. All have been charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. But Jeffrey maintains that he does not belong in that company. When he blew the whistle on Operation Merlin - a CIA operation to hinder Iran’s nuclear program - he says that he went through the official channels. 

JEFFREY STERLING: I took my concerns to others within the organization, within the CIA, my management, above my management, and they all turned a blind [eye].

NARRATOR: He went all the way to the top.

JEFFREY STERLING: I took my concerns to the intelligence committees. 

NARRATOR: The US government claims that Jeffrey went further. He was convicted of sharing details of Operation Merlin with James Risen, an allegation that Jeffrey has always strenuously denied. Risen’s 2006 book, State of War, claimed that the operation had been botched and that it may have even helped Iran on its journey toward becoming a nuclear state. Someone had leaked top-secret information with the journalist, way outside of official channels. And when fingers started pointing, they landed on Jeffrey because he knew James Risen. In fact, James Risen had been an important contact during a difficult stage of his life, long since past. Or so he thought. You see, in 2001, Jeffrey became one of a very few CIA officers to file a racial discrimination case against the Agency. 

JEFFREY STERLING: There was an article written about my discrimination suit by James Risen. 

NARRATOR: It was this earlier contact with Risen that made Jeffrey a prime suspect when the journalist’s tell-all book was published in 2006. But Jeffrey believes that his willingness to speak out put a target on his back.

JEFFREY STERLING: The fact that I had gone to the intelligence committees with regard to discrimination and Operation Merlin, I think labeled me, to them, a whistleblower. And especially my article about the discrimination at the CIA. And it just took years for them to say, “Let's do this. Let's teach him a lesson.”

NARRATOR: There was a time, long ago, when Jeffrey Sterling felt good about the CIA. Born to a working-class family in small-town Missouri at the tail-end of the 1960s, he always longed to be part of something bigger.

JEFFREY STERLING: To give a context of the type of place it was, I mean, its claim to fame, as I was growing up, was [that] it was the hometown of Rush Limbaugh. The same sort of conservative ideals.

NARRATOR: As a child, he was keenly aware of the role that race plays in the makeup of American society.

JEFFREY STERLING: Segregation was a real thing there. 

NARRATOR: Jeffrey dreamed of defying the expectations he felt were placed upon him by wider society, and by his own community.

JEFFREY STERLING: Black America didn't understand the interest that I had. White America didn't understand the interest that I had. So it was difficult for me growing up in that town because I was caught in the middle of white and black America. [it] was pretty much a solitary sort of childhood for me. But I knew there was another world out there where I could be judged not by the color of my skin or expected to take certain roles based on the color of my skin, but that I could be myself.

NARRATOR: In the early ‘90s, as a law student at university, he finally got his chance to enter that ‘other world’.

JEFFREY STERLING: It happened for me in my last year in law school. It was during lunch. I was reading the newspaper and I came across an ad. It said, ‘Join the CIA.’ I mean, it wasn't a hidden ad or anything. It was flat out, “Join the CIA. Travel the world.” 

NARRATOR: He didn’t hesitate.

JEFFREY STERLING: I thought that was going to give me a unique opportunity to not only see the world, be a part of it, but also to serve my country. 

NARRATOR: As you’ll know from previous episodes of True Spies, the application process for a job at the CIA is long and arduous. While Jeffrey waited to find out if he’d been successful, he worked as a clerk at the Public Defender’s Office in St. Louis, Missouri.

JEFFREY STERLING: I had the duties to talk to clients, see what their needs were, get the facts from them, and read them.

NARRATOR: You can see where this is leading, can’t you?

JEFFREY STERLING: Working with the CIA, it's the same sort of reading [a] person. You get to know a person. You find out what their buttons are. Find out what their motivations are. Find out what their standing is. And a lot of that you can get by just talking to someone and just listening. And for me, I learned that skill - just being quiet and listening - especially when I was working in the Public Defender's Office. 

NARRATOR: Eventually, in 1993, Jeffrey’s application was accepted. As a case officer, he’d be joining the upper echelon of the Agency’s hierarchy - the movers and shakers who go out into the world and further American interests.

JEFFREY STERLING: I was absolutely proud when I first joined the organization. In movies, TV series, you always see the emblem in the lobby of the CIA. When I first joined, I would park and walk around the front so I could walk across that emblem. And that's how proud I was to be part of that organization.

NARRATOR: Like all case officers, Jeffrey trained at the Farm - the CIA’s top-secret spy school. After completing his course, he was excited to receive his first assignment.

JEFFREY STERLING: Being the nerdy little kid that I was when I was growing up, I watched the news all the time, and one of the biggest stories was the Iran hostage crisis. I was so fascinated by the relationship between the United States and Iran. And then the opportunity came to work at the Iran desk, the Iran taskforce with the CIA. And I felt like, ‘Wow I don't know if this is a dream come true, but this is certainly working out great for me.’ So I was very enthusiastic that opportunity presented itself and I jumped at it. 

NARRATOR: But even as he threw himself into his work, learning Farsi and getting up-to-speed with the relevant geopolitics, Jeffrey’s idealized image of the Agency began to show a little tarnish.

JEFFREY STERLING: Yeah, when I got there, I was like, ‘Wow, these aren't supermen. They're doing a super job, But there's not much difference from me and them.’ And I felt that was good because I can fit in here. I can make a difference here. I can be something here. But over time, that changed. 

NARRATOR: White males made up the majority of Jeffrey’s CIA colleagues. Even today, 30 years on, ethnic minorities make up a little over a quarter of CIA staff. But at that time, the only overt challenge to his presence at the Agency came from another African-American officer.

JEFFREY STERLING: A long-term African American employee approached me shortly after I joined and point blank asked me why I was there. 

NARRATOR: Jeffrey was taken aback - offended, even. Why shouldn’t he be there?

JEFFREY STERLING: And then he continued to clarify what he meant. And he was basically telling me that, as an African American in the CIA, your career is really nothing and you're not going to go anywhere. After the offense wore off, I felt that it was a challenge because I also felt like, ‘Well, you're here. You seem to have been here for a long time. Why can't I have the same sort of career?’ 

NARRATOR: At the time, Jeffrey took the question as a challenge. Today, with his CIA career long behind him, he has another perspective.

JEFFREY STERLING: Maybe it was a sort of surrender on his part about how he felt himself in the organization and didn't want that for me or wondered why I would submit to the same thing. 

NARRATOR: In any case, the exchange only stiffened his resolve.

JEFFREY STERLING: I'm going to prove myself, not only to the white employees at the CIA, but also to the African-American employees at the CIA.

NARRATOR: Before long, he’d get a chance to do just that. 

JEFFREY STERLING: We certainly don't have and didn't have a CIA office in Iran. So I was tasked with finding Iranians of interest wherever in the world. 

NARRATOR: Some of Jeffrey’s very first assignments took place in Africa. There, he was tasked with recruiting valuable Iranian sources living on the continent. Jeffrey quickly set to work, eager to prove his mettle as a Case Officer. In an African country that we can’t name here, the CIA have identified an Iranian of interest. 

JEFFREY STERLING: He was in a good position to be able to provide information that we were interested in.

NARRATOR: But they need a smart way to make contact. This isn’t the Iranians’ first rodeo.

JEFFREY STERLING: There had been other officers who had tried to reach this Iranian many, many times before.

NARRATOR: Jeffrey and his colleagues have to figure out a way in. Luckily an opportunity presents itself. 

JEFFREY STERLING: Well, he's got a car for sale. Let's see what happens. 

NARRATOR: Jeffrey calls the Iranian, posing as a potential buyer for his beat-up old car. He’s selling it because he needs the cash and people who need cash are often prepared to spy for it.

JEFFREY STERLING: Well where others had failed, I succeeded in having a direct relationship with this individual. I was able to get him to the point of possible recruitment.

NARRATOR: Recruitment can be a long and drawn-out process. It can take months, or even years, of relationship development. This isn’t the case here. This is what’s known as a ‘cold pitch’ - a no-nonsense, straight-to-the-point conversation. After luring the target into his safehouse-cum-apartment, ostensibly to ‘discuss the deal’, the stage is set for Jeffrey to make his play. Over steaming cups of tea, he informs the Iranian that he has no interest in negotiating a price for his vehicle but another lucrative business deal could be on the cards. Hearing this American switch to fluent Farsi sets off alarm bells for the Iranian. He walks. But Jeffrey still counts it as a win.

JEFFREY STERLING: It did not work out, but I went further with him than anyone had previously. And I felt proud even though I didn't have a recruitment at that time. I felt good. I'm showing these individuals what I can do 

NARRATOR: By 1997, it was time for the next step in the career of a CIA case officer - a permanent foreign posting.

JEFFREY STERLING: It's time to find an onward assignment. I chose a spot in Europe. I thought it'd be a good spot to go.

NARRATOR: But his request was denied.

JEFFREY STERLING: Up to that point I'd - even though I wasn't based abroad anywhere - I’d had successes in operations throughout the world.

NARRATOR: The CIA wanted someone else in that role.

JEFFREY STERLING: And it was a white guy and it wasn't even a white officer. He was a contractor from another agency. He wasn't even as qualified as me. So he was able to take the assignment.

NARRATOR: Jeffrey took the hit, and set about finding himself another assignment. But then, the Agency backpedaled.

JEFFREY STERLING: It turned out that that individual that they chose over me quit. So they were in a lurch trying to find someone to fill that position that I had originally wanted. And then they came to me and said, ‘Well, you're going to go to this position.’ I said, ‘No, I wasn't good enough for you before. I've already secured a position in another office and I'm going to go to the station that I've worked for, that I've worked to get.’ And flat out I was told, ‘You go where we want you, or you go nowhere.’

NARRATOR: Ultimately, he has no choice but to take the posting, working as an Iran specialist in a European city. The circumstances of his assignment were unfortunate. He would endeavor to make the best of it. But Jeffrey claims that the attitudes of his colleagues made that difficult.

JEFFREY STERLING: I get to this posting. And I'm receiving no support, I'm receiving no assignments. And I asked my management why, after I've been at that location for a number of months, and they tell me, ‘Well, you kind of stick out as a big black guy speaking Farsi.’ I was taken aback. To my management and to the Agency a black face was a security risk - couldn't be as secure as a white face - regardless of what I had already proven myself to be able to do.

NARRATOR: So, he’s a black CIA officer in a predominantly white Europe. But remember, he’s also been a black CIA officer in a predominantly black Africa, and during his time on the continent, Jeffrey had noted that this line of thinking didn’t apply in reverse.

JEFFREY STERLING: I always felt it interesting that most of the officers in Africa were white. To me, that really didn't make any sense. But then I kind of realized, okay, if they're good in their training, it doesn't matter where they are or what color they are. A black man in Europe was only an issue to them. It wasn't an issue in reality. 

NARRATOR: In fact, says Jeffrey, you could actually view it as an asset.

JEFFREY STERLING: I traveled to Europe several times prior to that, and as I said, nowhere that I had ever been during many travels with the CIA, did anyone ever suspect that I worked for the CIA. I just did not fit the profile. When you think of CIA, you think of Jason Bourne, James Bond. I never had any difficulty getting into any area in any country that I needed to to perform my job. 

NARRATOR: Frustrated, Jeffrey left the posting in 1999, moving to the CIA’s counterproliferation division - the part of the Agency responsible for keeping tabs on weapons of mass destruction.

JEFFREY STERLING: The opportunity came to move to New York and I jumped at it. And to be the Iran expert in the New York office, I felt, “Okay almost like a last chance, I'm going to give my all to do this job. I know how to do the job. And I'm going to prove to them once again that I can, and that I'm a resource for this organization.” 

NARRATOR: But even here, on home soil, things didn’t improve for Jeffrey.

JEFFREY STERLING: I was the only black face there. And I was the only one that wasn't given the same resources as the other officers. One of the key resources for a CIA officer is cover. I mean, you have to be able to have doors open for you based on your cover. And normally we're talking about diplomatic cover. 

NARRATOR: In Europe, Jeffrey’s cover was that of an Army Logistics Officer - the kind of job that might justify your presence at an embassy. In New York, he says, he was denied diplomatic cover altogether, and instead asked to pose as a junior administrative employee.

JEFFREY STERLING: Yet I took it upon myself to find other avenues using different methods. And I was successful. I mean, there was a particular new diplomat in New York. I found some other avenue outside of diplomatic functionalities to approach the individual, gain his confidence, gain his trust. I was so successful at that that the FBI was impressed as well. Yet that meant nothing to my management there. 

NARRATOR: As an Iran expert, Jeffrey’s work on Iranian issues in New York was less affected by the situation with his cover identity. He was assigned as the main case officer for an incredibly sensitive asset - one who would play a crucial role in Operation Merlin, the operation to slow down Iran’s nuclear program. Jeffrey can lay out the aims of that gambit.

JEFFREY STERLING: The plan was designed to have a Russian scientist approach an Iranian and offer to sell plans to a part for a nuclear weapon. My job was to train the Russian scientist on how to approach Iranians, how to act with them. give him the directions of how and where to reach out to Iranians with the hopes that we will get the key Iranian, maybe someone in their nuclear program.

NARRATOR: Once the Russian asset had identified a suitable Iranian target, they would offer to pass on the plans. At this point, you might be thinking: ‘Give the Iranians nuclear plans? What’s the end game here?’ Well…

JEFFREY STERLING: The design of the operation was that the plans would have a flaw built in, a flaw that no one would be able to detect. These plans were developed by one of the national labs. He would offer the plans to the Iranians. The Iranians would take the plans and put them in their program, and it would hinder their aspirations for nuclear weapons. 

NARRATOR: A Trojan Horse, if you will. Jeffrey says he was assured that every possible safeguarding measure was in place. 

JEFFREY STERLING: So we got to the point where finally the Russian asset was going to get the plans, he could see the plans, because you didn't really need to see them before he knew what they were. We just needed him to make a sales pitch. So he sees the plan. He immediately sees that they won't work.

NARRATOR: Ah. If the Russian can see the flaw, then maybe it’s not quite as subtle as the CIA thinks. 

JEFFREY STERLING: And bells and whistles went off in my head. I was like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute. We are doing exactly the opposite of what we're trying to do. If the Iranians can find the flaw immediately. They're going to fix it. And instead of hindering their aspirations for a nuclear weapon, we're going to enhance it, instead of slowing their program down, we're going to speed it up.’ 

NARRATOR: Sounds terrifying, doesn’t it? Jeffrey thought so too.

JEFFREY STERLING: I approach my management with those concerns.

NARRATOR: But Jeffrey's warnings don’t land on sympathetic ears.

JEFFREY STERLING: The response from management was they essentially told me to ‘shut up’, that they knew what they were doing. And who am I to question this long-standing operation? I was treated like an outsider as someone who was just complaining for the sake of complaining and didn't know what I was talking about.

NARRATOR: The writing was on the wall. At the same time as Jeffrey was raising his concerns about Operation Merlin, his managers were finding fault with his recruitment efforts outside of it. Efforts that he believes were hampered by a refusal to give him the tools available to other officers.

JEFFREY STERLING: Well of course, there were no doors open to me.

NARRATOR: And so he felt he had no option but to formally complain about the discrimination. Discrimination he felt was based on the fact that he is African American. Jeffrey strongly suspected that this would be the beginning of the end of his career in the CIA. As part of his complaint against the Agency, Jeffrey testified in front of the House Intelligence Committee - a body within the US House of Representatives that has oversight of the intelligence community. Meanwhile, the CIA’s internal complaints process was grinding on. As part of this process, Jeffrey requested to see his Agency file to see if he could find any evidence to support his claim. 

JEFFREY STERLING: What I found in the file was that they were saying I was still, at that time, in my trial period. I'd been in the agency almost 10 years at this point and my file indicated that I was still a trial employee which gave them all the more ability to levy whatever sort of punishment upon me that they could.

NARRATOR: Naturally, the internal files on CIA officers are closely guarded. Jeffrey was only able to read his [file] within a secure room, which was under constant supervision. But Jeffrey needed to have that information to hand if he was going to take this all the way to the top. Which is where his language skills came in handy.

JEFFREY STERLING: I took notes down in Farsi because I knew no one around me was going to be able to see what I'm writing or even know what I'm writing. 

NARRATOR: The notepad and pen were given to him by the security officer, who would get it back after the viewing was complete. After finishing his notes, Jeffrey tore out several pages beneath the one he’d been writing on - this way, the Agency couldn’t read and translate the imprint of his pen.

JEFFREY STERLING: So I was able to essentially run a sort of operation against the agency in that sense. 

NARRATOR: Eventually, Jeffrey was removed from the New York counterproliferation team and sent back to Washington, D.C.

JEFFREY STERLING: When I was back in D.C. I have to find an office for me. So they put me in a closet. It was a storage room for computers that weren't being used anymore. There were no windows. I was essentially put out, like so much trash. And then eventually I was forced to give up all of my credentials. I was put on administrative leave and not allowed to enter any Agency building or really have any contact with any Agency employee. The process was really having all of my dreams and my hopes and aspirations stripped away, not being able to really fight back, trying to fight back, but being hamstrung. My first discrimination complaint ended with no finding that there was any discrimination. 

NARRATOR: Jeffrey was labeled as a disgruntled employee. He had lost but he wasn’t ready to quit.

JEFFREY STERLING: So I decided then to file a federal suit in New York. 

NARRATOR: In 2001, Jeffrey Sterling - a trained lawyer, remember - filed a lawsuit against the CIA. 

JEFFREY STERLING: I was still on administrative leave at that time. I took the train up to New York. I had put the suit together. Filed it in New York. The agency found out, of course, about the suit being filed, and they were furious. I was given a call from my, if you will, my handlers from as part of that administrative leave process. They were telling me how angry everyone was and that security wanted to come out to visit me and this and that, like because I didn't go through the proper channels to file my suit. And I said, “Well what? You know I'm a lawyer. I think I know how to file a lawsuit. And I didn't really need any help. And if anyone wants to come and visit me and have a chat about it, where I live…” sort of thing.

NARRATOR: And it was during this process that Jeffrey spoke to the press to raise awareness of the lawsuit.

JEFFREY STERLING: There was an article written about my discrimination suit by James Risen. I had appeared on CNN to talk about my discrimination suit. Not many employees had ever filed a discrimination suit against the CIA. It really became apparent to me that ‘Wow, I'm doing something that maybe no one else has really done.’ But that didn't really matter to me. What mattered to me was that I was trying to right a wrong. And I thought that was something that the American public that organization is supposed to be serving, should know about.

NARRATOR: James Risen’s article appeared in The New York Times, and the CNN interview was widely viewed. But the public reaction was muted.

JEFFREY STERLING: So I was looking for support, maybe just to listen from organizations like the NAACP, Rainbow PUSH Coalition and even the Congressional Black Caucus. Organizations like that. None wanted anything to do with me. You mention ‘CIA’ and people run for the hills.

NARRATOR: Does the CIA really have that kind of sway on home turf? Jeffrey thinks so.

JEFFREY STERLING: I think they do have the pull in that you say ‘national security’ and individuals will bend over backward for you. You’ve got to protect national security at all costs. The CIA is able to do that and use that. There is the mystique of it as well. The reticence of even our politicians to take on the intelligence community builds that mystique that you don't want to face them. You don't want to go up against the Agency. It's a losing fight. 

NARRATOR: In 2002, Jeffrey was officially terminated from the CIA and new work was hard to come by.

JEFFREY STERLING: I was blackballed from anything in the intelligence community. I mean, you think about it. 9/11 happened. I had expertise. I had language skills. I had experience with the terrorism target. Yet no one would hire me. No one from the Defense Department - even [among] the tons of contractors, no one would hire me. No one would even give me an interview. 

NARRATOR: He ended up returning to his hometown in Missouri.

JEFFREY STERLING: And that was quite humbling for me. I couldn't find work there either. So I eventually moved north of the town where I grew up to Saint Louis because a friend had recently had a new baby. They were struggling financially, paying for daycare, childcare. So I offered, for room and board, I could be their nanny. And they were live-in ‘manny’ if you will. I go from being a CIA officer to a nanny. And I felt like I couldn't get any lower at that time. 

NARRATOR: Throughout 2003, Jeffrey battled mental health issues as a result of his dismissal. In that same year, he went before the Senate Intelligence Committee to voice his concerns about Operation Merlin. By now, he had nothing else to lose. 

JEFFREY STERLING: Operation Merlin was a part of my career. So I also used that opportunity to voice my concerns about what I felt was a faulty and dangerous operation. And though I did have the attention of members of the House Committee at that time, it was taken nowhere. 

NARRATOR: This, Jeffrey maintains, is the first and only time he ‘blew the whistle’ on that operation. A year later, in 2004, his discrimination lawsuit was dismissed. The Agency said that a trial would risk exposing national security secrets. He’d reached rock bottom.

JEFFREY STERLING: But I had good support from my friends who allowed me to care for their child and trusted me with their child. And I continued to look for work. And I eventually found a job with a large health insurance company in Saint Louis and became a fraud investigator with them. I was very successful at that job, and I actually worked with the FBI and saved the US government - because I worked on Medicare fraud - millions and millions of dollars on the investigations that I was able to conduct. 

NARRATOR: By the mid-noughties, Jeffrey’s life was getting close to being back on track. He’d learned some hard lessons during his time at the Agency, but he was ready to move on. In his personal life, he was finally in a place to start dating, and he got lucky when he met Holly, his future wife. The future seemed brighter than it had in years. Until the whispers began.

JEFFREY STERLING: The previous attorney I had reached out to me and said there were some rumblings that I was being investigated. And one day, I return home from work and a car pulls up to me as I'm at my mailbox and a couple comes out and they're the FBI and they say they're concerned with me. They were asking me if I knew about a book written by Jim Risen.

NARRATOR: Jeffrey hadn’t heard of any book. The FBI agents went on…

JEFFREY STERLING: And then they said, they were concerned for my safety. They showed me a picture of what they said was an Iranian and they thought he was a hit man coming to get me.

NARRATOR: Could they come in and talk?

JEFFREY STERLING: I saw right through their ruse at that point. And I absolutely refused. “I got nothing to say to you.” So that was the start of me learning about the book. And the floodgates just seemed to open after that. The past that I thought I had escaped reared its ugly head, and was reaching up from the depths to pull me back down. 

NARRATOR: Then, things went quiet for a while. 

JEFFREY STERLING: So you can imagine from the time the FBI shows up at my door it's just this sword of Damocles over my head for years. You do your best to try to go on with your life and not think about the worst things that can happen. And just time passes and you think it's done and it's over with, and then all of a sudden you're proven wrong drastically. 

NARRATOR: A few months later, the situation intensified.

JEFFREY STERLING: I was on a work trip and I had just arrived home and I get a call from my attorney and he tells me that the FBI is coming to conduct a search warrant at my home. And before I even have a chance to react to him, there's the knock on the door. They completely had this planned out to a ‘T’. And this army of FBI agents, they're all parked out in front of my house and they descend upon my home. The emotions at that time were… ’Is this what it means to stand up for yourself? Is this what my country thinks of me?’ I stood up to them. So this is the retaliation that's finally coming down upon me.

NARRATOR: Jeffrey calmly sits outside while the search goes on.

JEFFREY STERLING: I didn't want another confrontation. How easy would it be then to say, ‘Oh Sterling put up resistance. So we had to get physical with him,’ sort of thing. 

NARRATOR: After the search, Jeffrey is on edge. As a lawyer, he knows that a search warrant is usually followed by an arrest in pretty short order.

JEFFREY STERLING: I heard nothing. Nothing at all for years. And so time passes. And during the interim, Holly and I got married. I, of course, was thinking, ‘Well, my relationship is over with Holly.’ But she's just been incredible throughout. So I'm continuing with my career thinking and hoping all of this is behind me - 2010, late 2010, I had knee replacement surgery.

NARRATOR: You know what happens next. Jeffrey is pulled out of his recovery, ostensibly to meet with his boss. He’s arrested at work by the FBI. The public spectacle is humiliating. He’s charged with leaking state secrets about Operation Merlin to the journalist, James Risen. But why had it taken so long? Why was Jeffrey allowed to hope that he was out of the woods?

JEFFREY STERLING: It was under the Bush administration, that there was the investigation. Well, they dropped any interest in it. The Obama administration came along and reignited the investigation.

NARRATOR: Barack Obama’s administration charged more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined. 

JEFFREY STERLING: I was labeled a disgruntled employee and whatever reasons for his vendetta, witch-hunt against whistleblowers, I was an easy target. “Let's reignite the investigation into this individual. We don't really have any evidence.” And it was proven in court, there was no additional evidence. “Let's just go ahead and arrest him and see what happens.” I don't think they expected to go to trial with me. I thought they expected that I would just cave in and do like everyone else and plead to whatever they wanted me to plead to. But I think, also, in a sense that… I wasn't that image of black America that Obama wanted people to see or know about. Here's this black employee who's disgruntled. He's just using the color of his skin to complain. It made it easy for them to target me and go after me. I think they knew it was going to be an easy win.

NARRATOR: A major sticking point in Jeffrey’s trial was the prosecution's desire to force Jim Risen, the author of the explosive book that had blown the lid on Operation Merlin, to testify. Risen refused to name his sources, stating that he would rather go to prison himself than do so. The drama overshadowed the issue of Jeffrey’s own guilt, or lack of, in the press.

JEFFREY STERLING: I became a spectator to my own trial. It became the Risen case, it was no longer the US versus Jeffrey Sterling. And the moment that he was okay, that the government decided not to call him, there was little, if any, interest anymore in my case.

NARRATOR: The case wore on for years, until Jeffrey was convicted in 2015. 

JEFFREY STERLING: So the evidence was that I had a relationship with Jim Risen and well, of course I did. He wrote an article about my discrimination suit. The other is that it's like, okay, they had phone records of conversations between me and Mr. Risen. 

NARRATOR: The content of the phone calls between Jeffrey and Jim Risen weren't available to the prosecution. They only knew that the exchanges had taken place, when they had taken place, and for how long. The court heard that the calls had lasted for a total of two minutes and 40 seconds. The court was also shown an email, in which Jeffrey had sent Risen a CNN article about Iran.

JEFFREY STERLING: But beyond that, there was nothing else presented. Everything was just completely circumstantial. They were hammering the jury with ‘I was bitter because I lost my discrimination suit.’ Well, I didn't lose my discrimination suit. My discrimination suit wasn't allowed to go forward because the government claimed it would pose a threat to national security. 

NARRATOR: And according to Jeffrey, he wasn’t the only officer who had spoken to Jim Risen.

JEFFREY STERLING: And one interesting thing was that one of the staffers that I had spoken to from the Senate Intelligence Committee, Shortly after I had spoken to them about my concerns with Operation Merlin, this individual was fired from the Senate Intelligence Committee for leaking classified information to a journalist. The journalist she leaked that information to was Jim Risen. That didn't seem to matter to anyone because the crosshairs were on me.

NARRATOR: In 2015, Jeffrey was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison in Colorado - miles away from his wife, Holly, and his family.

JEFFREY STERLING: And one thing growing up was the absolute determination that I wasn't going to go to prison. I wasn't going to be behind bars ever in my life. So many African Americans and blacks that I grew up around that was just a normal thing. And I just did not want that for myself.

NARRATOR: And the circumstances of his incarceration were particularly galling.

JEFFREY STERLING: Everything that I would have brought up during my discrimination suit was used and talked about in the trial against me for supposedly violating the Espionage Act. So my fighting against the government, my bringing up the government's wrongdoing is a threat to national security. But they can use that exact same information against me to put me in prison. 

NARRATOR: Since his release in 2018, Jeffrey has campaigned against the US government’s use of the Espionage Act to convict whistleblowers.

JEFFREY STERLING: It's been five years this year that I walked out of prison. Finding a traditional job has really been taken off the table for me. But I can make the best of it. I can make the most of it, because now I have something. I have an experience that maybe can be of value for change. I've been able to attend seminars or speak at rallies or whatever, bringing attention to how whistleblowers are being persecuted. 

NARRATOR: His memoir, Unwanted Spy, is a part of that campaign. Begun before his sentencing, he completed it after his release. He says that the CIA’s Publication Review Board - the people who vet every book written by former officers - did not make it easy to publish.

JEFFREY STERLING: For most of the information that they were saying they don't like to divulge, it's classified, like, well, it was divulged freely by the prosecution in a public trial. And I pointedly said, “You don't have the right to tell me I can't divulge information already divulged by the US government.” They quickly acquiesced and… the approval I got only took a few months. Normally, it takes individuals years to be able to get the proper approvals to publish books of this nature. So I have, that's a little bit of distinction, but I certainly had to go through a lot to be able to do it. 

NARRATOR: I’m Daisy Ridley. Join us next week.