CIA out to sabotage ex-employee’s writing career?

Stephen Lee used to work for the CIA as an operations manager. He now blogs for The Washington Examiner, and is getting the sneaky suspicion that his former employer is out to make his life in his new career a little difficult.

“I believe I am being subjected to a campaign of low-level harassment,” said Lee, who recently launched the rather critical “Examiner Spy” column and continues to draw up stinging cartoons, which he publishes on his own website – nationalsecuritydrone.com – under the alias Frank Naif.

Because he used to work for the CIA, everything he writes (and draws) must first pass through the spy agency’s Publications Review Board (PRB). If they don’t approve it, he can’t publish it.

Lee says he’s pretty careful about not suggesting – let alone outright saying – things he knows to be government secrets. He did, after all, work in counterterrorism for the CIA. But still PRB seems to censor the strangest of details.

For example, in an article entitled “Despite reform pledges, Panetta enables CIA’s bad old habits,” from June 19, the CIA insisted the following details be removed:

•    the name of an Al Qaeda suspect abducted by a CIA team in Italy in 2003
•    the name of the city where the snatch occurred
•    the name of the CIA station chief in Rome

We say ‘strangest of details’ because each of the above pieces of information has appeared in media around the world. Far from secret, the information appears on court documents and other sources available to the public.

So what’s the deal?

According to Lee, something not 100% kosher is going on. Because The Examiner requires of him about 4 pieces a week, the turnaround at the PRB needs to be rather quick – or at least predictable.

While Lee re-worded censored items in a couple of articles, turned them in again, and got them approved, PRB apparently ‘lost’ three of his subsequent pieces.

The three articles were about [1] the damage caused and blame doled out by former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden [2] CIA-related legislation in Congress and [3] the not exactly picture-perfect way in which the CIA recruits and trains.

When Lee made inquiries about the articles to find out whether they’d been reviewed – several days after having submitted them – he was told they had been “lost.” Of course, he resubmitted and the articles were not lost a second time, but reviewed in a timely fashion. PRB even apologized.

But 3 articles? Submitted at 2 different times? Does raise a little suspicion.

Other ex-CIA employees who write for the public say they have not encountered the same problems Lee has faced. The PRB will generally turn items around in 24 hours – or even a couple hours – if the request is made.

While the CIA maintains they have not singled out Lee, Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer who focuses on pre-publication review cases and other issues of the ex-CIA group, says that increasing censorship is definitely the trend of the moment. He told a reporter via email that “It’s far more routine now that I have to challenge the PRB’s censorship actions on behalf of my clients, and the inconsistencies in its decisions are unbelievably frustrating and often incomprehensible at times.”