The Central Intelligence Agency on Tuesday defended the firing of Mary O. McCarthy, the veteran officer who was dismissed last week, and challenged her lawyer's statements that Ms. McCarthy never provided classified information to the news media.
But intelligence officials would not say whether they believed that Ms. McCarthy had been a source for a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles in The Washington Post about secret C.I.A. detention centers abroad. Media accounts have linked Ms. McCarthy's firing to the articles, but the C.I.A. has never explicitly drawn such a connection.
In response to questions Tuesday, the intelligence officials declined to say whether discussion of the prisons had been part of what they described as a pattern of unauthorized contacts between Ms. McCarthy and reporters.
One intelligence official, who was granted anonymity to speak more candidly about the sensitive issue, said it was unclear how much access Ms. McCarthy, who had been assigned to the agency's inspector general's office, had to specific details about the secret prisons.
A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, said: "The officer was terminated for precisely the reasons we have given: unauthorized contacts with reporters and sharing classified information with reporters. There is no question whatsoever that the officer did both. The officer personally admitted doing both."
Ty Cobb, a lawyer representing Ms. McCarthy, said again on Tuesday that she never admitted divulging sensitive material. "She did not confess, orally or in writing, to leaking classified information," Mr. Cobb said.
Since 2004, the inspector general's office has been investigating the agency's role in the interrogation and detention of high-level terrorist suspects, as well as its network of secret jails abroad. At a minimum, intelligence officials said, Ms. McCarthy's work in that office gave her access to some of the agency's most sensitive information, including details about highly secret "compartmented programs."
Officials said that Ms. McCarthy's security clearance was pulled when she was fired, but that no consideration was given to taking away the pension she had earned as a career C.I.A. employee.
Acting before Ms. McCarthy's dismissal, the House Intelligence Committee asked John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, to study whether it should be possible to take away a pension from a retiree who was subject to only administrative or civil punishment and not criminal prosecution. A provision in the intelligence reauthorization bill, which goes to the House floor Wednesday, gives Mr. Negroponte 90 days to study whether pensions of intelligence officers who leak classified information should be revoked. |