Ex-C.I.A. Officer John Kiriakou Accused in Leak WASHINGTON - The Justice Department on Monday charged a former Central Intelligence Agency officer with disclosing classified information to journalists about the capture and brutal interrogation of a suspected member of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah - adding another chapter to the Obama administration's unprecedented crackdown on leaks. In a criminal complaint filed on Monday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation accused John Kiriakou, the former C.I.A. agent, of disclosing to several journalists the identity of a C.I.A. analyst who worked on a 2002 operation that seized and interrogated Abu Zubaydah, including using the suffocation technique known as waterboarding. The journalists included one at The New York Times, the complaint charged. "Safeguarding classified information, including the identities of C.I.A. officers involved in sensitive operations, is critical to keeping our intelligence officers safe and protecting our national security," said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., in a statement. Mr. Kiriakou, 47, played an important role in the fight against Al Qaeda after the Sept. He is the sixth person to be charged in connection with accusations of leaking classified information by the Obama administration, more than under any previous president. At the same time, the Justice Department cleared the American Civil Liberties Union of wrongdoing for its efforts, on behalf of defense attorneys representing Abu Zubaydah and other "high value" Qaeda suspects, to identify officials involved in their clients" interrogations. The attorneys were hoping to call such officials to testify in eventual trials to make the case that their clients should not be executed because they had been tortured while in the custody of the United States government. Among other things, the F.B.I. complaint accuses Mr. Kiriakou of being a source for a June 2008 front-page Times article, written by reporter Scott Shane, that identified a C.I.A. employee who played a major role in the capture and interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and another high-level Qaeda figure, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Robert Christie, a spokesman for The Times declined to discuss the matter. "We're not commenting at all," he said. Mr. Kiriakou worked for the C.I.A. from 1990 to 2004, first as an analyst and later as an operations officer overseas. In his 2010 book, "The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the C.I.A."s War on Terror," he describes playing a role in the capture in Pakistan in 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, the first of the high-level Qaeda operatives caught after the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. The prosecution is the second of a former C.I.A. officer for allegedly disclosing classified information to reporters within the past year. In 2011, Jeffrey Sterling, a former C.I.A. employee, was charged with leaking information about a botched effort a decade earlier to sabotage Iranian nuclear research to James Risen, who wrote about such an operation in his 2006 book, "State of War." Mr. Risen is also a reporter at The New York Times. In a statement warning C.I.A. employees not to leak information, which was posted on the agency's Web site on Monday, the agency's director, David H. Petraeus, took note of both cases, saying that the agency "fully supported the investigation from the beginning and will continue to do so." The investigation that led to the charges against Mr. Kiriakou began in 2009, after defense attorneys made a classified filing before a military commissions judge about the identities of officials who had interrogated their clients. A few months later, guards at the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, discovered 32 pages of photographs in the cells of several high-level Qaeda figures. Among them were pictures of several employees of the C.I.A. and F.B.I. and government contractors. That discovery created an uproar as critics accused the defense lawyers of endangering the officials and their families and the C.I.A. pressed the Justice Department to investigate whether the defense teams had violated any laws. In March 2010, Mr. Holder appointed Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago, to handle the case. The investigation led to Mr. Kiriakou. Citing e-mails from two accounts linked to him, the complaint said that he had disclosed the name of a different C.I.A. covert officer involved in the Abu Zubaydah case to another journalist, who in turn had supplied it to the investigator working with the A.C.L.U. The other journalist was not identified, and the complaint said that neither that journalist nor anyone else had published the identity of the covert official. By searching through Mr. Kiriakou's e-mails, the F.B.I. apparently discovered messages that led it to conclude that he had been a source for the June 2008 article in the New York Times. The F.B.I. also said that agents had discovered e-mails between Mr. Kiriakou and the co-author of his 2010 memoir, in which Mr. Kiriakou admitted to misleading a C.I.A. review board in order to receive permission to publish a classified passage about a device used to track cellphones. A reference to that device, dubbed the "magic box," also appeared in the 2008 New York Times article. But, the complaint said, investigators concluded that the defense team working to represent Guantanamo detainees had not broken any law. It noted that the defense lawyers themselves did not know which of the photographs they showed their clients to determine whether they recognized any of them as their interrogators were of government employees. "No law or military commission order expressly prohibited defense counsel from providing their clients with the photographic spreads in question under these circumstances," F.B.I. agent Joseph Capitano wrote in an affidavit. However, the fact that a defense investigator had learned the classified information, including the information necessary to take and/or assemble these photographs, suggested that the information may have been either deliberately or inadvertently disclosed, without authorization, in a manner that ultimately resulted in the defense team's possession of the classified information. Anthony Romero, the executive director of the A.C.L.U., said the organization was "relieved" that the defense team had been cleared in what he said was the only criminal investigation of the group in its 92-year history. He said it was "truly shocking that the investigation was launched in the first place" and that it had had a "chilling effect on defense counsel, government whistle-blowers, and journalists."