Former CIA officer charged in leaks The Justice Department on Monday charged a former CIA officer with repeatedly leaking classified information, including the identities of agency operatives involved in the capture and interrogation of alleged terrorists. The case against John Kiriakou, who served as a senior Senate aide after ending his CIA career, extends the Obama administration's unprecedented crackdown on disclosures of national security secrets to journalists. (ABC News/AP) - Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who told reporters he participated in the interrogation of terrorist Abu Zubaydah, has been charged with leaking classified secrets about CIA operatives and other information to reporters. Read the criminal complaint. Kiriakou, who was among the first to go public with details about the CIA's use of water-boarding and other harsh interrogation measures, was charged with disclosing classified information to reporters and lying to the agency about the origin of other sensitive material he published in a book. In its criminal filing, the Justice Department obscured many of the details of Kiriakou's allegedly illegal disclosures. But the documents suggest that Kiriakou, 47, was a source for stories in 2008 and 2009 about some of the agency's most sensitive operations after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including the capture of alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah and the interrogation of the self-proclaimed mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. CIA Director David H. Petraeus issued a statement to the agency's workforce on Monday afternoon saying that he could not comment on the details of the case against Kiriakou but warning that "the illegal passage of secrets is an abuse of trust that may put lives in jeopardy." The Justice Department also said that the information Kiriakou supplied to journalists also contributed to a subsequent security breach at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. Kiriakou's disclosures, according to the Justice Department, enabled defense attorneys to obtain photographs of CIA operatives suspected of being involved in controversial interrogations, pictures that were subsequently discovered in prisoners" cells. Kiriakou, who worked for the CIA from 1990 to 2004, was scheduled to appear at 2 p.m. Monday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. The case is the latest legal move by an administration that has been more aggressive than its predecessors in seeking to stem the flow of government secrets to the press. Other efforts include the pending trial of an Army private accused of sending classified intelligence files to the Web site WikiLeaks, and the prosecution of a former CIA analyst accused of disclosing secrets about agency operations against Iran to a reporter from the New York Times. A similar case against a former executive at the National Security Agency was seen by critics as evidence of overzealousness by the Obama administration, and ended in a plea agreement. Kiriakou worked as an investigator on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a year before leaving in 2010. The committee had not been aware of the criminal probe of Kiriakou, according to a former U.S. official familiar with the matter. Staff writer Julie Tate contributed to this story.