By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Less than two months after the Justice Department announced that it would not charge Central Intelligence Agency officials who participated in the brutal interrogation of detainees during the Bush administration, prosecutors on Tuesday won the conviction of a former C.I.A. counterterrorism operative who told a reporter the name of a covert C.I.A. officer involved in the program.
The operative, John Kiriakou, who worked for the agency from 1990 to 2004, admitted that he had disclosed the name of the former colleague to a reporter, identified as Matthew Cole, formerly of ABC News. Mr. Kiriakou, who was a leader of the team that located and captured Abu Zubaydah, a suspected high-level facilitator for Al Qaeda, in Pakistan in 2002, pleaded guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
Mr. Kiriakou came to public attention in late 2007 when he gave an interview to ABC News portraying the suffocation technique called waterboarding as torture, but describing it as necessary. The interview prompted reporters investigating the program to reach out to him.
The plea was a victory for the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on the unauthorized disclosure of government secrets. Mr. Kiriakou is one of six current or former officials to be charged with leaking under President Obama, twice the number of cases brought by all previous presidents combined.
On Tuesday, Mr. Kiriakou, 48, spoke calmly in court as he stood to face the judge, Leonie M. Brinkema. His lawyer, Robert Trout, stood beside him as the judge posed a series of questions to Mr. Kiriakou before asking him how he would plead.
“Guilty,” he said, nodding slightly.
As part of the deal, prosecutors recommended a sentence of 30 months in prison, rather than the decades he was potentially facing. They dropped several other charges, among them that he helped Scott Shane of The New York Times identify another colleague involved in interrogations, and that he lied to a C.I.A. publication board reviewing his memoir, “Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the C.I.A.’s War on Terror,” published in 2010.
Judge Brinkema will hold a hearing to sentence Mr. Kiriakou on Jan. 25. She noted that the proposed 30-month term was the same time that I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, received in connection with the investigation into the disclosure of the identity of another C.I.A. official, Valerie Plame Wilson. After Mr. Libby was convicted of making false statements, President George W. Bush commuted his prison term.
In a statement to employees of the C.I.A. on Tuesday, the director of the agency, David H. Petraeus, hailed the guilty plea as the first successful prosecution under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 27 years, calling it “an important victory” for the intelligence community.
The criminal investigation that eventually led to Mr. Kiriakou began in 2009, when government officials learned that defense lawyers for high-profile Qaeda suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were identifying witnesses to their clients’ interrogations while in C.I.A. custody. The lawyers wanted to make the case that the government had tortured their clients.
The discovery led to an uproar within the C.I.A., which filed a crimes report. The case was assigned to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, then the United States attorney in Chicago, who had led the investigation in Ms. Wilson’s case. He eventually cleared the defense lawyers and a researcher working with them of any wrongdoing.
But the investigation evolved into a leak case as investigators traced the defense lawyers’ knowledge of the covert official’s name through the researcher, who had learned it from Mr. Cole, who in turn had discussed it with Mr. Kiriakou. Court documents cited e-mails from Mr. Kiriakou to Mr. Cole, as well as exchanges with Mr. Shane.
Mr. Kiriakou had vowed to fight. But his chances were weakened after Judge Brinkema ruled on Oct. 16 that prosecutors needed only to prove that Mr. Kiriakou had “reason to believe” that the information he disclosed could be used to harm the country, not that he had intended to damage national security.
Jesselyn Radack, who described Mr. Kiriakou as a whistle-blower and who worked with him through theGovernment Accountability Project, a nonprofit advocacy group, said he took the deal to ensure that he would be in a position to watch his children grow up. In addition, she said, he was already facing six-figure legal bills.
Mr. Trout, the lawyer, said Mr. Kiriakou was “a loyal American who deeply loves his country and who served the United States as a C.I.A. agent over many years in challenging and often dangerous assignments.” His client’s actions, he said, “were without malice to others and were not motivated by disloyalty to the United States or benefit to himself.”
Neil H. MacBride, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, praised the outcome.
“The government has a vital interest in protecting the identities of those involved in covert operations,” he said. “Leaks of highly sensitive, closely held and classified information compromise national security and can put individual lives in danger.”
In 2006, during the Bush administration, David A. Passaro, a former civilian contractor for the C.I.A., was convicted of beating an Afghan prisoner with a two-foot metal flashlight while interrogating him; the man later died.
When Mr. Obama took office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. reopened some criminal investigations into the abuse of detainees. But he ruled out prosecuting officials who stayed within a list of techniques, like waterboarding, that Bush-era lawyers had blessed as lawful, despite anti-torture laws, in memos the department later retracted.
In 2010, Justice Department officials overruled a recommendation by its ethics office to sanction for professional misconduct the Bush-era lawyers who wrote those memos, and decided not to charge C.I.A. officials for destroying interrogation videotapes.
Then in August, Mr. Holder announced that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last possibility of criminal charges by officials who carried out brutal interrogations in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Last week, the department presented a Distinguished Service Award to prosecutors who handled the investigation.