Did Secret CIA Whistle-Blower Leak to the Senate?

Does the Central Intelligence Agency have a secret whistle-blower who has been trying to help the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigate his or her own agency? That’s a possibility that panel chairman Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California mentioned Tuesday on the Senate floor in her angry speech alleging that the CIA has illegally spied on committee computers.

At issue is how Intelligence Committee staffers obtained portions of a sensitive internal CIA study named the “Panetta report,” after former agency chief Leon Panetta.

Senator Feinstein in essence said that the Panetta report fell from the sky into the committee’s lap. Staffers flipping through millions of pages of digitized CIA documents, about Bush-era harsh interrogations of terror suspects, simply found the report via a CIA-provided search tool, according to the committee head.

“We have no way to determine who made the internal Panetta review documents available to the committee…. Further, we don’t know whether the documents were provided intentionally by the CIA, unintentionally by the CIA, or intentionally by a whistle-blower,” Feinstein said.

Why is the Panetta report such a big deal? That requires a bit of explanation.

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