After nearly four years of procedural delay, the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling is set to open shortly. Sterling was indicted at the end of 2010 for leaking information about a top-secret CIA operation to James Risen of the New York Times in violation of the espionage statutes. It is difficult to regard Sterling as in any sense a whistleblower, though, predictably, he calls himself such. He appears to have given Risen CIA secrets as a way to settle scores with the agency in a dispute over the presence of classified information in memoirs he sought to publish and also for being the victim of what, following a poor performance review, he claimed was racial bias.
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