Americans are by now familiar with a handful of whistleblowers who after spending years employed by the US intelligence community (IC) eventually saw enough to make them angry and throw away the safety of their future government careers by exposing state secrets to the public. Names like Snowden, Manning, Kiriakou or John Stockwell, William Binning and Thomas Drake (both of NSA whistleblower fame) are well-known, especially in independent and alternative media circles.
But lesser known are the names of those abruptly fired and dismissed from their posts as analysts or as officers for merely questioning and pushing back in real time what they understood to be disastrous and criminal foreign action and policy to their higher-ups. We suspect that this list of names, still largely unknown to the public or media, is much bigger than anyone knows. Such ex-employees of the CIA, NSA, DIA or other alphabet soup agencies typically have their security clearances revoked and are threatened with criminal prosecution should they ever reveal state secrets and classified information. The possibility of future employment even in the civilian world then comes under threat. This means most of them remain unknown.
Typically the American public only finds out about massive covert CIA operations or US war plans long after the fact. For example, the intelligence community knew that the Bush-Cheney White House was gearing up for a 'shock and awe' invasion of Iraq for months before it happened. Or for another example, the truth about the CIA's covert program to overthrow Syria's Assad (called 'Timber Sycamore') finally leaked to The New York Times at least half a decade after it began. Intelligence planners under President Obama understood that the US was arming and training al-Qaeda linked Libyan rebels to overthrow and execute Gaddafi. And all the while, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was getting briefed on these US-backed rebels conducting extermination campaigns against ethnic minorities. Such horrific and suppressed truths only typically come out years or decades after they happen.
