When the author blew the whistle on the C.I.A.’s torture program in 2007, Daniel Ellsberg called to congratulate him and say he had friends at his side. Years later, at a red-carpet event in Hollywood, the “most dangerous man in America” showed what he meant.
Daniel Ellsberg in 2008. (Christopher Michel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
Like so many Americans, I was heartbroken last week to learn of the death of my friend, mentor and personal hero, Daniel Ellsberg.
Dan was a giant of modern American history. He was the godfather of national security whistleblowers. And he was a patriot who wanted nothing more than to ensure transparency, truth and the rule of law within government.
Much will be made of Dan’s contribution to these ideals. He selflessly told the American people that the government was lying to them about the Vietnam War despite knowing that he could have spent the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary for his truth telling.
He embraced Henry Kissinger’s hateful admonition that he was “the most dangerous man in America.” He worked hard to oppose the notorious Espionage Act as unconstitutionally broad and vague. And he supported other national security whistleblowers with everything he had.
I would like to talk about the Dan Ellsberg I knew, the one who was my friend.
When I was a child growing up in western Pennsylvania, my family always had dinner together. My parents were both elementary school teachers, current events were important to them and they would talk about the news of the day every evening over dinner.
I was 7 years old in 1971 when Dan released the Pentagon Papers, and I distinctly remember my father saying, “Daniel Ellsberg is a hero in this house.”
In Mrs. Levine’s second- grade class, we were asked one day who, other than our parents, we admired most. Most of the kids said President Richard Nixon. A couple said George McGovern. I said Daniel Ellsberg.
When I blew the whistle on the C.I.A.’s torture program in December 2007, Dan was one of the first people to call to congratulate me.
It was the first time we had ever met; over the phone. I had no idea that he even knew who I was. His call could not have come at a better time.
The C.I.A. had reported me to the F.B.I. for revealing classified information to the media, just as had happened to Dan, and I had been receiving death threats from crazy people from coast to coast.
I still remember the thrill of speaking with somebody who had been a lifelong hero. Dan advised that some days would be dark, but that I shouldn’t forget that I had friends and that they would stand with me. I lived by those words over the next several years.
Ellsberg in 2013, at the San Francisco Pride Parade. (Moizsyed, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
In early 2012 I was finally arrested and charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, for conversations that I had had with The New York Times and ABC News about the C.I.A.’s torture program.
As I was facing 45 years in prison, Dan was again among the first to call. He stayed in close touch for the 13 months between my arrest and the day that I left to begin what turned out to be a sentence of 23 months in prison.
While I was imprisoned he was a regular correspondent, sending books about protest, truth telling and the Vietnam War, and signing each letter “Love, Dan.” In every single letter, he asked me how my children were doing.
PEN Awards Gala
In 2016, I was honored with the PEN USA First Amendment Award for my second book. The award ceremony was held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, and in attendance were 600 of the most important entertainment attorneys, writers, producers and directors in Hollywood.
[Related: CIA Whistleblower Kiriakou Honored]
Kate McKinnon in 2018. (ColliderVideo – Vimeo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)
The PEN First Amendment Award is one of the Big Four literary awards, along with the PEN Faulkner, the Pulitzer and the Edgar Allan Poe, so it was a very big deal for me.
I called Dan immediately to tell him the good news, and much to my surprise, he said that he would also attend the ceremony to accept an honorary award on Ed Snowden’s behalf. We made plans to sit at the same table.
The evening could not have been more exciting. There was a red carpet where photographers from the Associated Press, Getty Images, People Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times took pictures of awardees.
Dan and I posed for one together for the first time. We also took pictures with the night’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Francis Ford Coppola, the famed Oscar-winning director of the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now and other masterpieces.
My brother and several of my best friends sat at our table, which was immediately in front of the stage and next to Coppola’s.
The event was on a tight schedule. Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon was the master of ceremonies (she was hilarious), and the PEN people gave out a dozen awards for things like Best Children’s Book, Best Translation and Best Poetry Compilation before getting to the three of us.
Two hours into the ceremony, it was our turn. The PEN folks had asked us to keep our speeches to a tight seven minutes. I almost never rehearse for these things, but I did for this.
I wrote my speech, went over it a hundred times, and got it to a perfect seven minutes. Dan got up on Snowden’s behalf and gave the most eloquent 30-minute speech I’ve ever heard. He was on fire! At the end, he was treated to rousing, thunderous applause.
I was next, and the excitement from Dan’s speech took me from beginning to end before I even realized it was over. I hit the seven-minute mark perfectly, and I was proud of my indictment of the C.I.A.’s torture program.
Finally, it was Coppola’s turn. He walked onto the stage to great applause, took his folded speech out of his jacket pocket, and said into the microphone, “Where’s the C.I.A. guy?” I raised my hand and said, “Right here.”
He continued, “You’re probably a nice guy. But I’m sick and tired of people criticizing my president (Obama)! He’s working as hard as he can!”
Many in the audience began to snicker and clap, thinking that Coppola was launching into a joke. But he wasn’t. He turned to Dan. “You shouldn’t criticize. It only helps the Republicans!”
Dan was hard of hearing for at least the last decade of his life and he wore hearing aids in both ears. The echo in the ballroom made it impossible for him to understand what Coppola was saying.
Dan and I looked at each other and Dan asked, “What is he saying?” I answered, “He’s criticizing us, Dan.” “He’s what?” “He’s criticizing us.”
I didn’t think until that moment that I could be any prouder of Dan Ellsberg, or any prouder to be his friend. He stood up in front of those 600 Hollywood movers and shakers, put both middle fingers in the air and shouted as loudly as he could “Fuck you, Coppola!”
Coppola went silent, looked directly at Dan, and said into the microphone, “That’s it. I’ve said everything I want to say. I don’t want to say any more.” And he walked off the stage. The room was as silent as a church.
Francis Ford Coppola in 2011. (Gerald Geronimo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Kate McKinnon gingerly walked back out onto the stage and said into the microphone, “Well, on that note, drive safely, everybody!”
The PEN people turned the ballroom lights on and made a bee-line for Dan and me.
Meanwhile, the crowd finally realized that this was not a joke. Dozens of them walked up to the table to shake Dan’s hand. The president of PEN USA apologized profusely, saying that they had had no idea that Coppola would react the way he did. I said it wasn’t a problem.
“I’ve been criticized by men far more important than Francis Ford Coppola,” I told them. Dan was fired up. “I don’t have to take that shit from anybody! Even Francis Ford Coppola!”
There was nothing about the incident in the LA Times the next day. My brother opined that Coppola probably had an entire staff of PR people managing his messaging, and two days later, Los Angeles Magazine ran an article saying that “Francis Ford Coppola ditched his remarks following a poignant speech by First Amendment Award recipient John Kiriakou.”
That was it. I didn’t need Los Angeles Magazine or the LA Times or anybody else to explain to me what I had seen, though.
I had seen a giant in action. I had seen a man of the highest integrity unafraid of anybody. I had seen a man who helped to bring down a president of the United States armed with nothing more than the truth.
Over the next several years, Dan and I stayed in touch and even ran into each other at a few dinner parties. He always asked me about my children.
The last time we spoke was a couple of weeks before his passing. He was in a little pain, but he said something that my mom had said in her final few days: “I’m not ready to die. There are still so many things I want to eat.”
He then went into a soliloquy about the most delicious chicken fried rice he had ever had. He was saving the second half of it for after our conversation. And he closed with “love you.”
As I said, I’m heartbroken that the great Daniel Ellsberg is no longer with us. Besides my father and grandfather, only Dan and Pete Seeger had such a positive impact on my life.
Without Dan, national security whistleblowing would have been impossible. There would have been no Ed Snowden, Tom Drake, Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Daniel Hale, or John Kiriakou without him.
The entire nation owes him a debt of gratitude. And for me personally, I can say that my life was better with Dan a part of it.
John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Those unaware of Dan Ellsberg’s 2002 Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers may think the leak of the Pentagon Papers was Dan’s first unauthorized disclosure. Not so. Arguably, his first such leak, in March 1968, was even more consequential.
After the Viet Cong shocked most observers by mounting a countrywide offensive in South Vietnam at Tet (late Jan./early Feb. 1968), Dan leaked to the NY Times chapter and verse on how Gen. William Westmoreland had “cooked” intelligence, lowballing data on insurgent strength to create the impression the U.S. was making “remarkable progress” in the war.
The Only Thing Needed: More Troops
Unembarrassed by the Tet offensive, Westmoreland was asking for 206,000 additional troops. Dan knew that and expected President Lyndon Johnson to grant that request. In Secrets Dan writes:
“I wanted to deter him from it. I feared that once he had sent even more troops and called up the reserves, the public and Congress would demand an all-out attack against the North, up to and perhaps beyond the Chinese border. …
“This was what the JCS expected. … Whether or not some of the joint chiefs actually wanted war with China and use of nuclear weapons – I’m not sure on that question to this day – that is what we would be actually risking.
“The striking impact of [an earlier] unauthorized disclosure [in the NY Times on March 10] of the request for 206,000 additional troops – at the time one of the most closely held secrets in the administration – suddenly opened my eyes to my responsibilities as a citizen. I had never considered up till that point leaking classified information” …
“As I observed the effect of this leak, it was as if clouds suddenly opened. I realized something crucial: that the president’s ability to escalate … had depended on secrecy and lying and thus on his ability to deter unauthorized disclosures – truth telling – by officials.”
Sweet Irony
Dan did not find out who the first leaker was; that is, who leaked the Westmoreland request, until after the leaker, Leslie Gelb, died in 2019. Gelb was a senior Pentagon official in 1968. Now, ready for this? It was Gelb who was put in charge of compiling the Pentagon Papers – which were leaked three years later – but this time not by Gelb! He remained in good odor as President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations until he died. Even so, we are indebted to Les Gelb and for the good example (incognito) he gave Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg Wins the Sam Adams Award
At a small gathering today (April 11, 2023) in the Bay area of California, Dan Ellsberg, patron saint of whistleblowers) was presented with the traditional Corner-Brightener Candlestick Holder – the “Oscar” accompanying the Sam Adams annual award. Below is the award Citation:
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity
Presented this 11th day of April 2023 in the Berkeley Hills of California by admirers of the integrity of former CIA analyst, Sam Adams.
Know all ye by these presents that Daniel Ellsberg is hereby awarded the Corner-Brightener Candlestick Holder by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity.
Mentor, Mensch, “Most Dangerous Man,” Friend: We honor Dan for setting the standard in exposing government lies and – although he himself never worked for an intelligence agency – for giving unflinching support to intelligence officials who blow the whistle.
Earlier Awardees: From Katharine Gun (2003) to Daniel Hale (2023); from Julian Assange (2010) and Chelsea Manning (2014) to Sy Hersh (2017) – all took courage from Dan and from one another. Ed Snowden (2013), having watched the “Justice” system abuse Tom Drake (2011), decided he had to go abroad in order to expose “turnkey tyranny.” And, citing the patriotic example of Bill Binney (2015), Ed declared: “Without Bill Binney there would be no Ed Snowden.”
Poetic Justice: CIA analyst Sam Adams, for whom this award is named, proved in 1967 that the US Army in Saigon was falsifying the number of armed insurgents in the South. Adams’s count was almost double the 299,000 Gen. William Westmoreland insisted on for political purposes.
Felicitous Leaks: The countrywide insurgent offensive during Tet (Jan/Feb 1968) proved Adams right. Still, President Johnson planned to escalate until leaks to the NY Times thwarted this risky plan. A story by Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith, “WESTMORELAND REQUESTS 206,000 MORE MEN, STIRRING DEBATE,” led the Times’s front page on March 10, 1968, revealing plans to widen the war into Cambodia and Laos and noting the increasing opposition to escalation.
The Coup de Grâce: Enter Dan Ellsberg with his very first leak. Dan gave Neil Sheehan the damning data on Westmoreland’s lowball estimates designed to demonstrate “remarkable progress.” On March 19, the Times front-paged Sheehan’s story headlined: “US UNDERVALUED ENEMY’S STRENGTH BEFORE OFFENSIVE: CIA REPORTS FORCES WERE SIGNIFICANTLY LARGER.”
Escalation Thwarted: On March 25 the President complained privately: “The leaks to the NY Times hurt us. … We have no support for the war. … I would have given Westy the 206,000 men.” On March 31, Johnson paused the bombing and announced he would not run again for president. Westmoreland was pulled out of Saigon and ‘promoted’ to army chief of staff.
Dan Ellsberg has never rested on his laurels. Those who take seriously the danger of nuclear war are also deeply indebted to him for his The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017). That unique book is even more important today than when first published.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
It is not possible to work in intelligence and not imagine disclosing the many secrets you bear.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when the idea first crossed my mind. Maybe it was in 2008, when I was learning to be an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army and was exposed to sensitive information for the first time. Or maybe the germ of the idea was planted when I was stationed at Fort Drum, in upstate New York. I was tasked with transporting a cache of classified hard drives in a large box in the summer heat, and I began to imagine what might happen if I screwed it up and left the box unattended. If someone managed to get ahold of a stray hard drive, what ripple effects might it cause?
I knew the official version of why these secrets had to be kept secret. We were protecting sources. We were protecting troop movements. We were protecting national security. Those things made sense. But it also seemed, to me, that we were protecting ourselves.
While I felt that my job was important, and I took my obligations seriously, a part of me always wondered: If we were acting ethically, why were we keeping so many secrets?
The monthsI spent in Iraq in 2009 changed the way I understood the world. Every night, I woke up in the desert at 9 p.m. and walked from my tiny trailer to the Saddam Hussein-era basketball court that the military had converted into an intelligence operations center.
I sat at a computer screen for hours at a stretch, going through reports from our troops in the field. Monitoring reporting was like drinking from a fire hose: The military used at least a dozen different intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets. Each gave us a different view of the conflict and of the people and places we were watching. My job was to analyze, with emotional detachment, what impact military decisions were having on this giant, bloody “war on terror.”
The daily reality of my job was like life in a trauma ward. I’d spent hours learning every aspect of the lives of the Iraqis who were dying all around us: what time they got up in the morning, their relationship status, their appetites for food and alcohol and sex, whether they were engaged in political activities, and all the people they interacted with electronically. In some cases, I probably knew more about them than they knew about themselves.
I couldn’t talk about my work with anyone outside my unit, nor about this conflict that looked nothing like the one I’d read about back home or watched on the TV news before I enlisted.
We were seven years into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and people in the United States had begun to pretend that all of the conflict — all the lost American lives and the still-uncounted lost lives of Iraqis and Afghans — had been worth it. Attention turned away. The establishment moved on. There was the recession to deal with. People at home were losing everything. The health care debate was on the news every night. Yet we were still there. Still dying.
I was constantly confronted with these two conflicting realities — the one I was looking at, and the one Americans at home believed. It was clear that so much of the information people received was distorted or incomplete. This dissonance became an all-consuming frustration for me.
The idea that the information I had access to held real power began to flash into my brain more often. I’d try to ignore it, and it would come back.
In the intelligence field, you are vigorously inculcated with the notion that you can’t tell anyone anything about what you do, ever. This secrecy comes to control how you think and how you operate in the world. But the power of prohibition is fragile, especially once the justifications start to seem arbitrary.
During my time in intelligence, I had noticed that there was inconsistent internal logic to classification decisions. And I came to see that the classification system exists wholly in the interest of the U.S. government — in other words, it seems to exist not to to keep secrets safe but to control the narrative.
In December 2009, I began the process of downloading reports of all our activities from Iraq and Afghanistan.
These were descriptions of enemy engagements with hostile forces or explosives that detonated. They contained body counts, coordinates and businesslike summaries of confusing, violent encounters. They contained, in their aggregate force, something much closer to the truth of what those two wars really looked like than what Americans were learning at home. They were a pointillist picture of wars that wouldn’t end.
I burned the files onto DVDs, labeled with titles like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Manning’s Mix. I later transferred the files to a memory card, then shattered the discs with my boots on the gravel outside the trailers. On my next leave, I brought the documents back to America in my camera, as files on an SD memory card. This was every single incident report the U.S. Army had ever filed about Iraq or Afghanistan, every instance where a soldier thought there was something important enough to log and report. Navy customs personnel didn’t blink an eye. No one cared enough to notice.
Uploading the files directly to the internet wasn’t my first choice. I tried to reach traditional publications, but it was a frustrating ordeal. I didn’t trust the telephone, nor did I want to email anything; I could be surveilled. Even pay phones weren’t safe.
I went into chain stores — Starbucks, mostly — and asked to borrow their landline because supposedly my cellphone was lost or my car had broken down. I called The Washington Post and The New York Times, but I didn’t get anywhere.
I recalled that in 2008, during intelligence training, our instructor — a Marine Corps veteran turned contractor — told us about WikiLeaks, a website devoted to radical transparency, while instructing us not to visit it. But while I shared WikiLeaks’ stated commitment to transparency, I thought that for my purposes, it was too limited a platform. Most people back then had never heard of it. I worried that information on the site wouldn’t be taken seriously.
The website was the publication of last resort, but as the weeks went by and I got no response from traditional newspapers, I grew increasingly desperate. So, on the very last day of my leave, I went to a Barnes … Noble with my laptop.
Sitting at a chair in the bookstore cafe, I drank a triple grande mocha and zoned out, listening to electronic music — Massive Attack, Prodigy — to wait out the uploads. There were seven chunks of data to get out, and each one took 30 minutes to an hour. The internet was slow, and the connection was bad. I began to worry that I wouldn’t be able to complete my work before the store closed. But the Wi-Fi finally did its job.
The falloutwas instant and intense. The documents proved, unambiguously and unimpeachably, just how disastrous the war still was. Once revealed, the truth could not be denied or unseen: This horror, this constellation of petty vendettas with an undertow of corruption — this was the truth of the war.
The disclosures became a flash point for a larger argument about how the United States should engage internationally, and how much the public deserved to know about how their government was acting in their name. I had changed the terms of the debate and pulled back the curtain. But while all that was happening, I knew nothing about it. I was in a cage.
Everyone now knows — because of what happened to me — that the government will attempt to destroy you fully, charge you with everything under the sun, for bringing to light the ugly truth about its own actions. What I was trying to do had never been done before, and therefore the consequences were, at the time, unknowable.
Daniel Ellsberg, who had disclosed the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, avoided prison because of illegal evidence-gathering by the Nixon White House (which had ordered a break-in of his psychiatrist’s office, in search of information that might discredit Mr. Ellsberg).
Nobody had gone to prison for this sort of thing; I hadn’t heard of Mr. Ellsberg at the time, but I was very aware of Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency whistle-blower who had been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. He’d faced charges that carried a 35-year prison sentence, but shortly before trial he’d cut a deal that left him with only probation and community service.
I certainly weighed the potential consequences. If I was caught, I would be detained, but I figured at most I was going to be discharged or lose my security clearance. I cared about my work, and it was frightening to imagine losing my job — I had been homeless before enlisting — but I thought that if I was court-martialed, it would damage only the government’s own credibility. I never really reckoned with the notion of a life spent in prison, or worse.
The details of what happened to me are, by now, well known. I was held for several months in a cage in Kuwait. I was sentenced to 35 years in a maximum-security prison, where I spent seven years, much of it in solitary confinement. During that time, I came out as transgender and transitioned. Denied gender-affirming health care, I went on a hunger strike. I attempted suicide twice.
But even in prison I remained active. I began writing a column for The Guardian. I drafted a bill, “Bill to Re-establish the National Integrity and to Protect Freedom of Speech, and the Freedom of the Press,” which I proposed on Twitter and sent to members of Congress. It was meant to outlaw some of the most egregious ways that the Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act had been used against me, so that others wouldn’t be put in such a bind for wanting to do the right thing. It also included fixes to the Freedom of Information Act and would give stronger federal protections to journalists. It was a pipe dream and was treated as such.
On Jan. 17, 2017, President Barack Obama commuted my sentence, and I was released. Everyone expected me to be in shock at being out, to kiss the ground or something. It did feel surreal to be free, but it also felt as if what I’d been dealing with for the previous seven years would never be over. It certainly isn’t over now. I can never leave it behind.
This was my first time as a free woman. I had spent several years transitioning, so I felt comfortable in the way my body moved and felt. Even in prison, with restrictions on hair length and clothing, people had begun to accept me as a woman. They treated me as a human being. But now I needed to navigate a larger world with this new identity.
I emerged from prison a celebrity. I had been made, without consultation, into a symbol and figurehead for all kinds of ideas. Some of that was fun — Annie Leibovitz photographed me for Vogue’s September issue. Some of it — the C.I.A. director pressuring Harvard to uninvite me from a visiting fellowship, Fox News seizing upon my very existence as a cheap way to rile up its viewers — was much less so.
The main upside to my notoriety has been that I can do important work. Activism quickly became almost a full-time job. I went to the Pride parade in New York City; I ran for Senate in Maryland; I protested the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and refugees, and President Donald Trump’s reinstatement of the ban on transgender personnel in the military. The political moment into which I emerged is one in which we are figuring out what got us here as a country.
What I did during my enlistment was part of a deep American tradition of rebellion, resistance and civil disobedience — a tradition we have long drawn upon to force progress and oppose tyranny. The documents I made public expose how little we knew about what was being done in our name for so many years.
Despite becoming notorious for my acts of divulgence, I am still, in many ways, bound to secrecy. There are things the media has made public about this story that I can’t comment on, confirm or deny. Certain details remain classified. I am limited to some degree in what I can put on the record.
Some people have characterized me as a traitor, which I continue to reject. I have faced serious consequences for sharing information that I believe to be in the public interest. But I believe that what I did was my democratic and ethical obligation.
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence is a movement of former CIA colleagues of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, together with others who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. SAAII confers an award each year to a member of the intelligence community or related professions who exemplifies Sam Adam’s courage, persistence, and devotion to truth – no matter the consequences. Read more about the history here.
The annual Sam Adams Award has been given in previous years to truth tellers Coleen Rowley of the FBI; Katharine Gun of British Intelligence; Sibel Edmonds of the FBI; Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan; Sam Provance, former US Army Sgt; Maj. Frank Grevil of Danish Army Intelligence; Larry Wilkerson, Col., US Army (ret.), former chief of staff to Colin Powell at State; Julian Assange, of WikiLeaks: Thomas Drake, of NSA; Jesselyn Radack, formerly of Dept. of Justice and now National Security Director of Government Accountability Project; Thomas Fingar, former Deputy Director of National Intelligence and Director, National Intelligence Council, and Edward Snowden, former contractor for the National Security Agency; Chelsea Manning, US Army Private who exposed (via WikiLeaks) key information on Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as State Department activities; and to retired National Security Agency official William Binney, who challenged decisions to ignore the Fourth Amendment in the government’s massive — and wasteful — collection of electronic data.
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence is a movement of former CIA colleagues of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, together with others who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. SAAII confers an award each year to a member of the intelligence community or related professions who exemplifies Sam Adam’s courage, persistence, and devotion to truth – no matter the consequences. Read more about the history here.