Intelligence Identities Protection Act
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), enacted by Congress in 1982, prohibits the disclosure of the identities of covert U.S. government agents, particularly those within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This legislation was prompted by the actions of former CIA officer Philip Agee, whose publications in the late 1970s revealed the names of numerous CIA operatives, leading to serious security concerns, including the assassination of a CIA station chief. The IIPA establishes strict penalties for both insiders, who have authorized access to classified information, and outsiders, who do not. Insiders face severe consequences, including up to ten years in prison and hefty fines for intentional disclosures. In contrast, outsiders who reveal such identities while knowing it could harm U.S. intelligence operations face lighter penalties. The act reflects a significant governmental effort to protect the identities of intelligence personnel and maintain the integrity of U.S. foreign intelligence operations, balancing national security with the public's right to information.
Intelligence Identities Protection Act
Enacted: June 23, 1982
Place: United States (national)
Significance: This federal law made it a crime to publish the names of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents
Congress’ passage of the IIPA in 1982 outlawed publication of the names of covert government agents. The law was drafted as a response to former CIA employee Philip Agee’s publication of Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe (1978) and Dirty Work Two: The CIA in Africa (1980), books that revealed the names of more than a thousand alleged CIA officers. Congress was also reacting to the work of Louis Wolf, co-editor of the Covert Action Information Bulletin, a magazine containing a section devoted to identifying CIA operatives. According to the congressional report accompanying the IIPA, Agee’s practice of “naming names” had led directly to the assassination of CIA station chief Richard Welch in Athens, Greece, in 1975, and to other violent attacks on persons Agee identified as CIA officers.
The IIPA made it a crime intentionally to disclose the identities of CIA agents, establishing various penalties based on the accused’s degree of access to classified information. The harshest penalties were reserved for “insiders”—persons holding authorized access to classified information. Any person with access to information identifying CIA agents who purposely disclosed an agent’s identity could be jailed for up to ten years and fined as much as fifty thousand dollars. Any person who intentionally revealed the identity of a CIA agent after having had access to classified information in general could face up to five years in jail and a fine of twenty-five thousand dollars. Those penalties applied primarily to current and former government employees.
“Outsiders”—persons who did not have authorized access to classified information—were to be treated differently. Any such person who intentionally disclosed an agent’s identity while knowing that such disclosure might harm U.S. foreign intelligence operations could be imprisoned for up to three years and fined up to fifteen thousand dollars.
A survey of news stories written before the IIPA was passed in 1982 turned up more than eighty major books and news articles whose authors could arguably have been indicted under the law. A representative sample would include revelations that former CIA agents were involved in the Watergate break-in, accounts of illegal domestic spying by the CIA, and disclosures that a CIA employee tried to infiltrate the House and Senate intelligence committees in 1980 at the direction of the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB).