A CIA computer engineer on Wednesday testified at the espionage trial of a former CIA employee that the 2017 leak of thousands of pages of documents “was crippling” to the agency and turned his office into an FBI crime scene.
The engineer — testifying under the pseudonym Jeremy Weber — said the release of the materials by WikiLeaks left the CIA scrambling.
“We were in damage mode,” he said at the trial of Joshua Adam Schulte, who quit the CIA and moved to New York for a US$200,000 salaried job four months before the documents were published.
“The house was burning down and we were trying to figure out what was going on,” he said.
Weber said that he was put in charge of engineers assessing the damage from a leak of materials that prosecutors have said exposed CIA officers overseas and destroyed cybertools used to track terrorists and collect intelligence abroad.
“It was crippling,” Weber said.
It took a week of 20-hour workdays to learn the scope of the damage, protect overseas assets and decide how to begin rewriting programs that target foreign adversaries, he added.
During opening statements a day earlier, defense attorney Sabrina Shroff said that there would be no proof at trial of any relationship between Schulte and WikiLeaks.
She said that Schulte, 31, of Manhattan, was prosecuted because investigators could not find the source of the leak and spotted an “easy target,” someone who “antagonized almost every single person” while he worked at the CIA in Langley, Virginia.
“He really was a difficult employee, but being a difficult employee does not make you a criminal... Josh Schulte’s not a traitor,” she said.
Under questioning by a prosecutor, Weber said that he considered Schulte a friend after both started at the CIA about 10 years ago.
However, Weber said that he gave up the friendship in 2016 after Schulte told lies in formal complaints against a coworker.
“I felt like Josh ... crossed a line and I was done with him,” he added.
Later, Weber said he took it as a threat when Schulte demanded his access restored to a CIA program and said that he would get it restored “one way or another.”
He said he later complained to his bosses that Schulte had breached security protocols by using his status as an administrator of software programs to gain greater access to a top secret program without approval from superiors.
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