A senior CIA official, meeting with Senate staff in a secure room of the Capitol last June, promised repeatedly that the agency did not violate or seek to violate an international treaty that bars cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees during interrogations it conducted in the Middle East and elsewhere.

But another CIA officer — the agency's deputy inspector general, who for the previous year had been probing allegations of criminal mistreatment by the CIA and its contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan — was startled to hear in that meeting what she considered an outright falsehood, said people familiar with her account. It came during the discussion of legislation that would constrain the CIA's interrogations.

That CIA officer was Mary McCarthy, 61, who was fired April 20 for allegedly sharing classified information with journalists, including Washington Post journalist Dana Priest. A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that "CIA people had lied" in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading.

Mary McCarthy … a lie detector test showed possible deception. Photo: AP

Whether McCarthy's conviction that the CIA was hiding unpleasant truths provoked her to leak sensitive information is known only to her and the journalists she is alleged to have spoken with last year. But the picture of her that emerges from interviews with more than a dozen former colleagues is of an independent-minded analyst who became convinced that on multiple occasions the agency had not given accurate or complete information to its congressional overseers.

McCarthy was not an ideologue, her friends say, but at some point fell into a camp of CIA officers who felt the Bush administration's venture into Iraq had dangerously diverted U.S. counterterrorism policy. After seeing some of the secret fruits of the Iraq intervention, she became disenchanted, three of her friends say.

In addition to CIA misrepresentations at the session last summer, McCarthy told the friends, a senior agency official failed to provide a full account of the CIA's detainee-treatment policy at a closed hearing of the House intelligence committee in February 2005, under questioning by California Rep. Jane Harman, the senior Democrat on the panel.

McCarthy also told others she was offended that the CIA's general counsel had worked to secure a secret Justice Department opinion in 2004 authorizing the agency's creation of "ghost detainees" — prisoners removed from Iraq for secret interrogations without notice to the International Red Cross — because the Geneva Conventions prohibit such practices.

Almost all of McCarthy's friends and colleagues interviewed for this story agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity because her case still could be referred for prosecution and because much of her work involved highly classified information.

As a former director of intelligence programs in the Clinton administration's National Security Council, McCarthy was entrusted with deep secrets regarding the nation's covert actions overseas. She was a contributor in 2004 to the presidential campaign of Democratic Sen. John Kerry, and a former colleague of two Clinton aides — Richard Clarke and Randall Beers — who publicly assailed what they considered Bush's misguided focus on Iraq.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck — without naming McCarthy — denied the firing was meant to suppress dissent. She said it was provoked solely by the officer's admission to CIA investigators to having given classified information to the media. "You can't ignore an officer ignoring their secrecy agreement," she said.

But McCarthy, in e-mail to friends, has denied leaking anything classified. She has not denied speaking to Priest, but said she was unaware that the CIA had secret prisons in Eastern Europe, the most attention-getting detail in Priest's articles last year. McCarthy declined to be interviewed for this story and her attorney, Ty Cobb, said the CIA has precluded him from discussing what McCarthy said in a series of CIA interviews and polygraph examinations.

Copyright © 2006 Houston Chronicle

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