Former CIA Director Leon Panetta has been accused of violating security rules by revealing the name of the commander of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to the writer of the film Zero Dark Thirty, according to US Defense Department investigators.
An unpublished draft report was first disclosed by the Project on Government Oversight and has been confirmed by Representative Peter King, who asked for the investigation nearly two years ago, reports Stuff.co.nz.
The report cited two instances when administration officials divulged the names of individuals involved in the bin Laden operation - in both cases to makers of the film Zero Dark Thirty, which told the story of the decade-long hunt for the al-Qaeda leader and the Navy commando raid in which he was killed.
The first instance was a July 15, 2011, interview of the Pentagon's top intelligence official, Michael Vickers, by the film's director, Kathryn Bigelow, and screenwriter Mark Boal. In that session Vickers gave them the name of a special operations planner whose identity was supposed to be protected from public release, the report said.
The second instance was a June 24, 2011, awards ceremony at CIA headquarters in which Panetta identified the ground commander of the SEALs raid, with Boal in attendance.
The report did not say whether Panetta knew Boal was present. But a former agency official who was present at the ceremony said Wednesday that Panetta did not know Boal was in the audience and assumed that everyone in the audience of at least several hundred people had proper security clearances.
The draft report said that although one or both of the movie executives were present at both the Vickers interview and the CIA awards ceremony, investigators concluded that no classified or sensitive information about Navy commando tactics, techniques or procedures were exposed.