The Sam Adams Award is given annually to an
intelligence
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can b ...
professional who has taken a stand for
integrity and ethics. The Award is granted by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, a group of retired
CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...
officers. It is named after
Samuel A. Adams
Samuel Alexander Adams (June 14, 1934 – October 10, 1988), known as Sam Adams, was an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He is best known for his role in discovering that during the mid-1960s American military intelligence had un ...
, a CIA
whistleblower
A whistleblower (also written as whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person, often an employee, who reveals information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe or fraudulent. Whi ...
during the
Vietnam War, and takes the physical form of a "corner-brightener candlestick".
Ray McGovern
Raymond McGovern (born August 25, 1939) is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer turned political Activism, activist. McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, and in the 1980s chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared ...
established the Sam Adams Associates "to reward intelligence officials who demonstrated a commitment to truth and integrity, no matter the consequences."
The 2012 and 2013 and 2014 Awards were presented at the
Oxford Union.
Recipients
* 2002:
Coleen Rowley
* 2003:
Katharine Gun, former British intelligence (GCHQ) translator; leaked top-secret information showing illegal US activities during the push for war in Iraq.
* 2004:
Sibel Edmonds, former FBI translator; fired after accusing FBI officials of ignoring intelligence pointing to al-Qaeda attacks against the US.
* 2005:
Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who blew the whistle on UK complicity in the Uzbek government's use of torture and involvement in extraordinary rendition.
* 2006:
Samuel Provance, former
U.S. Army military intelligence sergeant; spoke out about abuses at the
Abu Ghraib Prison
Abu Ghraib prison ( ar, سجن أبو غريب, ''Sijn Abū Ghurayb'') was a prison complex in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, located west of Baghdad. Abu Ghraib prison was opened in the 1950s and served as a maximum-security prison with torture, weekly exe ...
.
* 2007:
Andrew Wilkie, retired Australian intelligence official; claimed intelligence was being exaggerated to justify Australian support for the US invasion of Iraq.
* 2008:
Frank Grevil
Frank Søholm Grevil (born 1960) is a Danish chemical engineer and former intelligence agent. He held the rank of major in Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste, the Danish military intelligence agency. On 22 February 2004 he acted as a whistle blower ...
, Danish whistleblower; leaked classified information showing no clear evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
* 2009:
Larry Wilkerson
Lawrence B. Wilkerson (born June 15, 1945) is a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Since the end of his military career, Wilkerson has criticized many aspects of the Iraq W ...
, former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and Iraq War critic.
* 2010:
Julian Assange
Julian Paul Assange ( ; Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army inte ...
, editor-in-chief and founder of
WikiLeaks.
* 2011:
Thomas Andrews Drake, former senior executive of the U.S.
National Security Agency (NSA);
Jesselyn Radack, former ethics adviser to the
U.S. Department of Justice.
* 2012:
Thomas Fingar
Charles Thomas Fingar, (born January 11, 1946) is a professor at Stanford University. In 1986 Fingar left Stanford to join the State Department. In 2005, he moved to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as the deputy director of Na ...
, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
* 2013:
Edward Snowden
Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American and naturalized Russian former computer intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, when he was an employee and su ...
, leaked NSA material showing
mass surveillance
Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens. The surveillance is often carried out by local and federal governments or governmental organizati ...
by the agency, sparking heated debate.
* 2014:
Chelsea Manning, U.S. Army soldier convicted in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses.
* 2015:
William Binney, former highly placed intelligence official with the NSA turned whistleblower.
* 2016:
John Kiriakou, former CIA analyst and case officer who publicly confirmed the employment of
waterboarding against detainees and characterized the practice as torture.
* 2017:
Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who reported on the
My Lai massacre, the
Abu Ghraib scandal
During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the CIA committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including physical and sexual abuse, tort ...
, and alleged misrepresentations of the
2013 Ghouta attack and the
2017 Khan Shaykhun attack.
* 2018:
Karen Kwiatkowski
Karen U. Kwiatkowski, née Unger, (born September 24, 1960) is an American activist and commentator. She is a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer and a variety of roles for the N ...
,
U.S. Air Force officer who became a whistleblower, leaking material behind the film
''Shock and Awe''.
* 2019:
Jeffrey Sterling, CIA whistleblower.
* 2020:
Annie Machon
Annie Machon (born 1968) is a former MI5 intelligence officer, a writer, and public speaker. In 1996, she resigned from MI5, with the intention to blow the whistle on a series of alleged crimes committed by the agency. Afterward, Machon went on ...
,
MI5 whistleblower.
* 2021:
Daniel Hale
Daniel Everette Hale (born 1987/1988) is an American whistleblower and former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence analyst who sent classified information about drone warfare to the press. Hale served in the United States Air Force ...
, U.S. Air Force
enlisted airman who became an
intelligence analyst for the NSA in
Afghanistan and later exposed the
consequences of drone strikes.
References
Sources
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External links
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{{Laureates of the Sam Adams Award
2002 establishments in the United States
Articles containing video clips
Awards established in 2002
Espionage scandals and incidents
Intelligence and espionage-related awards and decorations
Whistleblowing in the United States