WASHINGTON » In March 2002, John Kiriakou coordinated a team of fellow Central Intelligence Agency officers and Pakistani agents that descended upon a house in Pakistan where they believed they might find Abu Zubaydah, a high-level al-Qaida figure.

Rushing into the house amid the bloody chaos of a shootout, Kiriakou seized a heavily wounded man, photographed his ear and used his cellphone to send the image to an analyst.

"It’s him," the analyst reported back after comparing the shape of the ear to file photographs of Abu Zubaydah.

Kiriakou, who recounted the episode in a 2010 memoir, and his colleagues had captured alive the first big target in the al-Qaida hierarchy after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington — "one of the brightest moments of my professional life," he described it.

Now, Kiriakou is embroiled in another drama. The same government that a decade ago sent him to risk his life taking on al-Qaida is now trying to send him to prison for as much as 30 years, charging him with disclosing classified information — the identity of two former colleagues who participated in interrogating detainees — to journalists.

Several friends said the CIA this week abruptly fired his wife, who had worked as an analyst there since before the couple met; specifically, one said, she was called, while on maternity leave, and told her to submit her resignation. (The agency declined to comment.)

Kiriakou’s lawyer Plato Cacheris said Tuesday that his client would plead not guilty but could not discuss the matter. Friends and former colleagues say that Kiriakou is determined to fight the case.

The grandson of Greek immigrants, Kiriakou, 47, grew up in New Castle, in western Pennsylvania’s steel country. His parents, both now deceased, were elementary school teachers, and his father eventually became a principal, a childhood friend recalled.

The friend, Gary Senko, still lives in New Castle and has remained friends with Kiriakou; the two were in each other’s weddings, he is the godfather of Kiriakou’s daughter, and they text each other during Pittsburgh Steelers games. As a high school student, he said, Kiriakou played in the school band and was an honor student, taking an interest in politics and making clear that he had set his sights on the wider world.

"We joked that he was going to run for president some day," Senko recalled.

Kiriakou attended George Washington University on a partial scholarship, majoring in Middle Eastern studies. He applied to the CIA at the suggestion of a professor, Dr. Jerrold M. Post, who had served at the agency, according to Kiriakou’s 2010 memoir, "The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror."

He began as an analyst and learned Arabic but eventually trained as an operations officer, working in Athens and the Middle East. His book recounts several adventures, including ambushing and disarming a trainee after learning the man had been directed to kill him by a terrorist group.

He was dispatched to Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, hunting down al-Qaida figures. When he returned home to Northern Virginia, however, Kiriakou had difficulties. His first marriage had broken up earlier, and he fought a bitter custody battle with his ex-wife over their two sons. He later married his current wife; they now have three children.

In his book, Kiriakou describes strains with a supervisor over the time required by his family responsibilities. He decided to resign from the agency in 2004 and worked for several years at the auditing firm Deloitte, analyzing security risks for businesses overseas.

In late 2007, Kiriakou waded into the public debate over the CIA’s use of the suffocation tactic called waterboarding. He gave an interview to ABC News saying that it had elicited good information from detainees but that the country should no longer use the technique because "we’re Americans and we’re better than this."

Suddenly a controversial figure, he was asked to leave Deloitte, according to several friends and former colleagues. A Deloitte spokeswoman confirmed his employment but said the firm could not comment further because of a confidentiality policy.

The interview got him in trouble in another way. He described Abu Zubaydah as having started cooperating with investigators within seconds of being waterboarded. In fact, according to a document made public in 2009, the CIA waterboarded him 83 times, and Kiriakou later admitted that he did not personally witness any waterboarding sessions.

Over the course of 2008, however, reporters sought Kiriakou out for interviews about the CIA’s counterterrorism work. Court documents charge that he provided the name of a covert official to one journalist that summer, who in turn passed it on to a legal team defending Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Kiriakou is also accused of helping another reporter, Scott Shane of The New York Times, learn or confirm the name of another official involved in the interrogation program, which The Times published in a June 2008 article. A Times spokeswoman said that neither the newspaper nor Shane had been contacted by investigators or provided any information to them.

Kiriakou was also battling the CIA’s Publication Review Board that summer over what he could include in his memoir, which he would later try to sell to a movie studio; in recent months, he has also been trying to interest producers in a potential television show, friends say.

"I’m guessing they’ll let us publish a good chunk of the Abu Zubaydah story," he wrote in a June 2008 email to his co-author, according to the criminal complaint. "They objected to some of the details of the planning for the capture, but what I propose doing is telling them that we’ve fictionalized much of it (even though we haven’t)."

Kiriakou has been a security consultant for several movies, traveling to Afghanistan to assess if young actors in "The Kite Runner" might be at risk of reprisals after the film’s release because of its negative portrayal of aspects of Afghan society. (He decided they were, and the studio took steps to safeguard them.) He also vetted potential Middle Eastern subjects for the movie "Bruno," in which a flamboyantly gay character carries out ambush interviews of real people.

In 2009, Kiriakou joined the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts. He worked as an investigator on several counternarcotics and counterterrorism reports, leaving after a year.

In 2010, Kiriakou was able to publish his book, which is said to have received a chilly reception from some former colleagues.

While he wrote that the CIA "became a second family — one I came to respect and even love," he added, "The revelations in the so-called torture memos have muted my own enthusiasm for the way the agency conducts its business."

© 2012 The New York Times Company