Sharon Scranage
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sharon Scranage is a former CIA employee who was jailed for revealing the identities of CIA agents.
Scranage, who worked in Ghana in the role of Operations Support Assistant, passed classified information to her boyfriend, Michael Soussoudis. Soussoudis, a Ghanaian citizen with permanent residence in the United States, was a Ghanaian intelligence officer, and passed the information to intelligence chief Kojo Tsikata. Tsikata is alleged to have shared the information with several countries in the Soviet bloc.
Scranage is said to have come under suspicion when, upon her return to the United States in 1985, she failed a routine polygraph test. After an investigation, Scranage cooperated with the authorities, and assisted in the arrest of Soussoudis. Soussoudis was later exchanged for a number of Ghanaian CIA agents who had been arrested following their exposure by Scranage.
Scranage was charged with espionage and with breaking the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. She pleaded guilty to three of the eighteen charges against her, with the others being dropped. She was sentenced to five years in prison, later reduced to two years. To date, she remains the only person convicted of breaking the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which was introduced in 1982.
