Gary Berntsen spied for his country, courageously and well. Then the former Central Intelligence Agency case officer wrote a manuscript about his adventures, and like others before him he ran afoul of the CIA's resistance to exposure.

On Friday, a U.S. District court ruled in favor of the CIA's efforts to keep a lid on 18 specific secrets Bernsten sought to write about in his book Jawbreaker. The book recounts, primarily, Berntsen's campaign against Al Qaeda that included his being one of the CIA's first covert operators to enter Afghanistan after 9/11.

As Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly noted:

"Berntsen submitted a draft manuscript of Jawbreaker to the CIA for review prior to its publication. After finding the pace of the CIA’s review to be unacceptably slow, and then finding the amount of information redacted by the CIA as classified to be unsatisfactory, Berntsen filed this lawsuit seeking an order allowing him to publish his unredacted manuscript."

Berntsen and his former employers were subsequently able to negotiate most of their differences, save for 18 items the Agency wanted to keep secret. The Agency asserted that "the remaining 18 items reveal intelligence sources, methods and activities, foreign government information, or information impacting the foreign relations of the United States, and that publication of this information could cause serious damage to national security, endanger the safety and lives of individuals who work for and with the CIA, and undermine the ability of the CIA to collect intelligence information."

Which just about covers it.

The judge examined ex parte the detailed justifications for each of the 18 secrets; moreover, she noted, Berntsen did not file a formal opposition to the CIA's summary judgment motion. The latter deprived Berntsen of his final chance, and on Friday the CIA won.