The plot thickens? In an update to the on-going struggle of Navy veteran and former CIA Officer Zachary Young to publish his tell all book about his successful defamation trial against CNN, Young alleges the Central Intelligence Agency has issued contradictory letters while still refusing to give him permission to write about what was already broadcasted to a global audience.
As NewsBusters previously reported, the CIA’s Author Review Office (ARO) had not only denied Young’s request to publish a book titled American Spy, in which he’ll tell his side of the CNN defamation case, they also wanted him to delete his entire manuscript.
Part of the materials Young submitted to the ARO was evidence that came up during the trial that then-Public Affairs Director Tammy Kupperman Thorp inappropriately disclosed his affiliation to CNN’s Alex Marquardt:
The trial record also establishes that my prior CIA affiliation was not merely incidentally mentioned by a private individual or inadvertently disclosed by an unauthorized outsider. It was confirmed through the Agency’s official press function. The documentary record, admitted as a trial exhibit and broadcast nationally, shows CNN correspondent Alex Marquardt formally tasking the Agency’s Office of Public Affairs on October 29, 2021, stating: “FYI I asked Tammy if they can look into the other guy’s claim that he’s CIA.” This was not a casual conversation. It was a directed request to the Agency’s official press office to look into whether a named individual was connected to the CIA. Marquardt testified under oath at trial that Tammy Kupperman Thorp, who served as the CIA’s Director of Public Affairs from 2021 to 2025, confirmed my Agency background and described the practice as a “steer,” which he defined on the record as the Agency’s established method of informally confirming information to credentialed journalists.
Young argued to the ARO that the agency already had the opportunity to label Thorp’s involvement and his affiliation with the Agency as classified during the legal proceedings, and they chose not to act.
In the ARO’s June 15 , 2026 letter rejecting Young’s request to print, they wrote this about the additional material he included about Thorp, along with the other documentation:
In issuing this denial, we reviewed the additional materials you submitted with the manuscript, but must stress that these materials did not constitute confirmation or acknowledgement by the organization of the information contained in the manuscript or alter the status of the sensitive information. Therefore, you must delete any and all copies containing the sensitive information.
But in a follow up letter dated July 16, 2026, responding to a separate complaint Young filed requesting an Inspector General referral over the Thorp disclosure, ARO stated it has “no additional insight into those matters” and that the complaint had been “forwarded to the requested offices.”
Young says the two statements cannot both be true.
“They can’t tell me they have no insight into the Thorp disclosure while having already used their judgment about that same disclosure to reject my entire manuscript,” Young said in a statement to NewsBusters. “Either they evaluated it or they didn’t. Right now their own letters contradict each other.”
It’s worth noting that the ARO also seems to have dropped their initial demand for Young to delete his entire manuscript. At least for now as the appeal process proceeds.
To learn more about who Tammy Kupperman Thorp is and about her personal ties to CNN, you can read NewsBusters’ investigation into her here.
