From The Washington Post article, "Former NSA executive Thomas A. Drake may pay high price for media leak," by Ellen Nakashima:
In September 2006, the NSA transferred Drake to the National Defense University, where he taught a class on strategic leadership. Ten months later, on a Thursday morning in July 2007, teams of FBI agents descended simultaneously on the homes of Roark, Wiebe, Binney and the former analyst who also complained to the inspector general. In Binney's case, a friend said, the agents came in with guns drawn. They hauled away boxes of documents, even taking the computers from renters in Roark's basement in Stayton, Ore., where she had moved after retiring from the Hill.
On Nov. 28, 2007, shortly before 5:30 a.m., FBI agents knocked on Drake's door in Glenwood, Md. His wife, an NSA contractor, was about to leave for work and to take their son to school. They took computers, photos, books on the NSA, materials for a dissertation he was finishing.
Drake met three times with federal investigators in what friends said he termed his "cooperative" period. He thought that he could make them see that crimes had been committed. Instead, in his final meeting with them, in April 2008, it became clear that the government believed that he was the one who had committed a crime. A prosecutor pressed him to plead guilty or go to prison, a friend recalled.
That month, Drake resigned from the NSA rather than be fired. He also hired a private attorney.
"I will never plea-bargain with the truth," friends said he told them.
Throughout 2009, Drake's attorney appealed to the prosecution to dismiss the case, arguing that Drake had violated no law. But in November, with a new prosecutor at the helm, it became clear that the case would move ahead.
That month, Drake ran into Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, in Bethesda. Drake, who knew of Hersh's work uncovering the 1968 My Lai massacre, began talking to him and mentioned he was under investigation. He began sharing with Hersh what he had told congressional investigators years earlier, about the NSA's pre-9/11 knowledge of al-Qaeda. The story, Hersh told journalists in Geneva in April, was "much more devastating, much more important" than what was reported in the Baltimore Sun. Neither man followed up with the other.
Around that time, Drake called a friend, who said he could feel "the fear . . . the dread, the forlornness" in Drake's voice. "They're after me," he told the friend. "I can smell it."
