A former CIA agent was sentenced to 30 months in prison Friday for leaking the name of an undercover CIA operative.

John Kiriakou, 48, plead guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act when he disclosed the name of a CIA employee  to a freelance journalist, the New York Times said.  He was the first person to be convicted under the law in 27 years. 

Kiriakou worked as an intelligence officer for the CIA from 1990-2004. 

In 2002, Kiriakou led a raid in Pakistan that resulted in the capture of suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, the New York Times said. 

During a 2007 interview with ABC News, Kiriakou became the first CIA insider to publicly confirm the use of waterboarding during detainee interrogations. He said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds. 

The U.S. Justice Department began investigating Kiriakou in 2009 after government officials expressed alarm that several detainees at Guantanamo Bay had acquired photographs of CIA personnel, CBS News reported. 

The Justice Department discovered that Kiriakou had leaked the name of a covert CIA operative to a journalist, CBS News said. The journalist then passed the information along to researchers working for lawyers who represented several Guantanamo Bay detainees. The information allowed the lawyers to obtain the photographs of the CIA employees.