THE CIA has sacked a senior officer who leaked information about secret prisons in eastern Europe for terrorist suspects. The officer, Mary McCarthy, had failed a polygraph test and confessed to contacts with a reporter.

A veteran CIA analyst nearing retirement, McCarthy worked in the office of the inspector-general, investigating allegations that the agency was involved in torture at Iraqi prisons.

Although the CIA did not identify her by name, she is said to have supplied information on the covert detention programme to Dana Priest, a Washington Post journalist who won a Pulitzer prize for the story last week.

The revelation that the CIA had been involved in shipping prisoners on unmarked planes to secret prisons in up to eight countries, thought to include Poland and Romania, provoked a storm of international protest last autumn.

The European Union’s anti-terror coordinator, Gijs De Vries, announced last week that there was no proof any illegal CIA treatment of prisoners had occurred.

McCarthy’s unmasking has turned up the political heat after it was revealed that she had donated the maximum $2,000 to the 2004 presidential election campaign of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate. She was appointed to a senior intelligence post at the White House in 1998 by Sandy Berger, President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser.

Supporters of the war in Iraq have frequently accused the CIA of being riddled with Clinton supporters bent on leaking information damaging to American national security. The Pulitzers were dubbed “the treason prizes” by right-wing critics last week after an award went to reporters who disclosed that the National Security Agency was secretly wiretapping the overseas conversations of US citizens without a warrant.

Democrats countered that President George W Bush should hold accountable members of his team who leaked selective and often faulty intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

They also “outed” the CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose husband refuted allegations that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from Niger. “Apparently, President Bush doesn’t believe what’s good for the CIA is good for the White House,” said Robert Menendez, a Democratic senator.

Intelligence officials claimed McCarthy’s sacking was the result of a “pattern of conduct” and said she may have been a source for other stories. She is thought to have been one of a handful of officers to know about “compartmented” programmes such as the secret detention sites.

Now she has been sacked, she could risk prosecution if she goes public with what she knows, having “violated the secrecy agreement that everyone signs as a condition of employment with the CIA”, said a CIA spokesman.

Porter Goss, the director of the CIA, told Congress in February that he was determined to track down leakers in his agency. “The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission,” he said.

In a further sign of friction between the CIA and the White House over the war on terror, Tyler Drumheller, a retired intelligence officer, will claim on the 60 Minutes television programme tonight that Bush was reliably warned Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before he invaded.

• An Al-Qaeda explosives expert and paymaster was killed in a gunfight by Pakistani forces near the Afghan border, a senior Pakistani intelligence official claimed yesterday.

  A diary found on Marwan Hadid al-Suri suggests that he may have been distributing cash to the families of Al-Qaeda members, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the organisation’s leader in Iraq.

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