ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Less than two months after the Justice Department announced that it would not charge Central Intelligence Agency officials who participated in the brutal interrogation of detainees during the Bush administration, prosecutors on Tuesday won the conviction of a former C.I.A. counterterrorism operative who told a reporter the name of a covert C.I.A. officer involved in the program.

The operative, John Kiriakou, who worked for the agency from 1990 to 2004, admitted that he had disclosed the name of the former colleague to a reporter, identified as Matthew Cole, formerly of ABC News. Mr. Kiriakou, who was a leader of the team that located and captured Abu Zubaydah, a suspected high-level facilitator for Al Qaeda, in Pakistan in 2002, pleaded guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Mr. Kiriakou came to public attention in late 2007 when he gave an interview to ABC News portraying the suffocation technique called waterboarding as torture, but describing it as necessary. The interview prompted reporters investigating the program to reach out to him.

The plea was a victory for the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on the unauthorized disclosure of government secrets. Mr. Kiriakou is one of six current or former officials to be charged with leaking under President Obama, twice the number of cases brought by all previous presidents combined.