Sam Adams Award

The Sam Adams Award is given annually since 2002 to an intelligence professional who has taken a stand for integrity and ethics. The award is granted by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, a group of retired CIA officers. It is named after Samuel A. Adams, a CIA whistleblower during the Vietnam War, and takes the physical form of a "corner-brightener candlestick".
Ray McGovern established the Sam Adams Associates "to reward intelligence officials who demonstrated a commitment to truth and integrity, no matter the consequences."
The 2012, 2013, and 2014 awards were presented at the Oxford Union.

Recipients

2002: FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley
2003: Katharine Gun, former British intelligence translator; leaked top-secret information showing illegal US activities during the push for war in Iraq.
2004: Sibel Edmonds, former FBI translator; fired after accusing FBI officials of ignoring intelligence pointing to al-Qaeda attacks against the US.
2005: Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who blew the whistle on UK complicity in the Uzbek government's use of torture and involvement in extraordinary rendition.
2006: Samuel Provance, former U.S. Army military intelligence sergeant; spoke out about abuses at the Abu Ghraib Prison.
2007: Andrew Wilkie, retired Australian intelligence official; claimed intelligence was being exaggerated to justify Australian support for the US invasion of Iraq.
2008: Frank Grevil, Danish whistleblower; leaked classified information showing no clear evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
2009: Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and Iraq War critic.
2010: Julian Assange, editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks.
2011: Thomas Andrews Drake, former senior executive of the U.S. National Security Agency ; Jesselyn Radack, former ethics adviser to the U.S. Department of Justice.
2012: Thomas Fingar, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
2013: Edward Snowden, leaked NSA material showing mass surveillance by the agency, sparking heated debate.
2014: Chelsea Manning, U.S. Army soldier convicted in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses.
2015: William Binney, former highly placed intelligence official with the NSA turned whistleblower.
2016: John Kiriakou, former CIA analyst and case officer who publicly confirmed the employment of waterboarding against detainees and characterized the practice as torture.
2017: Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who reported on the My Lai massacre, the Abu Ghraib scandal, and alleged misrepresentations of the 2013 Ghouta attack and the 2017 Khan Shaykhun attack.
2018: Karen Kwiatkowski, U.S. Air Force officer who became a whistleblower, leaking material behind the film Shock and Awe.
2019: Jeffrey Sterling, CIA whistleblower.
2020: Annie Machon, MI5 whistleblower.
2021: Daniel Hale, U.S. Air Force enlisted airman who became an intelligence analyst for the NSA in Afghanistan and later exposed the consequences of drone strikes.
2022: Daniel Ellsberg, former U.S. military analyst who released the Pentagon Papers, showing that the public had been misled about the Vietnam War, to a number of newspapers in 1971.
2024: Aaron Bushnell, senior airman in the United States Air Force who engaged in a fatal act of self-immolation in protest against United States support for Israel in the Gaza war on February 25, 2024.
2025: Anthony Aguilar, retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel and former Green Beret officer serving as a security contractor on behalf of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, who disclosed alleged misconduct and war crimes associated with GHF operations.