A discrimination suit by an African-American CIA agent who worked on recruiting Iranian spies was rejected Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Jeffrey Sterling, 38, worked in the CIA’s Near East and South Asia division from 1993 to 2001.

Sterling maintained in his suit that he had been told by a supervisor that he would not get certain kinds of jobs in the spy agency because of his skin color.

Sterling’s suit, against the head of the CIA and 10 other agency employees, had been dismissed by a lower court, which ruled that although Sterling “could probably prove a prima facie case for race discrimination,” the extreme secrecy surrounding his job prevented an open airing of his grievance.

A federal appeals court agreed, accepting the CIA’s argument that “there is no way for Sterling to prove employment discrimination without exposing at least some classified details of the covert employment that gives context to his claim.”

The Supreme Court affirmed that decision without comment.

Sterling’s attorneys had countered that the CIA feared negative publicity from an adverse decision on race discrimination, not the leakage of state secrets.

“The CIA’s invocation of the state secrets privilege was nothing more than an effort to shield the CIA from exposure of the fact that it discriminates against minorities,” Sterling’s suit said. “Significant anecdotal evidence exists that the CIA discriminates against African-Americans in particular, and direct evidence exists that it discriminated against Sterling specifically.”

Further, said the attorneys, “there have been dozens of EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] cases brought against the CIA, each of which . . . necessarily involved the taking and compiling of classified evidence” without leaking state secrets.

Sterling himself had earlier filed a complaint with the EEOC, which gathered unclassified statements from Sterling’s former colleagues in the CIA’s Operations Directorate, “who said Jeffrey was being discriminated against and whose responsibilities exceeded their own and that they could not come up with any other explanation for that except racial discrimination,” according to Mark S. Zaid, his Washington attorney.

Early on in his dispute with the CIA, Sterling, a graduate of Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, was offered a cash settlement and a job in the agency’s general counsel’s office. When he rejected the offer, he was fired from his job recruiting people to spy on Iran, Zaid said.

Sterling represented himself when he first filed suit against the CIA in federal court in the Southern District of New York in January 2001.

That panel rejected CIA Director George J. Tenet’s motion for dismissal on the state secrets privilege as “inappropriate.”

The CIA then successfully had the case transferred to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, which dismissed the suit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld that decision.

Zaid called Monday’s decision “quite a sad day for the U.S. Judicial system.”

The court rejected a similar appeal in November by former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who claimed she was fired for reporting wrongdoing. Like the CIA, the Justice Department said that litigating the lawsuit further would threaten “state secrets.”

Sterling’s other lawyer, George Doumar, said in his appeal that the government’s tactic is designed to beat back whistleblowers.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.