Category: Agencies

33 articles in this category

"A policy support organization" — Asked how the CIA workforce would be reacting to the war on Iran, John Kiriakou answered from the Iraq war: people put their heads down and did as they were told, after a boss told an assembled group — all of whom opposed the invasion — that the agency is not a policy organization but a policy support organization, and would do what the White House told it to do.
Abraxas Corporation — The private intelligence company founded in the 1990s by retired CIA operations officers as a tax pass-through and a place to smoke cigars and tell stories — which, after 9/11, made its founders, in John Kiriakou's phrase, Mega Millions rich.
Alex Station — CIA unit that tracked Osama bin Laden beginning in 1995; per John Kiriakou, who served as chief of its counterintelligence branch, the unit kept extremely tight security around its files, limited FBI investigators' access to information about future 9/11 hijackers Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, and — under a deliberate policy of non-cooperation with the FBI — failed to watchlist participants in the Malaysia summit where al-Qaeda planned the attacks.
Bureau of Prisons — The federal agency that ran John Kiriakou's incarceration — and one of his most persistent post-prison targets. The BOP overrode his judge's camp recommendation by deeming him "a threat to the public safety," threatened him with "diesel therapy" until 1,600 logged phone calls and letters from a dozen House members and two senators backed it off, and, per Kiriakou, functions as "an employment agency for unemployable semi-literate rural white men" and "a dumping ground for failed medical professionals" — an agency for which a prisoner's death is cheaper than his treatment.
CIA directorates — The four-part internal division of the CIA as John Kiriakou describes it to lay audiences — the Directorate of Intelligence that analyses, the Directorate of Operations that recruits spies and steals secrets, the administrative arm that makes the trains run on time, and the Directorate of Science and Technology that supplies the scientists, forgers and disguise makers — the structure that determines which training a new officer receives.
Defense HUMINT Service — The Pentagon's human collection outfit, which John Kiriakou names as one of the three agencies that already do everything the CIA does — alongside the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research for analysis and the NSA for interception — and which is therefore the core of his argument that Langley is redundant rather than merely badly run.
Defense Intelligence Agency — The Pentagon's intelligence arm, of which John Kiriakou holds a low opinion he states plainly and expects to be criticised for. He attributes the targeting data behind the 2026 Iranian elementary school strike to the agency.
The Directorate of Intelligence — The CIA's analytic cadre, where John Kiriakou spent the first seven years of his career working on Iraq before switching to operations — a culture he describes as convinced it holds the smartest people in the room, and whose function he says is duplicated across a dozen other agencies.
The Directorate of Operations — The CIA's clandestine service, which John Kiriakou joined from analysis because he spoke both Greek and Arabic — a culture he describes as wildly different from the analytic side, short on institutional memory and organised around the race to become a station chief.
The Directorate of Science and Technology — One of the CIA's four directorates, which in John Kiriakou's time was an afterthought responsible for disguises and briefcases with hidden compartments, and which he says now works with Palantir, Amazon, Nvidia and Elon Musk's companies on work closer to DARPA's than to anything the agency did in the past.
The Fifth Fleet in Bahrain — The United States naval presence based in Bahrain since 1976 — the naval component of Central Command, headquartered at Manama. For John Kiriakou as a young diplomat it was mainly a social resource: the officers' club for its salad bar, the enlisted club for football and cheap beer. It was also, he came to understand, the reason his reporting on Bahraini extrajudicial killings went nowhere. The ambassador's summary of the alliance was four words long. In 2026 the headquarters was itself hit by Iranian missiles — an outcome that, in Kiriakou's reading, inverts the entire purpose of the Gulf basing architecture.
The Jordanian intelligence service — The service John Kiriakou calls one of the best in the world and arguably the best in the Middle East — good, in his account, out of necessity: half of Jordan's population is Palestinian, Black September once fought on the steps of the palace, and the survival of the monarchy depends on having infiltrated every faction in the country.
Greek Intelligence Service — Greece's intelligence service, with which John Kiriakou worked closely during his Athens posting; its head of surveillance called off surveillance on him after watching him make a large offering at Saint Nectarios's tomb on the island of Aegina.
The Gulf Daily News — Bahrain's English-language newspaper, and the source John Kiriakou turned to when a bomb went off at the Ministry of Labour two months into his posting — its Indian reporter, whose telephone was bugged like his own, told him a civil uprising was about to explode.
Gulf intelligence services — John Kiriakou's assessment of the intelligence services of the Gulf Cooperation Council states, which he worked with closely during his CIA career and rates uniformly excellent — highly trained, multilingual and experienced worldwide — with the Emiratis and Qataris the strongest of them and the Emiratis, in his ranking, the best of all.
Hamas — The Palestinian movement behind the October 7, 2023 attack; John Kiriakou argues that a case could be made for calling it a freedom-fighting organization dedicated to the liberation of its people rather than simply a terrorist group, notes it is labeled a terrorist organization by only a small minority of UN member states, and has ruled Gaza since Israel's 2005 withdrawal.
Houthis — The Iran-aligned movement that controls the most important parts of Yemen, described by John Kiriakou as fierce fighters who beat the Saudi military over a decade of war and who in July 2026 declared a naval blockade of Saudi shipping.
Iranian intelligence capability — John Kiriakou's assessment of Iranian intelligence as poor and always having been poor, on the ground that Iranian officers do not receive good training and are essentially on their own, with only marginal help from the Russians and the Chinese.
Irish intelligence services — Ireland's intelligence and law-enforcement services, which John Kiriakou toured and met with during a speaking trip to Belfast, Cork, Dublin, and Waterford. Per Kiriakou, Irish intelligence and the Garda are especially strong at anti-money-laundering investigation and counterterrorism — the latter traced, he says, to the large number of Irish militants trained by Carlos the Jackal in Libya and Lebanon during the 1970s.
Italian intelligence services — John Kiriakou's assessment of the Italian services as very good and very close partners of the CIA — except in the Abu Omar case, when they refused to help, were ignored, and responded by investigating the CIA and identifying twenty-one of its officers.
Office of the Director of National Intelligence — The intelligence-community layer created in 2004, which John Kiriakou argues should never have existed. He traces its origin to George Tenet's failures over 9/11 and Iraq, notes it grew from sixteen employees to roughly twenty-four thousand, and points out that most agencies nominally under it are Defense Department bodies over which it controls nothing but the budget.
The Public Health Service in the prisons — John Kiriakou's contrast between the United States Public Health Service officers he worked with during fifteen years at the CIA, whom he found excellent, and the Public Health Service physician assistants he encountered as a prisoner at FCI Loretto, whom he describes as the dregs of the service — people dumped into the Bureau of Prisons because they could not work anywhere else in government.
The Punjab Elite Force — The Pakistani provincial counterterrorism unit that supplied part of the assault manpower for the Abu Zubaydah raids of March 2002 — black trousers, black t-shirts stencilled with a pistol, and, in John Kiriakou's telling, a refusal to wear body armour on the grounds that if God called them that night they would go.
Russia is not the gravest threat — John Kiriakou's rejection of the first policy speech by MI6's first woman chief, Blaise Metreweli, which named Russia and the Russo-Ukrainian war as the greatest danger to Britain and Europe. His counter-case is demographic and fiscal — Russia is practically bankrupt with a birth rate that would empty it in a century — and his own candidate for the real threat is not a state at all.
SAVAK — The intelligence service of the Shah of Iran, which John Kiriakou describes as bloodthirsty and as having spent far more effort investigating and murdering Iranian citizens than operating abroad. He credits its record — torture, executions of tens of thousands, and bodies dismembered and left in the street — with the durability of Iranian hostility to the Pahlavi family half a century later.
Secret Service — The U.S. agency protecting the president. John Kiriakou, who worked alongside it for 35 years, describes a culture of complacency and poor follow-up — great with guns, weak on training and follow-through — and calls the 2024 Butler rally shooting a colossal historic screw-up in which coverage of the surrounding buildings was outsourced to a county sheriff's department. He has also encountered the Service as an adversary, outside the Venezuelan embassy in Washington in 2019.
Shin Bet — Israel's internal security service; per John Kiriakou, one of the two declared Israeli intelligence officers at the Washington embassy, and the service whose officer, alongside a Mossad officer, he says tried to recruit him at his first CIA liaison briefing in the spring of 1990 — an approach his colleagues told him had been made to every one of them.
From sixteen employees to twenty thousand — John Kiriakou's support for cutting the staff of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, on the ground that a body created after 9/11 with sixteen employees to coordinate the agencies had grown to twenty thousand.
The CIA buyout offer — The deferred-resignation offer extended to CIA staff in early 2025 on the same terms given to other federal workers — six to eight months' pay, no requirement to come to work, and then the end of the contract — which John Kiriakou discussed as part of a broader reorientation of the agency towards the Western Hemisphere.
The ISI-Mossad relationship — John Kiriakou's characterisation of the relationship between Pakistani and Israeli intelligence — a formal relationship as recently as 1979 and none since, but no hostility either, because Pakistan is preoccupied with India and Afghanistan and Israel has never regarded Pakistan as a threat.
The nineteen intelligence agencies — Asked how many American intelligence agencies there are, John Kiriakou put the number at about nineteen, said there are no genuinely secret ones left, and argued that the sprawl is empire-building by the Pentagon — before asking why the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce need intelligence agencies at all.
The Trilateral Commission — The body John Kiriakou says he used to dismiss as conspiracy-theory material until someone close to him attended one of its meetings and told him what was actually discussed there: arms deals — and at Davos, how to manage the global economy.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity — A group of former U.S. intelligence officials, of which John Kiriakou is a member, that issues the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence — which Kiriakou arranged to give to whistleblower-adjacent figure Joe Kent.