Category: Analysis

102 articles in this category

A dangerous neighborhood — The contrast John Kiriakou drew between his Gulf contacts on the second day of the 2026 Iran war — friends in Dubai who were panicked as drones struck the city's landmark towers, and the son of a senior Qatari official who simply chuckled and said 'this is life in the Middle East. We live in a dangerous neighborhood.'
A virtual state of war with Venezuela — John Kiriakou said in February 2025 that he was mystified by the choice of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, describing him as a neoconservative in the mould of George W. Bush, and predicted that on Venezuela the second Trump administration would simply continue the Biden policy — which had itself continued the first Trump policy — leaving the two countries in what he called a virtual state of war.
"All it takes is a signature" — John Kiriakou's answer, drawn from his years as a Senate investigator, to the claim that Congress had run out of time to obtain the Epstein flight logs — that a committee's investigative power is exercised by one senator signing a piece of paper, which can be done at any hour, and that the excuse is therefore not a sensible one.
Bahrain's force majeure — John Kiriakou's explanation of Bahrain declaring force majeure on its energy commitments during the 2026 Iran war — why it is catastrophic for Bahrain and irrelevant to the global oil market, since the kingdom produces and consumes about a hundred thousand barrels a day and sells only the output of a small offshore field gifted to it by Saudi Arabia.
Declare victory and go home — The exit John Kiriakou prescribed for Israel in Gaza: turn the territory back to the United Nations, declare Hamas destroyed, declare victory, then engage the Saudis on the Abraham Accords and negotiate a deal later. His reasoning was that nothing remained to destroy, that killing as many people as possible is not a viable policy, and that Israel had no other way out.
Do what is right or what is easy — Asked what he would tell the boy who once told his father he wanted to be a spy, John Kiriakou said he would tell him to always tell the truth and do the right thing — arguing that everyone already knows in their gut the difference between right and wrong, and that the only real question is whether they then do what is right or what is easy.
Dr Oz and the Armenian hospices — John Kiriakou's reaction to a television segment by Mehmet Oz alleging fraud by Armenian-run hospices in Los Angeles — that a man he identifies as a veteran of the Turkish special forces zeroing in on Armenians in California is not a coincidence, and that each of the administration's appointees appears to arrive with a racial scandal of their own.
Epstein and more than one service — John Kiriakou's revision of his own position after the release of a further tranche of Epstein documents — that while he continues to believe Jeffrey Epstein was working for the Israelis, the papers indicate he was probably also working for the British, probably for the Americans, and possibly for the Germans.
"Every Israeli I ever knew" — John Kiriakou's account of the attitudes he encountered among Israelis he knew professionally and socially — that almost every one of them wanted the Palestinians killed or exiled — together with his description of a sensibility he says is palpable walking around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and his immediate self-correction when he overstated the claim.
Expanding your realm — The lesson in CIA office politics John Kiriakou says he was taught in his first week — that to make yourself as important as possible you must constantly expand your realm and be king of as many people as you can — and his argument that at the senior-most level the same instinct starts reaching across agencies.
Fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction — John Kiriakou's objection to the designation of fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction — that a WMD is by definition a single weapon that kills large numbers at once, that no drug can be that, and that stretching the term cheapens and disables it. He notes in passing that Venezuela does not make fentanyl and that what it does ship goes to Western Europe.
Hope is not a strategy — Opening a February 2025 commentary with a maxim he attributes to business school — that hope is not a strategy — John Kiriakou nonetheless set out four things he was hoping the second Trump administration meant, on the grounds that if they did not come from Trump he did not expect them from anyone else in American politics.
Islam in America — John Kiriakou's response to a widely circulated clip of thousands of American Muslims at prayer, captioned as evidence that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States. He notes that nothing in the clip establishes where or what the event was, and that most new American Muslims are African Americans converting — often, in his experience, in the prison system.
Israel and the fear of being held back — John Kiriakou's explanation of why an ally that receives almost everything it asks for still spies on the United States — that the Israelis are always afraid something is being withheld, and, having nowhere to be pushed except the Mediterranean, will do anything to be certain about their own security.
Jihad means to struggle — John Kiriakou's insistence, as a graduate in Islamic theology and an Arabic speaker, that jihad does not mean and has never meant holy war. He traces the American usage to media coverage of the 1979 Iranian revolution and the embassy hostage crisis, and points out that one can declare a jihad against poverty or in favour of education.
Kermit Roosevelt and Mosaddegh — The CIA officer John Kiriakou names as the man who ran the 1953 overthrow of Iran's Prime Minister Mosaddegh on behalf of British Petroleum — who called it the gravest mistake of his life in the only interview he ever gave, and who, according to the documents Kiriakou has since read in the archives, did not actually run it at all.
Leaks come from the Pentagon — John Kiriakou's rule of attribution for national security leaks, drawn from his own CIA experience: ninety-nine times out of a hundred the leak came from the Pentagon — which he says leaks constantly, is so gigantic that the source cannot be traced, and does not polygraph anybody. He adds the motive: somebody who opposed the operation and was overruled.
Lincoln's candlelight pardons — The historical contrast John Kiriakou drew while discussing a mass grant of clemency: stories of Abraham Lincoln staying up late into the night pardoning Civil War deserters by candlelight, on the principle that nobody should be executed for cowardice — set against a modern president who Kiriakou says has pardoned more people than anyone in American history, whenever the mood strikes him.
Mental health as a disciplinary problem — John Kiriakou has said that before his own prosecution he never gave five seconds of thought to the American prison system, and that living inside it showed him a broken one — in particular a system in which mental health is treated as a disciplinary problem rather than a medical one.
Mexico City as an espionage hub — John Kiriakou's assessment of Mexico City as one of the world's principal centres of international espionage, alongside Vienna, London, Paris and Washington — driven by a gargantuan American embassy that Russian services target from next door — and his reading of why Mexico simply ignored a dossier of suspected Russian officers handed over by the Biden administration.
Mojtaba Khamenei — The successor named as Iran's leader after the assassination of Ali Khamenei, and John Kiriakou's reading of the choice — that the only real objection is the shared surname, which exposes Iran to charges of hereditary succession, but that the appointment was an act of defiance aimed squarely at Donald Trump's declaration that he would choose Iran's next leader.
No ethics training at the CIA — John Kiriakou's claim that the CIA provides no ethics training of any kind, so that an officer either arrives with a personal moral code or never acquires one — and the classroom hypothetical he uses to show where the line goes undrawn.
No prosecution for a dead journalist — A fact John Kiriakou says he read the day he raised it — that the Israeli government has never prosecuted anyone over the death of any journalist, ever — and the conclusion he draws from it: that killing journalists is state policy, and that Israel should stop pretending otherwise and simply say reporters enter at their own risk.
"One dead pedophile" — John Kiriakou's explanation of why he believes the American intelligence community will not examine whether Jeffrey Epstein worked for a foreign service — that the accusation points at Israel, that the relationship with Israel is uniquely valuable, and that nobody in Washington will upset it over one dead pedophile when covering it up is easier.
Pardons nobody asked for — Two cases John Kiriakou cites of people pardoned without applying: the Binance founder, who said publicly that he had never met the president, never asked for a pardon and never applied for one; and Darryl Strawberry, a New York Mets great with tax and drug problems behind him. Kiriakou raises both while waiting, unsuccessfully, for a pardon he has actively sought for years.
Presidential appetite for intelligence — John Kiriakou's ranking of the presidents he served under by how much intelligence they actually wanted — from George H. W. Bush, who asked for special analytic products constantly, to Bill Clinton, who he says was briefed twice in eight years.
Qatari money in Egypt — John Kiriakou's explanation for Qatar injecting seven and a half billion dollars into the Egyptian economy: to annoy Saudi Arabia. He describes a long, close Saudi–Egyptian relationship dating back to the mid-1960s, a terrible Qatari–Saudi one, and an Egypt happy to take the money — including the year the Egyptians thanked the Saudis for their generosity with an uninhabited island in the Red Sea.
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.
Russia was always the same enemy — John Kiriakou's observation, from inside the CIA, that the collapse of the Soviet Union changed nothing about how the agency worked on Russia. The marching orders given to his colleagues on the Russia account were not to change policy at all: Russia was treated as the same enemy it had been as the Soviet Union, with a brief exception during the Yeltsin presidency.
Sanctions and the Russian adjustment — John Kiriakou's account of why sanctions stopped hurting Russia: Sergey Lavrov's admission that Moscow was caught off balance by the speed of the American response, the three or four weeks that shock lasted, and the discovery that Russia did not need the United States or its banking system once India and China agreed to buy whatever oil it had.
Snowden did not defect — John Kiriakou's two corrections to the treatment of Edward Snowden at Tulsi Gabbard's 2025 confirmation hearing — that "traitor" has a constitutional definition Snowden does not meet, there having been no declaration of war since December 1941, and that Snowden did not defect to Russia but was stranded in a Moscow transit lounge en route to Ecuador when John Kerry revoked his passport.
"Stefanik will not be governor" — John Kiriakou's flat, on-the-record prediction about the New York governor's race, made against a friend he describes as irrationally conservative who insisted the contest would turn on a single issue — the right to carry a gun. Kiriakou called it the most ridiculous thing he had heard the man say, and argued that Elise Stefanik's political career is finished.
Syrian minorities and the Israeli strikes — John Kiriakou's account of a conflict inside American policy toward post-Assad Syria: Washington wants the country's Christian, Jewish and Druze communities protected and has recognised the new government and moved to reopen its embassy, while Israel continues to strike Syrian territory despite repeated instructions from Donald Trump to stop.
"Take our word for it" — John Kiriakou's account of the standing justification given after American strikes kill civilians — that there was a terrorist present, and that the public would agree if it could see the intelligence — set against his statement that he saw that intelligence and it was fabricated, and applied to the 2021 Kabul strike that killed seven children.
Taking the ball and going home — John Kiriakou's rule of thumb, offered after the July 2024 Butler shooting, that a failed state-run assassination is not retried: an operation with that many moving parts would not be attempted in front of thousands of people, would not be entrusted to a twenty-year-old, and once blown would be abandoned rather than repeated.
The Afghan Zero Units — The CIA-trained Afghan paramilitary units whose surviving members were resettled in the United States, and John Kiriakou's account of why so many of them have broken down: recruited without training or therapy, taken out at night to kill their own tribesmen and extended family, promised the land of milk and honey, and then met on arrival with no work permit, no treatment and no help at all.
The Afghans in diplomatic limbo — John Kiriakou's two-sided answer on the Afghan evacuees still held at a base in Qatar years after the fall of Kabul: that anyone who works for an occupation government which then loses will probably end badly, and that the United States nevertheless owes a debt to people who worked for it and should not leave them hanging.
The Al Udeid strike — John Kiriakou's account of Iran's face-saving retaliation for the American bombing of its nuclear sites in June 2025 — a single missile fired at Al Udeid air base in Qatar, announced two hours in advance, which he says hit a geodesic dome housing top secret communications.
The approvals required to kill Assange — John Kiriakou's reading of the 2021 Yahoo News report on CIA plans to abduct or assassinate Julian Assange — that an operation of that kind requires three separate approvals, from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, from the government of the target's own Five Eyes country, and from the congressional oversight committees — and his conclusion that if the planning went as far as reported, all three were given.
The attribution problem in the DNC hack — Asked in 2017 whether he had any confidence in the intelligence community's assessments of Russian interference, John Kiriakou said he had none — objecting that no one had ever defined what was meant by hacking, that the published evidence told the public nothing, and that an agency asking to be taken at its word should not be.
The Australian pilot — The disappearance John Kiriakou recounts as an argument for declassification rather than as proof of anything: a pilot in his early twenties flying on 10 September 1978 who radioed that a silver cylinder was above his aircraft matching his speed exactly, said it was not an aircraft, was cut off by a loud sound of electronic interference, and was never seen again — along with the plane.
The Bahraini fire brigade — A report John Kiriakou says he found credible during the 2026 Iran war — that a Bahraini fire brigade refused to fight the fire at Manama airport after an Iranian strike. His explanation is the kingdom's sectarian arrangement: a Shia-majority population under a Sunni royal family, which he says 'can be a problem at times.'
The bunker busters as preemption — What John Kiriakou says friends in the CIA, the Defense Department and the White House told him about why Donald Trump broke with every previous president and struck Iran — that Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was so certain of an Iranian nuclear attack that it was prepared to use nuclear weapons itself, and that Trump used bunker-buster bombs so that Israel would not.
The call about rebuilding Gaza — A telephone call John Kiriakou says he received on 7 November 2025 from a contact in the Israeli government, reporting that Israel had approached private American companies to redevelop Gaza — not Gazan Palestinians — and that the widely reported Saudi-administration plan was newspaper talk rather than anything the Israeli military was discussing. His conclusion: 'the fix is already in.'
The calls not to attack Iran — John Kiriakou's report, given in late January 2026 and sourced to friendships he had recently formed in three Middle Eastern royal families, that the Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians and Emiratis had all telephoned Donald Trump to ask him not to attack Iran — the Egyptians warning of an almost immediate region-wide war — and that the Israelis had asked the same thing, for the unsentimental reason that they had not replaced the interceptors spent in the last round.
The Capitol switchboard — John Kiriakou's advice, drawn from years as a congressional staffer, on how ordinary constituents actually move members of Congress — that the House will act on a single letter, that the Senate needs ten or twenty calls to put an issue on a senator's agenda, and that the Capitol operator will identify a caller's own representative for them.
The case against work camps — John Kiriakou, who asked to serve his own sentence at a minimum-security work camp and was sent to the prison across the street instead, came out of prison arguing that the camps should not exist at all — and, in the same breath, that some prisoners are dangerous enough that prisons certainly should.
The Chinese embassy in London — John Kiriakou's assessment of the Chinese mission planned for London — an embassy occupying an entire city block that would be the largest in the world, approved over street protests, and which he calls 'the mother of all spy dens.' He contrasts it with Washington's refusal of the same proposal, and predicts China will now build such embassies everywhere.
The CIA that never existed — A former senior CIA officer once told John Kiriakou that the agency he spoke about so fondly had never really existed — that it had only existed in his mind, that it had always been troubled and antithetical to American life, and that he had simply been too junior to see what was happening at the top. Kiriakou has come to think the man was right.
The CIA under a left-wing president — John Kiriakou's two-part answer to a hypothetical about a socialist administration — that most of the CIA would carry on as though nothing had happened, because officers serve at the pleasure of the president, while elements of the directorate of operations would actively seek to remove such a president. His supporting example is John F. Kennedy.
The Colonial Pipeline hack — Days after the May 2021 ransomware attack that shut the East Coast's main fuel pipeline, John Kiriakou said an FBI contact told him the bureau was fairly confident the Russian government was not behind it — and turned the episode into an indictment of the National Security Agency for watching Americans instead of defending them.
The Costa Rica model — John Kiriakou's suggestion, raised while discussing Russian demands to demilitarise Ukraine, that a country can simply have no military at all — Costa Rica having a national police force, no army, no navy, and a coast guard of one boat in the Atlantic and one in the Pacific. He immediately noted why it would not be permitted in Ukraine's case.
The counterfeit dollar trade — John Kiriakou's account of high-quality counterfeit US currency — the Swiss paper that makes it possible, an estimate that five to ten percent of the notes in circulation may be forged, and a quiet policy of buying up caches at thirty cents on the dollar and incinerating them.
The counterintelligence report that stopped — John Kiriakou's account of an annual FBI assessment of the worst counterintelligence threats to the United States that named Russia, China and Israel every year, reported each time by Newsweek's Jeff Stein — until, he says, Dianne Feinstein changed the rules so that the report no longer had to be issued.
The cyber victimhood complaint — John Kiriakou's dismissal of American public complaint about foreign cyber attacks — that everything the United States accuses Iran, North Korea and China of doing, it does itself every day, because disrupting foreign networks is the NSA's job as much as intercepting communications is. Better security is needed, he says, but so is it by everyone else, against the United States.
The dispersal of the Iranian program — John Kiriakou's assessment that neither the Israeli nor the American strikes had any lasting effect on Iran's nuclear programme, because the facilities are spread across the country and mostly deep underground — and his reading of Iran's shrugging response as the best evidence that the bombing did not work.
The DNC in debt — John Kiriakou's July 2026 summary of the Democratic National Committee's finances, drawn from New York Times reporting: two million dollars in debt against Republican reserves of $130 million, vendors asked to hold their invoices until after the elections, the party headquarters pledged as loan collateral, and a chairman who threw his phone at a junior aide.
The Emir of Bahrain's verdict — The judgement John Kiriakou says the Emir of Bahrain delivered to him at his beach house — that George H. W. Bush was the last American president to give the Arabs a fair shake — and Kiriakou's reasons for agreeing with it.
The Eritrea prohibition — John Kiriakou's account of being forbidden to visit Eritrea on a Senate Foreign Relations Committee trip through the Horn of Africa — not by the Eritrean government but by the State Department, whose only stated reason was that Eritrea is 'the North Korea of Africa.' He notes that he was later free to dine at the Eritrean ambassador's residence in Washington.
The Flynn charges — John Kiriakou supported the appointment of a special counsel in 2017 while rejecting the Russia allegations outright — arguing that the case for an investigation rested not on election interference but on a list of ordinary, provable crimes he believed senior Trump campaign figures, and Michael Flynn in particular, had already committed.
The French human sources — John Kiriakou's confirmation of what Chris Hedges was told by French intelligence after 9/11 — that the CIA had no human assets inside al-Qaeda at all, while the French thwarted attacks by having recruited people next to the plotters — and the general principle he draws from it: that no amount of money spent on electronics substitutes for a human source.
"The government is the biggest leaker" — John Kiriakou's answer, given on the eve of his imprisonment, to the argument that leaks make clandestine work impossible — that the United States government is itself the largest leaker of classified information in the country, sanctioning disclosure whenever it suits, as with the makers of Zero Dark Thirty and with drone-strike details given to the New York Times during an election campaign.
The Greenland prediction he got wrong — John Kiriakou's account of dismissing the idea that the United States would seize Greenland on a podcast one afternoon, and hearing Stephen Miller say the opposite on CNN an hour later — after which he treated the threat to a NATO member as a legitimate problem, and looked to Emmanuel Macron rather than Keir Starmer to stop it.
The hundred and eighty-seven Israeli officers — The figure John Kiriakou gives for undeclared Israeli intelligence officers working clandestinely in the United States when he joined the CIA around 1990 — 187 identified by the FBI, over and above the one declared Mossad officer and one declared Shin Bet officer at the Israeli embassy.
The inside-job refusal — Pressed on controlled-demolition theories about the World Trade Center, John Kiriakou refuses the premise while conceding the limits of his own expertise — he was inside the CIA's Counterterrorism Center before the attacks, and says he has never seen any evidence that 9/11 was an inside job.
The Iranians only have to survive — John Kiriakou's formulation of the asymmetry at the heart of the 2026 Iran war — that winning would require the United States to overthrow the Iranian government and install a pro-American, pro-Israeli replacement in Tehran, while Iran wins simply by continuing to exist. His conclusion is that Washington must either commit to killing half the population of Iran over twenty years or walk away.
The January 6 pipe bomber report — The story John Kiriakou says he posted to Facebook and nobody else picked up: a report that the FBI had identified the person who placed pipe bombs outside the RNC and DNC as a former Capitol Police officer who had been on rotation to the CIA doing physical security, recognised from a limp caused by a college sports injury, at a stated confidence of 94 per cent. She had not been charged, and Kiriakou lists the questions it would raise if true.
The land-bridge precedents — John Kiriakou's argument, made during the August 2025 Washington summit on Ukraine, that the Russian demand for a land bridge to Crimea is a solved problem in diplomatic history — the corridor that connected West Germany to West Berlin being the obvious model — and that no American network was discussing what he considered the likely linchpin of any agreement.
The Latin American newspaper prediction — The prediction John Kiriakou gave to a Latin American newspaper a week or two after Donald Trump's first inauguration — that things would be better for whistleblowers under Trump because they could not possibly be worse than under Barack Obama — and his later verdict that he had been "very foolish" to say it, since the Trump administration opened three times as many leak investigations and won longer sentences.
The MI5 model for America — The discussions John Kiriakou says he took part in on his first trip to London as a CIA officer in 1992 or 1993, about creating an American equivalent of Britain’s MI5 — a domestic intelligence service, without arrest powers, that would spy on citizens and hand what it found to the FBI — and his observation thirty years later that it looked to be coming to pass.
The mob vote for Trump — John Kiriakou's answer to a viewer asking whether he discussed politics with organised crime figures in prison: that he did, a great deal, that they love Donald Trump without qualification, and that the reason is a New York real estate developer's unavoidable daily contact with the unions the mob controls.
The multi-state permit — The warning John Kiriakou says he was given when he obtained his concealed carry permit: that the multi-state permit is not recognised in New York, New Jersey or Maryland, and that he should not carry a concealed weapon in any of them. He raised it while rejecting a friend's theory that gun rights would decide a New York governor's race.
The nineteen-hundred-dollar premium — John Kiriakou's own stake in the collapse of the Affordable Care Act subsidies: a monthly health insurance premium going from roughly $900 to $1,900. He says plainly that he cannot do it — that he does not have $1,900 a month for health insurance — and notes that the figure exceeds what the broadcast pays him.
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 Nordstream patsy — John Kiriakou's assessment of the man arrested in Italy over the Nordstream pipeline sabotage: a patsy. He says he cannot imagine otherwise, feels for whoever the man is, and thinks the authorities found somebody they could take a dump on — while maintaining that the operation itself required not just real expertise but state expertise and capability.
The orange jumpsuits — John Kiriakou has argued that the clothing ISIS put on the Western hostages it beheaded was not a coincidence but a citation: the group dressed its prisoners in orange jumpsuits because the United States dressed its own prisoners in orange jumpsuits, and once a government tortures, it has licensed every other government to do the same to its people.
The Outer Banks seasonal workers — John Kiriakou's observation, from years of family summers on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, that he never encountered an American lifeguard and almost no American shop clerks or waiters — the staff being Bulgarian, Romanian, Moldovan and otherwise Eastern European, working on the cheap, housed eight to twelve to a house and sent home at the end of the season.
The Palestinian middle class in the Gulf — John Kiriakou's stated puzzlement, after a career spent on and in the Middle East, at what he calls a region-wide dislike of Palestinians among Arab governments — given that Palestinians constitute the entire professional middle class of the Gulf states, and are themselves Arabs and mostly Muslims.
The Pentagon and the Pakistani arsenal — What John Kiriakou says he was told unofficially while stationed in Pakistan in 2002 — that Pervez Musharraf had turned control of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal over to the United States, and that the Pentagon controlled it — and Pakistan's insistence in the years since that this was never true, which Kiriakou says would be the more worrying answer.
The Pentagon injury figures — John Kiriakou's explanation of why the Pentagon was able to withhold news of dozens of American casualties in the Iran war: not secrecy law, but the absence of any statute requiring disclosure. In his framing Congress is asleep at the switch, having never passed such a law, so the department reports nothing it is not obliged to report.
The Puerto Rico thirds — The division of Puerto Rican opinion John Kiriakou says was given to him on the island by a mid-level government official — a third for independence, a third for statehood, a third for leaving things exactly as they are — and the official's conclusion that because of it, nothing will ever change. Kiriakou has repeated the split in his own voice as an argument that Puerto Rico is a colony but not a settler colony, and doubts statehood will ever come.
The Putin call and the China exception — In February 2025 John Kiriakou said he was optimistic that relations with Russia would improve, on the strength of a telephone call being arranged between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin — but drew a sharp exception for China, arguing that nobody in the American government was sincere about improving those relations and that Washington, not Beijing, was instigating talk of war.
The Red Fort bombing — John Kiriakou's on-air attribution of a car bombing outside the Red Fort in New Delhi to Kashmiri separatist groups — offered with the acknowledgement that saying so brings him death threats from Pakistanis, and with a flat definition: groups that murder civilians for political purposes are terrorist groups, whatever their political point may be.
The referee in a Greek-Turkish war — John Kiriakou's assessment, given in Athens in 2025, that Greece cannot count on the United States taking its side against Turkey — Washington would position itself as an honest broker between the two — but that NATO support, particularly from Italy, France, Germany and Britain, would make Greece able to cope even without American leadership.
The Russian nuclear umbrella — John Kiriakou's report, two days after the Israeli strikes on Iran began in June 2025, that Russia had declared Iran to be under the protection of its nuclear umbrella — and his conclusion that this rules out any Israeli nuclear use against Iran, because it would risk Russian nuclear retaliation against Israel.
The Saudi-administered Gaza proposal — An arrangement reported in the Israeli left-wing press and repeated by John Kiriakou as a possible basis for future talks: a disarmed, semi-independent Gaza policed and rebuilt by Saudi Arabia, with a port, an airport, a power grid and a sewage system.
The synagogue in Damascus — John Kiriakou's account of visiting an operating, practising Jewish synagogue in Damascus, and the forecast he attaches to it — that he would not bet money on the safety of Christians, Jews, Alawites or any other religious minority in Syria under the present government or any other, whatever else is said of Bashar al-Assad.
The two ISIs — Asked how much cooperation he got from Pakistan's intelligence service after 9/11, John Kiriakou answered that the honest answer was two answers: the counterterrorism officers he worked with had all been trained in America and Britain, while the men who gave him the stink eye in the corridors of ISI headquarters were the ones who had created the Taliban.
The two officers who changed — John Kiriakou's account of two colleagues he liked as junior officers and watched become something else — one who rose to deputy director for counterterrorism at both the CIA and the FBI and whom he calls a war criminal, and one who took over the bin Laden unit and became, in his phrase, a stone cold killer.
The unarmed ship — John Kiriakou's enumeration of war crimes committed in the 2026 Iran war — striking civilian targets, rocketing a school and killing 160 children, and sinking a naval vessel and then refusing to aid the survivors — and his insistence that the objection is not confined to Israeli conduct.
The unsearched car at Mar-a-Lago — An episode John Kiriakou related in July 2024 as evidence that the Secret Service's problem is systemic rather than confined to the Butler rally: a retired Army colonel and Republican fundraiser was asked at the Mar-a-Lago gate whether he had weapons in the car, said yes, went back to his hotel to lock them up — and later realised nobody had ever searched the vehicle.
The unswept roof — John Kiriakou's two security observations after the killing of Charlie Kirk: that drone surveillance of outdoor events is cheap, easy and has no reason not to be used; and that the building the shooter is said to have fired from had been closed for renovation since April and supposedly locked up tight, yet nobody in the campus police department appears to have walked up to the roof to check.
The Washington Post editorial on the cover-up — In May 2017 John Kiriakou pointed to an editorial in a newspaper he says he generally hates, which advised Donald Trump to save himself by adopting Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra posture — on the principle that it is never the crime that brings a president down but the cover-up, a principle Kiriakou illustrated with the conviction of Scooter Libby.
The Washington Post under Bezos — John Kiriakou's running account of the decline of a newspaper he subscribes to and no longer recognises — an editorial board he says has gone wholly right-wing and obsequious to its owner, foreign bureaus and sports and local coverage cut back, a comment of his own rejected for criticising Jeff Bezos, and his own short list of what he would want the paper to be instead.
The water's-edge doctrine — The old American convention that partisan disagreement stops at the border, which John Kiriakou says was destroyed by Newt Gingrich in 1995 — and whose collapse he offers as the reason the United States has spent thirty years unable to sustain a foreign policy across a change of administration.
Three Republican congressmen — John Kiriakou's arithmetic for why the shutdown fight was not over when the Senate cut its deal: the Senate produced its own agreement rather than voting on the House bill, so the House has to be recalled to vote on the Senate version. Republicans needed seven Democratic senators; the House needs only three Republican congressmen to kill it — which is why he thought attention should shift to the House.
Torture and morale inside the CIA — John Kiriakou's account of what the torture programme did to morale at the CIA — a compartment so tight that nobody knew for six or eight months, a workforce that split between objectors and true believers who enjoyed the work, and a pullback by George Tenet around 2005 that ended active torture at the secret sites while leaving the prisons open and Guantanamo untouched.
Turkey and a safe zone in Iran — John Kiriakou's response to the Turkish president's suggestion that, in the event of an attack on Iran, the Turkish army would establish a safe zone inside Iranian territory — that Ankara would love nothing more, having previously taken Iraqi, Cypriot and Syrian territory, and that pan-Turkism is a subject most people are unaware of.
Twenty-five al-Qaeda members — The Senate Foreign Relations Committee study John Kiriakou cites as finding that by the end of 2001 there were twenty-five active al-Qaeda members still in Afghanistan — the basis for his claim that the group was finished as a fighting force by Christmas.
Whether anyone is still looking for Zawahiri — Asked in December 2019 why Ayman al-Zawahiri had never been found, John Kiriakou offered a speculation he was careful to label as an outsider's: that the United States might simply have stopped looking for him, because al-Qaeda had become largely irrelevant and attention had moved to ISIS.
Whipping votes — John Kiriakou's explanation of what a party whip does and why Chuck Schumer's failure to do it mattered: a leader who tells his caucus to vote their conscience has not whipped the vote at all. Kiriakou traces the office to a figurative whip used in the 1700s and 1800s, and calls the concession very dangerous — an admission that you have lost.
Zaluzhny and the Nordstream prosecution — John Kiriakou's reaction to German investigators drawing a bead on the former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces over the Nordstream sabotage: that the CIA and the Pentagon now wish the case would go away, that the truth is not supposed to come out in such an operation, that Seymour Hersh probably had the kernel but not the details, and that it was very likely a joint operation. He expects somebody to go to prison.