Category: Anecdotes

18 articles in this category

Area 58 — The claim John Kiriakou says was put to him by a man who presents as entirely serious and is writing a book about it: that beyond Area 51 there is an Area 58 — seven more, and that much more secret — containing an underground bunker where alien craft land, known to those involved as the embassy because it is where the United States liaises with the aliens.
Embassy movie night — The weekly diversion John Kiriakou remembers from his posting to Pakistan after September 11th, when the station worked seven days a week and fourteen hours a day: on Wednesday nights the ambassador hosted a film in the embassy's small theatre, and the audience shouted at the screen and threw popcorn at whatever they had managed to get hold of.
Kiriakou on soccer — John Kiriakou's public reversal on football, a sport he had dismissed since his teens on the strength of a Saturday Night Live joke about a match between Yemen and Saudi Arabia being decided early by an insurmountable one-nil lead. Watching the 2026 World Cup, he concluded he had been wrong.
Presidents asleep in meetings — John Kiriakou's answer to who is the highest-profile person he ever saw fall asleep in a meeting — George H. W. Bush — together with his explanation that presidents do it all the time because the demands on their time leave too few hours in the day, and his father's account of Ronald Reagan doing it constantly.
The Alaska glacier — The visitor centre John Kiriakou saw on a 2016 trip to Alaska with Gary Johnson, built at the foot of a glacier close enough to touch from the observation deck and by then a quarter of a mile away from it — an image he uses as the plainest available demonstration of climate change, and one he refuses to let pass as a joke.
The Ann Coulter dinner — John Kiriakou's account of an unplanned dinner in Los Angeles around 2016 at which a college friend arrived with Ann Coulter, and of finding her interesting, well-informed and lovely — from which he concludes that the public hatred she trades in is an act, and one he says she has seriously cashed in on.
The Crenshaw text messages — John Kiriakou's account of taking his girlfriend's phone at midnight, finding a message from Dan Crenshaw asking what she was wearing, and texting back that he was her boyfriend and Crenshaw should ask his own wife — who had a ten-month-old baby at the time. Kiriakou says the woman showed him other messages that were filthy, and that she had saved them in case she needed to use them.
The Egyptian intelligence chief's son — A coincidence John Kiriakou reported from Oxford, Ohio in November 2025: his own son's marketing professor turned out to be the son of Muhammad Farag, head of the Egyptian intelligence service some thirty-five years earlier, whom Kiriakou had met in Cairo when the professor was a boy of seven or eight — and the two families went out to dinner together.
The interrupted break-in — A break-in in a friendly country nearly failed when the neighbour who was supposed to be at work turned out to have given birth the day before; John Kiriakou talked his way out of it at the door by claiming to be looking for his aunt's flat in the wrong building.
The Italian schoolchildren — An encounter John Kiriakou described in July 2026 as a measure of how far his late-career fame had spread: walking down Fifth Avenue in New York, a bus pulled up, a boy of about thirteen shouted his name in Italian, and sixty-five Italian middle schoolers ran off the bus. The selfies took half an hour.
The Libertarian Christmas party — The party John Kiriakou attended in a townhouse in Old Town Alexandria, held at the end of January because — being Libertarians — the organisers could not get their act together in December, and at which the head of the Libertarian Party of Virginia asked him to run for governor and was refused on the spot.
The new Iraqi flag — Before the invasion of Iraq, John Kiriakou walked into the CIA's Iraq Operations Group and found its director at his desk with Crayola markers, colouring in a design for a new Iraqi flag.
The sixty-five-cent arrangement — The deal John Kiriakou struck with the chaplain at FCI Loretto: rather than keep his 65-cents-an-hour janitor's wage, he asked to be kept on the books while the money went to the next man on the list, and to stop coming to work — which is how he found the time to write Doing Time Like a Spy.
The stapler in the Dirksen building — An incident John Kiriakou witnessed while serving as a senior staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: a Democratic senator threw a stapler at a staff member in a hallway of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, swore at him, and then looked around to see who had seen it.
The tomato patch surveillance — John Kiriakou's earliest surveillance operation, run at the age of nine with walkie-talkies against the neighbourhood children he suspected of stealing his father's tomatoes.
The Walmart phone call — John Kiriakou's account, from a White House friend, that Jared Kushner personally telephoned the chief executive of Walmart to find a job for a woman whose life sentence Donald Trump had commuted, and rang back every six months to check on her.
The White House pastry chef — John Kiriakou's former next-door neighbour, a White House pastry chef who was in the building when Donald Trump came to meet Barack Obama four days after the 2016 election, and who told Kiriakou that the president-elect looked sick and looked scared.
Three square meals and a warm bed — John Kiriakou has said he will never forget a remark he overheard from three men playing cards in an empty television room at FCI Loretto, who counted up the meals, the bed, the clothes, the television and the medical care they were given and concluded that the place was very nearly paradise.