Category: Biography

20 articles in this category

Coffee with a cabinet member — John Kiriakou's disclosure that he had coffee with a member of the cabinet who told him to be patient about his pardon — and told him to watch what he said. He reports the meeting while stating plainly that there is nothing further he can do to make his case, and that he is not confident the outcome will be decided on justice.
"Do not ever attempt to contact me again" — The reply John Kiriakou says he received from John Kerry, then Secretary of State, after emailing him privately in the days before reporting to prison to beg that his sentence be commuted. Kiriakou had worked closely with Kerry for two and a half years; the one-line answer, sent after two or three days, was the last he ever heard from him.
I should have gone to film school — One of the two answers John Kiriakou gives when asked whether, knowing what he knows now, he would join the CIA again. He is candid that he has answered the question differently over the years — sometimes yes, because the agency can only be changed from inside, and sometimes that he should have gone to film school, which he insists is not a joke.
Learning to dive in the embassy pool — John Kiriakou's brief diving history, offered when the Nordstream sabotage discussion turned to the physics of deep water: lessons in the pool of the American embassy in 1991, one dive in the Red Sea at Sharm el-Sheikh in about 1992, and never again after that.
Seven cell phones — John Kiriakou's account of why his first marriage ended — that his wife, a ballet teacher, knew only that he worked for the CIA, and that a career in which one of seven cell phones rang at midnight and he left speaking Arabic for a day at a time could not survive the questions it produced.
Sitting on my father's lap — John Kiriakou's earliest political memory — being four or five years old, watching buildings burn on television, and asking his father why, to be told that some bad men had killed Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and people were very upset — which he uses as his benchmark for how divided the United States has become.
The desert sunset photograph — The half-hour standoff John Kiriakou describes with Saudi security after photographing a desert sunset that happened to include the Ministry of Interior in the distance — resolved, he says, only when he produced his black diplomatic passport. He also explains that the ban on photographing American embassies from the street is Office of Diplomatic Security policy rather than law, because such pictures can be used to case a building.
The divorce at the airport — The end of John Kiriakou's first marriage, as he tells it: after 17 November assassinated his next-door neighbour and left a manifesto saying they had set out that morning to kill him instead, the embassy put him in an armoured car, collected his children and his wife, and packed out the house. His wife reached the airport, walked up to him and said she wanted a divorce. They flew home on the same plane.
The hundred-city tour — The year-long, hundred-city speaking tour John Kiriakou described beginning in early 2026 — opening in Belfast, Dublin and Manchester, returning to Scotland and northern England, then the United States and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, continental Europe, the Persian Gulf and East Asia.
The job in the medical practice — The made-up job that carried John Kiriakou through his first months out of prison — invented for him by the parents of a friend, both physicians, so that he would have something — and the patched-together living that followed it, including a think-tank post that ended in a mass layoff after a year.
The Kiriakou children — The five children of John Kiriakou, and what they do — a bond trader, an elementary school music teacher, a college junior studying supply chain economics, a sophomore who has not yet decided, and a fourteen-year-old. None of them, to their father's declared relief, has any interest in the CIA.
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 9/11 truth honorarium — How John Kiriakou came to headline a 9/11 truth event he had not realised was one: a $500 speaking fee from a PR man he had known through better days, a poster that revealed the sponsor, a sister telling him to withdraw, and his decision to honour the commitment anyway — while telling the audience to their faces that he would never believe Building 7 was a controlled demolition or that explosive thermite paint exists.
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 Penn State textbooks — How a week-long high-school scholarship to Penn State sent the teenage John Kiriakou into the university bookstore to buy the textbooks for Middle East courses he was not enrolled in — the purchase he credits with turning a childhood fascination into a field of study.
The Satan dream — Seventeen years after leaving Pakistan, John Kiriakou said he still dreamt about it every night — a recurring dream of Satan hunting him house to house — and described a failed blood pressure drug now used to erase the dreams of PTSD patients.
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 twenty-seven cousins — John Kiriakou has said Daniel Ellsberg was a hero in his family before he was six years old — because seven of his twenty-seven first cousins on his mother's side fought in Vietnam believing what they had been told, and it was Ellsberg who showed the family that all of it had been a lie.
Too much work to be Mrs Kiriakou — The reason John Kiriakou says his wife gave for leaving in 2017 — that it was simply too much work to be Mrs John Kiriakou — and his statement that he does not blame her.
Typhoid fever in Bangkok — The illness John Kiriakou calls the sickest he has ever been — typhoid fever caught in Bangkok in 2002, which he had assumed the inoculation would prevent, and which put him in hospital twice. The doctor's correction: the shot does not stop you catching typhoid, only makes it slightly less virulent when you do.