KiriPedia Kiripedia The Free Encyclopedia of John Kiriakou's World

Category: Cases

15 articles in this category

  • Abu Omar rendition — The CIA's kidnapping of a Milan cleric, Abu Omar, who was sent to Egypt to be tortured; the case is what ultimately sent John Kiriakou to prison, after he confirmed a former colleague's surname to a journalist writing a book about it.
  • Assange plea deal — The 2024 agreement under which Julian Assange pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage, was processed in Saipan, and returned to Australia; John Kiriakou details its odd terms — a Chelsea Manning purge affidavit and a 25-year green-card ban — and the debate over whether it sets a precedent.
  • Athens bank fraud report — John Kiriakou's account of taking a dream job as COO of an Athens investment firm in 2020, discovering it was an elaborate bank fraud, and being unable to get the FBI to act — an agent telling him that without 'terrorism, China, or January 6th,' they were not interested.
  • Bahrain fishing officer demarche — Kiriakou's account of serving, while stationed in Bahrain, as the embassy's econ officer and by extension its fishing, banking, aviation, and environment officer — including delivering a formal U.S. demarche to Bahrain's deputy foreign minister over a U.S.-Canada dispute about whether clams legally count as fish.
  • Citizens United — The Supreme Court decision John Kiriakou blames for legalizing unlimited corporate political money — which he says lets AIPAC pour tens of millions into single congressional races to defeat candidates who cross Israel.
  • Iraq WMD intelligence — John Kiriakou's account of how the case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was fabricated: the intelligence community's consensus was that Iraq had no WMD, but the White House had already decided to invade and sought analysis to fit the policy.
  • Israel's cell-phone assassinations in Iran — John Kiriakou's account of how Israel wiped out Iran's military leadership by tracking cell phones — recruiting destitute Afghan refugees as $100-a-month spotters, and, when the generals stopped carrying phones, targeting their bodyguards' phones instead.
  • Israeli art student spy ring — A spring 2001 U.S. counterintelligence report on so-called "Israeli art students" who used counterfeit visas to try to access federal buildings and military sites, some living on the same Hollywood, Florida block as 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta; per John Kiriakou, the "dancing Israelis" stopped by NYPD in a white panel van on 9/11 were part of the same espionage effort and were released back to Israel rather than prosecuted.
  • Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners — John Kiriakou's account of systematic abuse in Israeli detention after October 7 — thousands held, whistleblower reports of forced amputations, and a prison-wide rule that Palestinian inmates must crawl rather than walk, on pain of being beaten with rebar.
  • Japanese diplomat FBI sting — John Kiriakou's account of an FBI entrapment operation in which an agent posing as a Japanese diplomat cold-pitched him for classified information over five lunches, hoping he would commit actual espionage they could charge — a scheme he discovered only in his own case discovery.
  • Office of Special Plans Israeli leak — A major Israeli spy operation John Kiriakou says was uncovered in the 2000s involving a leak from the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, headed by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith — both authors, with Richard Perle, of the "Clean Break" report advocating a dual-containment strategy against Iraq and Iran on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu. Per Kiriakou, Wolfowitz and Feith did not merely fail to take Israeli counterintelligence seriously; he believes they actively helped abet it.
  • Operation Mega — A 1997 FBI investigation into a senior U.S. government official believed to be passing highly sensitive information to Israel, opened after the NSA intercepted an Israeli intelligence communication referring to a source code-named "Mega." Per John Kiriakou, unlike similar investigations into other countries, the case never resulted in an indictment or public disclosure, and the identity of the American official was never revealed.
  • Saudi princes and 9/11 — John Kiriakou's account of finding three Saudi princes' personal cell numbers in Abu Zubaydah's seized diary — and how, after the CIA warned the Saudis, all three princes soon died in improbable ways, convincing him the Saudi government was involved in 9/11.
  • United Fruit and the Arbenz coup — John Kiriakou's account of the 1954 CIA overthrow of Guatemala's President Arbenz after he nationalized the banana crop — engineered by the Dulles brothers, who sat on the board of the United Fruit Company, and followed by half a century of dictatorship.
  • Zawahiri assassination — John Kiriakou's account of the drone strike that killed al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri — using a bladed, warhead-less missile fired as he stepped onto a balcony to smoke, deliberately chosen to avoid killing the women and children inside.