KiriPedia KiriPedia The Free Encyclopedia of John Kiriakou's World

Category: Concepts

Articles in this category

  • Asset acquisition cycle — The four-step process — spot, assess, develop, recruit — taught as the first lesson of CIA case officer training
  • Cold cell — A CIA interrogation technique in which a stripped detainee is chained to a ceiling eyebolt in a cell chilled to 50°F, then doused with a bucket of ice water at hourly intervals; never authorized; documented to have killed at least two prisoners.
  • Enhanced interrogation techniques — The CIA's post-9/11 interrogation program; described by John Kiriakou as torture and as a euphemism designed to insulate the responsible officials from legal exposure.
  • Five Eyes — The intelligence-sharing partnership of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand
  • Hummus — The CIA's documented use of pureed hummus in coercive rectal feeding of detainees; one of the unauthorized interrogation techniques exposed in the 2014 Senate Torture Report and the practice for which John Kiriakou has become most widely associated in popular culture.
  • Lincoln's last turd — A purported piece of human waste attributed by a Pennsylvania circus-freak-show museum to Abraham Lincoln on the night of his assassination; auctioned for $5,000; subsequent DNA analysis disproved the attribution. John Kiriakou's failed bid for the artifact is the anecdote that, recirculated in early 2026, made him an internet meme figure.
  • Operating Directive — The CIA's six-tier (0 through 5) intelligence priority system used to indicate the urgency with which case officers should pursue specific topics
  • Pick the man, then find the crime — Robert H. Jackson's 1940 doctrine — recurringly invoked by John Kiriakou — that a prosecutor's worst abuse is to select a target and then comb the law books for an offense to charge him with
  • Senate Torture Report — The December 2014 executive summary of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's study of the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation program; the first public disclosure of techniques including rectal feeding with hummus, sexual assault with broomsticks, and prolonged sleep deprivation.
  • Sleep deprivation — A CIA interrogation technique used against high-value detainees post-9/11; the agency was authorized to deny prisoners sleep for up to 12 days continuously; people died; at least one detainee was rendered permanently clinically insane.
  • The "Soylent Green is people" cable easter egg — A long-running CIA case-officer in-joke in which the line "Soylent Green is people" is hidden inside classified operational cables as a sequence of incongruously lowercase letters
  • Surveillance detection route — Tradecraft technique used by intelligence officers and assets to determine whether they are being followed before, during, or after an operational meeting
  • Ticking time bomb scenario — The hypothetical case — an imminent attack only the captured terrorist's confession can prevent — used to justify the CIA's post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program; characterized by John Kiriakou as fictional and not corresponding to any real-world case.
  • Walling — A CIA interrogation technique in which a detainee is slammed against a wall; designed on paper to use a padded fiberboard surface and a rolled towel around the neck, but applied in practice against bare concrete-block walls without protective measures, producing in at least one case permanent brain damage.
  • The Welch .45 — The single .45 caliber pistol used by Revolutionary Organization 17 November in every confirmed assassination over the group's twenty-seven-year operational life
  • AIPAC — The American Israel Public Affairs Committee — the U.S. political organization that, in John Kiriakou's framing, ought to be registered as a foreign-lobbying entity but is not, and that wields decisive electoral power against U.S. elected officials who express support for Palestinian human rights.
  • Executive Order 12333 — The U.S. presidential directive — in its post-9/11 amended form — that grants the CIA the legal authority to kill any individual anywhere in the world deemed by the agency to pose a "clear and present danger" to the United States; the legal foundation underlying both CIA paramilitary operations and the agency's contractor relationships including with Blackwater.
  • Global Response Staff — The CIA's protective-security program for case officers operating in high-threat environments; run for the agency by Blackwater; especially active in Baghdad's Green Zone during the Iraq War, where movement between fixed locations was treated as life-threatening.
  • MK-Ultra — The CIA's mid-twentieth-century umbrella program of mind-control, behavioral-modification, and biological-warfare experimentation, encompassing subprojects such as MK-Chickwit and MK-Seesaw; active 1952–1975; documented practices included LSD dosing of unwitting American citizens in CIA-rented brothels and the aerosolized release of pathogens into the San Francisco fog; 80% of the program's documentation was destroyed by the CIA in defiance of a 1975 preservation order from Senator Frank Church.
  • National Endowment for Democracy — U.S. federally chartered organization characterized by John Kiriakou as a proxy for CIA propaganda — the funding vehicle by which the agency promotes pro-U.S. political leaders in foreign countries; explicitly not an operational entity in the boots-on-the-ground sense.
  • Operation Mockingbird — The CIA's mid-twentieth-century program of recruiting and managing American journalists as influence assets; in John Kiriakou's account, no longer operationally necessary in the contemporary period because the U.S. media voluntarily reprints CIA-supplied material, and in at least one documented case sends articles to the agency for clearance before sending them to its own editor.
  • Title 10 vs Title 50 — The U.S. legal-code distinction governing which kinds of armed action fall under military authority (Title 10) and which fall under intelligence authority (Title 50); the operative legal frame for the post-9/11 question of whether CIA contractors can lawfully kill in the agency's name, addressed in the 2025 Ninth Circuit ruling in the Abu Zubaydah contractor case.
  • Tuesday morning kill list — Weekly CIA targeting meeting instituted by John Brennan in 2009 during his service as Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism in the Obama administration; produced a written list of individuals to be killed in the following week; per John Kiriakou, the program was a source of pride within the Obama administration and was made operationally possible by the targeting-software sophistication of the period.
  • Vault 7 — The 2017 WikiLeaks disclosure of thousands of pages of CIA Directorate of Science and Technology documents — leaked by agency engineer Joshua Schulte — revealing CIA technical capabilities including remote takeover of internet-connected cars, conversion of smart-TV speakers into covert microphones, and the planting of Russian or Persian language fragments in foreign systems to mislead attribution.