Category: Concepts

695 articles in this category

9/11 attribution of responsibility — John Kiriakou's evolving view of who bears ultimate responsibility for the September 11 attacks — that al-Qaeda carried them out but was, in his current view, "allowed" to, amid a distracted Bush administration, an uninvestigated Saudi government, and an Israeli government he believes had a vested interest in the attacks proceeding.
A Middle East reading list — The books and the starting point John Kiriakou recommends to anyone trying to understand the modern Middle East: begin at the end of the Second World War, not five thousand years earlier, and start with The House of Saud, the Sykes-Picot Agreement and From Beirut to Jerusalem.
"A policy support organization" — Asked how the CIA workforce would be reacting to the war on Iran, John Kiriakou answered from the Iraq war: people put their heads down and did as they were told, after a boss told an assembled group — all of whom opposed the invasion — that the agency is not a policy organization but a policy support organization, and would do what the White House told it to do.
Abbas and the three-state problem — John Kiriakou's argument that no two-state solution is available — because there is already one state, because Mahmoud Abbas is nineteen years into a four-year term and has become a billionaire, and because East Bank, West Bank and Gaza Palestinians are so disconnected that the real arithmetic is three states, which nobody will discuss.
Abolish the CIA — John Kiriakou's position that the CIA should be abolished because its functions are already duplicated by the other 17 U.S. intelligence agencies — analysis by the State Department, human spying by the Pentagon, technology by DARPA, NSA and the private sector.
Active measures — The in-house name John Kiriakou gives to the CIA branch responsible for propaganda and for countering hostile propaganda — a division he describes as running twenty-four hours a day, paired with an opposing anti-active-measures branch, and as the ancestor of the political action group that remains the agency's clandestine propaganda arm.
"Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations" — One of the twenty life lessons John Kiriakou says the CIA taught him in training, and a slogan sold on coffee mugs and t-shirts in the headquarters gift shop — by far the most popular mug in the building. It was treated at Langley as a joke that was not quite a joke; in federal prison Kiriakou used it as an operating rule, and credits it with getting him out of an investigation into a prison-yard fight with nothing given up.
The Advanced Counterterrorism Operations course — The six-week CIA course for which John Kiriakou says he was one of only about a dozen officers in the entire agency selected — and which he finished, as he puts it, just in time for 9/11.
Advice to an aspiring intelligence analyst — John Kiriakou's answer to a 21-year-old student asking what to study and what to read: pick a geographic area, become the go-to person on it, and consume everything published in the field — including the journals written by people who have never made policy.
Advice to the next generation — John Kiriakou's answer to a Gen Z viewer who said he felt helpless — that helplessness is not new, that 1968 and 1969 were worse, and that the remedy is four concrete things: run for any office at all, starting with the local water board; demonstrate; ride your elected officials and vote them out if they will not do what they are told; and write.
Afghan Languages — The three major languages of Afghanistan — Pashto, Dari (a form of Persian), and Arabic — as discussed on John Kiriakou's show with NSA whistleblower and former military linguist Reality Winner.
The Afghan police tribal rotation — An American anti-corruption scheme in Afghanistan that John Kiriakou describes as achieving the reverse of its purpose: someone in the Pentagon decided that regional chiefs of police should come from other tribes in other parts of the country, so a man from Herat would head the police in Kandahar — which only deepened hatred between tribes and did nothing at all about corruption.
Afghan War Logs — A 2010 WikiLeaks publication discussed on a panel Kiriakou joined; the specific lines about it in the corpus belong to other panelists, not Kiriakou.
Afghan rare earth minerals — John Kiriakou's argument, made days after the fall of Kabul in August 2021, that the country with real leverage in Afghanistan was China — which holds an exclusive contract to mine rare earth metals valued in a Defense Department report at one trillion dollars, and therefore has a stake in a stable long-term Afghan government even a Taliban one.
Agent inducements — The non-cash things the CIA can offer a recruited agent — a child's university place anywhere in America, treatment at a top hospital for a sick spouse, or a carefully staged personal gift — and the standing arrangements with universities and large corporations that make them possible.
Agnes von Kurowsky grave story — John Kiriakou's account of discovering the Washington, D.C. grave of Agnes von Kurowsky, the World War I Red Cross nurse whose four-month wartime romance with a young ambulance driver, Ernest Hemingway, made her the model for the lead female character in six of his books, including A Farewell to Arms.
Agent payment mechanics — How the CIA physically pays a recruited agent — cash every month, a receipt signed with any alias the agent chooses, and a polygraph regime built around the assumption that the officer handling the money is the person most likely to steal it.
Ai Whistleblower Initiative — The AI Whistleblower Initiative, working on legal protections for the wave of whistleblowers now coming out of the artificial-intelligence industry.
AIPAC and foreign-agent registration — John Kiriakou's argument that AIPAC is the only organization of its kind exempt from registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act — set against his own experience around 2008, when a contract worth five or six thousand dollars to write four op-eds praising the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce obliged him to register as a foreign agent.
Air wars are overrated — John Kiriakou's summary judgement on the 2026 Iran and Lebanon campaigns, delivered as the meta-headline of the whole war: air power flattened Gaza without destroying Hamas, is bogging down against Hezbollah, and cannot produce the outcome the war requires.
Akrotiri Village Evacuation — Kiriakou says the drone that hit Britain's Akrotiri base in Cyprus was likely an Israeli operation, staged and then falsely blamed on Iran.
Al Jazeera blocked in the United States — Within hours of the first strikes on Iran, John Kiriakou reported that American cable carriers had pulled Al Jazeera — a friend in Florida texted him that Dish Network had blocked it, and viewers reported the same of Comcast Xfinity in Boston. His reading was blunt: they do not want Americans to see what is happening in the Middle East.
The al-Qaeda foot soldier — What John Kiriakou says he learned from interviewing captured al-Qaeda fighters — not the leaders but the eighteen-, nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, who told essentially the same story: an isolated village, illiteracy, no job skills, a poor relationship with their father, an age at which they wanted to marry, and no father willing to give them a daughter. The local imam offered $300 a month to go to Afghanistan, and $500 to their parents if they were martyred.
Al Qaeda Software — A claim raised on a Kiriakou-appearance podcast that "Al-Qaeda" is also the name of a terrorist-tracking software, alongside its use as the name of the terrorist organization.
Al-Qaeda training manual interrogation-resistance tactics — A captured al-Qaeda training manual instructing operatives on how to resist interrogation, including feigning illness — a technique John Kiriakou says he saw a detainee use, and recognized, during a capture and interrogation in Pakistan.
Albert Stubblebine — Per John Kiriakou, General Albert "Bert" Stubblebine was among the Army Intelligence figures behind the original Project Stargate remote-viewing program; Kiriakou interviewed the program's top people and says Stubblebine, like remote viewer Lyn Buchanan, had to sign non-disclosure agreements with the NSA and CIA.
Alexa — Per John Kiriakou, Amazon's Alexa smart speaker reports directly to the NSA — and he owns one anyway. The device recurs across his interviews as the standing example of the surveillance trade-off in modern smart-home technology, and of his own negotiated exception to it: one speaker, in one room, against the advice of every intelligence officer he has ever known.
American media consolidation — John Kiriakou's account of why American news coverage is uniform: the entire national media is owned by six corporations or oligarchs, a number the Warner Brothers sale would reduce to five. He attributes the consolidation to profit rather than politics, and describes the practical consequence as an audience that turns on a cable channel believing it is being educated when it is being propagandised — with independent media the only alternative and almost nobody with the time to find it.
American missile stockpiles — John Kiriakou's argument that the United States has run its interceptor stocks down to the point of strategic vulnerability — that the conventional wisdom in Washington was that a round of the Iran war ended because the Patriots ran out, and that a country which cannot fight a two-front war certainly cannot do it below maximum production.
American shoes — The detail by which the chief of the Greek intelligence service identified John Kiriakou as an American within minutes of meeting him — not his Greek, which was fluent, but his footwear — and which sent Kiriakou straight to a shoe shop before working the anarchist quarters of Athens.
Americans and the word socialism — Two exchanges John Kiriakou uses to argue that the political vocabulary of the United States has stopped carrying meaning — a Thanksgiving conversation with a woman who denounced socialism and lived on Social Security, and a newspaper comment thread in which a restaurant owner taking his staff's tips was described as socialism.
Andrew Feinstein — Referenced on the same WikiLeaks-conference panel as John Kiriakou; the description of Feinstein's talk on the multiple factors that ended apartheid was given by another panelist putting a question to Kiriakou, not by Kiriakou himself.
Kiriakou's personal anecdotes — Three personal stories John Kiriakou has told in interviews — tracking down and meeting Andy Warhol as a college senior, a Congolese vice president's remark that Americans promise democracy while the Chinese provide food, and Kiriakou's own Zelle account being suspended over Cuba-sanctions compliance after a paid article about his Cuba trip.
Angry Birds — The mobile game John Kiriakou describes as his only vice besides buying art, played every morning for nine consecutive years and cited by his ex-wife as a grievance in their marriage.
Antisemitism and anti-Zionism — The conflation of criticism of the Israeli state with hatred of Jews, which John Kiriakou describes as a worldwide confusion and, according to a young Israeli he spoke to, an explicit lesson of the Israeli school system; a subject Kiriakou says he personally struggles with.
The Arab states and the Gaza war — John Kiriakou's country-by-country reading of how the Arab governments positioned themselves after October 2023 — the Gulf states ranked by their fear of Iran, Jordan caught between its border and its population, Egypt sealing Rafah to prevent a repeat of earlier refugee flows — and his conclusion that every one of them is calculating damage to itself first and the Palestinians second.
Arabic and Greek — The qualification John Kiriakou says opened the door to his transfer from CIA analysis to operations: a post in Athens wanted Greek or Arabic, and he had both — by most of his tellings the only officer in the agency who did. The chief who hired him gave the reason in one sentence: it is easier and cheaper to take a linguist and teach him operations than the other way round. The pairing also became a detection tool, since the language nobody speaks in Pakistan is Arabic.
Arabists — The label applied inside the U.S. government to diplomats and analysts who knew Arabic and Middle Eastern history, and which John Kiriakou confirms functioned as a dismissal — the assumption being that anyone who understood the region was blindly prejudiced against Israel, or antisemitic.
Arming the crazies — John Kiriakou's account of the American habit of arming the most radical faction available — the Mujahideen over any other Afghan force, the White Russians over the Red — and his expectation, stated days into the 2026 war, that the United States and Israel would begin arming factions inside Iran and that the factions chosen would be the radical ones.
Asian fuel reserves, 2026 — The effect of the Strait of Hormuz closure on oil-importing Asian economies as John Kiriakou described it — countries counting their remaining fuel in days rather than months, with no substitute supply available, and economies he expects simply to stop.
Assange and solitary confinement — John Kiriakou's 2018 argument that Julian Assange's isolation inside the Ecuadorian embassy amounted to solitary confinement — a practice the United Nations classes as torture — and that everybody breaks under it eventually, however strong they are.
The assassination approval process — Why John Kiriakou thinks arranging the death of a foreign leader is far harder for the CIA than the public assumes. It is not the 1960s: there is congressional oversight, and before any proposal reaches the president's signature it must clear layers of lawyers at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the National Security Council and the agency's own General Counsel. Pressuring a leader into flight, he notes, is both easier and more legal.
Authorized leaks — The distinction John Kiriakou draws between the classified information Washington releases on purpose and the classified information it prosecutes people for releasing. The mechanism is the same and the legal status is identical; what differs is whether the leak flatters the leaker. His worked example is an agency leak claiming the CIA predicted the October 2023 attack on Israel three days out — a story the CIA can then piously report to the FBI, knowing the source will never be found.
Bahrain's naturalisation policy — John Kiriakou's account of how the Bahraini royal family changed the sectarian arithmetic of the country over thirty years — importing Syrians and naturalising Indian and Pakistani Sunni Muslims until a population that had been two-thirds to three-quarters Shia was closer to half and half.
Bay Path University — Per John Kiriakou, he teaches in the graduate intelligence-studies program at Bay Path University in Massachusetts, covering introduction to intelligence, the history of terrorism, and intelligence and cybersecurity.
BDS movement — The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel; John Kiriakou notes that some 40 U.S. states now have anti-BDS laws that can require a speaker at a publicly funded university to sign a pledge of support for Israel — which he refuses to do.
Belmarsh Prison — The maximum-security London prison where Julian Assange was held for years on a bail-jumping sentence John Kiriakou calls a fabrication — kept in solitary confinement alongside the worst offenders in the United Kingdom, and held past the expiry of his sentence at the request of the United States. Kiriakou corresponded with Assange there and watched the letters change.
Below World's End — Film in which John Kiriakou made his acting debut, filmed entirely in Mexico during October 2025; Kiriakou's performance earned him a Screen Actors Guild membership card, and Sean Penn told him after a private screening that he had unknowingly been acting throughout his entire CIA career.
Benjamin Netanyahu — Israeli prime minister, per John Kiriakou an unpopular but politically durable figure whom Kiriakou says has spent decades pressing successive U.S. presidents to bomb Iran, presided over escalating land seizures in the West Bank, and used the October 7 attack and its aftermath to entrench his own political survival.
Big Assawoman Bay NASA launch — John Kiriakou's account of being taken, as a junior CIA analyst, to watch a NASA rocket launch near the village of Big Assawoman on Virginia's Eastern Shore, where he was startled to find foreign space-agency officials present unsupervised.
Bilderberg and weapon sales — John Kiriakou's claim, sourced to someone he knew who attended, that elite gatherings like Bilderberg and the Shangri-La Dialogue are — beneath the talk of global issues — fundamentally 'all about weapon sales' and defense-contractor deals.
Bill Barr — Per Sean Davis, speaking on the same Megyn Kelly panel as Kiriakou, the attorney general under the first Trump administration, seen as competent but not fully loyal, whose relationship with Trump ended in a "breakup."
Bin Laden health rumors — John Kiriakou's dismissal of the claim that Osama bin Laden died years before the 2011 raid. He says the CIA received a steady stream of medical rumours about him — kidney failure, dialysis in a cave, a spinal disorder — none of which turned out to be true, and that bin Laden was in fine health apart from arthritis and a hip problem until the day he died.
Blackmail in agent recruitment — What John Kiriakou says CIA career trainees were taught about blackmail: that the agency does not use it, not on moral grounds but because a long-term agent relationship requires mutual trust and coercion cannot produce it. He allows two exceptions — the pre-Church Committee past, and cases where the objective is simply to stop a target doing something, which can also be handed to a friendlier service.
Blackmail of closeted politicians — John Kiriakou's argument that a significant number of senior American politicians are concealing their sexuality and are vulnerable to blackmail because of it, illustrated with a roll-call of congressional outings from the 1980s onward.
Bob Woodward's CIA headquarters access — John Kiriakou's account of watching Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward walk the halls of CIA headquarters unescorted while researching a book, after the CIA director ordered staff to cooperate with him — an episode Kiriakou cites as evidence of how close the relationship between senior CIA officials and favored journalists really is.
Bombing the Omanis — John Kiriakou's judgement that Iran's strikes on the Gulf states — and above all on Oman, which had been trying to broker peace — made enemies Iran did not need to make, of governments that would otherwise have sat the war out.
British Bases in Cyprus — British sovereign bases in Cyprus host a large American contingent. Kiriakou, a quarter Cypriot, on the bases as evacuation hub, missile target, and suspected nuclear site — and on the 46-year US weapons embargo almost no American knows about.
Bulldozing the olive orchards — The sequence John Kiriakou describes preceding Israeli seizures of Palestinian land in the West Bank — olive orchards bulldozed and crops burned to make leaving easier, then the house demolished and a prefabricated one built for a settler family — and the different practice he says applies in East Jerusalem.
Canada as a bargaining chip — John Kiriakou's reading of Mark Carney's Davos speech as the moment Canada stopped pretending the United States could be trusted as a long-term partner — and his account of what wore the relationship out, including Washington's insistence that Ottawa arrest Huawei's chief financial officer on a computer-hacking charge and hold her for three years to trade.
Cancelling the 2026 midterms — John Kiriakou's argument that the 2026 war cannot win the midterm elections for the Republicans, and his flagged-as-paranoid worry that it may instead furnish the pretext for a national emergency and a cancelled election.
Carrying classified material out of a SCIF — The two lawful procedures John Kiriakou describes for removing classified documents from a secure facility — a double-enveloped, double-marked package addressed to your home agency, or a leather bag with a double lock — and his flat statement that nothing about either allows a document to be forgotten in a garage for twelve years.
Carrying passports in Washington — John Kiriakou's report in September 2025 that people in Washington had begun carrying their passports for fear of being scooped up by immigration enforcement — alongside the case of an American symphony violinist held for three weeks, and his own belief that ethnic profiling violates the Fourth Amendment.
Carving up Iran — The Israeli end goal John Kiriakou says has been discussed with increasingly less discretion — dividing Iran into five small rump countries including Balochistan, Arabistan and Kurdistan, on the reasoning that small states are more easily controlled — and which he expects Israel will eventually try to get Donald Trump to carry out.
Censorship on the left — John Kiriakou's observation that he was censored far less by Forbes and Fortune than by The Nation and Mother Jones, which he offers as an instance of a general rule that a writer's own side censors them hardest — the counterpart to Ted Rall's account of being made to fit a particular kind of leftism rather than any kind.
Chaos as the Israeli objective — John Kiriakou's answer to whether Netanyahu's government actually wanted an American invasion of Iran: what the Israelis want in Iran is what they got in Libya — chaos, civil war, and as many dead Iranians as possible.
Chaos Computer Club Wikileaks — The Berlin hacker collective that shaped WikiLeaks' early years — and where a journalist first met Daniel Domscheit-Berg under a pseudonym.
Charlie Kirk shooting — Kiriakou questions the official account: a court filing says the ATF could not match the autopsy bullet to the rifle tied to the suspect.
Chelsea Manning — Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who provided WikiLeaks its 2010 trove of military and diplomatic documents. Per John Kiriakou, Manning meets the legal definition of whistleblower for exposing war crimes, was a torture victim of prolonged solitary confinement with forced nudity, and was sentenced to 35 years in prison before Barack Obama commuted — not pardoned — her sentence. Kiriakou says Manning later refused a grand jury's offer of immunity and chose renewed jail time rather than testify against Julian Assange.
Chief of station — The CIA's senior officer in a foreign country — appointed by the CIA director alone, outranking the ambassador's intelligence equities in practice, and in John Kiriakou's account the figure who sets the moral temperature of a station, from the officer who handed him his first counterterrorism assignment to the one who walks into a minister's office fifteen minutes after the human rights officer has left.
The child-trafficking misquotation — A widely circulated claim that John Kiriakou said the CIA is involved in the sex trafficking of children. Kiriakou denies it flatly and traces it to a distorted account of a teaching hypothetical he uses in university lectures on ethics — a speech cleared by the CIA's Publications Review Board, whose video was attached to the original article by a writer who evidently had not watched it.
The chilling effect of whistleblower prosecutions — John Kiriakou's argument that national-security prosecutions are not primarily about convictions but about deterrence — that the CIA cares about sending a message where the FBI cares about promotions, that his own case was meant to frighten anyone else considering disclosure, and that a New York Times reporter told him every national-security source the paper had went silent on the day of his arrest.
China as mediator — John Kiriakou's argument that China is the plausible mediator of Middle Eastern and Ukrainian conflicts, grounded in his claim that — Tibet and its border wars aside — China has no history of invading other countries, and his observation of how quickly Beijing accepted an offhand suggestion that it might mediate between Israel and Iran.
China as economic threat — John Kiriakou's argument that China is the real threat to the West not militarily — it has one aircraft carrier to America's two dozen and rarely invades — but economically, buying friends worldwide while the U.S. spends a trillion dollars a year on weapons.
Chinese illegal fishing — John Kiriakou calls Chinese overfishing one of the world's biggest under-discussed problems, citing the near-extinction of Chilean sea bass and heavy overfishing of Alaskan and Atlantic cod, and recounting personally seeing Chinese fishing vessels in Antarctica on his honeymoon.
China's generals without combat experience — Presented with the observation that China's purged and reshuffled top brass are now too young to have fought in any war, John Kiriakou agreed it mattered little in the near term and a great deal in the long term — because American military planning will have to account for an adversary whose senior commanders have never been in combat.
Chinese overseas police stations — John Kiriakou's account of a New York Times revelation about Chinese nationals with apparent ties to the Chinese police operating out of storefronts around Manhattan and travelling around the United States to threaten Chinese people with reprisals against relatives in Beijing — and his puzzlement that the FBI missed it.
Christian Zionism — John Kiriakou's argument that American evangelical Christianity functions as an arm of Zionism, and that its support for Israel is helping extinguish the oldest Christian communities on earth — a position he says he argued directly with the evangelical students he was invited to teach, and which he grounds in the projection that Nazareth, Christian for two thousand years, may soon have no Christians left.
"Christians are suckers" — John Kiriakou's explanation for how a president who does not go to church, has no spiritual adviser and could not name a line of scripture can push school prayer without cost — that he thinks most Christians are suckers, an assessment Kiriakou says he hates to make and believes anyway.
Christopher Steele dossier — The 2016 opposition-research dossier alleging Trump-Russia ties, compiled by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. John Kiriakou worked with Steele in the 1990s on Greek terrorism, after the assassination of the British defence attaché in Athens, and rates him an outstanding officer whom the affair reduced to caricature. His explanation is structural rather than personal: a case officer collects, an analyst vets, and in private practice there was no analyst — only a client. On who paid, his accounts have hardened: he first reported the Ted Cruz origin story, and later called it nonsense put about by the Clinton campaign.
CIA adultery culture — John Kiriakou's recurring characterization of the CIA officer corps as riddled with adultery and casual sex — which he frames not as gossip but as a systemic counterintelligence vulnerability that makes officers easy to recruit.
The CIA and Hollywood — The CIA's standing arrangement with the film industry, as John Kiriakou describes it: a branch inside the Office of Public Affairs whose only job is to cooperate with Hollywood studios, on the model the FBI has run since the 1950s, so that what comes out of Hollywood carries a pro-agency message. Kiriakou notes it is technically illegal for the CIA to propagandise the American public and says that is exactly what happens every time an agency-linked film is released.
The CIA as a policy support agency — John Kiriakou's standing correction to the idea that the CIA has a foreign policy of its own: it is not a policy agency but a policy support agency, it serves at the pleasure of the president, and its officers have no civil service protections at all. Career staff can slow-roll an order they dislike until an administration ends — but in a hot war, he says, they do as they are told.
CIA attention to West Africa — John Kiriakou's answer on whether the CIA is likely to be operating in Burkina Faso: for all the years he was at the agency it cared very little about Africa and especially West Africa, but the presence of al-Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates plus the drug trade makes CIA and special forces involvement probable — and, he adds, the American public will not hear about it.
CIA–Big Tech revolving door — John Kiriakou's account of the traffic between the CIA and the major technology companies — "they work hand in glove" — illustrated by a supervisor who resigned five years short of his thirty-year pension for a Microsoft job paying eight times his government salary. The exchange, he argues, benefits both sides and is for that reason dangerous: the agency gains access to the most advanced companies in the world, and the companies gain a direct channel into the intelligence community.
Concealment of the CIA budget — John Kiriakou's description of how the CIA hides its spending: there is no publicly available written CIA budget, and individual line items are distributed across unrelated federal departments under invented cover programmes — a practice he says persists unchanged, and which once repeatedly exposed the agency to Senator William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award.
CIA Car Hacking — Kiriakou on the Vault 7 disclosure that the CIA can seize control of a moving car and stage the crash as a suicide or an accident — a capability he says is not limited to electric vehicles, whose only counter is the emergency brake, and which he treats as the clearest example of a leak that is a matter of life and death rather than embarrassment.
CIA cash room — John Kiriakou's description of the rooms at large CIA stations stacked floor-to-ceiling with cash — tens or hundreds of millions of dollars — from which an officer can sign out whatever an operation needs, as when he took $2 million to buy safe houses for the Abu Zubaydah capture.
CIA crimes reports against Kiriakou — The referral mechanism by which the Central Intelligence Agency asked the Justice Department to investigate John Kiriakou, used not once but repeatedly — by his account after every op-ed, television interview and university speech he gave following his 2007 disclosure of the torture program. The Justice Department declined every time, and Kiriakou treats the pattern as retaliation conducted through a lawful channel.
CIA culture of lying — John Kiriakou's account of deception as an occupational condition at the CIA — the tradecraft of detecting it, the training that instils it, and the institutional rot he says follows when officers cannot switch it off: a deputy director who married five successive secretaries, promotion panels that traded advancement for sex, and staff psychiatrists overheard planning how to push a colleague toward resignation or suicide.
CIA Democrats (2016) — John Kiriakou's term for a wave of 2016-era congressional candidates with intelligence or military backgrounds who ran for office opposing Trump from the right on Russia — including former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger, who won a one-term-limited Virginia governorship, and former DIA official Elissa Slotkin, who moved from intelligence into Congress and the Senate — both of whom Kiriakou suggests are positioning for future presidential runs.
CIA disguise program — John Kiriakou's account of the CIA's disguise and forgery specialists — including a master disguise maker recruited from a beauty academy who built him a custom bald-head mask over six weeks, and a master forger recruited off his college newspaper cartoons.
The CIA divorce rate — John Kiriakou's account of why marriages fail at the CIA at a rate he says exceeds that of any other part of the U.S. government — the impossibility of explaining a midnight departure to a spouse without a clearance, and the difficulty officers have switching off a professional habit of deception. He gives the figure variously as over 75 percent and upwards of 80 percent, says he was determined not to become a statistic and became one anyway, and dates the end of his first marriage to a sentence spoken in an armoured car on the way to Athens airport. Both his divorces have been costly; of the second he says the agency played an active role he is barred by court order from explaining.
The CIA entrance examinations — The two rounds of testing John Kiriakou sat before joining the CIA in 1990: a current-affairs multiple choice he found trivially easy, a blank fold-out map of the world, and a psychological inventory of several thousand agree-or-disagree statements that repeated the same proposition hundreds of questions apart to catch inconsistency — followed by an interview panel of a psychologist, a psychiatrist and an anthropologist.
CIA–FBI interagency rivalry and 9/11 — John Kiriakou's account of the historical CIA–FBI rivalry, dating to J. Edgar Hoover's opposition to the 1947 National Security Act, and how it manifested before September 11 when Cofer Black's Counterterrorism Center withheld from the FBI that hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar had been granted U.S. visas.
CIA/FBI Budget Fearmongering — John Kiriakou's account of how the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, pioneered the tactic of citing a shifting parade of enemies before Congress to justify annual budget increases — communists, anarchists, gangsters, beatniks, anti-war protesters — a tactic the CIA later adopted wholesale, citing "communism" until 2001 and "terrorism" since, without needing further explanation to win budget increases.
CIA–FBI incompatible computer systems — John Kiriakou's claim that from the CIA's founding in 1947 until 2009 the computer systems of the CIA and the FBI were not compatible with one another — no message could be sent from one to the other and no intelligence shared — which he offers both as the material substrate of the interagency hatred that helped make September 11 possible, and as the gap through which James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were able to pass Ali Soufan's FBI debriefings of Abu Zubaydah off as the fruits of torture.
CIA and FBI ties to organized crime — John Kiriakou's survey of documented U.S. intelligence partnerships with organized crime — the FBI securing wartime ports with the Genovese family, the CIA's Castro plots with the Trafficantes, its work with the Escobar cartel against Colombian communists, and a mob hitman deployed against the Klan.
CIA and FBI embedded at social media firms — John Kiriakou's claim, citing the Twitter Files, that active-duty CIA and FBI officers were placed undercover inside Twitter, Facebook and other platforms — which he argues can only mean they were spying on Americans.
Groupthink at the CIA — John Kiriakou's account of the institutional conformity he says has made the CIA wrong about nearly every major international development since its creation — a failure he attributes to analysts agreeing with one another around a conference table while invoking red-team and outside-the-box vocabulary that changes nothing. He and his attorney Bruce Fein discussed writing a book about it.
CIA intelligence failures — John Kiriakou's standing position that the CIA has missed every major world event since its founding in 1947 — the building and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Iran hostage crisis, 9/11 — and that the remedy is therefore not more money but fewer overseas bases and actual accountability, of which he says there has been none.
The CIA's internal social culture — John Kiriakou's one-word characterisation of the agency's internal culture — "incestuous" — describing a club for every conceivable interest, actively encouraged officer-to-officer romances, and a design intent that officers should have no need of friends or activities outside the building.
CIA language training — The agency's language pipeline as John Kiriakou experienced and describes it: a full year of Arabic at nine hours a day, an optional second year at the State Department's school, and the calculation that made his own career — that it is cheaper to teach a linguist operations than to teach an operations officer Greek and Arabic.
CIA liaison relationships — John Kiriakou's critique of CIA intelligence-liaison relationships with foreign governments — sharply expanded after 9/11 — arguing that officers do not consider the long-term risk that disclosing sensitive operations to foreign services hands those governments leverage, including potential blackmail material, over the United States, and that no one left in Congress has the will to provide real oversight of the practice.
CIA media relations — John Kiriakou's account of how the CIA shapes press coverage in the 2020s without needing an Operation Mockingbird-style infiltration program — because corporate media now recites CIA messaging willingly, most journalists simply rewrite emailed statements from the agency's Office of Public Affairs, and the CIA allegedly manipulates algorithms and backs podcasts to spread its point of view.
CIA media revolving door — John Kiriakou's proposed reform to bar CIA officers from becoming paid media personalities without a cooling-off period, and to strip the security clearances of retirees who go straight from the agency to cable-news punditry.
CIA political action group — The CIA's most secretive clandestine propaganda arm — successor to the Cold War 'active measures group' — which John Kiriakou says places and funds propagandists worldwide; no officer of it has been publicly identified since 1982, and he encountered its work funding the DNC's and RNC's international arms in post-war Kuwait.
CIA political neutrality tradition — The informal midcentury norm at the Central Intelligence Agency, described by John Kiriakou from his own 1990-era experience, under which employees did not share their partisan affiliations at work, small displays such as a Bob Dole campaign bumper sticker in a cubicle triggered severe internal discipline, and career officers steered clear of political endorsement — a tradition Kiriakou argues collapsed by 2020, when 51 former intelligence officials signed the letter dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop story.
CIA record deniability — John Kiriakou's account of how senior CIA officers occasionally decide to keep an event out of the written record — illustrated by a recruited asset who committed a public murder, after which the Deputy Director for Operations told Kiriakou, on second thought, 'let's not put that in writing.'
The scholar-in-residence pipeline — John Kiriakou's description of retired CIA operations officers taking scholar-in-residence posts at universities and teaching literature courses that function, by their own account, as a recruitment funnel — students enrol knowing the instructor is a former officer and hoping for help getting in.
CIA Remote Vehicle Control — John Kiriakou's account, corroborated by Forbes' Andy Greenberg's real-world demonstration, that the CIA can remotely take over a car's systems and cause a fatal crash disguised as an accident.
CIA sexpionage — John Kiriakou's account of the CIA's use of sex in espionage — routine from its founding through the early 1980s, including MK-Ultra and honey-pot operations — and why the agency largely abandoned it: coercion cannot build the trust a long-term source requires. Other services never stopped.
CIA Smart TV Surveillance — Per John Kiriakou, a CIA technical capability — disclosed publicly by the 2017 Vault 7 leaks — to convert a smart television's speaker system into a covert listening microphone even while the television appears to be switched off.
CIA spy tech from Amazon — John Kiriakou's account that roughly 95% of the CIA's spy technology is purchased commercially from Amazon.com rather than custom-built, illustrated by a $10 leather briefcase he had rigged into a listening device in a Pakistani market.
CIA Torture Program Whistleblowing — In December 2007, John Kiriakou became the first former CIA officer to publicly confirm the agency's post-9/11 torture program, telling ABC's Brian Ross that torture — including waterboarding — was official U.S. government policy personally approved by the president. Per Kiriakou, the decision followed a slow, incremental disillusionment dating back to a hooding incident in the field, years of waiting for someone else to come forward first, and culminated in prosecution under the Espionage Act after the program's congressional overseers publicly denied knowledge of what they had authorized and funded.
CIA Training Doctrine — 'Our job is to break the law' — Kiriakou on what CIA training actually teaches, why it applies only overseas, and the ethics class that never comes.
CIA and the UFO question — John Kiriakou's consistent answer that UFOs and alien technology are a Pentagon matter, not a CIA one — though he says nearly every former fighter-pilot friend of his has seen something inexplicable, sometimes emerging from the ocean.
CIA versus FBI at a raid — John Kiriakou's two-sentence account of the institutional difference between the two agencies, drawn from joint raids in Pakistan in 2002: the FBI numbers the four walls with sticky notes, photographs the inside of every drawer and collects every piece of paper, because it is building a case. The CIA breaks down the door, grabs all the men and sends them to Guantánamo.
Civilian ships and piracy — Why merchant crews cannot defend themselves: by international treaty no civilian ship may carry a weapon. John Kiriakou handled international piracy as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer and brought Captain Richard Phillips to testify.
Classified email — John Kiriakou was serving overseas the day classified email was introduced at the CIA, and remembers his station chief saying there was no way to control it. His own illustration of what followed is a lunch invitation to his wife — a fellow senior CIA officer — marked Secret HUM 4-82, and her reply naming a deli and a time, marked the same way.
Classification compartments — John Kiriakou's explanation of the U.S. secrecy tiers above 'top secret' — the TS/SCI/TK/gamma clearances everyone at the CIA gets, and the additional compartments that mean even senior officials can be barred from a single cable.
Closing the Gulf embassies — John Kiriakou's reading of the American decision, announced live on air on 3 March 2026, to close its embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait: that in the whole of the first Gulf War no American embassy was closed except Kuwait's own, whose diplomats were taken to Iraq as human shields, and that shutting two at once meant Washington had concluded the war was about to get very much worse.
The Club Fed myth — John Kiriakou's standing objection to the phrase 'Club Fed' and the idea that federal prison is a soft landing for white-collar convicts: there is no such thing, he says, no golf and no gardening, only an institution designed to humiliate and emasculate and to make a man count the days.
Cold War — The U.S.–Soviet confrontation that built the CIA John Kiriakou joined. Kiriakou argues the Cold War was real "but also at a certain level desired" — America has always needed an ism to oppose — and that its habits never died: "The Russians thought the Cold War was over, but no one told the US." From its memoirs he draws a standing tradecraft lesson (the CIA's best recruits were always walk-ins), and in the new Russia and China confrontations he sees a Cold War 2.0 rebuilt on the old exaggerations.
Collateral Murder Video — The 2010 WikiLeaks release of gun-camera footage from a 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad; part of the trove of Iraq and Afghan war logs, Guantanamo files, and State Department cables leaked by Chelsea Manning, which John Kiriakou credits with corroborating major abuses and helping to touch off the Arab Spring.
Consulting for royal families — The work John Kiriakou says he was hired to do by members of two different royal families following the 2026 virality of his interviews — advising on ethics in their own intelligence operations — which he offers as evidence of how far the reversal in his standing had gone.
Consulting job entrapment offers — John Kiriakou's claim that he receives a steady stream of emails and telephone calls offering him work — always consulting — that he reads as attempts to bait him into violating federal law, and which he says happens all the time.
Corporate competitive intelligence — The private-sector discipline John Kiriakou entered on leaving the CIA in 2004: collecting human-source intelligence on rival firms for a big-four accountancy. He was the fourth CIA officer Deloitte had hired into a group that paired former intelligence collectors with corporate research analysts, and his requirements were a rival's pricing models, its discount structure, and which of its top-producing partners were unhappy enough to be poached. All the major firms, he says, run the same operation against each other.
Corporate whistleblower protections — John Kiriakou's argument that whistleblower law stops at the wrong boundary. Employees who report waste, fraud, abuse or illegality inside a private company are doing the very thing the word describes, and yet can be fired for it — as he says happened at Amazon. His remedy is codified statutory protection for corporate whistleblowers on the same footing as government ones.
Cory Booker — Per John Kiriakou, he was "especially furious" with Democratic senator Cory Booker for running through the halls of Congress to get to a photo op standing behind Benjamin Netanyahu, which Kiriakou cites as an example of Democratic silence in the face of AIPAC pressure.
Cost of the 2026 Iran war — The daily cost of the 2026 Iran war as John Kiriakou reported it — between two and three billion dollars a day, per Axios — and the comparison he draws with the Gulf War, when a president was rendered speechless by a figure of one hundred million dollars a day.
Counterterrorist driving — The vehicle training at the Farm — the PIT manoeuvre and how to avoid one, when to ram a roadblock and where to hit it, reversing at sixty miles an hour — conducted in a fleet of junkyard beaters the CIA bought expressly to be wrecked.
Cover stop — A routine, innocuous errand run in the middle of a surveillance detection route so that an intelligence officer has a plausible reason to be where he is — the 7-Eleven, the dry cleaner, the wine shop — and, in John Kiriakou's account, also a petty-expense line item that has ended CIA careers.
Cover position — The occupational identity under which an intelligence officer operates abroad. John Kiriakou's account collapses the popular idea that certain embassy jobs are tell-tale: because a diplomatic mission has to do its real work every day, every position in and out of an embassy is simultaneously a genuine job and a possible cover, which is precisely what makes cover work.
Covert action programs — The most tightly held category of American intelligence activity — so tightly held, John Kiriakou says, that a serving CIA officer may not utter the phrase in public. Which is why he found it extraordinary that a president announced one on television, and doubts the announcement was straightforwardly true.
Counterterrorism Center deaths in the line of duty — The colleagues John Kiriakou names as having been killed doing the work he did — Helge Boes and Mike Spann of the Counterterrorism Center, and the officer who sat beside him when he was chief of the counterintelligence branch of the Osama bin Laden group, killed with six colleagues by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. He pairs the physical risk with a second cost he states as near-certain: that a marriage will not survive an operational tour.
Cuban double agents — John Kiriakou's assessment of Cuban intelligence as one of the best services on the planet, defensive in nature and trained by the KGB, and his flat claim — repeated across several tellings — that the CIA has never recruited a Cuban who did not turn out to be working for Havana all along.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg — A WikiLeaks associate discussed on the same panel as John Kiriakou; the anecdote about meeting him via the Chaos Computer Club was told by fellow panelist John Goetz, a Der Spiegel journalist — not by Kiriakou himself.
Daniel Ellsberg — The Pentagon Papers whistleblower Kiriakou calls 'the Godfather of all national security whistleblowers' — and one of the great mentors of his life.
DARPA LifeLog — A Pentagon research program meant to track every email, photo, location and purchase of a person; John Kiriakou notes it was killed on February 4, 2004 — one day before Mark Zuckerberg filed the Facebook LLC.
Dead Drop (podcast) — John Kiriakou's narrative podcast, launched in late 2025 — a season-long, memoir-style retelling of his life in intelligence, from recruitment ("The New Recruit") through Athens ("Golden Boy") to the post-9/11 hunt ("The Hunt Begins"), with mini-episodes like "A Spy's Guide to Sofia." Written by Kiriakou with Alan Katz, produced by Costard & Touchstone Productions, with Kiriakou, Katz, and Nick Mechanic as executive producers. Its stated goal: "the deepest possible perspective on the world of spying and what makes any spy tick."
The death of investigative journalism — John Kiriakou's account of the collapse of investigative reporting inside the American mainstream press — Joby Warrick's resignation from the *Washington Post*, the paper that brought down a president, and the 80 per cent of its staff Kiriakou says have gone since Jeff Bezos bought it — together with the outlets he says are doing the work instead, and his advice to a student who wants to do it anyway.
The declared officer — The CIA officer whose identity is formally disclosed to the host country's intelligence service — as John Kiriakou was in Athens, taken by his chief within days of arrival to be introduced to the head of the Greek service.
Declassifying for a foreign government — The CIA procedure John Kiriakou describes for passing classified intelligence to a foreign service — the originating office extracts the substance onto a fresh sheet marked releasable to that country, so that no source or method travels with it — set out in 2017 as the thing Donald Trump did not do when he spoke to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in the Oval Office.
Decorum in the Reagan years — John Kiriakou's contrast between the State of the Union addresses he watched as a college student under Ronald Reagan — divided, substantive, but conducted with decorum — and the 2026 address he called a clown show with no decorum on either side.
Deep state — John Kiriakou's position on the deep state — that it is not a right-wing trope but an accurate description of something he served inside for fifteen years at the CIA and two more on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. He is indifferent to the label ("call it the state, call it the federal bureaucracy") and insists on the substance: "It's there to stay. It's not going anywhere."
Deloitte Consulting Career — John Kiriakou's post-CIA career at Deloitte Consulting (2004–2008), covering two corporate acquisitions he says he drove — India Tiger Analysis and, in effect, Bering Point — and ending in his effective firing weeks before his ABC News whistleblower interview aired.
Democratic change in the Middle East — John Kiriakou's answer to what it would take for Middle Eastern populations to free themselves of both Western influence and Saudi ambition — decades, a democratic rather than violent revolution on the early Tunisian model, and, in a conclusion he reaches reluctantly, blood in the streets, because he does not believe a bloodless model exists.
Democratic silence on the Iran war — John Kiriakou's observation that the only front-facing critics of the 2026 Iran war came from the isolationist right, while Democrats said nothing. He attributes the silence to fear of an AIPAC-funded primary challenge, and singles out Senator Cory Booker as the illustration.
Denied areas — The CIA term for countries so hostile and so heavily surveilled that ordinary operational movement is impossible — the Soviet Union, Cuba, Syria, and later Russia, China, North Korea and Iran — and the reason, in John Kiriakou's account, that officers heading to one get specialist briefings, eight-hour surveillance detection routes, and that the Agency has to fall back on liaison services instead of its own sources.
Der Spiegel — At a 2026 Berlin panel, a former Der Spiegel journalist said it took him years before he could call Julian Assange a publisher rather than an activist.
Destroying the Dome of the Rock — John Kiriakou's agreement with Tucker Carlson that a Zionist extremist plan to demolish the Dome of the Rock and build a third temple would be the event that starts the Third World War — and his additional prediction that it would also be the beginning of the end for the Israeli government and all of its support.
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.
Doing Time Like a Spy — Prison memoir by John Kiriakou, full title Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison; winner of two literary awards and reissued in a second edition by Simon and Schuster.
Domingo's television — John Kiriakou has used the television rooms at FCI Loretto as his sharpest illustration of prison segregation: sets owned by racial blocs since a riot in the 1990s, a seat in front of one costing fourteen dollars, and one set left tuned to Law & Order every morning because a man named Domingo had paid four hundred dollars for it and had been gone for years.
Domino theory — The Cold War doctrine, described by John Kiriakou as Ronald Reagan's organising obsession in Central America, holding that if one country there fell to communism the rest would fall in sequence up to the American border — the stated rationale for backing the Contra rebels against the Sandinistas.
"Don't charge Donald Trump with espionage" — An opinion piece John Kiriakou wrote for Consortium News after the classified documents were found at Mar-a-Lago, arguing against an Espionage Act prosecution of Trump — and, in its subheading, against Espionage Act prosecutions of anyone else either. He uses it as the frame for his position that the statute should be scrapped and rewritten to reach only those who mean the country harm.
'Don't try to save the government money' — The instruction John Kiriakou says a CIA supervisor gave him for parking in the nine-dollar economy lot at Dulles instead of the twenty-five-dollar daily lot, and the two trips it produced: a Pittsburgh approach funded entirely by a five-dollar bill, and a $195 fattoush salad in a Dubai nightclub.
Drunken border guards — John Kiriakou's explanation for how quiet frontiers become shooting wars — bored, drinking troops with nothing to do and no supervision — which he applies to the Thailand-Cambodia clashes, to the India-China line, and to why Vladimir Putin objects to a NATO country on his border.
Dubai as Iran's window — John Kiriakou's explanation of why Iran did not hit Dubai hard during the 2026 war: the city is full of Iranian businessmen and is Iran's outlet to the Western world and its principal means of evading sanctions.
Dumping cash in a Moscow bathroom — John Kiriakou's examples of what covert action has actually meant in practice — American commandos blowing up the Trans-Siberian oil pipeline, Afghan guerrillas hired to cross the Amu Darya and attack a refinery inside the southern USSR, and cash dumped in a Moscow bathroom to undermine the rouble.
Dumping the treasury bonds — The second economic weapon John Kiriakou says China holds against the United States — its position as the second or third largest holder of long-term government treasury bonds, which it could simply dump, and which he says would crash the entire American economy.
Economic roots of terrorism — John Kiriakou's argument, drawn from interrogating young al-Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, that jihadi recruitment is driven by poverty and hopelessness rather than religion — illiterate villagers paid $300 a month who could not find the U.S. on a map and had never read the Quran.
Elbridge Gerry and the salamander — John Kiriakou's account of the origin of the word gerrymander — Elbridge Gerry, vice president and former governor of Massachusetts, drawing district boundaries to elect his friends, and Benjamin Franklin saying the shapes looked like salamanders — together with a piece of trivia from his unpublished book on cemeteries.
Elizabeth Rouser — Named only in a producer/narrator voiceover on a Kiriakou interview episode, not in Kiriakou's own words; not attributable to Kiriakou in the corpus.
"Embrace it and keep telling it" — The advice John Kiriakou says he was given days after his arrest — that he could not hide from the prosecution but had to embrace it, and had to keep telling his side of the story until it became the side of record, because the government would eventually move on to its next target.
Government encryption back-door demands — John Kiriakou's account of state pressure on technology companies for access to encrypted systems — the British government's demand for a back door into Apple's operating system, which he says Apple met with a threat to leave the United Kingdom, and his prediction that the second Trump administration would make the same demand of any new platform under a counterterrorism pretext.
Encryption before the key — John Kiriakou's account of where encryption actually fails, offered against John McAfee's claim that no communication can be private. Kiriakou defers to the technologists he knows — Edward Snowden, Bill Binney, Thomas Drake and Kirk Wiebe — who tell him sufficiently sophisticated encryption does work. The exposure is upstream of the cipher: if an agency can reach your machine as you type, before you hit the encryption key, the encryption never gets a chance. He nonetheless encrypts everything he sends, and rejects the argument that encryption is what lets attacks through.
Beef jerky anomaly in the Epstein files — A pattern John Kiriakou has flagged in the released Epstein correspondence: on the order of 1,300 to 1,500 emails discuss beef jerky — making it, teaching others to make it, freezing and storing it — and none discuss eating it. Kiriakou treats it as an unexplained code and declines to speculate about what it stands for.
The Epstein statute of limitations — John Kiriakou's argument that nobody in the United States will be prosecuted over the Jeffrey Epstein case because the limitation period on the sex offences has run — a lapse he says may itself have been part of the plan, which leaves victims with civil suits against the estate, leaves the men named to social ruin rather than trial, and leaves only an improbable continuing-conspiracy theory as a route to criminal charges.
Erbil and the Kurdish autonomy question — Reading reports that Erbil airport in Iraqi Kurdistan had been targeted twice on the first night of the 2026 war, John Kiriakou drew out the implication: Baghdad had said repeatedly it would take no part in an American attack on Iran, but the Kurds hold autonomy in the north, and the strikes on Erbil suggest they may be supporting the attack independently of the Iraqi government.
Eric Swallwell — Kiriakou names Swalwell once — a passing aside contrasting today's partisan Congress with the Church and Pike Committees of 1975.
Ethan Mccord Collateral Murder — The US soldier who carried wounded children out of the street in the Collateral Murder video released by WikiLeaks.
Evangelical Zionism — John Kiriakou's account of the American Christian movement that supports Israel in order to hasten the return of Christ — a belief he calls a cult rather than a religion, which he says Israeli officials knowingly exploit, and which he blames for the abandonment of the Middle East's original Christians.
Europe without Russian gas — John Kiriakou's argument that Europe needs Russia more than Russia needs Europe, made from what he has physically encountered rather than from figures. Speaking in Nottingham in 2025 he found the concert hall so cold that the audience complained, and was told by the manager that the venue could not afford to heat itself without Russian gas. He reports the same of homes in Britain, Germany and Greece, where American gas is simply too expensive to substitute.
Executive assistant to the Deputy Director for Operations — The job John Kiriakou held during the Iraq war, and the shape of its day: a 2:45 a.m. alarm, ten thousand overnight cables triaged down to five or ten by dawn, the deputy directors briefed at seven and the director at half past — and only then the actual work of coordinating with the State Department, the Pentagon and the vice president's office.
Expanding the definition of terrorism — John Kiriakou's objection to the widening of the U.S. terrorism designation beyond groups that use violence for political ends — covering the addition of organisations loosely associated with Antifa, which he argues is not a group at all, and the designation of Latin American narco organisations, which he says should be answered with criminal charges rather than drone strikes.
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.
F-35 avionics dispute with Israel — John Kiriakou's account of how Israel demanded F-35 fighters without the deliberately degraded avionics the U.S. installs on export models — and, refused, allegedly worked through American defense contractors to steal the technology instead.
Fake CIA résumés — John Kiriakou's account of being used as a human authenticator in the private sector: at the consulting firm he joined after leaving the CIA, every job applicant claiming agency service was sent to dinner with him, and by his count fully half of them had never set foot inside the CIA.
False flags are too hard — John Kiriakou's practical objection to the idea that governments routinely stage false flag operations: they exist, and at the operational level the CIA used them constantly, but the bigger the operation the harder it is to run — too many moving parts, too many people who must buy into the conspiracy, and too much incompetence in government to keep any of it straight. He couples the objection with the observation that a government which is not transparent has no standing to complain about public suspicion.
Family Jewels — The CIA's internal catalogue of its own abuses, demanded in full by the Church and Pike Committees in 1975; per John Kiriakou, MK-Ultra and its assassination programs surfaced first, 85 percent of the MK-Ultra files were shredded in defiance of a direct order, and new officers were taught that everything in the file belonged to the era before 1975.
FBI apologies to Kiriakou — John Kiriakou says three FBI agents who worked on his prosecution have written to apologize since his conviction — one saying the case was 'directed and driven by seniormost officials' while mid- and street-level personnel objected, but 'we just followed orders.'
FBI Arrest Strategies — Per John Kiriakou, the FBI deliberately times arrests for Thursdays or Friday evenings because no federal arraignments happen on Fridays, forcing detainees to spend the weekend in jail before facing a judge on Monday — a tactic he says he saw applied to January 6 defendants as well as to himself.
FBI manufactured terrorism cases — John Kiriakou's account of terrorism prosecutions in which the FBI supplies the plot, the target, the explosives and the transport, then arrests the person it recruited. His central case is the 2026 Miami trial of a mentally ill homeless man facing six counts each carrying life without parole, in which Kiriakou testified for the defence and told the court that the FBI was "clearly the criminal in this case." The defendant was acquitted on every count.
Federal plea coercion — John Kiriakou's argument that the federal justice system coerces guilty pleas by stacking charges and winning 98.2% of its cases — so that even innocent defendants take deals, as he did, told by his own attorney that the system is 'not about justice; it's about mitigating damage.'
Fentanyl and China — John Kiriakou's argument that China declines to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States for the same reason he says the United States tolerated Afghan heroin reaching Iran and Russia — because an addicted society is a weaker one. He distinguishes Chinese-made illicit fentanyl, largely produced in Mexico, from the medical fentanyl that created the addiction pathway.
Fifty new crimes a year — John Kiriakou's argument that the United States has become a carceral country by legislative accretion — fifty newly created federal crimes every year for two decades, on top of five per cent of the world's population holding twenty-five per cent of its prisoners.
Five and a half years on the table — John Kiriakou's stated regret about his own whistleblowing — not that he did it, but that he waited: he learned of the torture programme in May 2002, it began on 2 August 2002, and he said nothing until 11 December 2007.
FISA court — John Kiriakou's account of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court — created under Carter, sitting atop the Justice Department, issuing warrants that are never public — which he says was abused against Carter Page as part of what he believes was John Brennan's plan to deny Trump the presidency.
Flock cameras — Automated licence-plate reading cameras mounted on police vehicles and on poles disguised as utility poles. John Kiriakou describes them as blanket, constant surveillance and a direct assault on civil liberties, more dangerous than the public realises, and says they are the point at which Edward Snowden's predictions have already come true.
Forcing Iran toward a bomb — John Kiriakou's argument that Western pressure risks producing the very outcome it claims to prevent: repeated Israeli assassinations of Iranian scientists and generals and strikes on Iranian sites may eventually leave Ayatollah Khamenei with no choice but to permit a defensive weapon — despite the religious prohibition Kiriakou credits him with maintaining, and despite successive American estimates that Iran is not seeking one.
Foreign aid — John Kiriakou's advocacy of a hundredfold increase in the American foreign-aid budget — a position he concedes puts him in "a very minuscule minority" — argued on the grounds that every dollar spent saves five or ten in refugee crises, civil wars and attacks on the United States, and that development is the only thing that empties terrorist recruiting pools. His counter-example is the Sana'a water-treatment plant, built by the European Union and rendered pointless by American and Saudi politics.
Freedom of Information Act — The U.S. transparency law that runs through John Kiriakou's story from every direction — his plea agreement banned him from ever filing a FOIA request on himself, so he filed one with the Bureau of Prisons anyway and got back pages stamped "FOIA EXEMPT — DO NOT RELEASE TO INMATE"; a FOIA request exposed the prison commissary skim; Jason Leopold's requests revealed that a detainee's eye was removed under sedation without his knowledge and that NBC's Ken Dilanian sent his stories to the CIA before his own editor; and a FOIA request is how Kiriakou learned Gary Johnson had quietly lobbied for his early release.
Freemasons and Opus Dei at the CIA — John Kiriakou's characterisation of the affinity networks at the top of the CIA — a great many senior officers who are Freemasons, and periods in which most of the leadership belonged to Opus Dei and attended the same church in Great Falls, Virginia. He rejects the idea that these are plots, describing them instead as accidental clusters of men who look out for one another.
Fridays at the agency — John Kiriakou's observation that Fridays were always very slow at the CIA, because the Middle East weekend falls on Thursday-Friday or Friday-Saturday depending on the country and the quiet propagates back to Washington — a rhythm he says bled into the United States generally.
Gail Slater — Per Sean Davis, speaking on the same Megyn Kelly panel as Kiriakou, the head of the DOJ antitrust unit under Pam Bondi who was stripped of authority and then fired.
Gangstalking claims — The belief, put to John Kiriakou almost daily, that the CIA subjects private individuals to permanent multi-person surveillance and electromagnetic attack. He rejects it as untrue and as a matter for psychiatry, while conceding that one element of the folklore has a real basis.
Kill the Messenger (Gary Webb) — The 2014 film about journalist Gary Webb, on which John Kiriakou served as script advisor; when Kiriakou was arrested in January 2012, the FBI seized his electronics, including a draft of the unclassified Hollywood script, and stamped every page "top secret" despite Kiriakou having no role in writing it.
Generals in national security posts — John Kiriakou's blanket objection to putting retired generals in charge of the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Defense Department or the National Security Council, resting on a single argument about how officers reach flag rank: generals became generals by saying 'yes sir', and what a president needs is somebody who can tell him why an idea is terrible.
Geneva Conventions — The laws of war at the center of John Kiriakou's most-told confrontation story: finding hooded prisoners in Pakistan, he demanded of the officer in charge — "Are you seriously telling me that you have never read the Geneva Convention? It is a war crime to put hoods on them. Take the hoods off." The two reported each other to headquarters; Kiriakou got in trouble — "they didn't give two shits about the Geneva Convention." He indicts the Bush administration's twin dodges: that al-Qaeda fighters, as non-state actors, fell outside the Conventions' protections, and that the techniques weren't torture at all.
Germany and Israel — John Kiriakou's account of German support for Israeli policy as an overcorrection driven by shame over the Nazi past, and of the resulting cultural blacklisting of critics of Israel in Germany — a pattern he put to Roger Waters, who described being effectively unpublishable in the German press.
Get better enough to go back — John Kiriakou's warning that the CIA does not care whether an officer has a mental breakdown, and cares about recovery only far enough to send them overseas again — advice he says means the officer has to look after themselves.
Greater Israel — The territorial project John Kiriakou believes the Israeli government genuinely holds: the expulsion of every Palestinian, beginning in Gaza and continuing into the West Bank, pursued on a hundred- or two-hundred-year horizon in the confidence that the United States will never push back.
Greek death rituals — The five-year grave rental, exhumation and ossuary practice of rural Greece as John Kiriakou describes it — bones washed in red wine, blessed, boxed, and eventually laid beneath the foundations of a new church, with cremation strictly forbidden. He visits the ossuary in his ancestral Rhodes village, where the records stop in the nineteenth century because the Ottomans burned everything earlier.
The Greek Orthodox Church — The church John Kiriakou was raised in and still belongs to — the institution behind his Greek fluency and his family's immigrant history, a recurring thread in his accounts of Athens, Damascus, Bethlehem and Washington, and, in two cases, an actor in his own story: the church the FBI followed him into, and the priest who tried to get him a pardon.
Gulf secret prisons for hire — Asked whether the CIA knew of Gulf royals operating underground torture facilities and secret prisons, John Kiriakou answered that it did — one hundred per cent — then refused to give details, saying he would risk returning to prison. He described the arrangement instead: the United States sought out these countries precisely because they had no parliament and no free press to answer to, and paid for the use of their cells.
Gulf security bargain — The decades-old arrangement — traced by John Kiriakou to FDR and the Saudi king, and originally British — under which Gulf Arab monarchies host U.S. bases and sell oil in dollars in exchange for American protection; a bargain Kiriakou says collapsed when those bases failed to shield them during the war on Iran.
The halfway house — The re-entry stage of a federal sentence — up to twelve months of it by law, in practice a fortnight before conversion to house arrest — which John Kiriakou was denied entirely for writing about prison conditions from inside, and which he describes as a system designed to make released prisoners fail.
Home confinement — The house arrest that followed John Kiriakou's release from prison — 87 days confined to the interior of his own house, telephone checks at any hour of the day or night, weekly halfway-house reporting and twice-weekly drug testing — which he describes as considerably worse than prison, and would rather have traded back for the cell. In federal sentencing arithmetic it is also one of the deductions that turns a headline number into the time actually served.
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.
Hostages and prisoners — John Kiriakou's objection to the vocabulary of the Gaza war — that Israelis held by Hamas are called hostages while Palestinians held by Israel without charge are called prisoners — which he treats as one instance of a wider pattern in which allies have governments and adversaries have regimes.
The hostile border crossing exercise — The training exercise run before dawn at a closed Dulles Airport in which CIA trainees crossed into the fictional Republic of Victoria — where John Kiriakou talked his way past a US-government-branded pen in his pocket, and the class clown ended up stripped to his underwear.
Hot bunking — John Kiriakou's description of living conditions aboard the overcrowded American warships and submarines he has visited: three men to a bed on eight-hour rotations, a shared pillow, decks raised several inches by the canned food stacked underfoot, and nuclear submarines that surface not because they must but to keep the crew sane.
How Chinese intelligence recruits — John Kiriakou's assessment of the Ministry of State Security's tradecraft: very effective with anyone who simply wants money, because the money is limitless, and very bad at cultivating a source who does not yet know who is cultivating him — with the target usually being access to sophisticated technology.
Hypersonic missiles — John Kiriakou confirms that hypersonic missiles are real and that Russia, China and Iran all have them; that a weapon travelling 2,500 miles an hour cannot be defended against; and that Iran holds too few of them to do anything but make each one count.
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.
Impeach him again — John Kiriakou's warning that if the Democrats win a House majority in 2026 and immediately move to impeach Donald Trump again, they should never win another race — and his prediction that this is exactly what they will do.
Kiriakou on influencing Trump — John Kiriakou's 2019 account of how to move Donald Trump on a policy question — that the president is malleable but needs to hear the same thing from three different people he respects, illustrated with an episode in which Rand Paul mentioned Kiriakou to Trump two weeks after an aide had, and Trump remembered the earlier mention. Kiriakou used the theory to argue that a pardon for Julian Assange was reachable.
Intelligence Agencies — Kiriakou counts roughly 19 publicly known US intelligence agencies and calls the proliferation Pentagon empire-building on duplicative work.
Fabricated intelligence reporting — The three things John Kiriakou says CIA case officers are caught doing — inventing intelligence outright, holding real reports back to smooth out a monthly quota, and padding cover-stop expenses — and his argument that the fabrication is driven by production targets set by bad managers.
Intelligence peddlers — John Kiriakou's breakdown of who actually walks into an American embassy offering information: the overwhelming majority are fabricators or probes, a few per cent are peddlers selling the same nugget to five embassies in a month, and about one per cent are the real thing.
"Iran posed no threat" — John Kiriakou's core objection to the 2026 war, stated as a chain of negatives: Iran had no nuclear weapon, no nuclear weapons programme, no wish for one, a religious ruling against one, and no delivery system if it had had one — findings he says were confirmed twice by the CIA and by the IAEA.
Iran strike factions (2026) — John Kiriakou's reporting, sourced to a former colleague at the White House, that a 2026 decision to strike Iran pitted an anti-war camp of JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard against a pro-war camp led by Marco Rubio — with the Joint Chiefs newly compliant because Trump had replaced them all.
Iran under sanctions: daily life — John Kiriakou's account of being talked out of his own assumptions about Iran by a close friend who travels there once or twice a year and eventually started filming ordinary life — leading him to conclude that a country with no American embassy, diplomatic presence or business presence since 1979 nonetheless lacks for nothing.
Iranian intelligence capability — John Kiriakou's assessment of Iranian intelligence as poor and always having been poor, on the ground that Iranian officers do not receive good training and are essentially on their own, with only marginal help from the Russians and the Chinese.
Iranian sleeper cells — John Kiriakou's assessment of Iran's clandestine reach abroad — that the IRGC and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security do run sleeper cells worldwide, but probably not in the United States, Canada or the UK, and that the greater danger is the unaffiliated lone attacker. He also argues Iranian operatives are consistently poor, and identifies the Gulf's real vulnerability as its tourist landmarks rather than its military bases.
Iranian strikes on Gulf hotels — John Kiriakou's reading of the Iranian drone and missile attacks on hotels in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Muscat during the 2026 war: not targeted killings, but deliberate strikes at the tourist economies of the Gulf states, aimed at hotels famous enough to empty the country of visitors.
Iranian suicide drones — John Kiriakou's description of the weapon he expected to define Iran's side of the 2026 war: one-way drones built inside Iran from Iranian parts, in large numbers, costing five to ten thousand dollars each, with explosives strapped on and flown remotely into a target. He treats them as the reason an aircraft carrier can no longer defend itself, the reason air defence fails on arithmetic rather than on technology, and the reason the Gulf states are reassessing the value of American bases.
Iranian underground missile silos — John Kiriakou's assessment of why the American and Israeli air campaign against Iran could not disarm it: the missile silos are buried under featureless desert with nothing on the surface to mark them, and an air force cannot destroy what it cannot locate. He measures the problem against twenty years of failure against Taliban fighters who had only rifles and caves.
Iraq, the training account — The reason John Kiriakou says he was given the Iraq portfolio as a new CIA analyst in 1990 — that nothing ever happened there — and the promise that once he had learned tradecraft and the house writing style he would be moved to somewhere exciting, such as Romania.
The Iron Dome — Israel's air-defence system as John Kiriakou reads it — impressive against a wave of slow Iranian drones, but shown by the handful that got through, and later by Iranian ballistic missiles, to be not all it is cracked up to be; each exchange, in his account, buying Iran intelligence about the gaps.
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.
Islamofascism — A term John Kiriakou says was introduced into American media around 2004 and 2005, was created by a public relations firm working for the Republican National Committee, was pushed hard into everyday usage, failed to catch on, and was quietly abandoned. He offers it as his clearest example of manufactured vocabulary intended as domestic propaganda.
Israel Boyd and the Wonder Bread story — John Kiriakou's account of finding the grave of Israel Boyd, one of two brothers forced by their parents into the family bakery business, who went on to invent the first industrial dough mixer and dough-cutting machine, pioneer adding milk to bread dough, and build the largest bakery in America before World War I — before selling the business, whose flagship "Mrs. McGill's Delicious Bread" was renamed Wonder Bread by its buyer.
Israel's counterintelligence threat ranking — John Kiriakou's repeated point that the American intelligence community formally ranks Israel a critical counterintelligence threat — the same tier as North Korea, China, Russia, Iran and Cuba — specifically for spying on and infiltrating the US government, and that policy has responded by giving Israel more access rather than less.
Israeli non-extradition of Jews — John Kiriakou's account of Israel as a refuge that does not extradite Jewish fugitives regardless of the offence, illustrated by the case of an American lawyer who fled there after a child-abuse suit and was recovered only by an Interpol sting in Cyprus. Kiriakou uses the rule to frame a question about Jeffrey Epstein: why a man with jets and hidden billions did not flee there himself.
Israel, Turkey, and NATO Article 5 — John Kiriakou's scenario in which an Israeli attack on Turkey would oblige every NATO member, the United States included, to come to Turkey's defence — and in which the alliance would sooner dissolve than honour that obligation against Israel.
Israel-United States relations — John Kiriakou's account of the U.S.-Israel relationship, including his own first visit to Israel as a tourist in 2022 and his characterization of Israel's willingness to destroy an entire city block to kill a single target, confident that the United States will not object.
Israeli False Flags — Per John Kiriakou, the Mossad has been carrying out false flag operations since the founding of the state of Israel and is "usually very good at it"; he says his first suspicion on hearing of attacks on Saudi oil fields, Azerbaijan, and Cyprus was that they were Israeli false flags, and he fears a false flag against the Al-Aqsa Mosque blamed on Iran or the Arabs.
Israeli integration into U.S. agencies — John Kiriakou's objection to the formal embedding of Israeli personnel inside American defense and intelligence institutions — a National Defense Authorization Act provision collocating them with the Pentagon and opening Five Eyes-style liaison with the CIA, arriving in the same weeks as a DIA all-hands warning that Israeli services were unusually aggressive in recruiting inside DIA. His argument is that the two cannot both be true: either Israel is a critical counterintelligence threat or it is a partner.
Israeli intelligence presence in the United States — John Kiriakou's account of Israeli intelligence activity inside the United States — dozens of undeclared Mossad and Shin Bet officers identified by the FBI, a critical-threat counterintelligence classification alongside Russia, North Korea and Cuba, and a pattern of harassment and intimidation directed at declared CIA officers posted to Israel.
Israeli interception of US secure calls — John Kiriakou's account of overhearing evidence, within six months of joining the CIA, that Israeli intelligence was listening to encrypted American government calls — a colleague's secure line dropped mid-conversation and two Israeli voices could be heard on the open channel discussing whether the call had ended. He treats the episode as the concrete basis for assuming that American principals are intercepted as a matter of routine.
Israeli property acquisition in Greece and Cyprus — John Kiriakou's account of Israelis buying land in Greece and Cyprus at a scale he considers destabilising — entire villages rather than holiday homes, a Jewish-only village outside Paphos with a casino attached, a rejected bid for an island in the Ionian Sea, and a request to open the first Zionist high school in Cyprus.
Israel's rightward shift — John Kiriakou's explanation for why Israeli politics moved sharply right over roughly two decades — that immigration from Russia, Ukraine and the United States brought in a conservatism the Israeli electorate had not seen before, displacing the socialist politics of the earlier European arrivals.
James Bond — The fictional spy who got John Kiriakou — and, he says, half the Directorate of Operations — into the business. He asked for walkie-talkies at nine and told his father at sixteen that he wanted to be a spy in the Middle East; he concedes "literally none of it is true to life", but vouches for one scene: Bond always runs into the CIA officer at the party. The figure follows him to the end, too — a personality paper titled "Who is James Bond?" describes the officer type in terms he finds harsh, and federal prosecutors, he says, argued for his detention by talking about him "like I was 007."
James Jesus Angleton — The CIA counterintelligence chief old-timers were 'genuinely afraid' of — and the wall of illegal files on American citizens kept in his office.
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.
'Joe Bidenopoulos' — The nickname John Kiriakou says Joe Biden carries in the Greek-American community — a reputation for being so pro-Greek-American that he is called Joe Bidenopoulos — which Kiriakou hoped in 2023 might give him a connection worth trying in his pursuit of a presidential pardon.
Joe Kent — Kiriakou on the former counterterrorism director he gave an award to, publicly opposed for a nomination, and has never actually spoken to.
John Kiriakou's Briefing Room — A twice-weekly news and commentary programme launched by John Kiriakou in July 2026, presented as analysis rather than partisan opinion, and distinct from his storytelling podcast Dead Drop.
John's rules for prison survival — The code John Kiriakou says he wrote for himself at FCI Loretto out of his CIA training — rule one, recruit prisoners as sources using the same motivations the agency teaches; rule two, seek cover and blend in — illustrated with a plan to obtain contraband binder clips.
Jordanian al-Qaeda detainee — The subject of John Kiriakou's first-ever interrogation in Pakistan — a Jordanian who had gone to Afghanistan to run an orphanage, joined al-Qaeda for its funding, and told the truth about his escape route because 'I'm your prisoner; what good would it do to lie?'
Julian Assange — Kiriakou — a 15-year friend and former WikiLeaks board member — on why Assange is a publisher owed a journalist's immunity, and a political prisoner.
Katherine Gun — UK whistleblower named once in an unlabeled multi-speaker panel transcript; not safely attributable to Kiriakou in the corpus.
Killing Khamenei — John Kiriakou's assessment that the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei during the 2026 war would change nothing, because the West had seriously overestimated his authority — an argument he extends to the American habit of expecting a war to end when a leader is removed.
Kiriakou and third parties — John Kiriakou's advocacy for viable third parties, and his 2016 experience touring the West with Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson — including the disorganization that convinced him the party would never break through, epitomized by a colleague who ignored an airport page thinking it was 'NSA tracking my movements.'
Kiriakou cameo practice — John Kiriakou's post-2026 use of the Cameo personalised-video service — running at roughly 25 to 30 hours a week, some 900 messages in the month of March 2026 alone, nearly 2,000 messages in total by July 2026 — that he says has produced three cases in which the person receiving the video message afterwards told him he had talked them out of committing suicide, including a 15-year-old bulimic girl to whom Kiriakou gave his personal phone number.
Kiriakou's case-officer rankings — A recurring segment in which John Kiriakou grades serving and former American politicians on how good a CIA case officer each would make, using an S-to-F scale. The criterion is character and the ability to attract confidence rather than politics, and he repeatedly grades allies low and opponents high.
Kiriakou's Cuba trip — John Kiriakou's account of his first visit to Cuba, where his books sit in the national library and officials treated him warmly — and a Cuban vice president told him every U.S. president is 'the same,' blaming Cuba while it cannot keep the lights on. He was invited as a guest of the Havana international book fair after his first two books were translated into Spanish, and later wrote about how the U.S. embargo shapes daily life there, from a dengue-fever hospital bill he had to pay in euros to a diet dominated by squash.
Kiriakou's daily news diet — John Kiriakou's account of the wide range of mainstream and alternative outlets he reads each morning to compare competing angles, the two outlets — the Associated Press and ProPublica — he singles out as exceptional, and his broader habits of media consumption, from an admitted addiction to political polling to his distrust of AI chatbots after they repeatedly fabricated his own biography.
Kiriakou Introduction to WikiLeaks — Kiriakou first heard of WikiLeaks as a warning inside the secret spaces it existed to expose: 'Don't touch that. Don't go near that.'
Kiriakou's Iran trips — John Kiriakou's account of his own visits to Iran and his Iranian-American partner's regular travel there — noting Tehran's status as the cosmetic-surgery capital of the Middle East, a warning to Iranian state TV viewers about American fast food rather than American generals, and his own repeated but unfulfilled invitations to visit.
Kiriakou's money-laundering tip — John Kiriakou's account of taking a chief operating officer job at a boutique investment firm early in the COVID pandemic that he came to believe was an international money-laundering operation possibly backed by Iran — downloading 15,000 pages of supporting documents before an FBI agent told him the bureau would only take interest if the case involved Russia, China, terrorism, or January 6th.
"I'm a non-person" — The phrase John Kiriakou uses for his standing after prison: a former colleague was sent to deliver congratulations from a mutual friend who had risen to a senior administration post, together with the message that he could never speak to Kiriakou again. Kiriakou pairs it with the loss of his federal pension after nineteen and a half years of service, and with the fact that in eight years no other CIA officer joined him in speaking publicly.
Kiriakou's Omega Seamaster — The wristwatch John Kiriakou bought himself in the Athens duty-free the day after Christmas 1999, on his way to recruit an asset in another European country, at the end of a Christmas that had gone badly in a failing first marriage.
Kiriakou on animated television — John Kiriakou's stated taste in television cartoons — South Park, Family Guy, The Simpsons and Bob's Burgers — his judgement that South Park is by far the most cutting edge of them, and the episodes he thought worth buying outright.
Kiriakou on artificial intelligence — John Kiriakou's stated experience with and objections to large language models — a ChatGPT exchange in which the system stated his degrees incorrectly, refused his correction and then cut him off, and a test in which every scholarly citation it produced for his university syllabus turned out to be fabricated. He also describes AI as the flagging layer of contemporary surveillance.
Kiriakou on Christmas — John Kiriakou's account of finding Christmas so depressing since his two divorces that he does not decorate or mark it at all — and of the year he replaced it by taking his children to every station on the New York City subway system in a single day.
Kiriakou on diet and nutrition — John Kiriakou's views on eating, given to a Cypriot nutrition interviewer who challenged several of them: that the worst dietary advice he ever heard was to cut fat and cholesterol, that the American sugar lobby spent decades persuading the public that fat was the enemy, and that at his age carbohydrates are the enemy instead.
Kiriakou on Greek and Cypriot food — The verdict John Kiriakou delivered on Cypriot cooking during a 2026 visit to the island — that its cheeses are more sophisticated and more distinct from one another than Greece's, where most are variations on a theme — together with his coffee positions, his conversion from frappé by a cousin in Rhodes, and his complaint about the size of the straw.
Kiriakou on travel — John Kiriakou's own ranking of the countries he has visited: Greece his favourite and, he insists, the best food anywhere; Oman the most beautiful landscape; Syria the most extraordinary civilisation; and Chile the cheapest, illustrated by a bottle of a vineyard's locked-away reserve that cost $8.50 on his honeymoon.
Kiriakou on wine — John Kiriakou's long-standing interest in wine — a subscription to Wine Spectator running a quarter of a century, a climate-controlled cellar built into his house, an eye that has twice caught a host passing off a cheap bottle as something better, and a professional life in which wine served in turn as cover story, surveillance-detection errand, recruitment currency and diplomatic catastrophe.
Kiriakou prison manipulation tactics — John Kiriakou's account of applying CIA tradecraft — including deliberate deception, forged paperwork, and manipulating other inmates into violence — to protect himself and control his environment during his federal prison sentence.
Kiriakou's public-speaking training — The origin John Kiriakou gives for his manner as a speaker: a tenth-grade speech and debate class taught by Dr. Scarvel, his father's childhood best friend, who drilled his students out of verbal fillers and pushed Kiriakou into competitive extemporaneous debate. Kiriakou credits the class with teaching him to let silence do the work of 'um'.
Kiriakou's Russian media work — John Kiriakou's account of hosting a daily Sputnik radio show for seven and a half years with full contractual freedom to criticize anyone, including Putin — which he did on the morning of the Ukraine invasion — offered as a rebuttal to claims that Russian outlets are mere propaganda.
Kiriakou's serial-killer letters — John Kiriakou's account of writing letters, as research for a planned book, to several well-known serial killers — including David Berkowitz ("Son of Sam"), Gary Leon Ridgway (the Green River Killer), the BTK killer, the "co-ed killer," and Manson family member Tex Watson — and the uniformly evangelical, Jesus-focused responses he received instead of the interviews he wanted.
Kiriakou's shortwave listening — The childhood hobby John Kiriakou identifies as the reason he went to work for the CIA — a fifty-cent auction radio, a walk-in closet turned radio shack with a pinned world map, membership of the American Shortwave Listeners Club, and a verified logging of Radio Ulan Bator that put him on the cover of the club's magazine at fourteen.
Situational awareness — The discipline John Kiriakou describes as the civilian version of surveillance detection — get out of the kill zone at the first sign of trouble, keep an escape route, and refuse to let the brain rationalise away what it is seeing.
Kiriakou's television pilots — The eight television pilots John Kiriakou has sold since 2007 as a hobby, beginning with Bomb Squad, a procedural about the New York City bomb squad built around a statistic that almost no bomb threat has anything to do with terrorism — alongside a parallel career as a script adviser on The Bourne Ultimatum, Kill the Messenger and CBS's True Lies, an MGM pilot conceived in prison, and a History Channel series developed with Oliver Stone from one chapter of his first book.
Kiriakou's type 2 diabetes — The disease John Kiriakou was diagnosed with after leaving the CIA for a desk job, which he first fought down with a nutritionist's diet and a 70-pound weight loss, then lost ground to when insulin slowed his metabolism to a halt — reaching an A1C of 12.1 before he had his stomach removed to end it.
How Kiriakou went armed in Athens — The load John Kiriakou carried every day during his Athens tour — a 9mm in a tear-away waist pack with three magazines, a snub-nosed .38 on his ankle, about 47 rounds in total, and a buck knife his boss handed him on his first day *"just in case things go to shit"*.
Kiriakou's writing process — John Kiriakou's account of how he actually writes — books in waves over roughly nine months, op-eds in forty-five minutes to an hour once an idea has sat for a few days, and a habit of getting up at two in the morning to write one because he cannot sleep. He wrote *Remains of the Day* in six weeks during COVID, losing whole evenings to it: "I look at the clock again, it's 2:00 in the morning. I'm like, oh my god, what happened?"
Kiriakou's recommended reading — Asked in March 2026 what to read about the CIA, John Kiriakou named his own first two books and, beyond them, a 1980s history called The Rise and Fall of the CIA, which he says was his own first real introduction to covert action and its failures.
Kurds — The stateless people John Kiriakou calls generationally pro-American — he escorted visiting Kurdish delegations around Washington as a young analyst and bristled at officials who talked down to them. In his telling the Kurds were the only genuine opposition inside Saddam's Iraq, the only faction of the exile circus that ever amounted to anything (Jalal Talabani ended up president of Iraq), the victims of Saddam's chemical weapons and of a no-fly zone that forgot to ban helicopters — and the common enemy that actually united Turkey and ISIS.
Lavrov on sanctions — The two remarks by Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov that John Kiriakou pairs to summarise the failure of the sanctions weapon — that Russia was surprised by how swiftly the Americans imposed sanctions, and, a year or two later, surprised by how quickly Russia got around them.
Leaker versus whistleblower — The fight over what the American networks would call John Kiriakou. It took his lawyers, above all Jesselyn Radack, a year of work between January 2012 and January 2013 to get CNN and MSNBC to stop introducing him as 'CIA leaker John Kiriakou'. CNN changed and Fox, he notes, never needed to; MSNBC in his account never did, and Rachel Maddow settled on a formula he quotes with some precision — a man 'who styles himself a whistleblower'.
Leaking versus whistleblowing — The distinction John Kiriakou insists is legal rather than rhetorical — whistleblowing being the disclosure of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality or threats to public health and safety, and leaking being everything else. He applies the same statutory test to Edward Snowden, to Chelsea Manning and to his own case, holds that motive is irrelevant to whether the test is met, and had to have the definition explained to him by his own attorney, because no whistleblower thinks he is one.
Lebanon-Israeli Conflict — Per John Kiriakou, no Israeli government will allow Lebanon to flourish as a nation; he expects continued Israeli attacks and forced displacement of civilians, citing a statistic of up to 700,000 Lebanese internally displaced, and links the war to the "Greater Israel" rhetoric of US ambassador Mike Huckabee.
Lee Zeldon — Per Megyn Kelly's opening monologue, the EPA administrator reportedly considered by Trump as a possible replacement for Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Letter from Loretto — Prison newsletter written by John Kiriakou from FCI Loretto, modeled on Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," which exposed two crimes committed against him by guards and went viral after being relayed to the Huffington Post, drawing national press to the prison.
Letters the cabinet ignored — John Kiriakou's account, from his years on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of what happened to congressional oversight letters sent to cabinet secretaries and agency directors — mostly nothing — and why he expects the same of demands made from the minority side of the aisle.
The Libertarian Party — The third party a lifelong Democrat joined on release from prison, after its 2016 presidential nominee had written to him in his cell and to the Attorney General on his behalf — the party John Kiriakou says was the only one talking about whistleblowing and the security-versus-liberty trade-off, and the one whose structural problem, he was told, is that it has no benefactor.
LSD Mind Manipulation — Kiriakou on the CIA dosing unwitting men with LSD in safe houses, using sex workers as bait, to find out whether the drug could unlock secrets.
Lynn Buchanan — A Fort Meade-trained Army intelligence veteran of the CIA and NSA remote-viewing programs — a primary source, Kiriakou says, not a TV psychic.
Major non-NATO ally status for Ukraine — John Kiriakou's forecast of how the Russian demand that Ukraine never join NATO can be met without leaving Ukraine unprotected: the designation of major non-NATO ally, already held by Australia, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which he says confers essentially the same rights without the membership.
Marco Rubio and Iran policy — John Kiriakou's answer to who was actually driving American policy toward Iran in 2026: with the Vice President, the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs all reported as opposed, and with Marco Rubio holding both the State Department and the National Security Adviser's job, the policy was Rubio's.
The Mariel boatlift comparison — John Kiriakou's rebuttal to the claim that Venezuela emptied its prisons and mental institutions into the United States: nothing of the kind has been shown to have happened, and the episode being described actually belongs to Cuba, which did exactly that during the Mariel boatlift.
Mark Levin Iran Policy — Per Sean Davis, speaking on the same Megyn Kelly panel as Kiriakou, radio host Mark Levin was among the "outside voices" — alongside Senator Lindsey Graham — who effectively made the real policy call to invade Iran. Separately, per John Kiriakou, Levin is one of the very few prominent commentators who consistently defends Israel publicly online.
Kiriakou on mass incarceration — The argument Kiriakou developed in the letters from Loretto and has repeated since: that the United States holds a quarter of the world's prisoners with five per cent of its people, that the cause is the drug war and election-year legislating, and that reform died in the Senate without a vote.
Mass Surveillance — Kiriakou says the NSA has dropped any pretext of protecting civil liberties, warehousing every call, text and email in the Utah desert.
Maxwell at a work camp — John Kiriakou's objection to Ghislaine Maxwell's placement in a minimum security work camp — that convicted sex offenders are, in his experience, never eligible for minimums — and his refusal, when pressed, to offer any explanation for the exception.
McCain-Feinstein Amendment — 2015 amendment, sponsored by Senator John McCain, that formally and permanently banned torture by U.S. government personnel, codifying the Army Field Manual as the single interrogation standard for all agencies. Per John Kiriakou, it restored the original language of the 1946 Federal Torture Act after U.S. policy had drifted from it through post-9/11 reinterpretation — and passed, he says, in part because of his own 2007 whistleblowing.
Meredith Whittaker — Per John Kiriakou, Meredith Whittaker is developing a new, and by his account successful, business model for the encrypted-messaging app Signal, an alternative he cites alongside ProtonMail's compromised attempt at the same thing.
Mexican 9 Month Work Visas — A George W. Bush-administration proposal, negotiated with Mexico in the six to eight months before 9/11, to give undocumented Mexican workers renewable nine-month U.S. work visas requiring federal income tax payment — killed by the September 11 attacks before it could be ratified.
Military Ethics — The hypothetical Kiriakou puts to college audiences — and the line no CIA training class ever teaches an officer where to draw.
Miranda Rights — Reality Winner, interviewed on Kiriakou's show, says she was never read her Miranda rights during her 2017 arrest by the FBI.
Misleading headlines — John Kiriakou's argument that the headline rather than the article is where American news does its work, that major papers routinely run headlines unsupported by the evidence beneath them, and that the problem was frequent enough for his radio show to devote a weekly segment to it.
Monroe Doctrine — John Kiriakou's history of the Monroe Doctrine — ignored for decades after its declaration, humiliated in the Falklands and Venezuela, and only made real by Teddy Roosevelt in 1905 — and his argument that reviving it to seize Maduro handed China a claim to Taiwan and Russia a claim to Ukraine.
"Most other countries are more moral than the CIA" — John Kiriakou's answer to a viewer who asked whether the United States has the most moral intelligence agency: it does not, and a hundred countries could be named whose services behave better — the disqualifying practice being the killing of people who pose no threat to the United States.
Mormons in intelligence — John Kiriakou's observation that Mormons are heavily overrepresented in the CIA and FBI — because their clean-living record lets them pass the polygraph easily, and their missionary years leave them fluent in rare languages the agencies need.
Morocco–Algeria rivalry — The long enmity between Morocco and Algeria over primacy in North Africa, which John Kiriakou identifies as the actual cause of the 2026 mass crossing into Ceuta after Spain's prime minister paid an official visit to Algiers.
The mosaic concept — The intelligence method John Kiriakou names for assembling a complete operational picture out of individually trivial fragments — one tile at a time, worthless alone, decisive together. He attributes the idea to Soviet thinking of the 1960s, cites Mossad's Iranian networks as the clearest modern demonstration, and warns that the same logic is what would let an American prosecutor charge a scholar with espionage for reading declassified documents.
Moving a satellite to Kuwait — John Kiriakou's illustration of how thin American overhead coverage once was: after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 the United States had no satellite looking at Kuwait, and it took six months to move one that had been parked over Moscow.
Muslim Brotherhood terrorist designation — John Kiriakou's objection to the designation of the Muslim Brotherhood, or elements of it, as a terrorist organisation: that the group is more than a century old, has never carried out an anti-American terrorist operation, and had never been so designated by any previous administration. He distinguishes fundamentalism and hostility from terrorism, has made the same argument to a former IDF spokesman's face, and traces the American quarrel with the Brotherhood back to its winning an Egyptian election.
Myanmar's civil war, per Kiriakou — John Kiriakou's account of Myanmar as the only country in the world continuously at war without a single day of peace since World War II, its Buddhist-majority persecution of Muslims, Christians, and Hindus, his view that Aung San Suu Kyi should have her Nobel Peace Prize stripped, and his argument that the world ignores the country's atrocities because it has gems rather than oil.
National Archives declassification — John Kiriakou's exposé of why U.S. records go undeclassified: the National Archives runs a 20-year-old computer with no connectivity, its head has asked for a smaller budget, and Freedom of Information Act requests face what he calls a 500-year backlog.
National Bird — Award-winning documentary on the U.S. drone program featuring whistleblower Daniel Hale; John Kiriakou calls it essential viewing, noting its footage of drone operators debating on audio whether the figures in their crosshairs are children before firing.
National Security Act of 1947 — The law that created the CIA and the National Security Council — passed, in John Kiriakou's telling, only because Harry Truman lied to J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover lobbied Capitol Hill to kill the bill until Truman promised the CIA would be a division of the FBI; the bill passed, Hoover realized he'd been duped, and ordered the FBI not to cooperate with the new agency — a freeze that lasted, incredibly, until after 9/11. Kiriakou's account of how the agency was designed at all runs through a room in New York where MI6 officers sat down with Bill Donovan, Prescott Bush and some pads of paper.
National Security Agency — The U.S. signals-intelligence agency. John Kiriakou notes it was never created by an act of Congress and that its own charter forbids collection on Americans — a rule that, when he entered government, meant heads rolled over accidental intercepts, and which he says has since been inverted into total collection stored in Utah for 500 years.
National security letters — The demand letters the FBI began sending internet service providers after 2001, which John Kiriakou describes as one of three mechanisms that between them retired the warrant requirement for obtaining Americans' personal information. The other two are the FISA process and the outright purchase of metadata from social-media companies.
National Security vs Civil Liberties — Kiriakou's recurring argument that invoking "national security" is used to excuse the erosion of civil liberties and that the secrecy regime cannot coexist with constitutional democracy.
Nationalizing the midterms — John Kiriakou's recurring comparison between contemporary party messaging and Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America, including his advice that Speaker Mike Johnson should keep Gingrich on his couch and ask him nightly how the 1994 midterms were nationalised.
Article 5, invoked once — John Kiriakou's argument against NATO's continued necessity, resting on the observation that in the alliance's whole history it has been called on to defend a member from attack exactly once — on 11 September 2001 — and on the repeated American promises to Russia not to expand toward its borders, which he says four presidents in a row have broken.
NDAA 2027 US–Israel fusion provisions — Provisions in the proposed National Defense Authorization Act for 2027 and the companion intelligence authorization bill that would create a permanent Pentagon executive agent for US–Israeli military fusion and lock in permanent intelligence sharing tied to Israel's qualitative military edge. John Kiriakou describes the effect as handing over voluntarily the technology Israel previously ran spies to steal.
NDAA Section 219 — The provision of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2027 that would co-locate Israeli personnel with the Pentagon and open Five Eyes-style intelligence liaison with the CIA, which John Kiriakou opposes as merging with a service ranked a critical counterintelligence threat.
NewsGuard — A media-rating organization, founded by the former head of Court TV and a former Wall Street Journal publisher, that scores news outlets 0-100 for reliability. Per John Kiriakou, NewsGuard docks any outlet that takes a position on Ukraine or Syria contrary to its preferred line, is subscribed to mostly by government entities (chiefly the Pentagon), and singled out Consortium News, the Grayzone, Antiwar.com, and ScheerPost over their criticism of U.S. policy — prompting a First Amendment lawsuit.
There is no such thing as bad food in Athens — The lesson John Kiriakou says he learned at a lorry drivers' stop outside Corinth, where the food was as good as his grandmother's — reached on the three-and-a-half-hour drives he made to meet a source too sensitive to be met in Athens, with a vineyard tour as his cover story.
No band-aids since the early nineties — What doctors told John Kiriakou when he visited an Afghan hospital in 2000, during the first Taliban government — that they had not seen a band-aid since the early 1990s — and his conclusion that the humanitarian carve-outs in the Clinton-era sanctions did not exist in practice.
No-bid contracts — John Kiriakou's account of the mechanism he considers the real corruption of American national security: an officer retires on a Friday, returns Monday on a contractor badge at ten times the salary, and is fed no-bid contracts by the friends he left behind — including, in one unnamed case he describes, a tax shelter that became a multi-billion dollar company inside a decade.
No declaration of war since 1941 — John Kiriakou's answer to whether Congress will assert its authority over military action against Venezuela — an unqualified no, resting on the fact that the last declaration of war was on 8 December 1941 and that even the Gulf War was fought on an authorisation to use force rather than a declaration.
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 good guy — John Kiriakou's standing refusal to treat opposition to Donald Trump and defence of the intelligence agencies as a single position — that a citizen may dislike Trump's policies without throwing in with the CIA, the FBI and the likes of John Brennan — together with the electoral remedy he attaches to it.
No plan for day two — The lesson John Kiriakou says he learned early at the CIA: the United States is very good at overthrowing governments and has no idea what to do afterwards. The planning is all about day one. He lists Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Sudan and Somalia as the record, and gives three reasons the same officials keep repeating the mistake.
Nobel Peace Prize — The prize a Swedish parliamentarian nominated John Kiriakou for in 2016 — a marker of how far world opinion had swung his way after prison. Kiriakou once believed Obama deserved his; he came to see it as unearned, and he treats Trump's foreign policy as substantially organized around wanting one too — "never underestimate Donald Trump's desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize," a White House friend told him. Netanyahu's nomination of Trump he summarized in a single unprintable phrase.
NSA Surveillance — 'It is part of NSA's founding charter that it is not allowed to spy on Americans' — Kiriakou on warrantless collection and the Bluffdale warehouse.
Nuclear war is winnable — The belief John Kiriakou says is held by a real faction in both Ukraine and the United States: that a nuclear exchange can be survived and won. He traces the American version to Pat Buchanan's 1992 presidential campaign — we come out from our caves and continue the fight — and reconstructs the Ukrainian version as a bet that if Russia went nuclear, the American, British and French arsenals would answer. He calls the reasoning insanity and thinks it is nonetheless being done.
Obama's drone escalation — The pair of figures John Kiriakou uses to measure what changed between the Bush and Obama administrations — twenty-four people killed by drones in George W. Bush's last month in office against four hundred and forty in Barack Obama's — offered as the answer to anyone who treats the drone programme as an inherited policy rather than an expanded one.
Official leaks — The category of disclosure John Kiriakou says is both the largest and the only one that is never prosecuted — trial balloons and opinion-shaping put out by the White House, the National Security Council and the Pentagon, with the president himself as the most prolific leaker in Washington.
'Once CIA, always CIA' — The comment-section accusation John Kiriakou says angers him more than any other — that no one who has served in the CIA ever really leaves it, and that whistleblowers are therefore still working for the agency. He calls it "the most intellectually lazy, stupid, thoughtless position that anybody could take", says the agency actively benefits from it because it splits the anti-CIA public, and answers the version aimed at himself by pointing at his prison sentence.
"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.
One hundred and twenty-three investigations — The figure John Kiriakou attributes to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and what he calls his big mouth: 123 active national security leak investigations under way, which Kiriakou uses to argue the Trump administration was worse for whistleblowers than Obama's.
OnlyFans — Per John Kiriakou, the man who owned OnlyFans — whom he describes as Ukrainian-American rather than Israeli — was a major donor and strong supporter of Israel, part of a broader claim Kiriakou makes about Israeli involvement in the porn industry.
"Only Fox came to my defence" — John Kiriakou's account of how the American networks labelled him — MSNBC never using the word whistleblower and calling him a CIA leaker, CNN taking a year to change, and Fox, he says, being the only outlet that defended him at the time — offered as evidence that the label a case receives is drawn along political lines rather than factual ones.
"Only two and a half more years" — The consolation John Kiriakou says he takes from the second Trump term's remaining span, and his reasons for doubting that a Democratic successor would undo any of it. He points to Joe Biden's failure to reverse the first term, including the never-restored relationship with Cuba.
The operational cable — The written product of every CIA field meeting — drafted the same day, printed and handed to the instructors at the Farm, who critiqued the prose, the conduct of the meeting and what the officer had been wearing.
Origins of al-Qaeda — John Kiriakou's position on where al-Qaeda came from: bad American foreign policy decisions led to it indirectly, but not by design. He rejects the deliberate-creation theory on the grounds that it is unnecessary — a state willing to kill does not need to manufacture a pretext first.
"Our job is to break the law" — The line John Kiriakou says CIA instructors repeated in training, and the qualification he attached to it at the time: the job is to break the law over there, not here. He describes participating willingly in break-ins abroad while insisting a warrant is required at home.
Over-classification — John Kiriakou's account of why the American government classifies far more than it can ever review: not conspiracy but incentive. At lesser agencies a classification stamp is a status marker — it puts you in the in-crowd and above the colleague who lacks access — and at the CIA everything carries a stamp by default. His complaint about press coverage of classified-document scandals is that it never reaches the underlying question of why the documents were secret at all.
Overcriminalization — John Kiriakou's argument that the United States criminalizes too much — locking up 25% of the world's prisoners with 5% of its population, and adding roughly 50 new felonies a year — illustrated by a NOAA employee prosecuted for whistling at a whale.
Pacific island peacekeepers — John Kiriakou's observation that small Pacific states such as Fiji supply a disproportionate share of the world's peacekeeping forces because the pay makes up a large part of their national budgets — and his argument that this makes them cultural strangers wherever they deploy.
Kiriakou's Pakistan-Islam economic critique — John Kiriakou's controversial view that Islam has held Pakistan back economically, contrasting Pakistan's stalled development since the 1960s with South Korea's — which had the same GDP as Pakistan in 1964 — and citing lost productivity from prayer breaks and holy days, resentment over partition, and spending on nuclear weapons instead of infrastructure and education.
Navigating Pakistan without maps — The logistical problem John Kiriakou says nearly undid the Abu Zubaydah operation: in 2002 Pakistan had no maps to buy, no street signs and no addresses, so the CIA team navigated a city of twelve million by shoe advertisement, traffic policeman, British school and McDonald's — rehearsing the route twice in the small hours before the raids.
Pakistani corruption and democracy — John Kiriakou's assessment that corruption in Pakistan is so deep and so broad that a genuinely functioning democracy is almost impossible there — set against a long history of military coups, a habit of imprisoning former prime ministers, and his insistence that Imran Khan should not be in a cell.
Pakistani troops for Gaza — The proposal, floated by Israel and Saudi Arabia in late 2025, to send some 20,000 Pakistani peacekeepers into Gaza — which John Kiriakou thought might be a good idea on cultural and religious grounds, and thought Israel would never permit, because a country that will not let journalists in will not let foreign Muslim troops in either.
Pam Bondi — Panelists alongside Kiriakou on why Trump picked Bondi for loyalty above all, and called her handling of the Epstein files a farce.
Panquake — Open-source, blockchain-based social platform developed by the Iceland-registered company Talk Liberation, for which John Kiriakou has served as brand ambassador since 2020. Kiriakou describes it as advertising-free, subscription-funded, free of back doors, and run on servers powered by Icelandic geothermal steam — a project he frames as a David-and-Goliath fight against banks, big technology and governments.
Pegasus spyware — Israeli-developed phone-interception software that requires no action by the target — no link clicked, no message answered — and gives its operator the contents of the device along with live use of its camera and microphone. John Kiriakou describes it as having escaped state control: sold on commercially, routed through an American contractor and then directly by the Israelis, used against Americans, and implicated in a Greek interception scandal that he says brought down a government.
The Pentagon's congressional district strategy — The practice John Kiriakou describes of placing defence manufacturing orders in effectively all 435 congressional districts, so that every member of Congress has constituents dependent on the defence budget — and nobody has an incentive to vote against it.
The permanent multipolar world — John Kiriakou's assessment that the unipolar period following the collapse of the Soviet Union has ended permanently, and that the arrangement was not inevitable — he attributes it to American strategic choices, principally leaving the Iran nuclear agreement and choosing confrontation with China and Russia over the cooperation that was available.
Permanent wartime economy — John Kiriakou's thesis that since 9/11 the United States has run a permanent wartime economy so large that cutting the defense budget would trigger a depression — likening the dependency to crack addiction and warning it makes war almost inevitable.
Pete Hoekstra — Named once in an unlabeled multi-speaker panel transcript; not safely attributable to Kiriakou in the corpus.
Kissinger and the petrodollar — John Kiriakou's endorsement of the theory that Henry Kissinger deliberately structured the 1970s petrodollar to tie the U.S. to Middle Eastern oil — creating a standing rationale for policing the region, even as America exports its own fracked oil.
Phone microphone ad targeting — John Kiriakou's account of a spoken telephone conversation about concealed carry permits being followed, five minutes later, by a Facebook feed in which every single advertisement was for a concealed carry class — offered as evidence for his claim that the platforms go further than they admit and listen when the phone is turned off.
The pivot to Asia — John Kiriakou's criticism of the American realignment toward the Pacific begun under Barack Obama, which he describes as unnecessarily provocative — and his argument that the historical fear in the region runs the other way, since it was China that was invaded by Japan, and Chinese children are taught the occupation as part of their national inheritance.
Planning a surveillance detection route — The hours of paperwork behind every CIA meeting before satellite mapping existed — photocopied road-atlas pages taped into sheets six feet across, legs and stops marked in coloured highlighter, submitted to instructors for approval and then driven in advance to check for no-left-turns and closed roads. John Kiriakou ran routes to and from work every day in Athens against 17 November, taught surveillance detection as an agency instructor, spent four or five hours of a night on the route around a single emergency meeting, and wrote the CIA Insider's Guide to the subject — from which the agency redacted six pages.
Plus 972 — The Israeli platform that, per a 2026 Berlin panel, has published a striking number of IDF whistleblowers as AI enters modern warfare.
Podcast Bros — Per Sohrab Ahmari, speaking on the same Megyn Kelly panel as Kiriakou, podcast bros.
Podcasters on foreign payrolls — John Kiriakou's account of being told by an investigative journalist he respects that four household-name podcasters were taking CIA money — an allegation she could not corroborate and would not publish. He treats it as credible and extends the logic: if the agency is paying podcasters, foreign governments will be paying them too.
The polygraph — The lie-detector examination that gates entry to the CIA, described by John Kiriakou from the inside: the twenty-minute wiring-up, the psychiatrist's advice to stare at a speck on the wall, the deliberately planted false accusation used to test a candidate's reaction, and his contention that the machine screens out exactly the wrong people.
Population decline as a national-security question — John Kiriakou's argument that demographic collapse — an emigrated Greek middle class, a shrinking Russia, and a Chinese population he believes is far smaller than claimed — is a strategic variable rather than a social one, and that some countries may not remain viable as countries without large population changes.
Prepublication review — The CIA clearance process every former officer's writing must pass through, and John Kiriakou's account of what it did to his eighth book — five weeks instead of two, a missed publisher's deadline, six pages redacted as classified that he says the agency had itself declassified a decade earlier, and an appeal route requiring another ninety days.
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.
Presidential call memcons — How a call between the president and a foreign leader is staffed and recorded, as John Kiriakou describes it. Four people are usually on the line and rarely five — not the twenty reported during the Ukraine affair — and the write-up, a memorandum of conversation or memcon, is held so tightly inside the National Security Council that a CIA analyst, he says, would never see one.
Presidents and the CIA — John Kiriakou's observation that some presidents actively lead the CIA while others are led around by it — citing George H.W. Bush's ongoing "love affair" with the agency after his 11-month stint as director, and Richard Nixon's close relationship with the CIA, which Kiriakou says was one of the things that brought down his presidency.
President's Daily Brief — Per John Kiriakou, the President's Daily Brief (PDB) is a roughly 16-page, top-secret intelligence document produced daily for the president, written in a uniform CIA house style, briefed each morning, and — in his account — used partly to gauge and flatter incoming presidents.
Prison as temporary duty — The frame John Kiriakou and his wife adopted in the weeks between his sentencing and his surrender: that a thirty-month sentence was to be treated as a long overseas posting. He had spent much of his CIA career deployed for months at a time, once for two years, and says the family handled the separation the way it had handled those. The analogy borrowed a specific piece of agency vocabulary — TDY, the assignment nobody asks you about.
The chapel job — The work assignment John Kiriakou was given at FCI Loretto after he volunteered to teach a class — *"if I want you to teach a class I'll ask you to teach a class"* — and was made a janitor in the chapel instead, at $1.08 a month.
The prison commissary — The federal prison store as John Kiriakou describes it: a captive market with a flat thirty per cent mark-up whose proceeds were supposed to buy library books and athletic equipment for prisoners and instead bought a large-screen television for the guards' lounge — a diversion he established through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The prison food economy — The underground kitchen at FCI Loretto, where meals were cooked in bin liners heated by improvised immersion elements, guards stole and resold the food they were meant to be guarding, and Kiriakou stopped going to the cafeteria for the last six to eight months of his sentence.
Prison guard hiring standards — John Kiriakou's account of what it takes to become a federal prison guard — a GED or work towards one, and no felony convictions — and his supporting anecdote that prisoners themselves regularly had to conduct mail call because the officer assigned to it could not read.
Medical care in federal prison — Kiriakou's account of health care at FCI Loretto, where a bunkmate's months of reported chest pain ended in a heart attack, a prisoner with untreated back pain was diagnosed with terminal cancer weeks before he died, and Kiriakou himself collapsed after being handed a drug nobody had explained to him.
Prison pedophile accounts — John Kiriakou's account of encountering convicted pedophiles for the first time in federal prison, drawing on advice from a psychiatrist friend and his own work running the chapel library — one of only two safe spaces in prison for inmates convicted of child sex crimes.
Prison phone monitoring — Kiriakou treated the recording of his prison telephone calls as an intelligence channel rather than a constraint, planting messages for staff he knew were listening — a practice that produced a confrontation with a lieutenant over the word 'Nimrod'.
Prison racial segregation — John Kiriakou's account of the rigid racial and ethnic division of American prisons — a cafeteria split like the 1950s South — and his argument that segregating and hardening inmates for years, then releasing them with no skills, makes society less safe.
The prison service economy — The trade in goods and services at FCI Loretto as John Kiriakou describes it — used shoes resold on commission, convenience stores run out of lockers at a thirty per cent markup, a dozen bookmakers, unlicensed chiropractic, and sexual services priced in books of postage stamps.
Prison tattoos — Tattoos as John Kiriakou encountered them at FCI Loretto — the swastika-necked welcoming committee on his first day, the Lady Justice piece that made him laugh and then think, the constant pressure on him to get one, and his flat refusal to take a souvenir of the place.
The prison visiting room — The room where a federal prisoner sees his family, reached through a strip-search cell — where John Kiriakou's children came to accept where their father was, where a former CIA boss turned up unannounced, and which is closed entirely to prisoners held under special administrative measures.
Private prison system — John Kiriakou's account of the U.S. private prison industry as an incentive to keep beds filled and cut costs on food and medicine — illustrated by the 'sewer trout,' dog-food, and dead-rat-in-the-Kool-Aid stories from his own incarceration.
Progressive taxation — John Kiriakou's argument that the United States abandoned a system it was once proud of: taxation based, in Theodore Roosevelt's formulation, on a person's ability to pay. It fell apart under Ronald Reagan, he says, and the regressive substitutes now proposed — a higher gas tax among them — hit the people least able to absorb them.
Project Stargate — The CIA's remote-viewing program, which Kiriakou says burned millions for decades and failed — and which he understands is being revisited.
The promotion panel — The CIA board that reviews an officer for advancement, and the one that reviewed John Kiriakou weeks after the Abu Zubaydah capture — where his refusal to be trained in the enhanced interrogation techniques was recorded as *"a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism"*, and he was passed over.
Proposals to relocate the Palestinians — John Kiriakou's account of recurring schemes to solve the Palestinian question by moving the population somewhere else — including a 1980s proposal to rename a barren diamond of land on the Saudi–Iraqi border "Palestine" and resettle everyone there — and his verdict that picking up an entire people and moving them is unprecedented and untenable.
Prosecution as promotion — John Kiriakou's structural explanation of national-security prosecutions: that the FBI agents and Justice Department attorneys who bring them advance their careers by collecting convictions, which is why cases survive investigations that found no crime and why charges like false statement, perjury and wire fraud get filed when nothing else will stick.
Prosecutorial careerism — John Kiriakou's explanation for why senior federal prosecutors pursue high-profile national-security cases regardless of their merits: the conviction of a famous defendant is the entry ticket to a partnership at a large firm, a congressional candidacy, or a run for governor.
Psychiatric evacuation — The CIA's practice of pulling an officer out of a posting and flying him home when he breaks down — known inside the agency as being psychovac'd — and the desk-bound evaluation period that follows before he is allowed to travel again.
PTSD — Post-traumatic stress disorder runs through John Kiriakou's life and worldview — he had it coming out of Greece after an assassination attempt, brought it home from Pakistan alongside his shock at colleagues' willingness to kill, and was blindsided by a delayed post-prison version that helped end his marriage. For six months after release he dreamed the same dream nightly: that he was out by mistake and had to get back inside before midnight count. He still takes a repurposed blood-pressure drug that stops the dreams, and he extends the diagnosis outward — to secret-site interrogators who came back crying, to drone pilots, and to prisoners released angry and untreated.
Public-interest defense — The affirmative defense the Espionage Act does not allow: John Kiriakou explains that a defendant cannot tell a jury he acted in the public interest, and that Edward Snowden's willingness to come home hinged on getting that chance — which the Justice Department refused.
Purchased data as a warrant workaround — John Kiriakou's account of U.S. federal agencies buying Americans' personal data from social-media platforms and data brokers rather than seeking a warrant — a practice he describes as an ethical and legal problem likely to reach the Supreme Court, and one in which no judge is aware a case is being built.
Rand Paul and Eric Holder — Senator Rand Paul asked Attorney General Eric Holder whether the president may kill an American citizen on U.S. soil without a trial. In John Kiriakou's tellings the answer is sometimes a flat "yes" citing the Patriot Act, and sometimes a refusal to answer on the record — a distinction he treats as immaterial, because either way the authority has never been challenged in court. Paul is also, in Kiriakou's accounting, one of only two members of Congress who have ever stood up for whistleblowers, and the senator who summoned him to Capitol Hill to help block Gina Haspel and then voted to confirm her a week later.
Ranking Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden — John Kiriakou's answer to a viewer asking which of four presidents he would choose to live under. He begins by picking Barack Obama as the least bad face to the world, reverses himself over the whistleblower prosecutions, and ends by naming Joe Biden — on the grounds that the country was effectively running itself.
RDAP — The Bureau of Prisons' Residential Drug and Alcohol Program, which takes a year off a federal sentence on completion — the single most valuable piece of advice John Kiriakou says he gives to people facing prison time, alongside good-conduct credit and halfway-house conversion.
Recruiting foreign students — The long-horizon intelligence argument for admitting foreign students to American universities — that a doctoral student in the hard sciences recruited on campus goes home to a weapons programme as an asset already in place — and John Kiriakou's view that collapsing enrolment is an operational loss nobody at the top is thinking about.
Recruitment attempts on Kiriakou — A series of episodes in which foreign intelligence officers tried to recruit John Kiriakou himself — an over-eager Hungarian during his CIA application, a French counterterrorism officer who staged a car pickup in Islamabad, and a Shin Bet officer at his first liaison briefing.
The refusal to talk to adversaries — John Kiriakou's argument that the single worst American foreign-policy habit of the past two decades is the refusal to engage diplomatically with governments Washington disagrees with — a practice he dates to the George W. Bush administration, which he says CIA officers complained about at the time, and which has since become bipartisan.
The Republican split over the Iran war — John Kiriakou's account of the division inside the Republican Party over the 2026 war with Iran — between the voters who backed Donald Trump as the no-foreign-wars candidate and an administration Kiriakou says has reverted to the neoconservative posture of John McCain's party, with Tulsi Gabbard and J.D. Vance on one side and Marco Rubio on the other.
Restraint Camp — A term for foreign-policy conservatives who favor ending forever wars and regime-change interventions; not attributable to Kiriakou in the corpus.
Rival factions in Libya — John Kiriakou's account of the CIA and the State Department backing opposing factions inside Libya — proxies funded by two arms of the same government that end up fighting each other, an arrangement he calls insane and treats as characteristic of American intervention in places nobody is reporting on.
Ruining the whistleblower — John Kiriakou's account of what a prosecution of a whistleblower is actually for — not conviction but ruin, personally, professionally and financially — offered as the thing he did not think through before he spoke, and the thing he says then happened to him exactly as described.
Rule six: the body endures more than the brain says — The CIA maxim John Kiriakou carried into prison — that the human body can take much more punishment than the brain believes — which he applied first to being punched in the face and then, more importantly, to depression.
Running into former sources — John Kiriakou has twice met people he once ran as agents by accident, years after leaving the CIA — once at an airport and once in the street — and both times they came to him with a bear hug. One of them was astonished to discover he spoke English.
Russell Targ — Named in a post-produced narration segment appended to an interview featuring John Kiriakou, describing Targ as an original Stanford Research Institute scientist behind government remote-viewing protocols — not a claim made by Kiriakou himself, who elsewhere expresses skepticism that remote viewing ever worked.
Russia and NATO membership — John Kiriakou's account of the opening that was available with Moscow in the early 2000s and was refused — deep cooperation on terrorism, narcotics and proliferation offered only on terms of junior partnership, and approaches from both Yeltsin and Putin about joining NATO that met, in his words, the cold shoulder.
Russia-Ukraine war origins — John Kiriakou's account that the war began in 2014, not 2022 — rooted in broken U.S. promises that NATO would not expand to Russia's borders, the 2014 removal of a pro-Russian Ukrainian leader, and the seizure of Crimea; he says Russia is now winning and has no reason to negotiate.
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.
Russiagate — John Kiriakou's rebuttal of the claim that Russia swung the 2016 U.S. election: the Mueller report found no interference, the DNC emails were leaked in person rather than remotely hacked, and Russia's roughly $50,000 in Facebook ads — half spent after the election — was trivial against billions in campaign spending.
Saddam and the journalists — John Kiriakou's comparison, drawn from fifteen years working the Iraq target at the CIA, between a dictator who hated the press and did not kill it and a government that he says kills journalists deliberately and in numbers.
Saddam Hussein's classified biographer — John Kiriakou's first job at the CIA: writing the classified biography and psychological profile of Saddam Hussein in the Office of Leadership Analysis — the desk from which he watched the agency conclude, on 30 June 1990, that Iraq would invade Kuwait, and get the scale of the invasion wrong.
Sam Adams Award — The integrity-in-intelligence award John Kiriakou received in 2016 at American University, joining a laureate list that includes Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Sy Hersh. Named not for the founding father but for the CIA analyst who insisted the true enemy strength in Vietnam was double what General Westmoreland allowed to be reported, it is given by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity — a community Kiriakou describes as doubling as a support group for whistleblowers.
Sanctions Effectiveness — John Kiriakou's assessment that U.S. sanctions have been so overused against disfavored countries that nations like China now route around them entirely, and that sanctions work only when reserved for the worst actors and imposed in concert with other countries — citing apartheid South Africa as a success and Cuba/Venezuela as failures that instead entrench nationalist narratives.
Saudi aid priorities — John Kiriakou's characterisation of Saudi generosity abroad as real but consistently misdirected: instead of building schools they build mosques, instead of building hospitals they send planeloads of Qurans, and instead of water treatment plants or power plants they send money for weapons, ammunition and training.
Saudi Arabia and radicalism — John Kiriakou's long-held position that Saudi Arabia is the primary generator of radical movements worldwide — a claim he locates not in the government alone but in the whole structure of Saudi government and society, in which a clerical establishment tells the rulers what to think while the rulers privately do as they please.
Saudi Arabia as an open-air prison — John Kiriakou's verdict on the country he served in — 'the biggest open air prison in the world' — together with his account of what the ambassador's life there is like inside the residence and outside it, the two ambassadors he served under, and the annual migration of the entire Saudi government to Jeddah to escape the heat.
The Saudi fear of an election — The explanation a Saudi diplomat gave John Kiriakou in the late 1990s for the royal family's opposition to democracy in the kingdom: if there were an election in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden would win it — a remark Kiriakou uses to argue that the regime's problem was not that its princes loved al-Qaeda but that it feared its own population did.
Composition of the Saudi military — John Kiriakou's long-standing claim that there are almost no Saudi nationals in the Saudi armed forces below the most senior ranks, and that the rank and file are Pakistanis hired from among Pakistan's poor. He treats it as a standing joke in the Gulf and as a limit on what Saudi Arabia can contribute to any war with Iran.
Saudi-Iran diplomatic rivalry — John Kiriakou's account of the roots of Saudi-Iranian hostility — Iran's bloody 1979 infiltration of the Hajj, Saudi Arabia's suppression of its own Shia minority, and the 2023 restoration of diplomatic relations brokered, to Washington's surprise, by China.
SEAL Team Six attrition — John Kiriakou's answer to the claim that the Navy SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden have since been killed off: the dead came from the broader unit rather than the raid party, SEAL Team Six numbers several hundred men rather than the dozen or so people imagine, and losing a high number of them to accidents and combat is, in his phrase, very sadly common.
Securedrop — The encrypted submission tool pioneered by WikiLeaks to let sources hand over documents without exposing themselves.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee — Kiriakou was senior investigator under John Kerry — and still held the post when his own federal prosecution came to a head in January 2012.
Senior Intelligence Service — The CIA's executive rank above the General Schedule, entry to which requires a tour outside an officer's own directorate and a tour in the policy community — a box-checking requirement John Kiriakou identifies as the reason an untrained analyst was sent to run a base in Afghanistan. Its officers are career staff rather than political appointees, some with thirty or forty years in place, which is why Kiriakou describes the service as capable of simply waiting a president out — or slow-rolling him. Its officers in the Counterterrorism Center were also the authors of the torture techniques.
Sensitive but unclassified — SBU — the intelligence community's name for what other agencies call controlled unclassified information. John Kiriakou stresses that it is a control and not a classification, gives gun-cleaning manuals and unreleased Commerce Department trade figures as examples, and warns that folding it under the Espionage Act would place an entire additional layer of federal employees — people with no clearances at all — inside the reach of the statute.
Sentencing enhancements — John Kiriakou's explanation of how a nine-year federal offence becomes a forty-year sentence: the sentencing table's forty offence levels and seven criminal-history columns, and the enhancements stacked on top of a base level — for terrorism, for hacking, and, in the case he considers most perverse, for having pleaded not guilty and lost.
Serving at the pleasure of the president — The employment rule John Kiriakou says he was taught in his first week at the CIA: agency employees have none of the protections of the Civil Service Act and can be dismissed at will, over a bad tie or an unwelcome line in the President's Daily Brief. He treats the rule as long-standing and harmless in itself, because every previous president wanted unbiased analysis — and as newly dangerous when a president fires the analysts whose assessments he dislikes.
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.
Sharia law — Islamic jurisprudence. Challenged by a viewer who equated it with executions of gay people, forced child marriage and the criminalisation of apostasy, John Kiriakou answers that those acts are largely the work of ISIS rather than of any government, and that Sharia is in substance a body of civil law covering inheritance, insurance, education, property ownership and commercial disputes.
Shia populations and the oil fields — John Kiriakou's observation that the oil-bearing areas of the Middle East are largely populated by Shia Muslims, and his account of the effort by Saudi Arabia and by Saddam Hussein's Iraq to ensure that those populations neither controlled the oil industry nor received any of the money it generated.
The shooting house — The live-fire decision course at the Farm where a trainee has about three quarters of a second to decide whether the figure at the window is a gunman or a woman holding a baby — and where John Kiriakou says he never missed, which he connects to his own account of the temperament the CIA selects for.
The SIGINT–HUMINT balance — John Kiriakou's answer to what he calls the most important question facing any incoming CIA director: how to divide investment between signals intelligence and human intelligence. His position is that signals collection cannot supply the one thing policy requires — a person in the room when a decision is taken — and that every new director says so on arrival and then drifts back toward the technology.
Signal and the parking lot — John Kiriakou's account of how a clandestine source is actually contacted — an innocuous telephone question with a pre-agreed answer standing for a time and a place fixed in advance, and a physical signal such as the flowerpot on Bob Woodward's balcony — offered as the reason investigators looking for an email trail between a service and its agent will not find one.
Signature strikes — The drone-targeting doctrine, exposed by Daniel Hale's leak, under which the U.S. kills people not for who they are but for patterns of behavior or association; John Kiriakou says operators treat any male over 12 as a legitimate target on the theory that he 'could pick up a gun.'
Six different passports — John Kiriakou's answer to what has changed for intelligence officers since his own service — that he carried six different passports, and that he does not know how officers cross borders now that AI and facial recognition mean everything is scanned and stored — coupled with his advice not to let the technology take over the job.
Six ways from Sunday — Senator Chuck Schumer's 2017 televised warning that a president who takes on the intelligence community leaves himself open to retaliation, and John Kiriakou's reading of what the threat actually consisted of — not violence, but the institutional attrition available to career officers who outlast any administration.
Sixteen people knew — John Kiriakou's answer to why deeply held secrets do not leak: at the outset only sixteen people in the entire federal government knew about the CIA torture programme, which is why it stayed hidden for years.
Slow-rolling the president — John Kiriakou's 2017 forecast that the CIA would not confront Donald Trump but outlast him — senior officers with twenty-five and thirty years in the building having already waited out several presidents — offered as the agency's characteristic response to a president it neither trusts nor is trusted by.
Small-country intelligence services — John Kiriakou's account of dealing with the intelligence services of very small states — Djibouti, whose entire service he says occupied less space than his rented townhouse, and whose director's office was half the size of his living room. His operating rule is that respect is the whole of the tradecraft: address the director as Your Excellency, and doors open that money cannot.
Sofia, Bulgaria Dead Drop — John Kiriakou's account of a CIA trip to Sofia, Bulgaria, in which he tracked down and debriefed a retired Bulgarian general — a Cold War-era trainee at Fort Polk, Louisiana — about his proximity to the 1975 assassination of CIA station chief Richard Welch in Athens.
Solitary confinement — The prison isolation practice the United Nations calls a form of torture; John Kiriakou, drawing on his own ten days in a six-by-sixteen-foot cell, argues that jailing depressed prisoners like Daniel Hale in solitary 'for their own safety' is precisely what drives them to suicide.
Souda Bay Vulnerability and Nasser on American Decisions — Two observations John Kiriakou has made on U.S. Mediterranean strategy and decision-making — a U.S. military contact's warning that Souda Bay in Crete, the nearest major port able to host a U.S. aircraft carrier like the USS Gerald Ford, is a possible vulnerability; and Kiriakou's favorite quote from Gamal Abdel Nasser, that Americans never make clear-cut stupid decisions, only complicated ones.
Sources are not traitors — Asked whether CIA officers privately regarded their recruited agents as traitors and held them in contempt, John Kiriakou answered that they did not — because the officers believed they were the good guys, and a recruited source had become one of them.
South Caucasus realignment — John Kiriakou's reading of the post-election South Caucasus: Russia has lost Armenia, Georgia has split from Armenia and moved closer to Moscow, and Iran — contrary to the assumption that two Muslim neighbours would be natural partners — keeps far closer relations with Christian Armenia than with Azerbaijan.
Soviet Union — The superpower whose collapse framed the start of John Kiriakou's CIA career — it was "literally in the process of collapsing" when he joined in January 1990, ushering in a brief "peace dividend" era when the agency's new threats were environmental degradation and AIDS. Kiriakou cites Brzezinski's "Afghan trap" that lured the Soviets into Afghanistan, argues the U.S. abandoned the radicalized mujahideen the moment the Soviets were beaten, notes America then took "a vacation from history," and recalls that Jonathan Pollard's stolen documents were traded by Israel to the Soviets in exchange for Russian Jews.
The Speaker's office as gatekeeper — John Kiriakou's account of how legislative power moved in the mid-1990s from committee chairmen and the Rules Committee into the office of the Speaker of the House, where it has stayed because no subsequent Speaker has wanted to give it back — and the member of Congress who explained the death of his own whistleblower bill in four words: 'Nancy said I couldn't.'
Spies traded home — What happens to intelligence officers and agents after they are exchanged and sent back, in John Kiriakou's account: not usually execution, but a career that is irreparably damaged, because every service you would want to hide from now knows exactly who you are.
Sports and the Steelers bar — Asked whether he enjoys any sport, John Kiriakou named baseball and football, and described walking to a Steelers bar in Clarendon, Arlington, to watch a game he could have watched at home — for the five hundred screaming Pittsburgh fans.
Spy films John Kiriakou considers accurate — Kiriakou's assessment of which espionage films get it right — Argo, The Recruit and Bridge of Spies — and his flat rejection of the action genre's premises, including the hidden weapons stash.
Spy films and television on screen — John Kiriakou's scene-by-scene verdicts on how spy films and television handle real tradecraft — what they get right (static surveillance from upper floors, hostile operational meetings, exchanges of bona fides, breaking into offices), what they invent (silent helicopters, high-speed submersibles, Batcaves, gadgets that cannot be bought), and the shows he says commit felonies on screen. He opens with why CIA officers watch them at all — *"not because they love the CIA movies, but because they love to criticize them."*
The CIA–State Department cover agreement — The standing arrangement under which CIA officers serve abroad under State Department cover. As a senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kiriakou was told the agency was misusing the agreement to place officers from the torture program under diplomatic cover so that publishing their names would expose journalists to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. His written query, sent over Senator John Kerry''s signature, came back classified above his own clearance.
Strait of Hormuz transit fees — John Kiriakou's account of Iran's proposal to charge ships up to $2 million to transit the Strait of Hormuz, payable in yuan rather than dollars, and of the U.S. Navy's subsequent announcement that it had taken control of the strait and closed it — reversing decades of policy that the strait must remain open. He sets it against the precedent he watched at first hand: Reagan sending the Navy to escort tankers through the strait in the 1980s, when the Iranians set the world's largest oil tanker ablaze. Asked what he would do in Tehran's place, his answer is that he would shut the strait.
Strategic patience — The doctrine John Kiriakou uses to describe a state that absorbs an attack and answers with a response calibrated to be smaller than the provocation — Iran's telegraphed drone waves against Israel, and India's refusal to escalate against Pakistan, which he says kept a war from becoming a nuclear one.
The suicide watch protocol — The federal suicide watch procedure as John Kiriakou describes it from inside — a room with windows on four sides, volunteer prisoners watching in four-hour shifts around the clock, and paper sheets that cannot be knotted — which he uses to enumerate, step by step, everything that failed in the case of Jeffrey Epstein.
Superdelegates — The Democratic Party's automatic-delegate system, which John Kiriakou describes as created after George McGovern's 1972 landslide loss to return nominating power to party insiders. He cites West Virginia and Wyoming in 2016, where Bernie Sanders won the vote and Hillary Clinton took every delegate, and notes the Republican Party has no equivalent — which is why an insurgent like Donald Trump could win its nomination.
Sweat Lodge — Per John Kiriakou, the federal prison where he was incarcerated had a Native American sweat lodge that was shut down after it was misused for sex rather than religious ceremony; he says he has never personally been in a sweat lodge.
Syria as a regime-change template — John Kiriakou's argument that the fall of Bashar al-Assad shows organic regime change is faster, cheaper and less destructive than the enforced kind — and should be studied as a model. He allows aid to local forces as legitimate policy, and notes without prompting that in Syria the CIA was supplying al-Qaeda while the Pentagon supplied a group at war with it.
Syrian sanctions relief — John Kiriakou's argument that lifting sanctions on Syria was the most effective counter-terrorism measure available — because the recruits he interrogated joined for money, and an economy that offers roads, a working port and wages removes the recruiting pool rather than the recruiters.
"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.
Targeting analyst — A specialized CIA analyst — distinct from an intelligence analyst — who sifts millions of pieces of data, much of it metadata, to physically locate a person for capture or killing; John Kiriakou credits one with finding Abu Zubaydah down to 14 sites.
Targeting information between allies — John Kiriakou's argument that Russian targeting support to Iran during the 2026 war was unremarkable rather than scandalous — the same thing the United States was doing for Ukraine, the Soviet Union did for North Vietnam, and Washington did for the Afghan mujahideen. His conclusion is that the way to stop it is to ask Moscow directly.
Temporary protected status — The American immigration category for people who cannot safely return home because of armed conflict, natural disaster or other temporary catastrophe. John Kiriakou treats it as a policy with no exit: when conditions in the home country never improve — often, he argues, because of American action — revoking the status amounts to a death sentence.
Ten-minute moves and the count — The clock that governs a federal prison: a fixed daily timetable, movement permitted only during ten-minute windows on the hour, and five counts a day — two standing, three conducted with a flashlight in the face of a sleeping man, which John Kiriakou argues serve no purpose except sleep disruption.
Terry Aubry — Named by Kiriakou both as an FBI whistleblower who exposed racism at the bureau and as one of two Intercept journalists who sent him to prison.
THAAD stocks in the Gulf — John Kiriakou's report, during the 2026 war, that the United Arab Emirates were seven days from exhausting their THAAD interceptors and Qatar four days — with American resupply unable to keep pace.
The 189 undeclared officers — A figure John Kiriakou attributes to the CIA's director of security, given to his intake class on his first day at the agency in January 1990: against two declared Israeli intelligence officers at the embassy in Washington, the FBI counted at least 189 undeclared ones operating across the United States. He pairs it with the fact that Israeli liaison officers were barred from CIA headquarters.
The 2017 European tour — In May 2017 John Kiriakou spent a week speaking about national security whistleblowing in Iceland, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and Ireland, addressing the German Parliament and sharing panels with serving European ministers — an audience he contrasted sharply with his reception in the United States, and one he found newly willing to break with Washington because it was, in his word, panic-stricken about Donald Trump.
The Abraham Lincoln off Oman — The carrier battle group John Kiriakou placed in the Arabian Sea off Oman in January 2026, and the reason he said he genuinely feared the coming weeks: a belief in Washington and Jerusalem that the Iranian government needed only a gentle shove to collapse, against 150,000 members of the Revolutionary Guard who would not oblige.
The Afghan woman's lesson — The remark a visiting Afghan intellectual made to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff that John Kiriakou says stuck with him for over a decade — that the Taliban did not come down from outer space, that they are Afghanistan's own sons and brothers and husbands, and that if the country had not been secured after ten years of nation-building it was because nobody wanted the Americans there.
The African diplomat's remark — The line John Kiriakou says an African diplomat gave him at a White House summit, and which he uses to explain Chinese success on the continent: you Americans always offer us democracy and military aid, and the Chinese offer us food and new roads. Kiriakou traces the consequence to Chinese bases across Africa and a State Department that did not see it coming.
The AI he uses — Asked which AI tool he uses and why, John Kiriakou named Perplexity over ChatGPT, on two grounds: ChatGPT invents things about him, and Perplexity — for reasons he says he does not fully understand — returns much deeper analysis when he asks it to look at something.
The Al Mayadeen debate — Two days before the 2026 attack on Iran, John Kiriakou went on the Lebanese network Al Mayadeen expecting the usual point-counterpoint with an academic and found himself opposite Iran's lead nuclear negotiator. His argument to the negotiator — that what the two sides were then negotiating was the JCPOA under another name — was rejected outright before being accepted.
The Alcatraz walkthrough — On his very first day of house arrest, the day Ai Weiwei's political-prisoner exhibition closed at Alcatraz, the San Francisco gallery that had helped stage the show telephoned John Kiriakou and walked him around the entire exhibition on an iPad so that he could see his own portrait and the ceramic flowers filling the sinks of the solitary confinement cells.
The anti-semite smear — John Kiriakou's account of the professional cost of saying publicly that Israel spies on the United States: Alan Dershowitz calls him names, and the political director of the Israeli foreign minister called him a noted anti-semite.
The applicant who invented a CIA career — The job interview John Kiriakou conducted in the private sector at which he took a candidate to lunch, asked two questions any real CIA officer could answer, and was told: "I'm really sorry. I really need this job."
The Arlington house — The 1,200-square-foot house John Kiriakou bought with his Pakistan overtime and danger pay for $347,000, sold two years later for $721,000, and now values at a million — the anchor of his repeated argument that his own children can never live in the Arlington, Virginia neighbourhood they grew up in.
The ask-forgiveness maxim — The rule of thumb John Kiriakou says he was taught early in his CIA career — that it is always better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission — and which he offers as the explanation for how the agency runs legally doubtful programmes: it does what it wants, apologises if caught, and that is the end of it.
The ATF funding rider — The provision John Kiriakou describes as the reason no American felon has had firearm rights restored since the 1990s: a Clinton-era law permitting non-violent, non-drug felons to apply to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, paired in the same statute with a bar on any federal money being spent to investigate the applications.
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 Backstory — The daily Radio Sputnik programme John Kiriakou co-hosted with Lee Stranahan, carried on terrestrial radio in the Washington area as well as online. It was the successor to his earlier show Loud and Clear with Brian Becker, and he described its format as two men with a beer talking about the day.
The balloon test — John Kiriakou's argument that Israel had warning of the 7 October 2023 attack — that settlers along the Gaza line had reported training for months, that balloons were sent over as a probe in the days beforehand, and that nothing was done.
The Bamiyan precedent — John Kiriakou's account of how the Taliban destroyed their own diplomatic position by blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas — at a moment when Washington was paying Taliban salaries, funding opium eradication, flirting with a trans-Afghanistan pipeline and flying Taliban emissaries to Houston to meet the Bush camp.
The BBC and the sanctions coverage — John Kiriakou's assessment of the BBC — that it has a long history of offering both sides, which American broadcasters do not — set against his memory of watching it from inside the CIA in the run-up to the liberation of Kuwait, when its reporting on starving Iraqi children under sanctions drove him mad, because food was not sanctioned and Saddam Hussein was refusing to distribute it.
The beer and the couch — What John Kiriakou says he did with the CIA's spot-assessment training after leaving the agency. He still sizes up strangers within moments of meeting them, but the question is no longer what they can do for him: it is whether he would want to have a beer with them, and whether, if he were down on his luck, they would let him sleep on their couch.
The Berlin conference list — Checking into a Berlin hotel for a conference, John Kiriakou was handed the guest list when the clerk could not find his booking — and discovered that every one of the dozen names on it was a friend of his, and every one of them an outspoken whistleblower.
The best meal overseas — Asked for the best meals he had eaten abroad, John Kiriakou named first a dish cooked by a young Pakistani in a CIA guest house in Islamabad — shaved beef, a myriad of spices, hot green chillies and rice cooked in chicken stock — followed by sushi in Tokyo and the Lenten table of Clean Monday in Greece.
The bomb course — The week-long CIA explosives course at a facility in another state, where John Kiriakou learned to build a Molotov cocktail, then a detonator rig, then an ammonium nitrate bomb — his final exam, which put a van's transmission three hundred yards into the woods.
The bowl of dates — The detail John Kiriakou uses to compress his argument about interrogation: that the intelligence the CIA's contractors reported as the fruit of waterboarding had in fact been obtained by an FBI agent who offered Abu Zubaydah a bowl of dates.
The Brett Stephens column — A New York Times column arguing that genocidal statements by Israeli officials after October 7 were intemperate rather than policy, which John Kiriakou answered with a test of his own: if the remarks had not been official policy, the officials who made them would have been fired, and instead two of them became ministers.
The burden of peace — John Kiriakou's rule for asymmetric wars — that in any lopsided military conflict most of the burden of making peace falls on the superior military force, which will have to make most of the concessions — together with his rejection of unconditional surrender as a war aim.
The Bureau of Prisons answers to no one — John Kiriakou's summary of what he calls the hardest lesson of his incarceration: that the Bureau of Prisons sits under the Justice Department but is accountable to nobody in practice, disregarding what sentencing judges order and what its own prosecutors have agreed, and placing prisoners wherever it chooses.
The C-130 resettlements — John Kiriakou's confirmation that the Hmong communities of Minnesota were former CIA assets brought to the United States as refugees, and his extension of a rule Ted Rall proposed — that refugee populations end up wherever the aircraft carrying them happened to land — to the Kurds of Bismarck, North Dakota and St Louis.
The can of ravioli — John Kiriakou's confession that he eats tinned ravioli cold, straight from the can, and refuses on principle to pay more than ninety-nine cents for it — used, when the price reached $2.49, as his own answer to the polling finding that Americans care about prices more than anything else.
The car pickup meeting — A clandestine meeting technique in which an agent is collected from a street corner and ducks out of sight — and the occasion when a French intelligence officer used it on John Kiriakou, a colleague rather than an asset, and was refused.
The cave myth — John Kiriakou's rejection of the popular image of al-Qaeda's leadership living in caves. He says the CIA knew its targets were in major cities, deliberately let them believe the search was concentrated on the tribal areas, and caught them because men who think they are unobserved get sloppy with their phones and email.
The chain of command argument — John Kiriakou's standing rejection of the advice given to new intelligence officers — that evidence of waste, fraud, abuse or illegality should be taken up the chain of command — supported by the fates of Thomas Drake, William Binney, Kirk Wiebe and Diane Roark, and by the fact that his own chain of command had created the torture programme.
The CIA as a paramilitary organization — John Kiriakou's periodisation of the CIA's mission — spying and analysis until Vietnam, restored after the Church and Pike hearings of 1975, and converted immediately after September 11 into a paramilitary body that he says it has remained ever since. His objection is stated without hedging: drawing up a kill list every Tuesday and dispatching officers to carry it out is not intelligence, it is murder.
CIA backdoor banking — John Kiriakou's answer to a question about the intelligence community opening Western capital markets to sanctioned groups — that the CIA's interests frequently diverge from the national interest, that its friends are often hostile to the State Department and the White House, and that it will arrange backdoor banking, investment and loans to keep those outlaws going.
The CIA barber shop — The barber in the basement of CIA headquarters, which John Kiriakou visited once on the reasoning that it saved a trip across town and found stocked with Playboys and Penthouses — one of several amenities, alongside a dry cleaner and a post office substation, that made the building function as a self-contained town.
The CIA defense — John Kiriakou's account of what happens when a CIA asset is arrested — either the station chief privately asks the host country's intelligence service for the man's release, which he says works ninety-nine times out of a hundred, or the agency declines, leaving the defendant to argue at trial that he was acting on the CIA's behalf while the agency says nothing at all.
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 Clinton asset purge — John Kiriakou's account of the human-rights screening ordered in the first days of the Clinton administration, under which the CIA fired fully one third of its recruited assets — the informants whose reporting depended on their proximity to right-wing death squads in Latin America.
The colleague who went to Microsoft — In 2000, John Kiriakou's supervisor left the CIA for Microsoft to do what he called "some really cool social media stuff" — a phrase that meant nothing to Kiriakou at the time, and which he later read as an early sign of the deliberate placement of intelligence officers inside technology companies.
The Colombian air bridge through Venezuela — What John Kiriakou says his own Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation found about drug trafficking through Venezuela — that it exists, that it consists of Colombian aircraft landing there en route to Africa, and that there is no evidence Nicolás Maduro controls it or knows when and where it happens.
The Communist Party of Greece — John Kiriakou's account of Greek communism: a civil war from 1946 to 1949 whose bitterness still scars families, a party banned outright until Andreas Papandreou legalised it in 1980, and a present-day remnant polling between three and five per cent — enough for parliamentary representation and not enough to be a factor.
The concealed carry advertisements — The anecdote John Kiriakou offers about surveillance capitalism: a private telephone conversation in which a friend told him he needed a concealed carry permit, followed within the hour by a Facebook feed consisting entirely of advertisements for concealed carry classes.
The conscientious objectors book — A long out-of-print volume of interviews with American conscientious objectors, published around 1972 and given to John Kiriakou from the personal collection of an objector he was friendly with in prison — a book whose harrowing accounts of objectors sent to real federal prisons rather than to camps convinced him that refusing to serve was often more physically dangerous than serving.
The Convenient Terrorist — Book co-written by John Kiriakou and former Guantanamo guard Joe Hickman on the case of Abu Zubaydah, split half and half between the hunt and capture on one side and the detention on the other; Kiriakou dates the decision to write it to a declassified CIA inspector-general report that told him the intelligence he had risked his life on was false.
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 exemption — The rule John Kiriakou says makes counterintelligence the darkest corner of American intelligence: such cases are the only category that need not be briefed to the congressional oversight committees, because a mole hunt might implicate a member of those very committees. He argues Mike Pompeo's description of WikiLeaks as a hostile non-state intelligence service was chosen precisely to move the Assange operation into that exempt category, where a killing in a London street would never have had to be explained.
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 cousin who stopped speaking — An older first cousin told John Kiriakou after his conviction that he could no longer speak to him because Kiriakou had brought shame on the family; Kiriakou's reply was to point out that the cousin had imported drugs from Colombia, had appeared in the Washington Post as a mayor's cocaine dealer, and had fled to Greece until the statute of limitations expired.
The culling of friendships — John Kiriakou's description of what happened to his private life after he confirmed the CIA's torture program: friends and even family members began walking away from him before any charge was filed, a process he came to regard, oddly, as a culling exercise that dispatched phonies and left the people who genuinely loved him.
The culture of secrecy and the truth — Asked how he decided what counted as true inside an institution built on secrecy, and whether that changed after he left, John Kiriakou answered no twice — because in his account everyone knows the difference in their gut, and the job is to stop the culture of secrecy from bastardising what you already know.
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 density of spies in Washington — John Kiriakou's claim that there are more spies in Washington DC than anywhere else in the world, that the FBI's counterintelligence division does nothing but try to root them out, and that the job cannot be finished short of becoming North Korea.
The detractors who died — John Kiriakou's observation that the senior CIA officials who wanted him dead or wanted him to die in prison have themselves since died, while a new generation of officers reaches out to tell him he did the right thing.
The difficulty of getting out — John Kiriakou's standing formulation about regime change: it is easy to invade a country and easy to overthrow a government, and very difficult to leave. He measures it in the twenty years the United States spent in Afghanistan and the nineteen in Iraq.
The draft argument — The disagreement John Kiriakou had at eighteen with a fellow College Democrat over Vietnam — that he thought the war immoral and illegal and would have served anyway if drafted, because his country had asked him to — which he identifies as the clearest surviving statement of the belief he later lost.
The Drone Papers — The trove of classified documents leaked by Daniel Hale and published by The Intercept — later collected in book form as 'The Assassination Complex' — exposing how the U.S. drone program selected and killed targets; John Kiriakou relied on it in his own writing on the war in Afghanistan.
The Dublin compensation — The night John Kiriakou spent in Dublin at an airline's expense after a mechanical fault in Madrid cost him his connection — a four-star hotel, an expedited check-in, a shuttle bus and half his fare refunded into his checking account six weeks later — offered as the standard American passengers do not get.
The east Mediterranean gas partnership — John Kiriakou's explanation for why the Greek government is solidly pro-Israel while the Greek public is solidly anti-Israel: Cyprus sits on an ocean of natural gas, and the Greeks, Cypriots, Israelis and — to a lesser extent — Egyptians lift it together and share the money. The arrangement drives Turkey to distraction, and in his reading puts Greek–Turkish relations on track to get worse.
The empire on the ropes — John Kiriakou's answer to whether the American empire is finished — that it is on the ropes but certainly not over — and, in the same exchange, his first unqualified statement that Israeli tactics were inspired by Nazi Germany, a comparison he says he hesitated for years to make.
The EU whistleblower directive — The European Union whistleblower protection directive, which John Kiriakou describes as a watered-down descendant of the Greek law he helped write in 2015. His objection is to its exemption: the directive does not apply to Brussels itself. He treats that as an instance of a general legislative habit rather than a European failing — Congress, he notes, routinely exempts itself from the laws it passes, including the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
The fentanyl-from-cocaine claim — The assertion that seventy per cent of American overdoses trace to fentanyl processed from Venezuelan cocaine, which John Kiriakou refuted on air by reading the DEA's own fact sheet — fentanyl is not made from cocaine, it is mixed into it, along with almost everything else on the market.
The filibuster and Harry Reid's lesson — John Kiriakou's defence of the Senate filibuster, offered as praise for John Thune's refusal to abolish it under pressure from the White House, and grounded in what he regards as Harry Reid's costly mistake over judicial nominations.
The FLETC badge — The shiny gold badge John Kiriakou carried before joining the CIA, issued after he trained at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center — and which he insists never made him a law enforcement officer, a distinction he uses to deny the same status to ICE agents and federal prison guards.
The forty-seven suffix — The last two digits of a federal prisoner number that, according to John Kiriakou, mark the holder as a member of an organised gang — and which the Italians at FCI Loretto carried along with MS-13, the Bloods, the Crips and the Mexican Mafia.
The four-question torture exam — A final examination set by a former CIA officer teaching alongside John Kiriakou at Liberty University, consisting of four escalating questions about whether the student would torture — the terrorist, then his wife in front of him, then their children — with the last question asking the student to justify the previous three answers to God. Kiriakou describes it as the most powerful exam he has ever seen.
The four requirements of a coup — The checklist John Kiriakou says is taught at West Point for overthrowing a government — the presidential palace and the leader, the broadcast stations, the capital's major intersections, and the support of the military — which he uses to argue that regime change in Venezuela cannot work, because the fourth item belongs to the incumbent.
The Gang of Four and Gang of Eight — John Kiriakou's description of how the CIA restricts notification of its most sensitive covert operations to four or eight congressional leaders, and his verdict on the practice: because a member of an intelligence committee can be an overseer without being cleared for what is being overseen, the arrangement is not oversight but, in his word, gangsterism.
The General Assembly workaround — A proposal John Kiriakou says a Russian diplomat described to him: letting the United Nations General Assembly take implementable decisions without Security Council permission, so that a supermajority of states could override an American veto. Kiriakou, whose last CIA tour was at the United Nations and who found the institution paralysed, says he thinks it is a good idea.
The golf course deed forgery — The property fraud John Kiriakou encountered at FCI Loretto — a prisoner who forged papers transferring ownership of a golf course to himself and then began charging people rent — and the place such crimes occupy in the prison's own hierarchy of offences.
"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 Grand Mosque cover story — A single fabricated account of innocent travel that John Kiriakou says he heard roughly twenty-five times from Arab men detained in Pakistan after the September 11 attacks — a trip to Karachi to study Arabic, a lost passport, and a ride to the Grand Mosque. Its details were wrong in ways that gave it away, and Kiriakou treats its uniformity as evidence of poor operational security rather than of innocence.
The Greek brain drain — The editorial John Kiriakou read in a Greek newspaper tracking where educated Greeks emigrate — the United States, Britain, Germany, Australia — and the line he took from it: that when fifteen hundred Greeks with master's degrees, law degrees, MDs and PhDs move to Turkey for better opportunity, you know you are finished.
The Greek turn toward Israel — John Kiriakou's account of why Athens abandoned its traditional pro-Arab alignment and embraced Israel — a 180-degree flip he attributes to the collapse of Turkey's relationship with Israel and, above all, to money: Israeli property buying that he says has tripled Greek house prices, and Cypriot gas fields Greece hopes to develop with Israeli partners.
The Guantanamo airfare catch — The pair of legal traps John Kiriakou describes around the detainees at Guantanamo Bay who have been cleared for release: no country will take them and Congress defunded the ability to pay for their flights, while a separate 2009 statute forbids any of them from setting foot on United States soil — so that even a conviction could not be served in an American prison.
The Hajj ban as leverage — John Kiriakou's answer to what a Saudi retaliation against Iran would look like: not a military strike but a ban on Iranians making the pilgrimage to Mecca. He notes it was done at the turn of the 1980s, that it produced a crisis, and that Iranian terrorist attacks against Saudis followed.
The Hersh publishing collapse — John Kiriakou's account of Seymour Hersh's disappearance from mainstream print — from the London Review of Books in 2017, which Hersh told him was already the only outlet that would take his work, to Substack five years later. Kiriakou, who helped give Hersh an award for integrity in intelligence, presents the trajectory as a measure of how bad conditions for American journalism have become.
The hierarchy of charges — How federal prisoners ranked one another by offence, in John Kiriakou's account — RICO at the top, usually with a murder conspiracy attached; wealthy white-collar convicts despised as soft; and arson, insurance fraud and mortgage fraud attracting no interest at all.
The homelessness executive order — Donald Trump's July 2025 executive order on homelessness, which John Kiriakou criticised on the ground that it understates the population by two thirds and proposes forcible commitment to facilities that do not exist — while conceding that Trump diagnoses the problem better than his predecessors did.
The house of cards theory — John Kiriakou's account of the strategic premise behind the 2026 Iran war — that decapitating the Iranian government would bring the whole state down — and of why it fails. To win, he argues, the United States would have to destroy the entire Iranian government and military and install a puppet; Iran wins simply by surviving.
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 ideological circle — John Kiriakou's long-held claim that the political spectrum is not a straight line from left to right but a circle, on which the two ends meet — and that in the case of MAGA and the progressive left, the point where they meet is war and peace.
The indicator he'd be watching — Asked what single sign would most alarm him if he were still inside the CIA on the first day of the 2026 Iran war, John Kiriakou named the movement of ground forces: about fifty thousand American troops are in the region, which cannot invade a country of ninety-two million, and it is the arrival of hundreds of thousands more — plus the last uncommitted carrier battle group — that would frighten him.
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 Iranian interest section — How John Kiriakou obtained a visa to travel to Iran in the absence of diplomatic relations — through an Iranian interest section housed in the Pakistani embassy in Washington — and the argument he draws from it, that withholding recognition only makes diplomats' work harder.
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 ISI-Mossad relationship — John Kiriakou's characterisation of the relationship between Pakistani and Israeli intelligence — a formal relationship as recently as 1979 and none since, but no hostility either, because Pakistan is preoccupied with India and Afghanistan and Israel has never regarded Pakistan as a threat.
The Israeli electorate shift — John Kiriakou's structural explanation for why he does not expect Israeli politics to swing back — that the influx of Russian and Ukrainian Jewish immigrants over the preceding ten or fifteen years has moved the electorate so far right that a viable socialist movement or Labour party is, in his view, gone for good.
The Israelis are free agents — John Kiriakou's formulation of Israel as an intelligence partner whose cooperation is conditional rather than allied — friendly when it suits, and equally willing to deal with Russia, China or Germany — offered as the reason an Israeli-run source could end up passing American information to a service hostile to the United States, and given each time with an acknowledgement that saying it brings him threats.
The Israelis were off limits — John Kiriakou's flat denial, given on a televised panel, that the CIA collected against Israel in return — 'the Israelis were off limits to us at the CIA. We were not permitted' — and Alan Dershowitz's refusal to believe it.
The jury consultant's advice — What John Kiriakou's jury consultant told him about a national security trial in the Eastern District of Virginia: that in any other district in America he would say fight and win, but in that one, "buddy, you don't have a prayer. Take the deal."
The kafala sponsorship system — The Saudi sponsorship regime as John Kiriakou describes it — a Saudi national must own the majority of any company a foreigner works for, that sponsor holds the worker's passport, and a falling-out leaves the worker under effective house arrest, which he says is how South Asian women brought in as domestics are kept as sex slaves.
The KGB denial cables — Two occasions on which, according to John Kiriakou, the first message the CIA received after an American killing came from the KGB and said the same thing: we promise it wasn't us. One followed the assassination of Athens station chief Richard Welch in December 1975, the other the killing of President Kennedy in November 1963. Kiriakou treats them as evidence of a standing gentleman's agreement between the two services not to touch each other's people — one he expects to hold even where Russian troops overrun CIA bases.
The Knight Ridder panel — At an April 2022 Assange benefit in Washington, John Kiriakou described a Zoom panel on which two former Knight Ridder reporters spoke for ninety minutes without once mentioning Julian Assange, and one of them, asked why, said he saw Assange as an activist rather than a journalist.
The Kosovo objection — John Kiriakou's account of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as seen from the American embassy in Athens — an Orthodox Christian American diplomat serving in an Orthodox country while the United States bombed one, and his view that Kosovo is a rump state invented on land holy to the Serbian Orthodox Church.
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 lapsed film rights — John Kiriakou has sold the rights to his life story three separate times — to Universal, 20th Century Fox and Paramount — and all three studios let the option lapse, telling him there was too much detail and too many stories to fit into two hours.
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 Laura Ingraham exchange — John Kiriakou's account of an on-air exchange with Fox News host Laura Ingraham about torture, in which she told him she hated his position and he replied that anyone who wants torture as an instrument of policy should have the courage to go to Capitol Hill and change the law rather than pretend the existing law does not apply.
The lawfare template — The assessment of John Kiriakou's prosecution that he quotes most often and finds most alarming: a former United States attorney for Utah told him the Kiriakou case was the template for the Democratic Party's policy of lawfare. Kiriakou's gloss is that if they do not like you they can ruin your life, and there is nothing you can do to protect yourself.
"The least I could do" — Told that he had kept another whistleblower from slipping, John Kiriakou declined the credit and described the work in the plainest possible terms: getting somebody out of the house for three or four hours, or taking them to dinner, because so many people had done exactly that for him when he was at his lowest.
The legal definition of whistleblowing — John Kiriakou's insistence that whistleblowing is a legally defined act rather than a figure of speech: bringing to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to public health or public safety — at any level of government.
The liaison class — The course John Kiriakou ran at the CIA for visiting officers of allied intelligence services — the setting for Cofer Black's warning weeks before 9/11, and the reason Kiriakou was in the counterterrorism chief's office to ask whether he had meant it.
The Libya policy reversal — John Kiriakou's verdict on the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi: the United States had a healthy working relationship with a man who hated al-Qaeda as much as it did, and flipping sides at the last minute was a terrible policy error that left the country in anarchy. Told that destabilisation may have been the objective all along, he called that an incredibly shortsighted policy, because power vacuums drag America in and it cannot get back out.
The logic of radicalization — John Kiriakou's explanation of why an isolated state escalates rather than moderates: it stops caring what anyone else thinks, concludes it can count on no one, and does things its own way. He applies it to Israel's 2026 death penalty law and judges the law a serious mistake in Zionism's own terms.
The manager's ranking — John Kiriakou's answer to a viewer who asked whether he would ever appear on Joe Rogan's show alongside Mike Baker — that his new manager, who represents some very senior people, told him he is more highly sought after than Baker is, so there is no reason to legitimise him.
The martyrdom bonus — The recruitment offer John Kiriakou says captured al-Qaeda foot soldiers described to him in Pakistan: a monthly wage to go and fight the Americans in Afghanistan, and five hundred dollars paid to the fighter's parents if he was killed. He uses it to argue that the men he captured had no religious or political motive at all — most had never read the Quran — and that the only way out of the cycle is education and economic development.
The Mayflower Madam analogy — John Kiriakou's argument, borrowed from the 1980s Mayflower Madam case, that the Epstein 'list' will disappoint anyone expecting a schedule of clients — because address books contain the dry cleaner and the Chinese takeaway alongside everyone else, and nobody keeps a spreadsheet of their crimes.
The McDonald's theory of regime change — John Kiriakou's argument, drawn from Vietnam and Cuba, that commerce accomplishes what force cannot: to turn a country pro-Western, open a McDonald's rather than bomb it.
The mental health parity gap — John Kiriakou's account of American mental health provision — parity written into the Affordable Care Act and entirely unenforced, more mentally ill people in most county jails than in the mental hospitals, and his condition that nobody should be forced into treatment until the treatment is worth being forced into.
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 MI5 model — The proposal John Kiriakou says was already being discussed with the British in 1992 or 1993 — an American domestic intelligence service on the MI5 pattern, without arrest powers, feeding what it collected on citizens to the FBI — and which he believes the post-January 6 legislation would finally deliver.
The mobile passport lane — John Kiriakou's report of flying home from Spain during the longest government shutdown in American history — ridiculous security lines, and an immigration officer who said four words, "Look at the camera. Welcome home," which Kiriakou attributes to the man not being paid.
The NATO expansion promises — John Kiriakou's account of the assurances American presidents gave Russia that NATO would not expand to its borders or admit Ukraine — promises he says were made repeatedly, broken repeatedly, and, in his blunt formulation, never meant. He couples the account with an equally explicit statement that he opposes the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The New York Times problem — Barack Obama's reason, as John Kiriakou reports it, for never charging Julian Assange: the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press publish classified information every single day, so a publisher charged with espionage cannot be the only one. Kiriakou treats it as the central First Amendment question of the case, and notes that Joe Biden — who was in the room for the original argument — doubled down instead of dropping the charges.
The nine-dollar-eighty-three premium — John Kiriakou's own Affordable Care Act premium, which he gives as $9.83 a month, and the doctor who asked him why he carried the plan at all. Offered during a October 2025 discussion of the government shutdown and the expiring Obamacare subsidies.
The nuclear testing legacy — John Kiriakou's observation that the United States waited seventy years after the Second World War before offering money and relocation to the South Pacific communities contaminated by its own atmospheric nuclear tests — a delay he called ridiculous, and a measure of how casually the era's tens of thousands of test detonations were treated.
The oath to the Constitution — The oath sworn with a raised right hand on the first day at the CIA, in an auditorium full of new hires, to protect the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic — and the secrecy agreement signed alongside it, which John Kiriakou and Ray McGovern both treat as merely a contract. Kiriakou uses the oath to answer the charge that he broke a promise, to explain why torture had to be disclosed, and to state a rule of precedence: when a law, a policy or a signed agreement conflicts with the Constitution, the Constitution wins every time. He suspects he was the only person in the room who meant it.
The Obama recruitment thesis — John Kiriakou's public explanation of what happened to Barack Obama: not that the CIA created him, but that a first-term senator with no national security experience is exactly the kind of president the agency wants, and that the first briefing several levels above top secret is enough to hook him. Kiriakou supports the reading with two quotations Obama gave to reporters, including that he never had any idea he would be so good at killing people.
The obliteration claim — Donald Trump's statement that the Iranian nuclear programme had been "obliterated", and John Kiriakou's reading of it. Kiriakou offers three possibilities — the president lied, was tricked, or did not understand what had been achieved — and notes the claim's incompatibility with the later justification that Iran was days away from a weapon.
The Official Secrets Act comparison — John Kiriakou has argued that for whistleblowers the United Kingdom is far worse than the United States, because the Official Secrets Act bars anyone from saying anything touching national security and is used, in his phrase, as an iron fist against whistleblowers and potential whistleblowers alike.
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 Oz analogy — John Kiriakou's habit of explaining federal prison social structure through the HBO drama Oz, in which rival gangs are forced to share a single unit — and his identification with the show's unaffiliated Irish character, who belonged to no faction and survived by playing them off one another.
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 Panda card — The Chinese national payment card John Kiriakou encountered in Hong Kong, where he found few places willing to take Mastercard or Visa. Asked why, he was given a one-sentence answer about routing: Visa and Mastercard transactions pass through New York, Panda card transactions pass through Shanghai, and so fall outside the reach of American sanctions. He treats it as both an instance of Chinese strategic competence and an argument that the American card duopoly is a racket.
The pardoned January 6th defendants — John Kiriakou's observation that a striking number of the January 6th defendants pardoned by Donald Trump have got into trouble since their release — one arrested for threatening to kill the House minority leader, another shot dead in a gunfight with a police officer in Indiana — and his agreement that the base rate may explain all of it.
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 prostitute hypothetical — The classroom exercise John Kiriakou uses in university lectures to demonstrate that the CIA gave its operations officers no ethical guidelines at all — a recruited terrorist source who demands a prostitute, and then the same demand for a child.
The psychology chairman's letter — Unsure how to deal with the child molesters who made up a large share of the population at FCI Loretto, John Kiriakou wrote to a professor friend for advice; the reply, from the chairman of a university psychology department, told him that pedophiles cannot be cured and that they talk about their crimes constantly because reliving them is itself gratifying.
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 rare earth calculation — John Kiriakou's explanation of how China came to control the world market in rare earth metals — not by holding the only deposits, which exist everywhere including under California's Salton Sea, but by being willing to absorb the economic loss of mining ore that is mostly waste, at a fraction of American defence spending.
The regime change approval process — John Kiriakou's step-by-step account of how a proposal to overthrow a foreign government travels through the United States government — beginning as a memo written at an officer's own desk, cleared by lawyers at the Justice Department and the National Security Council, signed by the president as an executive order, and ending in a safe on the seventh floor at CIA headquarters while the order itself goes to the Pentagon.
The rejected deposits — John Kiriakou's explanation of why banks returned large deposits to Donald Trump — not political discrimination, in his account, but anti-money-laundering law: a bank that cannot get a credible account of where the money came from faces felony exposure, and no bank turns away deposits for any lesser reason.
The Reluctant Spy — John Kiriakou's 2009 memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror, begun in secret months before he blew the whistle and reaching number five on the New York Times bestseller list.
The Rwanda deportations — The British policy of removing asylum seekers to Rwanda for resettlement, which John Kiriakou cited in 2023 as evidence that the United Kingdom belongs on the list of countries with entrenched right-wing governments — a policy he called right-wing extremist and probably illegal.
The Samson Option — John Kiriakou's assessment, given during the 2026 Iran war, that Israel would use nuclear weapons if it believed the state itself was about to collapse. He notes that a year earlier he would have called the idea ridiculous, and that analysts put the Israeli arsenal at between eighty and two hundred warheads.
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 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 Saudi demand for a political appointee — John Kiriakou's account of a standing Saudi condition on the American embassy in Riyadh — that the ambassador must never be a career diplomat, the opposite of what most countries want, because Riyadh wants someone whose telephone call the president of the United States will take.
The Saudi question — John Kiriakou's challenge to the premise of the Abraham Accords: that after a lifetime working in the Middle East he is unable to identify anything Saudi Arabia would actually gain from recognising Israel.
The search for a country to take Gaza — John Kiriakou's account of Israel approaching one country after another — Albania, Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and finally South Sudan — to accept expelled Gazans, a project he calls the literal definition of ethnic cleansing and says cannot be done because it is illegal.
The secret prisons the heads of state did not know about — John Kiriakou's account of how the CIA's black sites were established — as arrangements struck directly between the director of the CIA and the head of the host country's intelligence service, in some cases without the knowledge of that country's own head of state — and his statement that he learned the extent of the system only years after leaving, by reading the press.
The secret Sahel appropriations — John Kiriakou's complaint that the United States is quietly pumping billions of dollars into Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Conakry and Guinea-Bissau — spending he says is supposed to be a big secret, addresses a French problem rather than an American one, and which American taxpayers have a right to know about and to judge.
The September 10th country — John Kiriakou's formulation of what he wants back, and his ledger on the two wars: he never supported the invasion of Iraq, which he calls a war of choice and of family revenge, and he did support the war in Afghanistan until al-Qaeda was defeated in 2003, after which everything became nation building. He assigns the destruction of the pre-attack country to George W. Bush and Barack Obama equally.
The seven countries argument — John Kiriakou's dissent from the claim that America's post-2001 wars were fought on Israel's behalf. Taking the list of seven countries country by country, he argues Libya, Somalia and Afghanistan were American decisions made for American reasons — and concludes that the United States cannot blame all of its problems on Israel.
The Snickers bar — The ritual in John Kiriakou's Athens station: when an officer made a recruitment, the boss announced it in the staff meeting, everyone applauded, and he threw the officer a Snickers bar.
The Sociopath Next Door — The book John Kiriakou reaches for when explaining why the CIA's leadership looks the way it does — sociopaths climbing over the people around them, as in any Fortune 500 company — and the source of his claim that 85 percent of American prisoners have a diagnosable mental illness.
The sources and methods red herring — John Kiriakou's argument that the federal government invokes the exposure of sources and methods in every leak prosecution as a matter of routine, has never produced proof in any of them — not against Julian Assange, Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning — and that American claims of damage to national security should therefore not be taken seriously.
The spy shop — A London shop, with branches in New York and briefly Washington, where John Kiriakou says the CIA bought a good deal of the equipment it needed — on the reasoning that a thousand-dollar purchase beat a million-dollar development programme. Any member of the public could walk in and buy the same things; much of the rest, he says, came from Radio Shack. In six months in Pakistan he used more gadgets than in the whole of the rest of his career, and all but one of them were bought online.
The Taiwan blank check — John Kiriakou's reading of the Republican revolt against funding Ukraine: that most of the members refusing to write another blank check for Kyiv wanted to write it for Taipei instead, and would rather have a direct confrontation with China than a decade bogged down in Eastern Europe.
The tax rates from Eisenhower to Nixon — John Kiriakou's explanation for the American wealth gap and the size of the deficit — that from Eisenhower through Nixon the top rate of tax ran upwards of seventy-five per cent and the wealthy whittled it down from there, whereas now they begin at almost nothing and whittle down from that.
The Texas Muslim development — A housing development planned by a group of wealthy Muslim professionals in Texas — twenty-five or thirty large houses on an empty tract with a mosque at the centre, marketed to other Muslim doctors, lawyers and engineers. John Kiriakou cites the alarm it caused, up to and including Governor Greg Abbott, as a case study in unnecessary panic.
The third-term workaround — John Kiriakou's constitutional argument that Donald Trump cannot reach a third term by running as vice president and having J.D. Vance resign — because a vice president barred from the presidency cannot assume it, so the speakership takes precedence.
The three pro-Israel countries — A global opinion poll John Kiriakou reported in August 2025 which, on his account, found only three countries with majority pro-Israel populations — Israel, the United States, and, to his own bafflement, Nigeria — with Turkey the most anti-Israel country outside the Middle East and Greece at 74 per cent against.
The Tomahawk red line — John Kiriakou's judgement that giving Ukraine Tomahawk cruise missiles would be a very bad idea — because it would risk drawing NATO in and risk a tactical nuclear strike on Ukrainian positions — set against Peter Kuznick's assessment that Ukraine is losing and is now snatching old men off the street.
The Trump weave — The name a speakers' bureau gave to John Kiriakou's platform manner — starting one story, turning off into another, and coming back to finish the first — a habit he attributes to never writing anything down before he walks to the podium.
The Truth Social announcement — John Kiriakou's objection to how the 2026 war was announced: at two o'clock in the morning on Truth Social, with no address from the East Room, and with a president shuttling between Washington and Mar-a-Lago rather than explaining to the country why Americans were being sent to fight.
The underlying sadness — The change several people have independently reported to John Kiriakou about himself since his prosecution — an underlying sadness that was not there before — which he says he does not see in himself, considering himself a happy and well-adjusted person.
The University of Salamanca professorship — John Kiriakou's teaching post in the graduate intelligence studies programme at the University of Salamanca, where he lectures on introductory intelligence studies and the history of terrorism, at an institution he describes as older than Spain itself.
The visa reciprocity rule — The bilateral arrangement John Kiriakou describes by which each country sets the price of its own visas and the other matches it — and his conclusion that a United States policy of refusing visas to applicants who are overweight or who have cancer or diabetes must, under the same rule, license every other country to weigh American travellers at the door.
The Wagner coverage asymmetry — John Kiriakou's explanation for why the Wagner Group saturates American media while American private military contractors do not: there is no desire or necessity in the American press to keep secret a private army that does not belong to the United States, and the coverage doubles as a device for keeping Americans engaged with Ukraine.
The War Department renaming — John Kiriakou's support for restoring the name Department of War — because Truman changed it in 1947 to avoid the United States looking like an aggressor, and the record since does not support the euphemism — together with his point that a president cannot rename a federal department by executive order.
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 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.
The weight of the government — John Kiriakou's comparison, made on the eve of his imprisonment, between the danger of his overseas career — including two attempts on his life by different terrorist groups — and being prosecuted at home, which he says none of it prepared him for.
The West Africa cocaine route — John Kiriakou's account of where cocaine transiting Venezuela actually goes: not north to the United States but east to West Africa, onto camels along an old Tuareg track to Morocco, and by boat to Spain. The drugs, he says, are meant for Western Europe — and are not Venezuelan to begin with, but Colombian and Ecuadorian.
The whiskers rule — John Kiriakou's description of the cultural practice he says American personnel encountered with some regularity in Afghanistan — that a boy who has not yet reached puberty is treated as available for sexual abuse — and his account of what he understood to have happened, and not happened, at Abu Ghraib.
The White House tip — A week and a half before the 2026 attack on Iran, John Kiriakou said publicly that a friend at the White House had told him the decision to attack had been made and that it would come the following Monday or Tuesday. A podcaster mocked him for it — how could a man twenty years out of the CIA know that? On the morning the strikes began, Kiriakou answered: people with access do call, because they are opposed to the war.
There are denials and then there are denials — John Kiriakou's rule for reading official statements — that 'we have no such plans' is not a denial, because nothing counts as a plan until a head of government signs off on it, leaving a government free to discuss and even prepare something it can still credibly say it has no plans for.
"There is almost no upside" — John Kiriakou's accounting of what blowing the whistle cost him — pension, friends, freedom and finally family — set against the single thing he says is left: knowing he did the right thing. And his timeline, from the whistle in 2007 to a vindication he says took eleven years.
They deserve an apology — John Kiriakou's statement that he feels he owes the men his government tortured an apology, that they deserve compensation they will never receive, and that at the very least they are owed the apology.
Think tank financing — John Kiriakou's warning that Washington's think tanks — more than 1,200 of them by a Washington Post count — must be read through their funding, illustrated with the case of someone close to him who controlled about $200,000 a year in donations for a Fortune 100 defence contractor and moved the money when a household-name institute proved insufficiently pro-contractor.
Thirty-year mandatory declassification — The statutory requirement, described by John Kiriakou, that classified American documents be released after thirty years — a law he says virtually nobody knows about, and which he raises against the continued withholding of Kennedy assassination records more than sixty years on. He also describes the redaction practice that operates alongside it.
This desk kills fascism — The sign Kiriakou taped to the cell desk on which he wrote the letters from Loretto, borrowed from Woody Guthrie's guitar, torn down by a guard within hours and kept by Kiriakou ever since.
The three legal ways to enter another country — The test John Kiriakou applies to American military action abroad: that there are only three lawful ways for one country to move into another — with the approval of the UN Security Council, at that country's invitation, or after being attacked by it — and that the United States, in his account, never meets any of the three.
Todd Blanch — Per Megyn Kelly, reading Trump's own statement live during her interview with Kiriakou, Todd Blanch was named the incoming acting Attorney General, replacing Pam Bondi.
Torture as a recruiting tool — John Kiriakou's argument that interrogations, drone strikes and targeted killings have generated more enemies than they removed — supported by the arithmetic he uses, from an al-Qaeda core of a few hundred in Afghanistan to an ISIS he numbered at some thirty-five thousand, by the fighters he personally captured who told him they had no quarrel with America until a drone killed their families, and by his answer to the charge that it was his disclosure rather than the programme that put Americans at risk.
Trading informants to El Salvador — John Kiriakou's reaction to reports that the secretary of state had agreed to hand over American informants in El Salvador in exchange for the use of Salvadoran prisons — that it is, in plain terms, a death sentence, and that the surprise is not that people will stop cooperating but that they never seem to.
Treason — John Kiriakou's insistence on the constitutional definition of treason — a capital offence consisting of taking up arms against the United States or giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war — and his argument that a president who publicly disagrees with an intelligence assessment has not committed it, because the CIA does not set foreign policy.
Trump cartel terrorist designation — Donald Trump's early second-term State Department designation of drug cartels as terrorist organizations, which John Kiriakou says was understood at the time mainly as a paperwork exercise to free up agencies like the NSA and DIA to spend money on intercepting communications and training foreign nationals — but which Kiriakou says Trump has since treated as license to attack any vessel he personally deems cartel-linked.
Trump Dni Replacement — Trump privately asked cabinet members about replacing his Director of National Intelligence, frustrated that the DNI had protected Joe Kent.
Trump's need for glorification — John Kiriakou's psychological reading of why the 2026 Iran war happened — that Donald Trump "craves glorification," has pursued it by attaching his name to public landmarks, and concluded that "real glory can only come with war": becoming the president who succeeded in overthrowing the Iranian government where every predecessor since Carter had failed. Kiriakou attributes the false expectation of quick collapse to wealthy Iranian-American exiles.
Trump Iran Ceasefire Efforts — Per John Kiriakou, Donald Trump reached out behind the scenes twice in ten days seeking a ceasefire with Iran and was rebuffed; Kiriakou also says Benjamin Netanyahu called the White House to check reports of the outreach, and that on foreign policy Netanyahu "has just as much authority as whoever happens to be president of the United States."
Trump — Kiriakou applied for a pardon on the last day of Trump's first term — and says Trump had agreed to it, until the last-minute reversal.
Trump's NATO reversal — John Kiriakou's explanation for Donald Trump's turn from hostility to enthusiasm for NATO — that he genuinely expected Vladimir Putin to do as he was told, and embraced the alliance out of anger when Putin would not settle the war in Ukraine, because the alternative was standing alone.
Trump's Supreme Court appointees — An assessment John Kiriakou volunteered in February 2026 and that runs against his politics elsewhere: that Donald Trump's appointees to the Supreme Court have been surprisingly good, and that the justices he regards as disasters — Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — were put there by moderate presidents.
Tulsi Gabbard — U.S. Director of National Intelligence; a longtime family friend of John Kiriakou's, who has known her since she was 12; Kiriakou calls her appointment "an inspired choice" despite disagreeing with her decision to join the Republican Party, and says she appears to have given up her opposition to Section 702 surveillance to secure Senate confirmation.
A Turkey–Israel confrontation — John Kiriakou's account of what two senior Turkish foreign ministry officials told him over dinner in March 2026 about the prospect of war with Israel: that it will not happen, that Turkey would win if it did, and that Turkey would not ask NATO for help.
The state-affiliated media labels — The warning tags applied by social media platforms from 2020 identifying accounts as mouthpieces of foreign governments, which John Kiriakou describes checking his own account for daily. His standing example of how indiscriminate the practice became is the labelling of Ed Schultz, who had been dead for years.
The two Abu Zubaydahs — John Kiriakou's account of the first cousin who shared Abu Zubaydah's name, whose activities were folded into a single intelligence picture of a man Kiriakou called a terrorist Superman — and who vanished as soon as the capture reached the newspapers.
The two-party system — John Kiriakou's account of American party politics as a spent form — more Americans now call themselves independents than Democrats or Republicans, the two parties are 'two sides of the same coin,' and ideology has displaced party as the organizing fact. He tells it partly as autobiography: a third-generation Democrat whose grandparents joined the party for Franklin Roosevelt and who left it himself.
UK secrecy laws — John Kiriakou's view that Britain is even harsher on whistleblowers and dissent than the United States, using the Official Secrets Act and Terrorism Act to stop people at airports and threaten arrest merely for supporting Palestinian rights.
Kiriakou's Ukraine settlement prediction — The endgame John Kiriakou forecast in June 2025 and calls deliberately unbold: Russia keeps the disputed eastern territories and Crimea, Ukraine never joins NATO but probably joins the European Union, and Moscow gets ninety per cent of what it wanted. The one demand he expects Russia to trade away is denazification, which he reads as propaganda rather than policy.
'An unusually violent society' — The judgment the Amir of Bahrain delivered to John Kiriakou in the mid-1990s, shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing — that Americans are accepting of violence 'that would be unacceptable in any other civilized country,' even by Arab standards. Kiriakou says he had no answer, because it was true, and he has since used it as the frame for political shootings in the United States.
U.S. diplomatic vacancies — John Kiriakou's account of how the mass dismissal of career U.S. ambassadors — never replaced — left the Gulf without American envoys as war with Iran loomed, so allied royals had to ask him personally whether the U.S. would attack.
United States–DRC relations — John Kiriakou's account of why American policy toward the Democratic Republic of the Congo is quietly comfortable while the east of the country is in chaos: the United States buys as much Congolese rare earth metal as can be dug out of the ground, and the central government's weakness against Rwanda is a problem Donald Trump claimed to have solved for the purposes of a Nobel Peace Prize case, with a peace Kiriakou says lasted a couple of weeks.
U.S. foreign policy process — Three foreign-policy observations from John Kiriakou — the narrow legal basis for U.S. military presence abroad, which he says does not cover American special forces in Syria; the formal congressional travel-clearance process that undercuts Pentagon and White House claims of no advance knowledge of Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan trip; and the depth of U.S.-China economic interdependence that Kiriakou says makes antagonizing Beijing strategically unwise.
Five per cent of the population, twenty-five per cent of the prisoners — The statistic John Kiriakou returns to from inside prison — that the United States holds five per cent of the world's people and a quarter of its prisoners, more per head than Russia, China or Iran — and the causes he assigns: the war on drugs, election-year lawmaking, and a Congress creating some fifty new crimes a year.
US Military Venture Capital — Per John Kiriakou, the U.S. military now purchases technology using a venture-capital investment model, a shift he cites as a warning sign about how national-security institutions acquire emerging tech.
The US overseas basing footprint — John Kiriakou's summary of the one thing he says Democrats and Republicans in Washington genuinely agree on: that the United States needs a military presence in about 110 countries and bases in about 86 of them, along with the newest nuclear weapons, the biggest ships, the best aircraft and the biggest bombs.
The U.S.–Saudi relationship — John Kiriakou's account of the American alliance with Saudi Arabia as a straightforward trade — basing rights and oil in exchange for weapons sales and protection — and of the price the United States pays for it, which he describes as a demonstrated willingness to walk away from its own commitments to international law and human rights in order to protect the regime.
USAID as a CIA cover vehicle — John Kiriakou's account of USAID's use by the CIA as a channel for covert operations and money laundering rather than as an undercover posting for individual officers — including a declassified 1972 exchange in which Henry Kissinger confirmed the CIA had paid Laotian mercenaries through USAID payroll checks.
Veterans' benefits for IDF service — A bill sponsored by a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and one from Ohio that would extend US veterans' benefits to any American who joins the Israel Defense Forces. John Kiriakou calls it an outrage and, as an American, treason.
Venezuelan heavy crude and the refining bottleneck — John Kiriakou's economic explanation for American pressure on Venezuela: the country's oil is unusually high in sulfur and requires specialty refining, which for years could only be done in Houston. He says sanctions pushed India and China to build refineries capable of processing it, and that a Chinese announcement of a Caribbean refinery for Venezuelan crude left Washington with a policy it could not admit had failed.
Walk-in — In John Kiriakou's telling, someone who walks into an embassy offering information; 95% are lunatics or liars, some are 'intelligence peddlers' or hostile 'probes,' and about 1% are 'the real McCoy' — a framework he used to see through a supposed 'walk-in' tip during the Abu Zubaydah hunt. A genuine walk-in — a witness to a terrorist assassination — was later hypnotized by CIA psychologists in a London hotel room and read back a stolen van's license plate, verifying his account.
Home rule in Washington, DC — The governing arrangement under which the District of Columbia has run its own affairs since 1971, explained by John Kiriakou as a grant made by Richard Nixon that replaced direct rule by a congressional committee — and which he describes Donald Trump as wanting to take back, on the strength of a single assault on a well-known administration staffer.
Washington political culture — John Kiriakou's account of how Washington changed across the forty-four years he has lived in it — from a city where members of opposing parties shared houses, churches and Friday-night poker games to one he calls hideous, angry and backstabbing, in which the polarisation is itself the reason nothing gets done and political violence keeps being waved past.
Watching naval movements — One of the first lessons John Kiriakou says he learned at the CIA: to read American military intentions, watch naval movements — one carrier strike group means business, two means war. He used it to correctly predict the 2026 strike on Iran days in advance.
Watermark — Reality Winner, on Kiriakou's show, describes the printer watermark that let the NSA trace her leaked document to a specific office.
"We don't hire felons" — After his release from prison John Kiriakou could not find work anywhere — turned down, he says, by Target, Safeway, McDonald's and Uber — and the one job he was eventually offered, at a Washington think tank, paid minimum wage on condition that he run a permanent crowdfunding campaign to raise his own salary.
Wealth concentration — John Kiriakou's argument that the present distribution of wealth is historically unprecedented and politically unsustainable — that trillionaires have never existed before, that five men hold as much as the bottom eighty per cent of the world, and that a defence budget approaching $1.5 trillion cannot be reconciled with the social spending it would have to displace.
The Weaponization Subcommittee — The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, created in January 2023 and promoted as a second Church Committee. John Kiriakou says he is a thousand per cent in favour of a second Church Committee and that this is not one: it was created on a straight party-line vote, the Democrats refused to take their seats, and its remit is the FBI's treatment of conservatives rather than the crimes the original committee exposed.
What we owed Mexico — John Kiriakou's answer to why American and Mexican cooperation against the cartels achieves so little: the federales are incorruptible and outgunned, the government does not control parts of its own territory, and the United States spent a century punishing Mexico instead of helping it develop — allowing four families to own the entire economy.
"Whatever DARPA's working on" — John Kiriakou's standing rejoinder to the defence of American research spending — that the secrecy of DARPA's projects is the indictment rather than the excuse, because whatever it is working on should have been developed twenty years ago and be in the field today, and should be, in his phrase, Star Trek kind of stuff.
Where he slept in Afghanistan — John Kiriakou's inventory of his own Afghan accommodation across a decade of trips — a shared tent on the first visits, a tent of his own once ("living high on the hog"), the officers' quarters at Bagram once the American foothold was serious, and a three-star Afghan hotel when he returned as a private citizen to get the Kite Runner children out.
Whispers in the Dirt — John Kiriakou's second cemetery book — a guide to the mafia graves of New York City, and the sequel Simon & Schuster commissioned after Remains of the Day. Reporting it produced the moment he realised an inmate who had told him a body was found in a barrel in his storage unit had been telling the truth.
Whistleblower psychology — John Kiriakou's account of what distinguishes people who come forward: psychological studies showing whistleblowers hold a much more sharply defined sense of right and wrong than the general population, weighed against his own claim that there is no whistleblower who has not contemplated suicide in the period after going public.
Whistleblowers and suicide — John Kiriakou's claim, drawn from conversations with some fifty whistleblowers, that every one of them considered suicide in the early stage of their case — and his own account of the family vigil that kept him from the garage.
"Whistleblowers die broke" — The observation John Kiriakou attributes to Daniel Ellsberg — that the one thing all whistleblowers have in common is that they die broke — which Kiriakou applies to his own confiscated federal pension and his expectation of working until the day he dies.
Why Iran targets the Gulf states — John Kiriakou's explanation of why Iranian missiles fell more heavily on Gulf Arab states than on Israel during the 2026 war: the Gulf has no Iron Dome, a finite missile stock has to be spent where it counts, and hosting American forces converted an uneasy coexistence into open enmity.
Why the UAE was targeted — John Kiriakou's explanation for the disproportionate weight of Iranian fire falling on the United Arab Emirates in 2026: not the American presence but the Emirati role at the forefront of the war against the Houthis — and a wish to bloody Emirati noses despite the thousands of Iranians living in Dubai.
Wikileaks as a System — Per John Kiriakou, WikiLeaks functions less as a single leader than as a durable system — one that protected whistleblowers, helped popularize the term "whistleblower" itself, was credited with contributing to the Arab Spring, weathered pressure to become a defanged NGO, and outlasted the political fallout of its 2010 cable releases (including, in Kiriakou's account, an unintended assist to Donald Trump's election).
WLDragnet — Free search tool documenting U.S. defense contractors' monitoring of social-media users by political affiliation. John Kiriakou says a search of his own name in the tool's beta showed Northrop Grumman had queried him hundreds of times, and that his attorneys used the data in separate litigation against the company.
Zelensky action figures — The detail John Kiriakou reached for in January 2023 to describe how far American war messaging had gone: you can buy Zelensky action figures in stores now. He offered it as the marker of a ridiculousness he thought few Americans recognised, alongside his argument that the war's real object was to bog Russia down before confronting China.