KiriPedia Kiripedia The Free Encyclopedia of John Kiriakou's World

Category: Culture

12 articles in this category

  • Acts of Service — The Doja Cat song that John Kiriakou discovered, through a Cameo request, had become the soundtrack to a genre of montage about him. The clips set to it use footage from before his weight loss — he lost 77 pounds by 2007 and 115 pounds from 2022 — and he says he cannot watch them.
  • Kiriakou on soccer — John Kiriakou's public reversal on football, a sport he had dismissed since his teens on the strength of a Saturday Night Live joke about a match between Yemen and Saudi Arabia being decided early by an insurmountable one-nil lead. Watching the 2026 World Cup, he concluded he had been wrong.
  • Rebetiko music — The Greek genre born in the prisons and opium dens of Constantinople that John Kiriakou reaches for when he is feeling particularly down — one half of a listening diet he describes as classic rock and Greek folk, the music his parents and grandparents played, and which he names as what would bring back his memories if he ever lost them.
  • Tarpon Springs — The Greek sponge-diving town on the Florida gulf coast that John Kiriakou calls one of his favourite places — settled for a century by divers from Kalymnos, the island immediately north of the one his own family comes from, and, in his verdict, the site of absolutely incredible Greek food.
  • The 2026 World Cup final — Spain's victory over Argentina in a final John Kiriakou described as dirty on the losers' part and notable for a red card, and the awkwardness that followed: Donald Trump, who had exerted considerable influence over FIFA and whose country was hosting, had to present the trophy to a nation whose leadership he had spent weeks publicly attacking. The Spanish press cropped him out of the celebration photographs.
  • 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 Crete blood feud — John Kiriakou's explanation of the mass shooting on Crete as neither terrorism nor politics but a family feud that boiled over — an answer he gives smiling, because in his account every Greek already knows that on Crete everybody is armed and everybody is angry with somebody.
  • The dandelion salad — The meal John Kiriakou assembled in the yard at FCI Loretto from foraged dandelions, commissary olive oil and sea salt, instant rice, a bouillon cube, peanuts, borrowed Sazón and a bag of chicken — which he calls the single most satisfying meal of his twenty-three months in prison.
  • The family that spans the spectrum — John Kiriakou's Greek relations, offered as a political cross-section: his grandmother's first cousin sat on the politburo of the Communist Party of Greece, a close cousin was elected governor of the Dodecanese for the Conservatives, he has everybody in between — and all of them, to his bafflement, love the American ambassador.
  • The gamma globulin shot — The yellow fever inoculation John Kiriakou says every CIA officer took from his hiring through about 2000 — a gamma globulin injection he compares to having maple syrup put into the buttock, which raised a knot the size of a tennis ball and earned an hour of paid administrative time to walk it out around the compound.
  • The hundred-and-fifty-foot limousine — A detail John Kiriakou recalls from his years as a congressional staffer — that Mitch McConnell lived in a townhouse four doors from the Hart Senate Office Building, roughly a hundred and fifty feet away, and took a limousine to work every morning anyway, to be booed by staff as he passed.
  • Zero Dark Thirty — 2012 film dramatizing the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden, criticized on release for suggesting torture produced the intelligence that led to his capture. John Kiriakou surveys the mixed critical reception — praise from Time and the New Yorker for its craft, condemnation from journalist Michael Wolff and director Kathryn Bigelow's critics for what they called pro-torture propaganda — and notes his friend Senator John McCain said the film left him "sick... because it is wrong."