Category: Events

440 articles in this category

1993 Bush Kuwait assassination plot — Iraqi intelligence plot, foiled by Kuwaiti authorities, to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush during his post-liberation "victory lap" visit to Kuwait; the U.S. response, per John Kiriakou's first-person account of his telephone call with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, was 47 cruise missiles fired into the Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters in Baghdad eight hours later.
The 2023 classified documents scandal — The run of discoveries of classified material in the private possession of Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Mike Pence, which John Kiriakou treats not as a scandal about any of them but as proof that the Espionage Act as currently applied makes almost everyone technically guilty. He rates Pence's briefing books as more highly classified than anything Julian Assange published, and says Biden's Senate-era documents are the ones that cannot be explained away.
2026 Iran war economic shock — John Kiriakou's running assessment of the economic damage from the 2026 Iran war — an oil shock he says already exceeds both 1970s shocks combined, a natural-gas shock worse than the Nord Stream destruction, and a chokepoint problem that runs through fertilizer as much as fuel, since 65% of the world's supply must transit the Strait of Hormuz. His summary: "This is an economic slowdown of choice."
1953 Iran coup — The U.S.- and UK-backed overthrow of Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh; per John Kiriakou, the coup served British national interests rather than American ones, and the subsequent outlawing of secular political opposition under the Shah forced dissent into the mosques — producing a religious rather than secular revolution in 1979.
2026 Iran war — The open-ended American and Israeli war against Iran that John Kiriakou tracked week by week on his own show — a conflict he says was sold as three weeks, ran into its fifth month, achieved every decapitation objective it set, and continued anyway. His grade for it is a D, and his forecast is a Truth Social post declaring victory while nothing changes.
2028 presidential field — John Kiriakou's assessment of the wide-open 2028 presidential race — the first in his life, he says, where he has no idea who either party will nominate. Predictive markets were listing 44 Democrats and 26 Republicans as possible candidates. His own preferred candidate is Tucker Carlson, whom he says he has repeatedly begged to run; his working assumption about anyone who does want the job is that they are "a narcissist and probably a sociopath on top of it."
The 2026 strike wave — The proliferation of American strikes in early 2026, from Minneapolis to the Southern California ports, which John Kiriakou raised alongside a February reversal in the job market and the question of whether union membership was rising after years of decline. The economist Richard D. Wolff's answer placed it in the ordinary rhythm of capitalist downturns and ended on employers squeezing workers who were, he said, beginning to really fight back.
9/11 plea agreements — The Biden-era plea deals under which Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and co-defendants agreed to plead guilty to murdering 2,976 people in exchange for life without parole and a guarantee against transfer to the Colorado supermax — vacated by the Secretary of Defense after public backlash. Per John Kiriakou, the deals existed because torture had rendered every confession inadmissible, leaving no usable evidence.
9/11 Commission — The federal commission of inquiry into the September 11 attacks, which John Kiriakou describes as structurally incapable of reaching the truth because it was barred from interviewing serving CIA officers or any Guantanamo detainee, and was blocked by the CIA from pursuing the Saudi thread.
A dangerous neighborhood — The contrast John Kiriakou drew between his Gulf contacts on the second day of the 2026 Iran war — friends in Dubai who were panicked as drones struck the city's landmark towers, and the son of a senior Qatari official who simply chuckled and said 'this is life in the Middle East. We live in a dangerous neighborhood.'
Abraham Accords — The Trump-brokered normalization deals between Israel and Gulf Arab states — in John Kiriakou's judgment "a terrible idea in the first place," a great victory for Israel and the Gulf Arabs that was "a punch in the throat to the Palestinians." He argues the Accords are how Trump meant to "solve the Middle East in a day" — by screwing the Palestinians — that Hamas read the abandonment correctly, that October 7 shattered the project, and that reviving the Accords (Saudis in, victory declared, Nobel collected) remains the organizing goal of Trump's regional policy.
The Afghan National Police poisoning — An incident John Kiriakou recalls from a 2012 New York Times report and treats as the clearest single illustration of why the American project in Afghanistan failed: at a DynCorp-run training facility that had deliberately mixed recruits from every tribe and region, one recruit poisoned the evening stew and then let four Taliban fighters into the dormitory to stab the survivors in their beds.
Afghanistan 2011 Kerry Trip — John Kiriakou's 2011 trip to Afghanistan as senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Chairman John Kerry, where the pair sat through a briefing with 11 one-to-four-star generals presenting an optimistic account of the war — after which Kerry mused the U.S. might win, only for Kiriakou to tell him the U.S. controlled only Kabul, and that the same rosy briefing had been given every year since 2002.
Air India Flight 182 — The 1985 bombing of a Boeing 747 over the Atlantic, which John Kiriakou has attributed to the government of India in the course of arguing that state sponsorship of terrorism is not confined to the countries formally designated for it.
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.
Albright in Pyongyang — John Kiriakou's account of Bill Clinton's stated regret over the final week of his presidency — that he wished he had pursued diplomatic relations with North Korea instead of Israeli-Palestinian peace — and of Madeleine Albright being in Pyongyang rather than at the talks.
The Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait — The portrait of John Kiriakou painted by Robert Shetterly for his long-running series Americans Who Tell the Truth, unveiled at Busboys and Poets in Washington on February 7, 2013 — weeks before Kiriakou reported to prison — and inscribed with the words 'Even if torture works it cannot be tolerated.'
"An actual summit" — John Kiriakou's reading of the August 2025 Anchorage meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin — that the Russian delegation's seniority proved Moscow was serious, that Putin is not the erratic figure American media portray, and that there is never any downside to diplomacy.
Another Bentley — The scene John Kiriakou describes from a meeting with Benazir Bhutto during her exile in Dubai — a five-million-dollar palace on the Gulf, a car pulling up outside, and Bhutto saying that so help her God, if her husband had come home with another Bentley she would kill him — which Kiriakou uses as his measure of Pakistani political corruption.
The Athens carjacking — The motorcyclist who followed John Kiriakou's car through Athens two months into his posting — leading to a gun drawn on a ten-lane intersection, a shot fired, a disabled motorcycle, and a question asked back in Washington: *is John a hothead?*
Bahrain Posting (1994–1996) — John Kiriakou's 1994–1996 assignment to Bahrain under U.S. State Department cover as second secretary for economic affairs — arriving with his wife Joanne and infant son Chris on August 1, 1994, into a tiny Gulf monarchy whose sectarian tensions erupted, two months later, into the first Intifada.
Bahrain Intifada (1994) — The first Bahraini Intifada, a Shia uprising against the Sunni Al Khalifa monarchy that began roughly two months into John Kiriakou's 1994 Bahrain posting with a bombing at the Ministry of Labor, led by Abdul Amir Al-Jamri, and met by the government first with police, then armored personnel carriers and tanks, and executions.
The Bob Jones frame-up — The operation John Kiriakou ran inside FCI Loretto against a man at his own cafeteria table — forging court papers in the prison law library from a genuine 1970s Ohio case involving a man of the same name, and using them to have him banished by the shot callers.
Bojinka plot — 1996 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed–planned operation, prepared in a Manila, Philippines apartment, to hijack as many as fourteen Boeing 747s and crash them into buildings along the U.S. West Coast; disrupted only by accident, when a cleaning lady let herself into the apartment while the planner was out, recognized the materials laid out as a terrorist plot, and called the police — who alerted Filipino intelligence and, in turn, the CIA. The plot's architect was known to U.S. intelligence for the next six years only by the alias "Mukhtar," his true identity as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed surfacing only when Abu Zubaydah named him to FBI agent Ali Soufan in 2002.
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.
Breaking the nuclear taboo — John Kiriakou's reporting that Donald Trump considered using a tactical nuclear weapon in Iran not for military necessity but to break what he regards as warfare's final taboo, freeing future presidents to use larger weapons — and the related account that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs refused him the nuclear codes.
The Brüno shoot in Jordan — The scene John Kiriakou set up for Sacha Baron Cohen in Amman — four retired Palestinian militants, found in the Damascus telephone book at the Library of Congress, shown hardcore pornography by a character they believed to be an Austrian documentary journalist — which produced no reaction at all and was cut from the film entirely.
Bureau of Prisons advisory board — The advisory board John Kiriakou joined at the personal invitation of the Director of the Bureau of Prisons, who told him the president had tasked him with tearing the Bureau down and rebuilding it.
Burn Notice — Both a piece of real CIA tradecraft — a worldwide cable forbidding every officer from speaking to a named person — and the USA Network spy series named after it, which John Kiriakou watched as a fan before he became its script adviser — a job he obtained by sitting next to its creator, Matt Nix, on a flight from Washington to Los Angeles, having previously run the show's credits in slow motion to find out who was advising it. Nobody was. By the time the plane landed Kiriakou had the job for season six.
Business class after 9/11 — John Kiriakou's illustration of what the post-attack money did to the CIA's habits: Cofer Black telling him to just do whatever operation he was proposing because there was so much money it could not possibly be spent, and everyone at the agency flying business class from then on, anywhere in the world.
Butler rally shooting — The July 2024 attempt on Donald Trump's life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on which John Kiriakou takes no position as to who was responsible but argues the published facts cannot be reconciled with a competent Secret Service — and that the questions it leaves open are owed an answer for the historical record whether or not anyone alive gets one.
Camp David Final Talks — Middle East peace negotiations held at Camp David in the final days of the Clinton administration. Per John Kiriakou — relaying an account from a senior NSC officer who was present — the talks came extraordinarily close to a comprehensive agreement: with President Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres around an enormous Sharpie-marked map of Jerusalem, dividing the city block by block. When the division was complete, Gore said 'My God, we have peace' — and Arafat replied 'I can never sell this to the Palestinian people' and walked out.
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.
Ceuta migrant crossings (2026) — The mass crossing of roughly 60,000 people from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in early August 2026. John Kiriakou reads the episode not as a spontaneous migration but as a deliberate act of Moroccan statecraft aimed at Spain, triggered by the Spanish prime minister's visit to Algeria, and rejects the widely circulated theory that Israel organised it.
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.
Cheney's airstrip question — A one-line request from Vice President Dick Cheney — what is the longest airstrip in northern Iraq made of? — that nobody in the CIA's operations directorate could answer, and that John Kiriakou eventually resolved by asking the agency librarian. The answer came back within a day, with the exact mix. The purpose was to work out whether the runway would take a transport aircraft carrying two tanks.
Chinese spy balloon incident — 2023 controversy over a high-altitude balloon that crossed U.S. airspace, widely labeled in media coverage as a "Chinese spy balloon"; John Kiriakou notes no U.S. government official ever officially confirmed it was conducting espionage, and says he personally believes it was likely a weather balloon, since satellite surveillance already renders such balloons unnecessary for spying.
Founding of the CIA (1947) — John Kiriakou's account of the CIA's creation under the National Security Act of 1947 — built with British MI6 help after a chaotic 1945-47 interregnum, and opposed by J. Edgar Hoover until Truman falsely promised him the new agency would be part of the FBI.
CIA Gmail account felony case — Per John Kiriakou, a CIA colleague working the counterterrorism fusion center night shift was ordered by cable to check a terrorist suspect's Gmail account and password, did so, and was later charged with a felony for illegally accessing a computer — despite having acted only on explicit written instructions from headquarters.
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.
Cofer Black's warning to the liaison class — The briefing Cofer Black gave to a class of visiting foreign liaison officers weeks before 11 September 2001 — code words about a honey salesman, a great football match and an enormous wedding — and the private exchange afterwards in which he told John Kiriakou he had been deadly serious.
The 2021 Cuba protests — The July 2021 demonstrations in Cuba, which John Kiriakou declined to read as the beginning of a revolution. He called them a test run to gauge the government's reaction, objected that a New York Times line about Democrats treading lightly in Florida meant nothing anyone could act on, and noted that everything touching Cuba is too politically loaded in the United States to be discussed plainly.
The custody standoff — The week John Kiriakou used his CIA surveillance training to find his own sons after his ex-wife hid them in breach of a custody order — ending with him carrying his eight-year-old out of a Greek Orthodox church during the consecration, a felony charge that was dropped, and a hostage-style handover at a diner on the state line.
The Cypriot billionaire's investigation — The six-week private-intelligence job John Kiriakou describes as operational rather than analytic: a Cypriot billionaire wanted to know about the man engaged to his only daughter, and Kiriakou bribed a police captain in Cyprus, ran surveillance in London, and reported back that the fiancé was a thief with drug convictions.
The Damascus consulate strike — The April 2024 Israeli attack on Iran's consulate in Damascus, which John Kiriakou describes as an unambiguous violation of the Vienna Convention, and whose official Israeli explanation — that it had not occurred to anyone the world would read it as a provocation — he calls disingenuous and intended purely for domestic audiences.
Dasht-i-Leili massacre — Late-November 2001 mass suffocation of approximately 2,000 surrendered Taliban prisoners in unventilated shipping containers in the Afghan desert; the prisoners' surrender was negotiated by the CIA via the Northern Alliance, the transport order was issued by the CIA, and the operation was overseen by Northern Alliance warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum; John Kiriakou in 2009 as Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigator attempted to reopen the case under a 2008 Obama campaign promise; the CIA's classified response was, per Kiriakou, "go fuck yourself."
David Rockefeller in Bahrain — Per John Kiriakou — economic officer at the American Embassy in Bahrain, 1994–1996, and control officer for a David Rockefeller visit — Rockefeller's award from the US-Bahrain Banking Society was a cover stop. After three days of documented public appearances, Rockefeller flew on a military plane to Baghdad to deliver a secret message to Saddam Hussein: stop violating sanctions, or the United States would take military action. Kiriakou cites the trip as a textbook case of how public figures are used as deniable back-channel intermediaries.
Death threats against Kiriakou — The threats John Kiriakou has received across two decades — first after going public about the CIA torture program, when FBI advice that at least two were credible sent his family out of the country, and later in waves tied to his opposition to Gina Haspel, his remarks about Pakistan, and his advocacy on Palestine and the Epstein case.
Democratic Party 2025 Political Snapshot — John Kiriakou's 2025 assessment of Democratic Party weakness — a record-low 24% approval rating, seven Senate Democrats crossing over to hand Trump a spending-bill win with no concessions, and California governor Gavin Newsom's surprising denial of parole to a large group of long-incarcerated eligible inmates, which Kiriakou reads as Newsom "playing the long game."
Democratic redistricting collapse — John Kiriakou's account of why Republicans remain competitive despite historically low approval ratings: a 1992 decision he attributes to Hillary Clinton to spend only in presidential battlegrounds, which he says ceded state legislatures and the congressional map for decades.
Diary of a CEO — January 2026 Kiriakou interview — The January 2026 long-form appearance by John Kiriakou on Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO podcast that a University of Texas at Austin sophomore then cut into TikTok shorts — sped and slowed, with lasers added — kicking off the Gen Z discovery of Kiriakou that pushed his cameo requests past 1,900 and drew a 2:30 a.m. representation call in Dubai from the Creative Artists Agency; Kiriakou treats it as the pivot after which stories he had been telling for nineteen years finally landed.
"Ecuador is open for business" — The Wall Street Journal headline John Kiriakou says appeared the day after he hand-delivered a letter to Ecuador's ambassador in Washington asking that Julian Assange's internet access be restored, and which made him fear Assange was about to be used as a bargaining chip.
Meeting Elon Musk in 2009 — The evening in 2009 when John Kiriakou, waiting to pitch a television idea to an incoming NBC president in a Washington bar, was introduced to a friend the executive had brought along — asked him what he did for a living, and listened to him talk about Mars all night.
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.
Europe and the 2026 Iran war — The rupture between the United States and its European allies over the 2026 Iran war, as the economist Richard D. Wolff described it on John Kiriakou's programme: Europe was not told the attack was coming, refused Donald Trump's request for help halfway through it, and was then publicly attacked by him for refusing. Wolff's verdict was that the alliance did not survive it — 'NATO is dead, the alliance is dead, and the blame for it is 100% on the US.'
Europe's 2026 jet fuel crisis — The Associated Press report, which John Kiriakou opened his programme with on 16 April 2026, that Europe would run out of jet fuel within six weeks — a shortage he called an economic calamity that would ripple across the entire planet, and which the economist Richard D. Wolff traced not to any shortage of crude but to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz starving the refineries that convert petroleum into jet fuel.
F-35 sale to Turkey — The proposed sale of F-35 fighters to Turkey, opposed for decades by Greece and Greek-Americans who fear the aircraft would be used against Greece, and opposed by Benjamin Netanyahu for the same reason with respect to Israel. When Netanyahu raised the objection publicly in July 2026, Donald Trump answered that he does not take orders from a foreign leader about arms sales — a rebuke John Kiriakou describes as unprecedented.
The FBI raids on Kiriakou's home — Twenty-two agents, eight hours, a sledgehammer hole in the kitchen wall that is still there, potted plants emptied onto the floor and every piece of electronics removed — twice, and with no charge arising from either. John Kiriakou uses the raids as the ground for his flat description of the bureau as an outlaw organization.
Kiriakou's first recruitment — How John Kiriakou made his first CIA recruitment in Athens: by combing 25-year-old Greek police files not for people who had talked but for people who had answered back, finding one such man in a communist neighbourhood coffee shop, and buying his telephone number from a waiter for the price of a fifty.
Forward Operating Base Chapman Attack — December 30, 2009 suicide bombing at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, killing seven CIA officers and wounding more than a dozen others — the deadliest single day in CIA history. Per John Kiriakou, the officer who led the base was a GS-14 with zero security training, assigned to the post as a career-promotion checkbox before her required elevation to the Senior Intelligence Service. The bomber — a Jordanian national who walked into the American consulate in Istanbul claiming to be Osama bin Laden's doctor — was never polygraphed because CIA personnel 'wanted so badly for this to be true.'
Four deaths at Loretto — John Kiriakou's tally of the prisoners who died during his twenty-three months at FCI Loretto — four, all of preventable illness, two of heart attacks and two of cancer — and his account of one of them, a man he ate with daily who was given Tylenol for months before an outside x-ray found stage four spinal cancer.
France recognises Palestine — Emmanuel Macron's decision in July 2025 to extend formal recognition to the Republic of Palestine and exchange ambassadors, which John Kiriakou called a turning point that could not be overstated — the first serious crack in Western support for Israel, and significant precisely because France is a historic colonial power in the Middle East with a Security Council veto.
Frank's heart attack — The 65-year-old insulin-dependent diabetic who shared a cell with John Kiriakou at FCI Loretto, reported chest tightness for months, was given Tylenol and a request for an EKG that the regional office never approved, and collapsed in the insulin line.
The Foreign Relations volume and the sources still alive — The errand that put John Kiriakou and Cofer Black in a car to the White House on the morning of 11 September 2001: three declassified cables due to be printed in a State Department history volume named CIA sources who were still living — and an obscure law requiring the United States to resettle any source it outs.
Galls.com sponsor story — John Kiriakou's account of outfitting the CIA's post-9/11 Islamabad station for terrorist-safe-house raids by ordering roughly $50,000 of tactical gear from the law-enforcement retailer galls.com on his CIA credit card, shipped to Pakistan via State Department diplomatic pouch in under a week — a story he now retells as an ad-read for the retailer, which sponsors one of his podcast appearances.
Gay Diplomat Operation — Per John Kiriakou, a CIA recruitment operation he ran against a foreign diplomat who was closeted and gay. After months of cultivation under cover as a gay man, Kiriakou attempted to kiss the diplomat at his apartment and was deflated by the response: 'I am gay. I'm just not into hairy guys.' The romantic gambit failed — but the recruitment ultimately succeeded anyway, because the diplomat had been passed over for a promotion and was angry enough at his own government to cooperate. Kiriakou cites the operation as evidence that financial motivation and personal grievance, not coercion, are the reliable drivers of recruitment.
Famine in Gaza — The starvation of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, which John Kiriakou describes as a United Nations-declared famine caused not by an absence of food but by an Israeli refusal to let food reach the people who need it; Kiriakou characterises it as a war crime, a crime against humanity and a form of genocide, attributing that characterisation to the United Nations and the International Court of Justice rather than to himself.
The General Muhammad equipment gift — John Kiriakou's account of the end of the Abu Zubaydah operation in Pakistan, when headquarters told him to throw away or hand over the truckloads of equipment his station had bought — and of learning weeks later from his day-to-day Pakistani contact that the brigadier general who accepted the gift had simply taken it all himself.
Get thrown out spicily — John Kiriakou's criticism of Representative Al Green's protest at the 2026 State of the Union address: that holding up a banned sign and then walking out quietly accomplished nothing, and that if you are going to be removed you should struggle and fight back.
Giuliani Pardon Solicitation — Per John Kiriakou, a meeting at the Trump International Hotel in Washington in which Rudy Giuliani's associate solicited $2 million in exchange for a presidential pardon — a story that subsequently appeared as a front-page New York Times article. Giuliani publicly denied ever meeting Kiriakou; Kiriakou sent the Times the photograph taken at the meeting that morning, and the paper published the story with the note that it had seen documentary proof.
The glyburide incident — The episode John Kiriakou described in a Letter from Loretto of 12 September 2014: handed a bottle of glyburide by the prison pharmacy without explanation, he crashed twice and passed out on the floor — and his physician father-in-law told him the drug could have put him into heart failure.
Graham–Netanyahu ICC tapes — Recordings of Lindsey Graham coordinating with Benjamin Netanyahu on how to discredit the International Criminal Court over its arrest warrant. On the tapes Graham lines up Senate signatories for a protest letter, jokes that he should be paid "tons of shekels," and asks Netanyahu to telephone two Democratic senators to thank them. John Kiriakou argues the conduct meets the definition of espionage his own judge applied to him.
The encounter at the Greek ambassador's residence — An exchange John Kiriakou describes from a dinner a few weeks after his 2015 release from prison, in which Senator Ron Wyden — then vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee — welcomed him home, was told Kiriakou had expected him to speak up, and answered that it had taken everything he had simply to keep his own security clearance. Kiriakou offers it as evidence that the intelligence oversight committees are afraid of the agencies they oversee.
Invasion of Grenada — The 1983 American invasion of Grenada, which John Kiriakou supported as a nineteen-year-old College Democrat at George Washington University on the grounds that American medical students had to be rescued — an episode he now cites as the clearest example of how completely he once accepted the government's own account of what it was doing.
Gulf consultations before the Iran war — John Kiriakou's account of travelling in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha in the weeks before the 2026 strikes on Iran, and finding that the United States had made no diplomatic case to its Gulf partners at all — in sharp contrast to the worldwide campaign that preceded the Iraq war. He told a senior Emirati royal that two carrier strike groups meant an attack was coming.
Haqqani White House meeting — A mid-to-late-1980s White House meeting between President Ronald Reagan and a Taliban delegation, per John Kiriakou — a former boss of his served as translator. One member of that delegation, a man named Haqqani, went on to found the Haqqani network, later responsible for the capture of Bowe Bergdahl and the kidnapping, rape, and torture of a Canadian couple.
Haroon Yenor trial — Federal terrorism prosecution in which John Kiriakou testified as a defense expert witness; Yenor, arrested in November 2024 on charges tied to an alleged plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange and a synagogue, was acquitted on all six charges on June 30; Kiriakou's expert testimony argued the FBI supplied the idea, the bomb, the explosives, the timer, the detonation cord, and the getaway car.
Truman's regret over Israel — John Kiriakou's account that Harry Truman called his role in the creation of the state of Israel the act of 'a damn fool' and the biggest regret of his presidency, because the situation spun out of control almost immediately.
The Hazara leader's judo belts — An encounter John Kiriakou describes from Afghanistan in about 2007: a very senior Hazara leader displayed every judo belt he had ever earned, white through black, in a large shadow box on his living room wall — and explained that he had gone to fifth dan not for sport but because Hazaras were forbidden to own weapons and he needed some way to protect himself.
Hayden at the National Press Club — John Kiriakou's account of seeing Michael Hayden, after a series of strokes, at a National Press Club event sponsored by the intelligence centre that bears his name — and the two reactions it produced in him, neither of them satisfaction alone.
Hunter Biden Laptop — John Kiriakou's assessment of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy — he saw nothing related to child sex abuse in the material but says the Biden family, particularly Hunter, has serious documented substance-abuse problems; and that the 2020 open letter in which 51 former intelligence officials called the story a Russian/KGB-style operation used deliberately hedged, CIA-trained language and was later shown (per Michael Morell's testimony) to have been solicited by the Biden campaign.
I want my fifty bucks back — What John Kiriakou says he shouted at John Fetterman from ten rows back at an Ohio State football game — and his explanation, as a Pennsylvanian furious about the senator, of why Fetterman keeps his seat anyway.
The Imia crisis — The 1996 confrontation between Greece and Turkey over an uninhabited Aegean islet, which John Kiriakou cites as the last time the two came close to exchanging fire — a flag raised, a flag taken down, warships dispatched, and Bill Clinton telephoning both capitals to tell them to stop.
Iran 12-Day War — 2025 Israeli air campaign against Iran during which Israel killed at least fourteen Iranian nuclear scientists by destroying the apartment buildings they lived in; preceded for each scientist by Farsi-language telephone calls from Iranian-Jewish Mossad and Shin Bet officers offering defection in lieu of certain death; characterized by John Kiriakou as a categorical departure from CIA targeting doctrine in its acceptable-civilian-casualty calculus.
Iran's 2024 drone retaliation — John Kiriakou's account of Iran's telegraphed 2024 drone strike on Israel — hundreds of slow drones, launched with advance warning to the U.S. and Jordan, nearly all shot down, which he reads as a controlled show of force and an intelligence victory that exposed the Iron Dome.
Iran-Contra — The mid-1980s scandal in which the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran and diverted the proceeds — laundered through Cyprus — to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Per John Kiriakou, Iran-Contra marks the precise end of what he calls the 'golden age' of congressional intelligence oversight: the roughly 1975–1982 window opened by the Church and Pike Committees, when 'serious people, heavyweights' actually held the CIA accountable. After Iran-Contra, he says, the oversight committees reverted to being 'cheerleaders' for the agency — a posture that has held ever since.
The Iranian elementary school strike — A Tomahawk cruise missile strike at the start of the 2026 war that killed more than 175 people at an Iranian elementary school. The United States denied responsibility until its own investigation confirmed it; John Kiriakou traces the failure to targeting data a decade out of date and expects no one to be punished for it.
Iran Nuclear Assessment — Per John Kiriakou's assessment, the US–Israeli military campaign against Iran was a war of choice driven by Israeli political pressure rather than genuine intelligence indicating an Iranian nuclear weapons threat. The CIA produced two National Intelligence Estimates concluding Iran had no nuclear weapons program; Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa in the 1980s forbidding such a program. The U.S. went to war anyway, in Kiriakou's view, after President Trump replaced the Joint Chiefs of Staff with officers willing to accept Israeli intelligence and proceed.
"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 regional war (2026) — The widening of the 2026 Iran conflict from a war between Iran on one side and the United States and Israel on the other into a regional war — Iranian missiles striking a US base in Jordan, Iranian strikes across the Gulf states, Houthi attacks on Saudi shipping and oil, and Saudi forces striking pro-Iranian militias in Iraq. John Kiriakou notes he had forecast the expansion a week earlier.
Iranian oil sanctions relief, 2026 — The American decision, during the war it was fighting against Iran, to lift sanctions on Iranian oil at sea in order to hold prices down. John Kiriakou pairs it with the moment an Indian ship paid Iran for oil in yuan and was waved through — after which, he says, the sanctions came off.
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.
Iraq War Israeli tower sabotage — Per John Kiriakou, after the U.S. rejected Israel's request to join the coalition for the Iraq War in late 2002/early 2003 — fearing the loss of Jordanian, Egyptian, and Saudi cooperation — communications towers across the western Iraqi desert began being toppled by explosives; when the New York Times asked the CIA if Israel was responsible, the agency denied any Israeli involvement.
Ireland recognizes Palestine — John Kiriakou's account of the American reaction to Ireland's recognition of Palestine, which he says he witnessed the aftermath of while in the country: the CIA was indifferent, but the State Department was apoplectic — not about Ireland itself, but about the precedent, which Kiriakou says other European states promptly began to follow.
The IRS audits of Kiriakou — John Kiriakou says that within weeks of his December 2007 ABC News interview confirming CIA waterboarding he was audited by the Internal Revenue Service, and that he was audited again every single year thereafter. He places the audits alongside FBI surveillance and repeated CIA criminal referrals as part of a single pattern of retaliation that preceded his prosecution by five years.
Ismail Haniyeh assassination — John Kiriakou's account of the killing of Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, which he says Israel carried out via a bomb planted months in advance in Haniyeh's regular guesthouse and detonated remotely — an operation he contrasts with the diplomatic and airspace complications a missile strike would have entailed.
Israeli drone factories in Serbia — Five drone factories John Kiriakou was told the Israelis are building in Serbia — a fact relayed to him by members of a Serbian delegation who welcomed it on the grounds that Israel is effective against Islamists, and which Kiriakou treats as the same emotional play he sees used on Greeks and Cypriots.
Israeli foreknowledge of 9/11 — John Kiriakou's stated belief that Israeli intelligence had penetrated al-Qaeda and knew an attack was coming but withheld the warning as a policy decision, offered as his explanation for the dozens of Israelis arrested in New York in the days after the attacks.
Israeli strike on Qatar — The Israeli bombing of Qatar that John Kiriakou treats as Benjamin Netanyahu's decisive overreach — an attack on a major non-NATO ally that hosts the largest air force base in the world, which Kiriakou says forced Donald Trump into a public falsehood about advance warning and then into the recognition that Israel acts in Israel's interests rather than America's.
Jack Murphy NATO Sabotage Story — John Kiriakou's account of a story reported by podcaster Jack Murphy — over a year in the making, drawing on CIA and Army intelligence sources — alleging the CIA worked through a NATO partner to conduct sabotage inside Russia, including munitions-warehouse fires and rail explosions; killed before publication after the CIA deputy director denied it on a call with the editor and blamed "rogue Ukrainians."
The JCPOA — The Iran nuclear agreement, which John Kiriakou describes as having worked for the two or three years it was in force under an inspection regime identical to the one the United Nations had used in Iraq. He treats the American withdrawal as a strategic error that also exposed a contradiction in American law, since sanctioning every country doing business with Iran would have meant sanctioning Britain, France, Germany and Japan.
JFK assassination — November 22, 1963 killing of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. John Kiriakou's position, drawn from a Pakistan-station encounter with Bay of Pigs commander Jean Gately, an RFK Jr. account of CIA Director John McCone's same-day exchange with Bobby Kennedy Sr., and a White House contact's confirmation that the remaining classified Kennedy documents all contain the word "Israel," is that elements of the CIA were probably involved and that Israeli intelligence was involved as well.
The John Kiriakou Task Force — The dedicated FBI unit that John Kiriakou says was created inside the Bureau to investigate him after he blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program: twelve agents appointed under director Robert Mueller who tapped his phones, intercepted his email and followed him in pairs to work, to church and to the grocery store for three years, trying to catch him committing a crime.
Justice Department self-immolation attempt — An attempted self-immolation at a Washington rally in support of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, held outside the Department of Justice, at which John Kiriakou was speaking. Kiriakou and another demonstrator physically stopped a naked man who had doused himself in lighter fluid; an attorney present intervened with the arresting officers and the man was taken to a hospital rather than a jail.
Kent State shooting — The 1970 shooting of unarmed student protesters by the Ohio National Guard; John Kiriakou says a family friend's daughter was among those killed — the closing event of a 1968–69 upheaval he treats both as the formation of his own politics and as the historical measure against which he judges the present.
Khobar Towers bombing — June 25, 1996 truck bombing of a U.S. military housing complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 U.S. Air Force personnel. John Kiriakou, then a CIA officer living across the water in Bahrain, felt the blast shatter his own windows and drove to the scene the next morning. He says the U.S. government worked hard to blame Iran and a small Saudi Hezbollah cell with no evidence, when the attack was in fact carried out by a radical Saudi group — a predecessor of al-Qaeda, which took credit for it.
Kiki Camarena case — 1985 abduction and murder of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena in Mexico; cited by John Kiriakou as the trigger for the 1985 U.S. statute authorizing the extraterritorial seizure of foreign nationals — the legal authority underpinning the 2026 U.S. operation that seized President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
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.
Kimberly Guilfoyle in Athens — John Kiriakou's assessment of Kimberly Guilfoyle's appointment as American ambassador to Greece — that she got it because Donald Trump Jr. wanted her out of the way, a manoeuvre he compares to Saddam Hussein's habit of exiling successful generals as ambassadors — and his reluctant conclusion that Greece could have done worse.
Kiriakou's 2026 viral wave — The sudden surge in John Kiriakou's public recognition in the spring of 2026 — five hundred selfies in three and a half hours in Dublin, a documentary shoot in Berlin interrupted thirty-five times, strangers stopping him in Poland who spoke no English — which he attributes to an algorithm he does not understand and an audience he had not expected: men between fifteen and thirty.
Kiriakou's acting career — The film role John Kiriakou took in 2025 after Tyrel Ventura wrote a part for him — a former CIA officer running a billionaire's security detail — which he shot in Mexico for a month and which made him, at sixty-odd, a member of the Screen Actors Guild.
The CIPA hearing in Kiriakou's case — The closed pre-trial proceeding under the Classified Information Procedures Act at which John Kiriakou's defence filed seventy motions to declassify the material it needed to mount a defence, and the judge denied all seventy at once. Kiriakou describes the ruling as the moment the case ended — his lead attorney told him on the way out of the courtroom that they had just lost — and as the point at which plea negotiations began.
Threats against John Kiriakou — The stalkers and death threats John Kiriakou has received since going public in 2007 — including a woman who believed he had proposed to her in code on C-SPAN and arrived at his office armed, and a caller who recited his son's home address.
The 2022 deplatforming — The removal of John Kiriakou's radio programme from every major podcast platform after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, on the basis of his work for Sputnik News — preceded, he says, by a Washington Post article and a CSIS paper arguing that his weekly segment on American prison conditions was Russian propaganda weakening American democracy.
Kiriakou's gastrectomy — The experimental operation John Kiriakou paid for with a bank loan in September 2022, in which his stomach was removed to reverse an uncontrolled type 2 diabetes — a procedure he had found in a Lancet paper by a Scottish surgeon, and which cost him 55 kilos and, he says, the disease itself.
Kiriakou's Greek citizenship — The Greek nationality John Kiriakou acquired in 2010, after his CIA career and before his prosecution — offered, he says, by the Greek ambassador who asked what could be done to help when his troubles began, and granted when he answered "you could give me Greek citizenship." Held by his children too, it made him a Greek national at the moment he became, in Greece, a national hero; it brought him the commission to write the country's whistleblower protection law, and the Athens job that turned out to be a money laundering operation.
Kiriakou Greek whistleblower law — A whistleblower protection law John Kiriakou says he was hired by the Greek government to write in 2015, at the invitation of Greece, after which it was passed by both the European Parliament and the Greek Parliament and became law across the European Union. Per Kiriakou, the law's first courtroom use involved a whistleblower who exposed Greece's defense minister for taking bribes from Siemens; the resulting press coverage led a consortium of Greece's four wealthiest families to ask Kiriakou to run a private equity fund for them.
Kiriakou's volunteer trip to Guatemala — A visit John Kiriakou made to Guatemala to volunteer for a couple of weeks at an orphanage, which he recounts as the closing evidence in his argument about the 1954 coup: the orphanage was ringed by a twenty-foot concrete wall, and he could barely sleep for the gunfire outside.
The Islamabad surveillance incident — The episode in which John Kiriakou, then the CIA's chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, detected a motorcyclist following him, resolved to kill the man, and discovered on a passing impulse that the surveillance was friendly.
Kiriakou's legal counteroffensive — John Kiriakou's announcement in February 2021 that after thirteen years of being reactive and responsive to his detractors he intended to start going after people, having connected with Harvard and Georgetown law professors — a plan he described without giving detail, saying only that things were turning around.
Kiriakou's mother's 2008 trip to Israel — John Kiriakou recounts his mother's 2008 church-group trip to Israel and the West Bank, during which she was struck by the contrast between first-world Tel Aviv and a walled, mined Palestinian town, and witnessed an IDF soldier tear apart a Palestinian bus driver's novel as suspected "PLO propaganda." Kiriakou made two trips of his own to Israel in 2022, including one to cover the elections, during which he personally witnessed a fatal stabbing at Jerusalem's Iron Gate.
Kiriakou pardon request — John Kiriakou's public campaign for a presidential pardon from Donald Trump to restore the pension and firearm rights he lost after his 2013 felony conviction for disclosing the identity of a covert CIA officer; includes a five-second Mar-a-Lago encounter in which Trump referred him to Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Kalshi prediction-market contract that opened at roughly 19 to 20 percent odds on his being pardoned, and letters of support from Tucker Carlson, Judge Andrew Napolitano and Dr. Phil.
Kiriakou's podcast breakthrough — The sequence by which John Kiriakou went from saying yes to every podcast request, including from teenagers, to appearances with the largest hosts in the world — a rise he attributes to three friends' shows triggering an algorithm in October 2024.
Kiriakou's post-gastrectomy complications — The aftermath of John Kiriakou's stomach removal: eighteen months of daily vomiting that turned out to be scar tissue, a diagnosis of malnutrition, and a night on his kitchen floor with a blood pressure of 80 over 52, caused by a blood clot sitting on an ulcer at the surgical site — one hour, his surgeon told him, from being too late.
Kiriakou's prison designation — The discrepancy between the minimum-security work camp John Kiriakou was sentenced to and the low-security prison the Bureau of Prisons actually placed him in, which he cites whenever the subject of preferential designations arises.
Kiriakou's skeet shooting — The competitive shooting hobby that began when an octogenarian instructor at the Farm watched John Kiriakou — who had never fired a shotgun — hit steel plates at seven, twelve and twenty-five metres with a Remington pump action, and took him aside afterwards.
The TikTok fan edits — The short-form videos made by a University of Texas sophomore, giving John Kiriakou a chipmunk voice and laser eyes, which reached Gen Z at scale and led within weeks to representation by a major talent agency and meetings about film and television.
Kiriakou's titanium knee — The injury John Kiriakou took crashing a junkyard car through a roadblock in CIA training — his seat tore free of the floor and his knees hit the dashboard — which sixteen years later was diagnosed as spontaneous osteonecrosis and cost him the joint.
Kiriakou's UFO sighting — The object John Kiriakou and his father watched from the side of Route 60 in Amish country, western Pennsylvania, on a Friday night in 1981 — three flashes of white light, then a silent orange trapezoid hanging a couple of thousand feet up, which left at a speed he had never seen before or since.
Kiriakou's transfer to the Directorate of Operations — John Kiriakou's roughly two-month internal campaign to transfer from the CIA's analytic Directorate of Intelligence to the operational Directorate of Operations, overcoming what he calls a "natural bias in operations against the eggheads on the analytic side," followed by an Athens posting secured because he was the only person in the entire CIA fluent in both Greek and Arabic. Covers his full CIA career arc from 1988/1990 recruitment through analyst years on Iraq, the switch to operations, 9/11, the enhanced-interrogation refusal, executive assistant to the deputy director for operations, and his eventual resignation and post-CIA career.
Kiriakou's speaking tours — The lecture circuit John Kiriakou described in December 2025: a tour of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland in January and February of that year, and a nationwide American tour due to begin the following February — one strand of a workload he said he was not sure he could keep up.
Kiriakou's visit to Vietnam (2026) — A week in Vietnam in August 2026, taken around a paid speech to Australian investment bankers and shaped by four cousins who fought there. John Kiriakou broadcast an episode from Ho Chi Minh City and used the trip to argue that commerce, not force, is what turns a country pro-American.
The Kite Runner rescue mission — 2007 covert operation in which John Kiriakou, newly departed from the CIA and working as a corporate-intelligence consultant, was hired by Paramount Studios to secretly evacuate the Afghan child actors of the film "The Kite Runner" and their extended families after real death threats over the film's content.
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait — John Kiriakou's most detailed account of the intelligence process around the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and its 1991 liberation. As a first-year CIA analyst on a 'training account' covering Iraq, Kiriakou produced the June 30, 1990 warning paper for the White House; suggested calling the US Defense Attaché in Baghdad to drive to the border and report what he saw (the answer: 'Literally the entire Iraqi military is heading south'); briefed the August 2 Oval Office meeting with Bush; and later took a single phone call from General Colin Powell that led, eight hours later, to 47 cruise missiles striking the Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters in Baghdad.
Kuwait Liberation Day — February 1991 expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait by the U.S.-led coalition; John Kiriakou entered the country with U.S. Marines on the day of liberation; the small American flags waved by the crowds — and the post-liberation arrival of Democratic and Republican National Committee personnel ostensibly to assist the country's transition to democracy — were, per Kiriakou, the work of professional propagandist John Rendon.
Kuwait oil fires — The February 1991 sabotage by retreating Iraqi forces of an estimated 600–800 Kuwaiti oil wells; per John Kiriakou's first-person account, the fires blackened the desert and blotted out the sun as far away as Riyadh, vaporized two French journalists who drove onto a sheet of melted-sand glass, and were extinguished only by an international team led by American specialist Red Adair using a Rolls-Royce jet engine to blow the flames out.
Larry — The prisoner at FCI Loretto who complained of back pain for more than a year, was given Tylenol, and progressed from a cane to a walker to a wheelchair before a chaplain forced an outside hospital referral — which found stage four cancer of the spine. He died in his bunk two weeks later.
Lincoln's last turd — A purported piece of human waste attributed by a Pennsylvania circus-freak-show museum to Abraham Lincoln on the night of his assassination; auctioned for $5,000; subsequent DNA analysis disproved the attribution. John Kiriakou's failed bid for the artifact is the anecdote that, recirculated in early 2026, made him an internet meme figure.
Lobbyists writing legislation — John Kiriakou's first-hand account from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: told that the committee would take part in the carbon offsets debate and protesting that he knew nothing about carbon offsets, he was told not to worry — and the next day strangers came into the office, took over most of the desks, logged on and began writing the bill.
Lunch with the Russian ambassador — A meeting John Kiriakou describes in which the Russian ambassador to the United States, having read a column of his, invited him to lunch and asked whether there was anything the two countries could still cooperate on in wartime. Kiriakou's answer was three areas — narcotics, proliferation and terrorism — each with a concrete case attached.
Macron and the airplane steps — Asked what he thought was behind the French president's bruised appearance at Davos, John Kiriakou gave the blunt answer — "honestly, I think she hits him" — and dated his own change of mind to the footage at the top of the airplane steps.
Maduro Capture — CIA-driven nighttime operation in which a team of Delta Force commandos entered Venezuela and removed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their beds. Per John Kiriakou, the key enabling intelligence — per a New York Times account he cited — came from a CIA asset inside Maduro's presidential palace who called when Maduro went to sleep: 'He's sound asleep. If you're going to do it, do it now.' At least eighty people were killed in the operation, including approximately thirty-five Cubans. Kiriakou compares it to the 1989 capture of Manuel Noriega, in which US forces blasted death metal at the Vatican Embassy until Noriega was asked to leave.
Mar-a-Lago pardon pitch — The lunch at which John Kiriakou put his pardon request directly to Donald Trump. Flown to Palm Beach by a wealthy friend who also wanted a pardon, Kiriakou delivered a prepared line as the president worked the dining room, was told to take it to Pam Bondi, and was afterwards vouched for on a speakerphone call to Trump by a political fixer who then asked him for $25,000 a month until the pardon came through.
Mark Zuckerberg–Angela Merkel Meeting — The trip John Kiriakou cites as the moment a private company took up the work of defining hate speech — Mark Zuckerberg flying to Germany, around the time of Barack Obama's election, to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel and build a hate-speech regime for Facebook. Kiriakou raises it as the origin of an authority he objects to: he accepts limits on child pornography and threats to life, but says it should not be up to Zuckerberg to decide what a private citizen's position on Israel may be. He has been suspended from Facebook himself, for calling Brazilians crazy.
MBS and Netanyahu asked Trump to attack Iran — John Kiriakou's account that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu jointly went to Donald Trump and asked him to attack Iran — a move Kiriakou finds hard to reconcile with MBS's own years of work to improve Saudi relations with Tehran.
Mecca Agreement — A trilateral mutual-defence pact between Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia signed in Mecca in August 2026. John Kiriakou treats it as the most consequential development in the region and one the American media largely ignored, because it makes three separate bilateral enmities collectively enforceable and leaves the United States out of the arrangement entirely.
Medea Benjamin's broken arm — John Kiriakou's account of Egyptian authorities breaking the arm of the CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin while arresting her, as she attempted to reach the Rafah crossing to escort a food shipment into Gaza — an incident he offers as a measure of what Egyptian policing of the border looks like in practice.
The merry-go-round prank — The dirty trick John Kiriakou played on an FCI Loretto prisoner he calls Wallace — planting a release form and a laundry bag on his bunk on a Friday evening, when no official was available to contradict them, and letting him give away his possessions and hold a farewell dinner before he was arrested for attempted escape.
Michigan 2026 Democratic Senate primary — The contest between the AIPAC-backed Haley Stevens and the DSA-backed Abdul El-Sayed, which John Kiriakou calls one of the most fascinating races he has seen and reads as the first real failure of the electability argument establishment Democrats have relied on.
Mir Aimal Kansi CIA headquarters attack — The 1993 shooting outside CIA headquarters by Pakistani gunman Mir Aimal Kansi, who killed two and wounded seven CIA-bound commuters before fleeing to Pakistan; per John Kiriakou, the CIA located Kansi months later but had to hand the arrest to the FBI, and the resulting "how the FBI got their man" Time magazine cover so enraged senior CIA officers that it shaped the agency's insistence on going it alone against al-Qaeda after 9/11.
MLK assassination — The April 1968 killing of Martin Luther King Jr. John Kiriakou, having set out to read everything he could find on it, concluded that if James Earl Ray fired the shot he was a patsy — citing the implausibility of a lifelong alcoholic making a perfect shot from a flophouse bathroom a block away, and the FBI's documented attempt two years earlier to push King into suicide.
The Mohamed Atta Prague claim — Dick Cheney's televised assertion tying the September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta to Saddam Hussein by way of a meeting with the Iraqi intelligence station chief in Prague, which John Kiriakou calls an out-and-out lie made up without a shred of supporting evidence.
National Whistleblower Day — John Kiriakou has called National Whistleblower Day an event no whistleblower or supporter should miss — held every year in the Kennedy Caucus Room, which he describes as not merely the biggest room on Capitol Hill but the most historic single room anywhere on it, having hosted every major Senate hearing from the sinking of the Titanic to Watergate and Iran-Contra.
Netanyahu and the Tel Aviv police chief — The July 2023 dismissal of Tel Aviv's police chief, which John Kiriakou identified as the moment Benjamin Netanyahu may have overstepped — arguing that the real threat to the Israeli prime minister came not from the Palestinians but from his own attempt to take over the court system, and from the strikes and demonstrations that had not subsided.
Netanyahu arrest poll — The 2026 survey finding that a majority of Americans — not a plurality — support the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu, a figure John Kiriakou notes is higher than the share who supported arresting Nicolás Maduro and which, per CNN, represents a fifty-point move in American opinion over five years.
Netanyahu in hiding — John Kiriakou's account of the Israeli prime minister's disappearance from public view during the 2026 Iran war, when reports placed him in Germany and then Cyprus, and of Iran's adoption of Israel's own decapitation tactics — strikes on Netanyahu's house, which killed his brother, and on Itamar Ben-Gvir's.
Netanyahu's nuclear threat to Trump — John Kiriakou's account, sourced to friends in the White House and the administration, that Donald Trump agreed to bomb Iran because Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to use nuclear weapons against Iran if the United States did not act. Kiriakou presents it as the reason a request every previous president refused was finally granted.
Ninth Circuit contractor ruling (2025) — Approximately July 2025 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruling, in a case brought by Abu Zubaydah against CIA contractors who had tortured him, holding that contractors operating under a written CIA contract are legally protected as agents of the agency; extends Executive Order 12333 authority to contractor operations including the Blackwater assassination program; received almost no U.S. media coverage.
Nixon's guarantee of Israeli national security — John Kiriakou's account that AIPAC, having begun to focus on election fundraising in the late 1960s, succeeded in getting President Nixon to guarantee Israeli national security in 1969 — a commitment he says no American president had made before.
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.
Nord Stream pipeline sabotage — The 2022 destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, whose responsibility John Kiriakou treats as genuinely unresolved — citing Seymour Hersh's reporting that the CIA did it, a later Ukrainian special-forces claim of a sailboat-based operation carried out without Zelensky's knowledge, and a retired CIA colleague's private theory that Putin blew up his own pipeline to blame the Americans.
"It's either him or it's Manning" — John Kiriakou's account of why Barack Obama commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence — that Joe Biden, lobbied by a wealthy Greek-American businessman, argued Kiriakou's clemency case to the president directly, and that Obama cut the discussion off ten minutes in by saying he would do one or the other but not both. Kiriakou's conclusion is that the commutation was an arithmetic judgement about a 35-year sentence rather than an act of conscience.
October 7 attack — John Kiriakou's analysis of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack as a policy failure, not an intelligence one — Israel was warned repeatedly, but Itamar Ben-Gvir diverted response forces to the West Bank, and Kiriakou believes Israel welcomed a pretext for overwhelming retaliation.
Olof Palme assassination — The 1986 street murder of the Swedish prime minister, which John Kiriakou revisited step by step in Stockholm with researchers who had spent years on it. His conclusion — drawn from dozens of witness reports of two-man cars with walkie-talkies, some identified as police vehicles — is that much of the surveillance that night was carried out by people who believed they were running a practice exercise, until someone walked up and shot Palme dead.
The Oman oil lease — A private-intelligence assignment in which an oil company that had leased a field on Oman's border with Yemen for ninety-nine years discovered al-Qaeda controlled the ground, and sent John Kiriakou to Muscat to ask whether the Omani government would clear them out.
The OPCW Douma investigation — The chemical weapons inquiry into the alleged 2018 attack in Douma, Syria, which John Kiriakou describes as falsified rather than merely disputed: fifteen investigators objected that their analysis had been taken out of context or fabricated outright, and the false version was then used to reach a political conclusion. He credits WikiLeaks with being the only reason any of it is public — and notes that major American shows carried on repeating the original story anyway.
Operation Fast and Furious — The ATF gun-walking operation John Kiriakou describes as the background to the Donnie Reynolds Jr case — in which agents let 2,000 weapons reach Mexican cartel buyers in the hope of tracing them upward, arrested nobody at the top, and then turned back on the small players when Congress demanded answers.
The operations course graduation — The end of CIA field training: a graduation ceremony at which the whole class wore full disguises for the photograph, and a certificate that is itself classified and therefore cannot be displayed — it stays in the officer's personnel file.
The Oval Office briefing of 2 August 1990 — The morning Iraq invaded Kuwait, a 25-year-old John Kiriakou was driven from CIA headquarters to the White House and found himself briefing President George H. W. Bush, Vice President Quayle, Brent Scowcroft and the CIA director — and answering the question *"well, now what do we do?"*
Pakistan Station (2002) — John Kiriakou's January 2002 arrival in Islamabad to become CIA chief of counterterrorism operations — a journey via London and Kuwait with lost luggage, a warning that steered him away from the soon-to-be-bombed Marriott, a skeleton counterterrorism branch of seven CIA retirees, and the raids that followed.
Expulsion of Palestinians from the Gulf — The mass expulsion of the Palestinian professional class from the Gulf Arab states in the aftermath of Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which John Kiriakou witnessed from the region and identifies as the reason Gulf governments are willing to normalise relations with Israel. He dates the Kuwaiti decision to a wedding he attended weeks after the liberation, says Western and Egyptian pressure stopped it being total, and has repeatedly said he has never understood the grudge himself.
The Panetta bin Laden disclosure — Leon Panetta's accidental naming of the special forces ground commander of the bin Laden raid in front of a Hollywood screenwriter, which Kiriakou uses as the control case for his argument that Espionage Act enforcement is selective.
The post-9/11 name traces — John Kiriakou's account of his own assignment in the weeks after the September 11 attacks: with people walking into American embassies all over the world offering information on al-Qaeda, the CIA was buried under tens of thousands of names — sometimes thousands arriving in a single day — and needed, as he put it, an army of clerks to search them against its databases.
Post-9/11 supplemental appropriations — The emergency money Congress pushed into the CIA after the September 11 attacks — a supplemental appropriation of roughly 160 per cent the day after, another at the end of the year, and a counterterrorism directorate that could not spend what it had been given.
Press TV website seizure — The FBI's confiscation of the Press TV domain, which John Kiriakou cites alongside the banning of TeleSUR, RT and Sputnik as the point at which American censorship stopped being algorithmic and became straightforwardly physical.
Principals Committee Meeting (February 2003) — Senior-most interagency forum of the U.S. national security apparatus, normally chaired by the president. Per John Kiriakou — who served as notetaker for CIA Director George Tenet at the eve-of-Iraq-invasion meeting on February 19–20, 2003 — Vice President Dick Cheney chaired in place of Bush, General Tommy Franks ended his order-of-battle briefing with 'If all goes as planned, we can be in Tehran by August,' and an NSC senior director said 'When we cross that border tomorrow morning, they're going to throw flowers at us.'
Kiriakou's FOIA request from prison — The Freedom of Information Act request John Kiriakou filed on himself six weeks into his sentence at FCI Loretto — despite a plea agreement promising he never would — which returned 250 pages including a warden's memorandum warning staff that the incoming prisoner had access to the media.
Qala-i-Jangi uprising — The late-November 2001 prisoner uprising at a fortress in northern Afghanistan during which CIA officer Mike Spann was killed; the event during which the American al-Qaeda figure John Walker Lindh was captured; among the first major firefights of the post-9/11 Afghan campaign.
Reading in on the Iraq invasion — John Kiriakou's account of his first day as executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations, when he signed six secrecy agreements and was told that the United States would invade Iraq the following March, and that the agencies opposing the war had already lost the argument.
Remains of the Day Treasury Clerk Story — John Kiriakou's account of finding the grave of an obscure Treasury Department clerk who, during the 1814 British burning of Washington, rescued the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Washington's military commission from the National Archives — and who, after later being deemed too difficult, was quietly transferred to the National Lighthouse Service, where out of boredom he invented the refractor light still used in American lighthouses today.
RFK Assassination — Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968 in Los Angeles; per John Kiriakou, physically impossible to attribute to Sirhan Sirhan alone — Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi determined the fatal shot was fired from behind and below Kennedy's right ear at close range while Sirhan stood in front, the crime scene yielded more bullets than Sirhan's revolver could hold, and a hotel security guard named 'Caesar' was captured on video standing behind Kennedy at the moment of the shooting.
Rhodes Jewish deportation and family rescue story — John Kiriakou's account of the 1944 Nazi roundup and deportation of roughly 2,000 Jewish residents of the island of Rhodes to Auschwitz, of whom only 14 survived — and of his own great-grandfather, a chauffeur, hiding his Jewish employer from the Nazis until the war's end.
Rhodes Jewish deportation — The 1944 deportation of the Jewish community of Rhodes, John Kiriakou's ancestral island, which he recounts from his grandmother's memory: rounded up within twenty-four hours, shipped to Piraeus and taken by train through Thessaloniki to Auschwitz. Of roughly two thousand taken, fourteen survived and seven returned. Kiriakou's great-grandfather hid the wealthy Jewish Rhodian he chauffeured for three and a half years.
The Richard Haass back channel — The April 2023 Track 2 meeting between Richard Haass, two former National Security Council deputies and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, which John Kiriakou explained as unofficial diplomacy requiring White House approval to be legal — and which he judged a good thing, because it built a mechanism for talks before the politics allowed them.
The Romanian silver mine — The private-intelligence assignment John Kiriakou uses to explain what commercial analysis actually buys: a mining client wanted to know who would win a Romanian municipal election, because a silver deposit lay under a village that would have to be destroyed to reach it.
The Romanian twins — The adopted children John Kiriakou says his FCI Loretto roommate Robert the Australian abandoned at the gate of the Romanian embassy in Washington — one of the stories Kiriakou judged to be true, in a stream of claims he otherwise treated as invention.
Ruby Ridge — 1992 federal standoff in Idaho involving Randy Weaver, triggered by an allegation that Weaver had sold a shotgun with a barrel two inches shorter than the legal minimum; per John Kiriakou, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot and killed Weaver's wife while she was holding her baby, and Horiuchi was never punished. Kiriakou describes Ruby Ridge as one of the events that, after his own imprisonment, caused him to fundamentally reassess his earlier acceptance of the official government account.
Russian refusal of US mediation — The Russian announcement during the 2026 Iran war that it would no longer take part in Ukraine settlement talks led by the United States, on the grounds that Washington had negotiated with Iran and attacked it mid-negotiation. John Kiriakou's assessment was that the reasoning was correct.
The Sanaa sewer project — The example John Kiriakou uses for what patient foreign assistance looks like: on a visit to Yemen around 2000 he called on the Dutch ambassador and the Italian defence attaché, who were proud because their governments had just finished building a sewer system and water treatment facility for the capital — a project that had taken about fifteen years.
Senate Torture Report — The December 2014 executive summary of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's study of the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation program; the first public disclosure of techniques including rectal feeding with hummus, sexual assault with broomsticks, and prolonged sleep deprivation.
The sentencing reform bills that died — The bipartisan legislation John Kiriakou watched from prison and campaigned for afterwards — the Recidivism Reduction and Public Safety Act and the Smarter Sentencing Act, alongside a Sentencing Commission move to lower drug guidelines — which would have freed thousands and abolished most mandatory minimums, and which died in the Senate without a vote. Kiriakou blames two majority leaders and two attorneys general, and sets out both the arithmetic behind the bills and the limiting principle he attaches to them.
The shank planting incident — The episode at FCI Loretto in which Dave Phillips made two homemade weapons, planted them on a pedophile the group was feuding with and informed on him anonymously — a plan John Kiriakou refused to join, and which cost Phillips a transfer while leaving Kiriakou untouched.
Signing with CAA — The representation John Kiriakou says followed the 2026 virality of his podcast clips: a contract with the Creative Artists Agency covering books, film, consulting and licensing, and a run of advertising approaches including one from the maker of the spectacle frames he already wore.
South Lebanon displacement, 2026 — John Kiriakou's assessment of the Israeli campaign in southern Lebanon running alongside the 2026 Iran war: mass evacuation orders, hundreds of thousands internally displaced, and his conclusion that Israel has guaranteed Lebanon will be a failed state. He notes the world is not watching because it is watching Iran.
Iran's conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz — The six demands issued by Iran's Supreme National Security Council in August 2026 as the price of reopening the Strait of Hormuz. John Kiriakou's observation is that they are the old nuclear-deal conditions transposed onto a new lever, and that the transposition is both smart and very difficult for Washington.
Strait of Hormuz — The shipping chokepoint at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and the centre of gravity of the 2026 Iran war in John Kiriakou's account — a strait whose only navigable deep water lies on the Iranian side of the maritime border, closed not by Iran's aggression but, as he insists, by the American and Israeli attack that provoked it: "The Strait of Hormuz was open. We're the ones that forced the closure."
Strikes on US bases in the 2026 Iran war — John Kiriakou's assessment of the damage Iranian retaliation did to the American basing network across the Middle East during the 2026 war — including the loss of Incirlik air base in Turkey — and of the resupply problem that followed, with matériel routed through European and Indian ports. His verdict is that none of it was unforeseeable; Iran had announced it in advance.
Suggested responses — The second email John Kiriakou says arrived before his first appearance on Fox News — a list of suggested responses to accompany the questions the producers had already sent him — which he ignored, and which he says was never sent again.
Supervised release travel restrictions — John Kiriakou's account of the years of court supervision that followed his prison term, in which a judge refused him permission to travel abroad to give paid speeches while he was expected to earn a living, and in which he had to surrender his passport on returning from every trip he was allowed to take.
Syrian minorities and the Israeli strikes — John Kiriakou's account of a conflict inside American policy toward post-Assad Syria: Washington wants the country's Christian, Jewish and Druze communities protected and has recognised the new government and moved to reopen its embassy, while Israel continues to strike Syrian territory despite repeated instructions from Donald Trump to stop.
The Taliban spokesman setup — Kiriakou's account of a prisoner transferred into FCI Loretto for five days who presented himself as the Taliban's American spokesman, while a guard photographed the encounter from the treeline — an attempt, in his telling, to manufacture a second case against him.
The Taliban truck escort origin — John Kiriakou's account of how the Taliban began: as a Pakistani government scheme under Benazir Bhutto to take madrasa students — talib, plural taliban — out of the religious schools and put them with Kalashnikovs aboard Pakistani trucks crossing Afghanistan to Iran, to stop mujahideen fighters from pirating the cargo.
The Talk Liberation bank freeze — John Kiriakou's account of the September 2022 freezing of Talk Liberation's Icelandic bank accounts — the seed funding behind the Panquake platform — on stated suspicion of money laundering and possible terrorist financing. Kiriakou, who deliberately declines to name the bank, calls the allegations nonsense, says in his personal opinion the freeze came at a government's behest, and notes the accounts were later unfrozen.
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.
*Now is not the time to go wobbly* — The telephone call from Margaret Thatcher to George H. W. Bush on the afternoon of the Kuwait invasion which, in John Kiriakou's account of that day inside the CIA, was what finally decided the president to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
The 2007 death threats — The immediate personal consequence of John Kiriakou's December 2007 television appearance confirming CIA waterboarding: hundreds of pieces of hate mail, and three threats against his life that the FBI classified as credible, one of which named his children and gave his home address. On the Bureau's advice he took his family out of the country for a week; the FBI then interviewed the senders, judged them local cranks, and told him to come home.
The 2016 research pitch — An approach made to John Kiriakou in October 2016, roughly eighteen months after his release from prison, by a caller claiming to be a former CIA colleague who offered him five thousand dollars a month to conduct classified research. Kiriakou reads it as a second entrapment attempt, mounted after his sentence was already served, and says he identified it by the caller's mistakes with agency vocabulary.
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 2020 extradition hearing — The London hearing on the United States' request to extradite Julian Assange, described by John Kiriakou two days into it — a proceeding scheduled to run to July with a month-long recess inserted at the American prosecutors' request, held in a courtroom whose microphones did not work, with Assange behind a plastic screen and unable to hear his own case. Kiriakou called it more of a circus sideshow than a legal hearing, and warned that even a defence victory would leave Assange expelled to Australia and open to a fresh American request.
The 2025 India–Pakistan clash assessment — John Kiriakou's verdict on the most recent India–Pakistan confrontation, delivered after an unusually explicit declaration of his own bias: he loved living in Pakistan, favours Pakistan on Kashmir, and judges that India accomplished nothing while Pakistan lost nothing, leaving the Pakistanis slightly ahead.
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 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 Afghans in diplomatic limbo — John Kiriakou's two-sided answer on the Afghan evacuees still held at a base in Qatar years after the fall of Kabul: that anyone who works for an occupation government which then loses will probably end badly, and that the United States nevertheless owes a debt to people who worked for it and should not leave them hanging.
The Ai Weiwei encounter in Berlin — John Kiriakou met the artist Ai Weiwei by pure chance on a Berlin street while dragging a suitcase to the airport after a board meeting — an encounter that led to a tour of Ai Weiwei's studio and a signed iPhone case bearing the Lego portrait the artist had made of him for an exhibition at Alcatraz.
The Ai Weiwei Lego portrait — The Alcatraz installation for which Ai Weiwei built 178 portraits of political prisoners out of Lego, and John Kiriakou's account of how his own inclusion was nearly blocked — Amnesty International told the artist it did not regard Kiriakou as a political prisoner, and only relented the week he left prison.
The AIPAC "Holy Land" trip offer — An approach John Kiriakou says he received within days of becoming chief investigator of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: two AIPAC representatives offered him an all-expenses-paid trip to what they called the Holy Land, never using the word Israel, and told him it was cleared by the Senate ethics committee. He declined; colleagues of his went. He pairs the story with his account of AIPAC staff stationed in congressional offices, while insisting the practice is not unique to them.
The Air Force One bomb threat — The bomb threat telephoned to the classified telephone aboard Air Force One as Bill Clinton's aircraft lifted out of Athens in November 1999, disclosed by the ambassador at the embassy's after-action review — a detail John Kiriakou withheld from years of tellings of that visit until 2026.
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 Al Udeid strike — John Kiriakou's account of Iran's face-saving retaliation for the American bombing of its nuclear sites in June 2025 — a single missile fired at Al Udeid air base in Qatar, announced two hours in advance, which he says hit a geodesic dome housing top secret communications.
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 American war against Iran" — A correction Benjamin Netanyahu issued to an Israeli reporter during the 2026 war — that it was the American war against Iran, and that Israel was merely America's ally. John Kiriakou treats it as the moment Israel walked away from a war it had spent years demanding, leaving the United States to fight it alone.
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 armour at Union Station — John Kiriakou's eyewitness account of stepping off an Amtrak train at Washington's Union Station in August 2025 to find two armoured personnel carriers and a .50 calibre machine gun trained on the entrance — and of tourists posing for photographs with the National Guardsmen deployed in the parts of the city where, he says, there is no crime.
The Bahraini fire brigade — A report John Kiriakou says he found credible during the 2026 Iran war — that a Bahraini fire brigade refused to fight the fire at Manama airport after an Iranian strike. His explanation is the kingdom's sectarian arrangement: a Shia-majority population under a Sunni royal family, which he says 'can be a problem at times.'
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 Baltimore plot — The 1861 conspiracy to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln as his train passed through Baltimore, uncovered by Pinkerton detectives — and the overnight passage in a soft felt hat and shawl that got him to his inauguration and made the press call him a coward.
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 Bay of Piglets — The phrase John Kiriakou wished he had coined for the twice-attempted amphibious landings in Venezuela — and his account of one of the men rounded up coming ashore, who emailed him years later asking to appear on his show as a whistleblower on communism, and was told no.
The Benghazi hearings critique — John Kiriakou's complaint about the congressional inquiry into Benghazi, which he watched all the way through: he believes there is some evidence of gun running, doubts anyone will ever establish who was behind it, and objects that the hearings were not trying to find out — having devolved into a political contest that served the American people not at all.
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 blacked-out grand jury minutes — John Kiriakou on the 119 pages of grand jury minutes released in the Epstein document tranches with every single word blacked out, despite two federal judges having ordered their release.
The Bloomingdale precedent — The scandal from Ronald Reagan's kitchen cabinet that John Kiriakou holds up as the model Donald Trump should have followed over Jeffrey Epstein — when Reagan's advisers nearly denied the friendship, were talked out of it because the denial would become the story, and issued a statement embracing it instead.
The body in the barrel — The exchange John Kiriakou reports having with a fellow prisoner who explained his conviction by saying the police had found a body in a barrel in his storage unit — and that a hundred people had access to the unit — to which Kiriakou's only reply was that he was not judging him.
The Bolton raid — John Kiriakou's reading of the August 2025 FBI search of John Bolton's home and office — that emailing national defense information to family members is the Espionage Act's definition of espionage, on a precedent set in Kiriakou's own case — together with the FBI evidence sticker he says is still on the back of his own computer.
The book the publisher sat on — The manuscript John Kiriakou says he delivered to his publisher three years before August 2025 and had still not seen printed, and the email he finally sent telling them it was time to fish or cut bait.
The Bridgeton and the tanker escorts — John Kiriakou's recollection of the 1980s American naval escort of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, and of seeing the SS Bridgeton — then the largest oil tanker in the world, set ablaze by the Iranians — from a boat in the Persian Gulf.
The bug in the bedroom — The listening device John Kiriakou says fell out of an air conditioning vent onto his bare chest while he read in bed in Bahrain — planted, his chief told him, because he was writing the embassy's human rights report.
The bunker busters as preemption — What John Kiriakou says friends in the CIA, the Defense Department and the White House told him about why Donald Trump broke with every previous president and struck Iran — that Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was so certain of an Iranian nuclear attack that it was prepared to use nuclear weapons itself, and that Trump used bunker-buster bombs so that Israel would not.
The Bureau of Prisons polos — What John Kiriakou says he saw on the morning of 6 January 2021 while parking on Capitol Hill for a meeting with his attorney Bruce Fein — a group of men stripping off Bureau of Prisons logo polo shirts and pulling on black ones — and the sentence he says he shouted at them.
The call about rebuilding Gaza — A telephone call John Kiriakou says he received on 7 November 2025 from a contact in the Israeli government, reporting that Israel had approached private American companies to redevelop Gaza — not Gazan Palestinians — and that the widely reported Saudi-administration plan was newspaper talk rather than anything the Israeli military was discussing. His conclusion: 'the fix is already in.'
The calls not to attack Iran — John Kiriakou's report, given in late January 2026 and sourced to friendships he had recently formed in three Middle Eastern royal families, that the Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians and Emiratis had all telephoned Donald Trump to ask him not to attack Iran — the Egyptians warning of an almost immediate region-wide war — and that the Israelis had asked the same thing, for the unsentimental reason that they had not replaced the interceptors spent in the last round.
The Capitol Hill cocaine ring — The 1983 congressional drug scandal John Kiriakou stumbled into at eighteen, when an FBI agent called at his father's house and then asked him whether he had ever seen his congressman trade stamps for cocaine — a question he answered no to, and which turned out to be exactly what the congressman was doing.
The catering truck transfer — The covert removal of Donald Trump from Air Force One at the end of a NATO summit in Turkey — boarded in front of the television cameras, driven across the tarmac inside an airport catering truck, and flown on to Britain aboard a smaller jet while the White House press corps travelled on the aircraft everyone believed he was on.
The Chilean newspaper prediction — The forecast John Kiriakou says he got wrong: asked by a Chilean newspaper the week Donald Trump was elected whether things would improve for national security whistleblowers, he said he was cautiously optimistic, on the ground that they could not get worse than under Obama.
The Chinese professor on LinkedIn — The year-long approach John Kiriakou says he received through LinkedIn from a professor at a Chinese university he had never heard of — an invitation to speak that became five arranged stops across eastern China without his agreement, and which ended when he wrote back that he does not work for the Chinese intelligence service and was immediately blocked.
The CIA buyout offer — The deferred-resignation offer extended to CIA staff in early 2025 on the same terms given to other federal workers — six to eight months' pay, no requirement to come to work, and then the end of the contract — which John Kiriakou discussed as part of a broader reorientation of the agency towards the Western Hemisphere.
The CIA Insider's Guide omnibus — Skyhorse Publishing's plan to reissue John Kiriakou's three CIA Insider's Guides as a single updated volume of some 550 pages, with an introduction Tucker Carlson wrote in a day — part of what Kiriakou described in 2026 as a big book year.
The CIA spotter professor — How John Kiriakou entered the CIA: a graduate-school professor who liked his writing style asked him to stay after class, and turned out to be an undercover officer working as a talent spotter. Kiriakou, who had been planning on Capitol Hill or the foreign service, says he had given the agency no thought at all until it approached him.
The clemency campaign of January 2013 — The three parallel appeals for a pardon or commutation made on John Kiriakou's behalf in the days before his 25 January 2013 sentencing — a letter to the president from Ralph Nader, Bruce Fein and Joan Claybrook, a change.org petition with nearly two thousand signatures, a Greek-American community petition, and a letter signed by more than eighteen CIA officers and FBI agents alongside Pete Seeger, Oliver Stone and Daniel Ellsberg.
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 Clinton Pakistan plane switch — Bill Clinton's secret transfer to an unmarked aircraft for the 2000 flight into Pakistan — the closest precedent John Kiriakou finds for the catering truck transfer, and the one that differs in the detail he thinks matters: the White House told the reporters while it was happening.
The CNN India refusal — The interview request John Kiriakou turned down on the morning of 19 November 2025 — the latest of many from Indian broadcasters — because, he says, every answer he gives about India or Pakistan is turned into a banner headline with three exclamation points, stripped of context, and followed by a dozen death threats.
The cocaine in the West Wing — John Kiriakou's explanation of how a bag of cocaine came to be found in a White House cubby in July 2023 — the phone cubbies outside every vaulted area, the fingerprints that every cleared visitor has already surrendered, and his prediction that despite an investigation requiring only a couple of hours of work, the public would never be told whose it was.
The coffee with the Jordanian intern — A morning meeting John Kiriakou took with a young intern from the Jordanian embassy who had found him on LinkedIn — and which he credits with reminding him that Palestinians are not a monolith, a point he says pro-Palestinian Westerners in particular tend to get wrong.
The Colonial Pipeline hack — Days after the May 2021 ransomware attack that shut the East Coast's main fuel pipeline, John Kiriakou said an FBI contact told him the bureau was fairly confident the Russian government was not behind it — and turned the episode into an indictment of the National Security Agency for watching Americans instead of defending them.
The Condoleezza Rice meeting — The nine o'clock White House appointment John Kiriakou and Cofer Black never kept on the morning of 11 September 2001. The Government Printing Office was about to issue a volume of declassified Greece-Turkey-Cyprus cables in an edition of five or ten copies; three of them named CIA sources who were still alive, and an obscure statute obliges the government to offer citizenship and resettlement to any recruited source it outs. The two men were going to ask the National Security Advisor to quietly pull three cables nobody would miss. The car was at the East entrance at 8.15.
The convicted felon introduction — The MSNBC appearance John Kiriakou says was his last: booked opposite Daniel Ellsberg, having agreed his on-air identification in advance with the producers, he was introduced instead as "convicted felon John Kiriakou", swore on tape, and began removing his microphone.
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 Cyprus naval buildup, 2026 — The concentration of European warships and defence ministers on Cyprus during the 2026 Iran war, and John Kiriakou's explanation of it: NATO and EU militaries feel compelled to appear supportive of Israel and the United States, whatever they say behind closed doors.
The Danish Greenland demolition plan — Denmark's preparations to destroy its own airstrips in Greenland rather than let an American invasion use them, including blood supplies moved into place. John Kiriakou confirms the preparations were real and made because the Danes took Donald Trump at his word.
The denials after Dallas — John Kiriakou's account, drawn from CIA historical files he read as a junior analyst, of how fast foreign governments moved to clear themselves after the assassination of John F. Kennedy: the Soviets came to the Americans within minutes, the Chinese did the same, and the Cubans asked the Mexicans to pass on that it was not them.
The disappearance of Daniel Hale — John Kiriakou's account of losing touch with the drone whistleblower Daniel Hale after his release from prison — a brief reappearance on social media, a shut-down account a week later, and a circle of friends none of whom has heard from him since.
The dispersal of the Iranian program — John Kiriakou's assessment that neither the Israeli nor the American strikes had any lasting effect on Iran's nuclear programme, because the facilities are spread across the country and mostly deep underground — and his reading of Iran's shrugging response as the best evidence that the bombing did not work.
The DNC in debt — John Kiriakou's July 2026 summary of the Democratic National Committee's finances, drawn from New York Times reporting: two million dollars in debt against Republican reserves of $130 million, vendors asked to hold their invoices until after the elections, the party headquarters pledged as loan collateral, and a chairman who threw his phone at a junior aide.
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 Egyptian berm — The earthwork Egypt built along its Gaza frontier more than a year before July 2025, which John Kiriakou describes as a defence not against Palestinians but against Israel — built because Cairo feared the border being thrown open from the other side, and because Egyptian troops would not fire on two million people.
The election day 1992 poll — An informal show of hands taken in a CIA branch office on election day 1992, which John Kiriakou describes as the moment he discovered he had no idea of the politics of the colleagues he sat three feet away from — and that he was not, as he had assumed, the only progressive in the room.
The embassy swap — The 1970s agreement under which the United States and the Soviet Union each built a new embassy in the other's capital — the Russians choosing the highest ground in Washington, the Americans being sold a dry riverbed in Moscow, and the American building having to be demolished because listening devices had been built into every beam.
The empty Church of the Holy Sepulchre — A video John Kiriakou describes watching during the 2026 Iran war — the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem completely deserted, filmed beside the Edicule that covers the tomb of Christ, with nothing audible but air raid sirens. He offers it alongside Israeli footage he reads as evidence that the country knows it is in trouble.
The Epstein birthday book — The page attributed to Donald Trump in Jeffrey Epstein's 2003 fiftieth-birthday book, released by House Democrats in September 2025, which John Kiriakou read out in full and assessed as a banker who had studied handwriting and as an artist — concluding that whoever signed it probably drew it, and refusing to call it a hoax.
The Epstein files and the Starmer government — John Kiriakou's prediction that the Epstein disclosures could bring down Keir Starmer's government, on the strength of evidence that Prince Andrew and Peter Mandelson gave Epstein classified British Ministry of Defence documents — an Official Secrets Act matter that in America would fall under the Espionage Act.
The Eric Adams ambassadorship — The September 2025 proposal, floated by Steve Witkoff, to remove Eric Adams from the New York mayoral race by offering him the embassy in Riyadh — which John Kiriakou thought likely to be attempted, on the reasoning that Donald Trump is not stupid, knows Adams cannot win, and would gain by forcing Zohran Mamdani to spend money.
The Eritrea prohibition — John Kiriakou's account of being forbidden to visit Eritrea on a Senate Foreign Relations Committee trip through the Horn of Africa — not by the Eritrean government but by the State Department, whose only stated reason was that Eritrea is 'the North Korea of Africa.' He notes that he was later free to dine at the Eritrean ambassador's residence in Washington.
The F-35 shootdown — Footage from the 2026 Iran war showing an F-35 hit by Iranian ground fire, initially dismissed as artificial. John Kiriakou notes the Pentagon confirmed the pilot reached a Middle East airbase wounded, and that nobody explained how a supposedly obliterated adversary had hit an invisible aircraft.
The Farragut West encounter — John Kiriakou's account of walking up to two National Guardsmen in the Farragut West Metro station — the safest station on the network, in his estimate — telling himself the whole way not to say anything, and then saying one sentence: "You guys should be ashamed of yourselves."
The fifteen-dollar maintenance fee — An appointment John Kiriakou made at his bank on the morning of a broadcast to ask for the return of a $15 monthly maintenance fee that had taken his account to minus fifteen dollars — a story he told on air as a plain statement of what his finances looked like after prison.
The first prisoner who cooperated — John Kiriakou's account of the first al-Qaeda prisoner in Pakistan who agreed to talk to him, the reason the man gave — that he was a prisoner and got nothing out of refusing — and the intelligence that followed: a foot-by-foot description of his crossing from Afghanistan and the locations of safe houses that were then raided.
The four-day-old New York Times — In December 2014, reading a four-day-old copy of the New York Times that prison staff had already cut articles out of, John Kiriakou found an interview in which Edward Snowden said that watching Kiriakou's case and Thomas Drake's — and seeing that neither man backed down — had inspired him to go public.
The fox that ate the scraps — The small grey desert fox that lived on the grounds of the Baja resort, which the cook told John Kiriakou would finish anything left on the plate — and which, every single night, defecated on exactly the spot he crossed to reach his outdoor mini fridge.
The Gabbard confirmation fight — John Kiriakou's February 2025 assessment that Tulsi Gabbard was in real danger of not being confirmed as Director of National Intelligence — not because the Democrats opposed her, which they did, but because she was losing Republicans over Section 702, and had been telling them privately that she supported a renewal he knows she opposes.
The General Assembly circus — John Kiriakou's view of the annual United Nations General Assembly, which he calls the Super Bowl for global politics and which he disliked more than almost anything else in his CIA career. His last tour was at the United Nations in New York, where the September session brings the city to a halt and makes the American mission almost unreachable.
The George Mason confrontation — The videotaped encounter at George Mason University in which former CIA director John Brennan poked a questioner in the chest — an incident John Kiriakou says at least a dozen friends sent him, and which showed him, for the first time in thirty-five years of knowing the man, a frightened John Brennan.
The Giuliani–Epstein emails — A cache of correspondence that a former chief of business development for Giuliani Partners told John Kiriakou she holds — thousands of pages of emails between Rudy Giuliani and Jeffrey Epstein, which she says she has offered to news organisations and to congressional committees and which nobody wanted, together with her claim that a second British prince and other former heads of state are implicated.
The glass-eating prisoner — A case John Kiriakou cites from a 2015 New York Times Magazine investigation of federal solitary confinement: a prisoner held in the Special Housing Unit at the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado for roughly eighteen years who smashed his narrow cell window and ate the broken glass so that he would be taken to a hospital and could speak to another human being.
The Graham Senate succession — John Kiriakou's comment on the appointment of Lindsey Graham's sister to serve out the remainder of his Senate term, and her announcement that she would run for a full term of her own — a candidacy whose only qualification, in Kiriakou's assessment, is her relation to the late senator.
The Greek colonel and China — The arrest of a Greek colonel assigned to NATO on charges of spying for China — a case John Kiriakou calls highly unusual not because espionage arrests are rare in Greece, but because they are almost always for Russia, and which he says shows the Chinese have begun caring about NATO communications.
The Greek neo-Nazi seats — John Kiriakou's tally of the June 2023 Greek parliamentary election, which he treats as the most disturbing case of a Europe-wide trend: eight parties won seats, six of them right-wing, four of them right-wing extremist, and two of them neo-Nazi parties taking thirteen seats between them.
The green room with Hayden — The 2008 television booking at which John Kiriakou and Michael Hayden were to appear together — and which Hayden, according to Kiriakou, walked out of after Kiriakou greeted him as "Mike" and refused to call him General Hayden.
The Greenland prediction he got wrong — John Kiriakou's account of dismissing the idea that the United States would seize Greenland on a podcast one afternoon, and hearing Stephen Miller say the opposite on CNN an hour later — after which he treated the threat to a NATO member as a legitimate problem, and looked to Emmanuel Macron rather than Keir Starmer to stop it.
The Grenier counterinsurgency op-ed — The New York Times piece by former CIA officer Robert Grenier arguing that the storming of the Capitol should be treated as an insurgency, and John Kiriakou's published answer to it — that a colleague of thirty years using that word is asking for people to be killed, and that counterinsurgency describes a set of practices the Constitution forbids at home.
The Guardian smear series — The run of articles about Julian Assange that John Kiriakou characterised in 2018 as a pile-on based on anonymous sources leaking intelligence-agency material, and which he read as a formal psychological operation intended to weaken Assange rather than as journalism.
The Hannity Lockerbie exchange — A televised argument in which John Kiriakou says he embarrassed Sean Hannity by pointing out that the 1986 American bombing that killed Muammar Gaddafi's daughter came three years before the Lockerbie bombing, and so could not have been revenge for it.
The HardTalk interview — The first interview John Kiriakou gave after leaving prison, on the BBC programme he describes as hard-hitting and mean-spirited, in which a host pressing him to show remorse drew the formulation he has used ever since: it is not a crime to reveal a crime.
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 honey salesman warning — The al-Qaeda briefing Cofer Black delivered unannounced to a visiting delegation of Middle Eastern intelligence officers at CIA headquarters on 6 July 2001, in which he described intercepted code words — a honey salesman arriving with vast quantities of honey, a great wedding, a great football match — as signals of an imminent attack on a massive scale, and begged the visitors for any source inside al-Qaeda.
The hooding dispute — The argument John Kiriakou says he had with a subordinate at a CIA safe house in Pakistan on the night of the Abu Zubaydah raid, over hoods placed on captured prisoners; both men reported each other to headquarters, and Kiriakou was the one reprimanded.
The hot dog lady cable — A cable John Kiriakou received in response to eight analytic questions about a prominent Middle Eastern women's-rights campaigner, which answered none of them and instead reported that the station called her 'the hot dog lady' and described her preferred condiments. He offers it as the episode that taught him how completely the CIA's operations and analysis directorates had stopped serving each other.
The hotel bar operation — The night a visiting foreign delegation's security detail was expected in a boutique hotel bar and every seat in it turned out to be occupied by a CIA officer — an episode John Kiriakou offers as an example of bad leadership, and which left his colleagues personally out of pocket for their espresso martinis.
The hundred-city tour — The year-long, hundred-city speaking tour John Kiriakou described beginning in early 2026 — opening in Belfast, Dublin and Manchester, returning to Scotland and northern England, then the United States and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, continental Europe, the Persian Gulf and East Asia.
The hundred-drachma coins — How demonstrators in Athens broke the windows of the American embassy during John Kiriakou's posting there in 1999 — with hundred-drachma coins the size of an Eisenhower dollar, worth about a quarter, followed by paint-filled balloons fired from slingshots.
The hundred-million-a-day briefing — A story John Kiriakou tells from his time as a CIA analyst during the Gulf War: the president's morning briefer returned to the office and reported that the president had been shocked speechless on being told the United States was spending one hundred million dollars a day in the Gulf.
The Imran Khan apology demand — The demand issued by Imran Khan's party in late October 2025 that John Kiriakou apologise in writing to Khan, to the party and to the Pakistani people over a single sentence he had given an Indian outlet — that India would win a conventional war because it has five times the population — together with his refusal, the death threats, his lawyer's advice, and the blanket policy on South Asian media he adopted afterwards.
The Imran Khan request — John Kiriakou's account of Imran Khan's dealings with the United States — that while still prime minister Khan warned the Americans he would start blaming them for everything, drawing the reply that they were blamed for everything anyway; and that after his arrest he got word out asking for help, which produced an approach to his former wife Jemima Goldsmith and a refusal from Pakistan.
The Iowa Republican exchange — The argument John Kiriakou says he had at a conservative event with the head of the Iowa Republican Party — an abortion absolutist who answered Kiriakou's challenge on Gaza by calling him pro-Hamas — and how Kiriakou ended it.
The Iran–Israel exchange assessment — John Kiriakou's judgement — which he expects to be unpopular — that Iran came out ahead of Israel in their direct missile exchange: the Iron Dome proved fallible, Iranian targeting was selective where Israel's was not, and the ceasefire came, in his reading, because Israel had run out of missiles.
The Istanbul peace talks — The early Russia–Ukraine negotiations in Istanbul that John Kiriakou says lasted three days and were never revived — talks the United States neither attended nor encouraged the Ukrainians to attend, and after which, he notes, the words "peace talks" disappeared from American discourse.
The Italian schoolchildren — An encounter John Kiriakou described in July 2026 as a measure of how far his late-career fame had spread: walking down Fifth Avenue in New York, a bus pulled up, a boy of about thirteen shouted his name in Italian, and sixty-five Italian middle schoolers ran off the bus. The selfies took half an hour.
The Jay Jones texts — The leaked 2022 text messages in which Virginia's Democratic candidate for attorney general joked about shooting Republicans — which John Kiriakou called shameful on reflex, before landing on the position he now holds: that everyone talks that way privately, that Republicans do it constantly, and that he no longer cares.
The Jenin incursion — The Israeli military operation in Jenin of early July 2023, which John Kiriakou cited by its casualty figures — nine Palestinians dead and about a hundred wounded before the withdrawal — and which he called only the very beginning of what the most right-wing government in Israeli history would do.
The Jerusalem harassment campaign — John Kiriakou's account of what happened to a CIA colleague and his wife during a declared two-year State Department rotation in Jerusalem: furniture rearranged after one embassy party, all three toilets in the house defecated in after another, and, before they left, the family dog's tail cut off and bandaged. Kiriakou presents the three break-ins as routine rather than exceptional.
The Kerry yacht tax — John Kiriakou's account, from his time on John Kerry's Senate staff, of the ocean-going boat Kerry docked in Rhode Island to avoid the Massachusetts yacht tax — the flood of angry calls it produced, and the advice Kiriakou gave the staff director about it.
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 killing of Alex Pretty — John Kiriakou's verdict on the shooting of a man by immigration agents in Minneapolis in January 2026: a Kent State moment for the administration, a cover-up in progress, and — because there is no statute of limitations on murder — a case that will outlive the presidency and put people in prison.
The Knesset death penalty law — The Israeli law imposing a mandatory death sentence by hanging on Palestinians convicted of killing during a terrorist act, and John Kiriakou's response to it. He notes that the government defining what counts as terrorism is the same government whose settlers the law exempts, and calls the result a codification of racial discrimination.
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 Kuwaiti cargo in yuan — The shipment of Kuwaiti oil that John Kiriakou says the Chinese paid for in yuan rather than dollars for the first time, which he treats as the first step toward the end of the American empire.
The Los Angeles Times Iran op-ed — An op-ed on Iranian foreign policy in Latin America that John Kiriakou was commissioned to write about six months after blowing the whistle on the torture programme. He had barely begun when the CIA general counsel's office telephoned to warn him off the subject — a call he could not explain for fourteen years, and which he now attributes to his own wife rather than to a source inside the newspaper.
The Lafayette Square tents — The long-running protest encampment across from the White House that a New Jersey congressman wanted removed by force in 2025, and John Kiriakou's observation that tents have stood on that spot for as long as he has lived in Washington — since 1982.
The letter to Larry Nassar — The letter from Jeffrey Epstein to the convicted USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar that John Kiriakou singled out from the released documents, in which Epstein wrote that he would have gone home by the time it arrived and blamed everything on Donald Trump.
The letter to the Shah — The fan letter John Kiriakou wrote at fourteen or fifteen to the deposed Shah of Iran, objecting to how the United States had treated him — and the reply, agreeing, with an autographed photograph enclosed.
The Libyan constitution unveiling — A launch event John Kiriakou attended in Washington after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi: a new Libyan constitution, commissioned by wealthy exiles from a lobbying firm, unveiled at the lobbying firm's offices. He calls the document better than the American one — equal rights for everybody, the oil money shared — and notes that nothing whatever was done with it, because nobody in Washington had heard of the people behind it.
The magazines that bought her freedom — John Kiriakou's account of his grandmother's imprisonment by the collaborationist government in wartime Athens, and of his grandfather buying her release from a prison guard with American magazines — after which the couple escaped to the United States.
The Mallios argument — The confrontation John Kiriakou describes with his mentor Gust Avrakotos while the two worked the 17 November task force — Kiriakou remarked in passing that the group's second victim, the Greek police chief Mallios, had been a torturer under the junta; Avrakotos slammed him against a wall; and the exchange that followed became the basis of their friendship.
The McConnell obituary — A Kentucky newspaper's decision, reported by John Kiriakou in July 2026, to run an obituary of the living Senator Mitch McConnell on purpose — a response, in Kiriakou's reading, to the rapid rehabilitation of Lindsey Graham after his death, and an attempt to get the assessment on the record before the whitewashing could begin.
The Melber walkout — An incident on MSNBC in which John Kiriakou removed his microphone and threatened to leave the set after host Ari Melber introduced him as a leaker and a convicted felon, on a segment about whistleblowing recorded alongside Daniel Ellsberg. Kiriakou recounts it as the sharpest instance of the naming fight he has waged with the networks for over a decade.
The minister of Awqaf compliment — The moment John Kiriakou calls the highlight of his Bahrain tour and freely describes as an ego booster: interpreting for Ambassador David Ransom's first courtesy call on the only Bahraini cabinet member who did not speak fluent English, and being complimented on his Arabic on the way out — something he says he still thinks about thirty years later.
The MintPress prediction — The forecast John Kiriakou volunteers against himself — that asked in a post-election interview alongside Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack whether whistleblowers would fare better or worse under Donald Trump, he alone answered that nothing could be worse than Barack Obama, and was wrong.
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 mosquito cloud — The night John Kiriakou waited beside Abu Zubaydah's hospital bed in Faisalabad in a room full of mosquitoes, having stopped taking his anti-malarial because of the nightmares — and turned the ceiling fan to full blast in a cold March room until an FBI agent asked what he was doing.
The move to Fort Myer — John Kiriakou's report that Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem all moved with their families onto Fort Myer army base into housing reserved for one- to four-star generals — 'the mother of all gated communities' — after Miller sold his Arlington house to escape protesters chalking his public sidewalk.
The National Guard in Washington — John Kiriakou's response to the August 2025 federalisation of the District of Columbia police — a decision he says was taken without informing the mayor or the police chief, in a city where crime was falling, and which he expected to expire after three days for want of congressional authorisation.
The Netanyahu death rumour — A theory advanced by well-regarded podcasters during the 2026 Iran war that Benjamin Netanyahu had been killed and the fact concealed — his son's seven-day silence read as sitting shiva. John Kiriakou recounts it collapsing when Netanyahu gave a press conference, and sets it against the real decapitation campaign against the IRGC.
The new Iraqi flag — Before the invasion of Iraq, John Kiriakou walked into the CIA's Iraq Operations Group and found its director at his desk with Crayola markers, colouring in a design for a new Iraqi flag.
The New Jersey drones — John Kiriakou's shifting account of the New Jersey drone flap: his state trooper friend's report of a missing Defense or Energy Department convoy load, and the 60 Minutes segment in which Air Force generals concluded the drones were hostile and probably Chinese.
The night the Snowden story broke — How John Kiriakou learned about Edward Snowden. Three months into his sentence at FCI Loretto, a cellmate who could not sleep was listening to Coast to Coast AM in the middle of the night and woke him. Kiriakou turned on his own radio and followed the story through the distant stations that reach central Pennsylvania after dark.
The 9/11 truth honorarium — How John Kiriakou came to headline a 9/11 truth event he had not realised was one: a $500 speaking fee from a PR man he had known through better days, a poster that revealed the sponsor, a sister telling him to withdraw, and his decision to honour the commitment anyway — while telling the audience to their faces that he would never believe Building 7 was a controlled demolition or that explosive thermite paint exists.
The nine months on food stamps — The nine months John Kiriakou's family spent on public assistance after his arrest in January 2012 — his wife working out at the dining room table that they could not afford to buy food the following week, because everything they had had gone to the lawyers, and the Arlington County welfare office for which they qualified for everything.
The NPR walkout — The Saturday morning interview John Kiriakou says he ended after five minutes of a scheduled half hour, having been attacked on air over an op-ed about Gina Haspel, and which he closed by asking the host where NPR had been while he was blowing the whistle on the torture programme.
The oath in the auditorium — The scene John Kiriakou returns to when asked what set him on the path to blowing the whistle: standing in the CIA's auditorium on his first day with three hundred other new hires, right hand in the air, swearing to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic — and his later suspicion that he may have been the only person in the room who meant it.
The October 2025 poll of American Jews — The Washington Post poll John Kiriakou cited, released on 5 October 2025, which he said found for the first time that a majority of American Jews believed Israel was committing genocide in Gaza — and the question he built on it.
The Office of Security arrangement — The disclosure John Kiriakou says emerged from a 2020 custody hearing: that his wife, herself a senior CIA officer, had accompanied him to the 2007 ABC News whistleblowing interview on the instruction of the CIA's Office of Security, and had continued to report on his activities.
The orb off Yemen — A leaked video John Kiriakou describes as the most dramatic UFO material he has seen: two F-18s following a silver orb off the coast of Yemen, given permission to fire, and a missile that hits the object and bounces off before the orb turns ninety degrees and flies on.
The O'Reilly exclusivity rule — The condition Bill O'Reilly's producer attached to booking John Kiriakou — that he appear on no other programme for three days either side — and Kiriakou's refusal to surrender a week of his diary, which meant he never appeared on the show at all.
The Penn State textbooks — How a week-long high-school scholarship to Penn State sent the teenage John Kiriakou into the university bookstore to buy the textbooks for Middle East courses he was not enrolled in — the purchase he credits with turning a childhood fascination into a field of study.
The Pentagon budget reversal — The pair of announcements John Kiriakou uses as his cleanest evidence of incoherence in the second Trump administration — a stated intention to cut the Pentagon budget by fifty per cent, celebrated at the time, followed a couple of months later by a stated intention to increase it by fifty per cent.
The Pentagon press contract — A contract John Kiriakou says every news outlet covering the Pentagon was required to sign in mid-2026, undertaking to publish no information that had not been officially provided by the department. Almost nobody signed: by his count Newsmax, One America News, a Turkish paper, a Hungarian paper and a couple of bloggers.
The Perplexity subscription — The free lifetime account John Kiriakou says the chief executive of Perplexity emailed him at ten o'clock at night, days after he told Joe Rogan's audience that ChatGPT had invented a University of Maryland degree and a Belgian graduate school for him — and that when he corrected it, the machine argued back.
The Pezeshkian invitation — The invitation John Kiriakou disclosed in September 2025 to meet the Iranian president in New York during the UN General Assembly, as one of six people asked — an invitation he says he accepted without asking what it was about.
The philosophy class — The introductory philosophy lecture at Miami University of Ohio in which John Kiriakou's own whistleblowing was set as the ethical dilemma, unknown to the professor with Kiriakou's son sitting in the room — the episode Kiriakou offers when asked how he survived losing his career, his pension and his marriage.
The Piers Morgan panel — The televised debate John Kiriakou returns to most often — two against two, with Scott Horton and himself on one side and Alan Dershowitz and a senior former Israeli official on the other. Kiriakou set out his position on Hamas, October 7th and Gaza, and Piers Morgan told him at the end that he had come around and agreed. On a second appearance from the same panel he argued that Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli access agent, provoked Dershowitz — Epstein's own attorney — into an interruption Kiriakou considers self-defeating, and got an unbothered "who knows?" from the Israeli.
The plea-hearing objection — John Kiriakou's account of standing up at his own plea hearing, over his lawyer's objection, to tell the judge that the statement of facts the prosecutors had written into his plea agreement was untrue — and of her reply that it was just window dressing.
The Pondiki cartoon — The satirical Greek newspaper that ran a doctored photograph of the American ambassador Nicholas Burns naked in a dog collar, being whipped by the education minister — and John Kiriakou's account of the ambassador's official protest, and of the staff who taped the page above their desks where he could not see it.
The porn on bin Laden's computers — The question a Pittsburgh newspaper editor put to John Kiriakou on live television hoping to embarrass him — about the pornography found on Osama bin Laden's computers — and the answer that left the programme's host saying he had been rendered speechless for the first time in twenty-five years.
The postcards for Daniel Hale — The letter-writing appeal John Kiriakou ran for Daniel Hale in May and June 2021 — naming Hale as the whistleblower most in need of help, posting his jail address publicly, and relaying from the prisoner himself the exact rules a letter had to satisfy to reach him: ten stamps a week, plain unlined white paper, black ink, and no photographs.
The Powell telephone call — The morning call John Kiriakou says he took from General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asking who would have run an Iraqi operation to kill former President George H. W. Bush; Kiriakou named the Iraqi Intelligence Service station in Basra and its headquarters in Baghdad, and eight hours later the United States fired forty-eight cruise missiles at that building.
The professor in the visiting room — John Kiriakou has credited the idea for his prison memoir to a university professor who visited him at FCI Loretto, listened to him tell stories across a visiting-room table, and told him that although the whole thing was by its nature depressing, the stories were good and there were lessons in them, and that he should write a book.
The Qatari 747 — The Boeing 747 given to the United States by the government of Qatar to serve as Air Force One. John Kiriakou reported in July 2026 that it had been delivered to the president while he was overseas and that he declined to fly home in it, because it had not been fitted with the protective equipment — countermeasures, radar jamming — that the role requires.
The question about the showers — The single thing John Kiriakou says he most wanted to know before going to prison, and the lunch his attorneys arranged with a former George Washington University professor — himself recently released — to answer it.
The Ramot Junction shooting — The September 2025 bus stop attack in an East Jerusalem settlement in which two Palestinians from the West Bank killed six Israelis, and John Kiriakou's divided answer — that opposition to attacks on civilians has to be unconditional, and that he does not know what he would do if strangers took his house.
The Ras Laffan strike — The Iranian attack on Qatar's Ras Laffan liquefied natural gas facilities during the 2026 war, which John Kiriakou discussed as taking seventeen per cent of Qatari export capacity offline for an estimated three to five years — one of the strikes that drove oil past a hundred dollars a barrel.
The rebuttal book — The volume published by a group of retired senior CIA leaders — George Tenet, Jim Pavitt, Jose Rodriguez and Cofer Black among them — answering the Senate torture report with the claim that the programme worked, saved lives and involved no mistakes, while continuing to refuse the word torture.
The roadblock strike — The drone strike Daniel Hale described at his own sentencing and that John Kiriakou retells as the reason Hale became a whistleblower: a car approaching a U.S. roadblock in Afghanistan, two girls aged six and nine visible inside, an order to fire given twice over Hale's objection, and a father who afterwards hid his daughters' bodies in a village dumpster for fear that special forces would take them.
The rogue officer remark — The answer President George W. Bush shouted to a reporter on his way to the helicopter — that if there was torture, it was the work of a rogue CIA officer — which John Kiriakou has said convinced him he was about to be made the scapegoat, and which led him to accept Brian Ross's interview offer.
The royal family at Taif — John Kiriakou's first overseas assignment sent him at twenty-five to the Kuwaiti government in exile at Taif in Saudi Arabia, where he found a king weeping over a dug-up rose garden and repeated a mantra to a despondent royal family: we are going to get you your country back.
The Russian nuclear umbrella — John Kiriakou's report, two days after the Israeli strikes on Iran began in June 2025, that Russia had declared Iran to be under the protection of its nuclear umbrella — and his conclusion that this rules out any Israeli nuclear use against Iran, because it would risk Russian nuclear retaliation against Israel.
The Russian soldier in Manama — The Russian soldier John Kiriakou says he met in Manama, Bahrain, who told him the Chechens were the only people on earth he was afraid of — a remark Kiriakou produced in a conversation about Chechnya's standing as a fighting nation.
The Sahel church burnings — John Kiriakou's account of al-Qaeda affiliates and Boko Haram in Chad, Mali and Nigeria attacking schools and churches — opening fire on teachers and administrators, kidnapping children, and burning congregations alive — and his observation that none of it is covered in the American media.
The San Francisco bacterium release — The MK-ULTRA experiment John Kiriakou describes in which the CIA waited for an unusually foggy day, released a bacterium across San Francisco and its public transit system to see how many people it could infect, and gave eight people a rare upper respiratory infection.
The Scooter Libby deposition — The 2006 or 2007 session at which John Kiriakou, appearing as a witness in the Scooter Libby case, mentioned that the only conversation he had witnessed between two senior CIA officers concerned a covert action programme — and the agency's general counsel jumped up and stopped him mid-sentence, because an officer may not say the words at all.
The seat-belt roadblocks — What John Kiriakou reported the federalised National Guard, police, FBI, ATF and DEA were actually doing at roadblocks on Washington's main thoroughfares in August 2025 — writing tickets for unworn seat belts and broken brake lights, in neighbourhoods he says have no street crime to speak of.
The second plane — John Kiriakou's account of where he was standing when United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower — in Cofer Black's outer office, mid-sentence, explaining to a secretary why a pilot could not possibly fly into the World Trade Center on so clear a day.
The Senate WikiLeaks ban — The instruction John Kiriakou watched the Senate security officer deliver in person to all one hundred senators and every committee after the WikiLeaks cables were published — that opening the material on a Senate computer would be the crime of unauthorized access to classified information, and that anyone who did so would be prosecuted.
The seventy-two-year-old contractor — The hallway conversation John Kiriakou says explained why the CIA had not sent him, an Arabic speaker, to interrogate captured al-Qaeda fighters — a returning contractor's answer that he had been in Afghanistan killing people — and the demand Kiriakou made afterwards that got him sent to Pakistan the next day.
The snapshots in the release — John Kiriakou's summary of what the first Epstein tranches actually contained — investigative documents, grand jury testimony and snapshots taken by Epstein and his friends — and the two photographs that dominated the early coverage.
The Solomon Islands trip — The reporting trip John Kiriakou announced for July 2026 — ten days on Guadalcanal with Jeremy Kuzmarov of CovertAction Magazine, travelling via Fiji, to cover the dispute between the United States and China over access to Japan's Second World War military bases.
The "spell your name" briefing — The first time John Kiriakou dealt with the Israeli services: eight weeks into his CIA career, giving the junior slot in a liaison briefing on Saddam Hussein's state of mind, he was interrupted by a Mossad representative who asked him to spell his name and then told him he was Jewish. Kiriakou's reply — that he was not recruitable — became one of his recurring illustrations of the liaison relationship.
The Sputnik shutdown — The 2020 cancellation of the radio programme John Kiriakou co-hosted at Sputnik, and what he says followed — a five-thousand-dollar crowdfunder for a camera and a microphone that became one of the more successful independent political podcasts.
"The Spy Who Talked Too Much" — Steve Coll's New Yorker profile of John Kiriakou, written after Coll had been welcomed into his home, and which Kiriakou telephoned him from prison to complain about. Coll's defence was that authors do not write their own headlines — a defence Kiriakou concedes, while still rating Coll among the country's great investigative journalists.
The stapler in the Dirksen building — An incident John Kiriakou witnessed while serving as a senior staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: a Democratic senator threw a stapler at a staff member in a hallway of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, swore at him, and then looked around to see who had seen it.
The strike on Ahmadinejad's house — On the first day of the 2026 war, reports placed one of the targets in Tehran at Narmak, believed to be the residence of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. John Kiriakou broke into the broadcast to call it gratuitous and an act of murder: Ahmadinejad is retired, holds no authority, and — in Kiriakou's description — was a moderate.
The Sudan massacre — The killing of at least 624 civilians by a government-affiliated militia in Sudan in late October 2025, which John Kiriakou called a crime against humanity — and which he reads as a proxy war financed by the United Arab Emirates on one side and Saudi Arabia on the other, with a Wahhabi component traceable to Hassan al-Turabi.
The supporters who could not be public — The thanks John Kiriakou offered on the day of his sentencing — to dozens of former and serving CIA officers, FBI agents and assistant United States attorneys who rallied to him, almost all of them privately, with cards, emails and donations to his defence fund.
The Taft joke — The moment at a White House briefing that John Kiriakou offers as the whole difference between the two men at the top of the Bush administration — a self-deprecating crack about William Howard Taft that left the president helpless with laughter and the vice president standing like a statue.
The Tajik civil war — John Kiriakou's account of the Tajik civil war of the 1990s as the pattern that later conflicts follow — a quarter to a third of the population dead by some accounts, ethnic massacres routine enough that captives were roped together and drowned when the bullets ran out, and a war that lasted exactly as long as its foreign sponsors stayed interested.
The Taliban lobbyist in Washington — A story put to John Kiriakou about a Taliban delegation's American press conference and the Washington lobbyist who represented them. Kiriakou remembered the episode and the lobbyist's New Jersey base but not the claim about her parentage, and explained why it caused so little controversy at the time: the United States had no historical quarrel with the Taliban, and had armed and fêted some of its future members during the war against the Soviets.
The tarantula on the mini fridge — The wildlife of the Baja resort as John Kiriakou catalogued it — rattlesnakes everywhere, an emailed instruction never to go barefoot, shoes shaken out before every midnight walk to the mini fridge kept outdoors, a flashlight in hand, and one night at three in the morning a tarantula sitting on the fridge itself.
The Tehran slip — The moment John Kiriakou says he witnessed as note-taker in a secure video teleconference a day or two before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when a briefing general said that if all went as planned American forces could be in Tehran by August, and CIA Director George Tenet turned off his microphone and asked Kiriakou whether the man had said Tehran or Baghdad.
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 thirty-year-old nominee — The nominee to head the Office of Special Counsel who withdrew in October 2025 after text messages surfaced in which he acknowledged a Nazi streak — and John Kiriakou's separate objection, which was that a man six years out of school has no business running an office at the Justice Department in the first place.
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 Toronto transit detention — John Kiriakou's account of being seized at the aircraft door in Toronto by two Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers, told 'you are not welcome in Canada,' and walked by both arms through the airport onto his connecting flight — while transiting home from a trip on which the Greek government had hired him to help write a whistleblower protection law.
The torture memo signature — John Kiriakou's account of how the CIA's torture programme was authorised: a list of about ten techniques sent from headquarters through the Justice Department, the National Security Council lawyers and Condoleezza Rice to the president — who, to the surprise of the agency's own leadership, signed it. Kiriakou recalls the deputy director saying three times in one meeting that he could not believe the president had signed the memo.
The Truman broadcast — An address by Harry Truman announcing American recognition of Israel that John Kiriakou says he watched on YouTube — in which Truman took the hatred of both sides as proof of his own success, and said recognition of a Palestinian state would follow further negotiations. Kiriakou's comment: that was 1948, and we are still waiting.
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 twenty-five in Pakistan — The answer John Kiriakou heard given to Senator Jeanne Shaheen in the spring of 2009, when she asked how many members of al-Qaeda were in Pakistan — twenty-five — and which he uses as the measure of how long the war outlived its stated object.
The twenty-thousand-dollar tweet — John Kiriakou's account of asking Jeanine Pirro for help with a pardon and being quoted $20,000 by her assistant — for a tweet. He refused, and says he was never invited back on her programme.
The two hundred billion dollar war request — The Defense Department's supplemental request for the 2026 Iran war, made without consulting Congress. John Kiriakou's contribution is his verdict on the Republicans who dropped their objections on the grounds that wartime is no time for questions: a bunch of cowards.
The unredacted copy-paste — John Kiriakou's account of the flaw in the first tranche of released Epstein documents: highlighting a redaction, cutting it and pasting it into a new document revealed the blacked-out text, which turned out to be the names of victims.
The unsearched car at Mar-a-Lago — An episode John Kiriakou related in July 2024 as evidence that the Secret Service's problem is systemic rather than confined to the Butler rally: a retired Army colonel and Republican fundraiser was asked at the Mar-a-Lago gate whether he had weapons in the car, said yes, went back to his hotel to lock them up — and later realised nobody had ever searched the vehicle.
The USS Gerald Ford plumbing failure — Days before the 2026 war, John Kiriakou raised the possibility that a sewage failure severe enough to send the carrier USS Gerald R. Ford back to Norfolk was sabotage by a crew that did not want to go to war with Iran.
The Uyghur resettlement trade — The exchange John Kiriakou says the WikiLeaks cables revealed behind the prosecution of UBS whistleblower Brad Birkenfeld — Switzerland agreeing to accept two Uyghur prisoners out of Guantanamo on the condition that the United States arrest the man whose disclosure had exposed Swiss banking secrecy.
The Vietnam speech — A paid speaking engagement John Kiriakou described in February 2026 — booked by a New York speakers bureau for the morning of 10 August, addressing three hundred Australian investment bankers at their annual convention in a country he had never visited and had always wanted to.
The voice vote on the Epstein files — John Kiriakou's account of how the Senate passed the Epstein files release without a roll call — a voice vote he says Chuck Schumer requested to save the majority leader, leaving no written record of how anyone voted and allowing every senator but one House holdout to claim they had stood up to the pedophiles.
The walk-in who was a probe — The man who presented himself at the American embassy in Athens claiming to be an Arab with information, and whom John Kiriakou interrogated the next day in a rolling meeting through the city — catching him reversing his own alias, while a hostile embassy's surveillance car followed and Kiriakou's boss ended it by putting a pistol to the man's cheek.
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 war powers resolution vote — John Kiriakou's assessment of the congressional attempt to take back war powers over the 2026 Iran conflict: a sense-of-the-Congress resolution would have no teeth or authority, and a bill with legal force would simply be vetoed.
The Warren, Ohio tail — John Kiriakou's account of being followed around Warren, Ohio in January 2012 — to his grandparents' old house, to their graves, and to the Packard Museum car park — while he assumed the car behind him belonged to a private investigator hired by his ex-wife, and of realising four days later, in an FBI conference room, that the Bureau had followed him from Virginia.
The washed-out road to the airport — The drive to catch a flight to the Joe Rogan taping, after a hurricane took out the only road from the Baja resort — thirty-five miles in almost two hours, driven by his co-star Jeff Fahey and by Tyrel Ventura, over a dune, across cactus, with the animals jumping out of the way.
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.
The woman escorted from the White House — Before John Kiriakou spoke to ABC News, someone else had already blown the whistle on the CIA's secret prisons — a woman at the White House whom he respected deeply, who was escorted out of the building, stripped of her badge and told never to come back, and who has always insisted it was not her.
The Yugo factory argument — The dinner-table confrontation in which one of John Kiriakou's uncles in Greece demanded to know why the United States had bombed the Yugo factory — an accusation Kiriakou could answer only technically, because he thought the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia was wrong in the first place.
The Zaporizhzhia accusations — John Kiriakou's inverted reading of the 2023 standoff over Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant: that Russia and Ukraine publicly accusing each other of planning a false-flag attack on the plant is precisely what prevented one, because ratting each other out forced the whole world to watch.
The Tiffany stationery letter — The deliberately expensive note John Kiriakou wrote to his first wife on Tiffany & Co. stationery, telling her he was halving her child support on the advice of counsel — a tactic suggested by his divorce lawyer to force her to file, and which worked the next day.
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.
Truman's CIA op-ed — A 1963 Washington Post op-ed in which former President Harry Truman — who signed the CIA into being in 1947 — called it a 'damn fool mistake' that should be disbanded; John Kiriakou notes the piece ran in the morning edition and vanished from the evening one.
Truck and Cat in the Hat — An incident at FCI Loretto in which John Kiriakou, told by one prisoner that another had called him a rat, invented a slur he knew would enrage a convicted serial killer — who beat the accuser badly enough to require a helicopter medevac. Kiriakou presents it as a live application of two rules he says he learned at the CIA: let others do your dirty work, and admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations.
Trump tariffs — The across-the-board tariffs imposed by Donald Trump on United States trading partners, which John Kiriakou describes as having shaken up the economy faster than any president in generations — causing chaos in global stock markets, laying the groundwork for inflation and economic contraction, and producing political upheaval at home.
The Trumpcare confusion — A television interview John Kiriakou says he watched, in which a woman from Arkansas wept with gratitude to President Trump because a website had insured her son's cancer treatment — and, told by the reporter that this was in fact the Affordable Care Act, insisted that Obamacare had been repealed and replaced and that what she had was Trumpcare.
Tucker Carlson 2026 FARA referral — The March 2026 criminal referral of Tucker Carlson to the U.S. Department of Justice, alleging treason, espionage and Foreign Agents Registration Act violations over his attempts to interview Iranian leaders. It was widely assumed to be a CIA crimes report until the political activist Laura Loomer claimed authorship on the Sunday; John Kiriakou, a friend of Carlson's, took it apart in public — treason is constitutionally defined and carries the death penalty, while the FARA charge amounts to failing to fill out an internet form, guideline zero to six months — read it as AIPAC's work by proxy, and predicted it would embolden Carlson rather than silence him. Loomer then turned on Kiriakou.
Typhoid fever in Bangkok — The illness John Kiriakou calls the sickest he has ever been — typhoid fever caught in Bangkok in 2002, which he had assumed the inoculation would prevent, and which put him in hospital twice. The doctor's correction: the shot does not stop you catching typhoid, only makes it slightly less virulent when you do.
Ukraine as a proxy war — John Kiriakou's assessment, given two months into the 2022 Russian invasion, that the United States was funding a proxy war it knew Ukraine could not win in order to bog Russia down — and that the outcome was already fixed, so peace talks should happen at once.
Venezuela Boat Strikes — September 2025 U.S. military strike on a boat in the Caribbean that killed 11 people the White House called drug traffickers; John Kiriakou calls it piracy on the high seas followed by mass murder, arguing the victims were never charged with a crime and that the boat's unusual passenger count undercuts the drug-trafficking story.
Venezuela regime change (2026) — John Kiriakou's assessment of the American operation that removed Venezuela's president — a clear violation of international law, since none of the three recognised grounds for one state attacking another applied, but not a violation of US law, which since 1985 has expressly permitted special forces to cross borders and seize people for trial. His reluctant conclusion at the time: "as much as I hate admitting it, this regime change seems to be working right now."
Venezuelan embassy occupation (2019) — A 2019 sit-in at the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C., which John Kiriakou says he joined at the Venezuelan government's request the night the United States broke relations with Venezuela; he says he still keeps Venezuelan government property from that night at his house.
Vietnam War — The war John Kiriakou grew up in the shadow of — his parents marched against it — and the deep precedent for everything he fights: entered on the Gulf of Tonkin lie, prosecuted by generals who knew for a decade they were losing (per the Pentagon Papers), studded with torture whose victims recited the Green Bay Packers' starting lineup as "intelligence," and ended in part by Daniel Ellsberg, "the godfather of all modern national security whistleblowers." Even Robert McNamara, he notes, understood waterboarding was a bridge too far.
The Virginia pardon and voting rights — John Kiriakou's account of applying to have his voting rights restored in Virginia after leaving prison and receiving, unasked, a full state pardon delivered by courier from the office of Governor Terry McAuliffe — followed by a courthouse clerk and a state employee who between them got him registered in time to vote.
2026 congressional landscape — John Kiriakou's read on two developments affecting the 2026 midterm landscape — the Supreme Court's disallowance of Virginia's redistricting, which he says makes a Democratic House win less certain given widespread Republican-favoring gerrymandering, and Marjorie Taylor Greene's resignation despite winning her last race with 77.5% of the vote, because she knew she could not survive another Republican primary.
Waco Siege — 1993 federal operation against the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, led by David Koresh, resulting in the deaths of more than twenty-seven people — more than half of them children. Per John Kiriakou, a CIA colleague's reaction upon hearing the news was 'It's about time.' Kiriakou describes this as the kind of response he once might have shared, but which his later experiences with government abuse of power caused him to revisit.
Walking Robert Morgenthau to the hearing room — John Kiriakou's recollection of taking the arm of a very elderly Robert Morgenthau in a Senate corridor and walking him to a Foreign Relations Committee hearing — and of telling him he had just read a book about Smyrna, and had not known his father coined the word genocide.
Watergate — The scandal that ended Nixon's presidency and the standing benchmark in John Kiriakou's vocabulary — the CIA spying on the Senate committee investigating its torture program was, to him, "a Watergate-level kind of scandal," except that this time nothing came of it. He draws one lesson from it above all others: Nixon did not fall for the burglary but for the cover-up. Watergate touches his own story directly — his lead defense attorney had been John Mitchell's lawyer — and its cast overlapped with the agency he joined, from E. Howard Hunt to the tradecraft by which Deep Throat summoned Bob Woodward.
"We're at war today" — The short speech John Kiriakou says Cofer Black delivered standing on his desk in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center on the morning of 11 September 2001, telling his officers that not all of them would make it home and that anyone for whom this was not enough could walk out without being thought less of. Nobody moved.
"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.
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.
Witness K case — Australian intelligence scandal in which a former ASIS officer known as Witness K exposed Australia's bugging of the East Timorese cabinet during oil and gas revenue negotiations; his lawyer, Bernard Collaery, describes the ASIO raids on both their homes and offices as paralleling the FBI's raid on John Kiriakou.
Wolf Blitzer at CIA headquarters — What John Kiriakou says he saw a couple of weeks into his CIA career in 1990: the CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer walking the halls of headquarters with a camera crew and no security escort, filming a stand-up in front of an agency sign. Kiriakou offers it, alongside the Bob Woodward episode, as evidence that the supposed wall between the CIA and the American press does not exist.
Yalta conference — The February 1945 Allied conference, which John Kiriakou uses as his teaching example of what a well-placed spy is worth: Stalin, told by a source inside the White House that Roosevelt was ill, insisted on a venue requiring a punishing multi-leg journey, then refused to delay the talks — and an exhausted Roosevelt, Kiriakou says, conceded Poland in order to go to bed.
Yellowcake Niger forgery — The fabricated intelligence document claiming Iraq had attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger; passed to the U.S. via the British (originally from the Italians); identified by CIA analysts including John Kiriakou as a forgery on sight ("it's not even in the right font"); pulled from President George W. Bush's State of the Union draft by Colin Powell; reinserted by Vice President Dick Cheney; pulled out by the CIA again; delivered in the 2003 State of the Union address anyway.
Yemen Diplomatic Pouch Arrest — Per John Kiriakou, his most wholly negative experience with a foreign intelligence service: arrested at Sana'a Airport in Yemen in 1991, eighteen months into his CIA career, after his Riyadh station chief asked him to carry a diplomatic pouch on a long-weekend trip. Yemeni officials demanded the sealed pouch go through the X-ray machine. When the scan revealed a handheld walkie-talkie inside, someone shouted 'Jassus' — spy — and Kiriakou was handcuffed and placed in an airport cell. The incident triggered a diplomatic chain reaction reaching the Yemeni Prime Minister before a Yemeni officer hacked open the diplomatic seal with a curved jambiya dagger to confirm the pouch contained only mail and the radio. Kiriakou spent the rest of the weekend under heavy surveillance; he later said each of his five trips to Yemen was worse than the last.
The Yemen jazz radio plan — A scheme John Kiriakou says the American defence attaché in Sanaa described to him on his last visit to Yemen in 2011: a propaganda programme modelled on NPR that would play jazz and run call-in shows for young Yemenis. It lasted about two weeks before it shuttered, because nobody was going to listen to it.
Zakynthos Holocaust rescue — John Kiriakou's account of the Greek Ionian island of Zakynthos, where the mayor and Orthodox bishop responded to a Nazi demand for a list of the island's Jews by submitting only their own two names, while residents hid every Jewish islander — making Zakynthos, per Kiriakou, the only place in Greece where no Jew died in the Holocaust.