KiriPedia Kiripedia The Free Encyclopedia of John Kiriakou's World

Category: Media

23 articles in this category

  • A Middle East reading list — The books and the starting point John Kiriakou recommends to anyone trying to understand the modern Middle East: begin at the end of the Second World War, not five thousand years earlier, and start with The House of Saud, the Sykes-Picot Agreement and From Beirut to Jerusalem.
  • Acts of Service — The Doja Cat song that John Kiriakou discovered, through a Cameo request, had become the soundtrack to a genre of montage about him. The clips set to it use footage from before his weight loss — he lost 77 pounds by 2007 and 115 pounds from 2022 — and he says he cannot watch them.
  • Barrett Brown — American journalist and former Anonymous associate whom John Kiriakou describes as one of the most intelligent writers and analysts he has ever encountered, with long-standing mental health problems and a two-decade heroin addiction he has now been clear of for at least a year, expelled from the United Kingdom and relocated to Mexico.
  • Censorship on the left — John Kiriakou's observation that he was censored far less by Forbes and Fortune than by The Nation and Mother Jones, which he offers as an instance of a general rule that a writer's own side censors them hardest — the counterpart to Ted Rall's account of being made to fit a particular kind of leftism rather than any kind.
  • Find a Grave — The cemetery database John Kiriakou calls literally his favourite website on the internet, which he opens during the ten-minute countdown before broadcasts and uses to decide who goes into his cemetery books — and which supplied him the story of Greta Zimmer Friedman.
  • Kiriakou's recommended reading — Asked in March 2026 what to read about the CIA, John Kiriakou named his own first two books and, beyond them, a 1980s history called The Rise and Fall of the CIA, which he says was his own first real introduction to covert action and its failures.
  • "Only Fox came to my defence" — John Kiriakou's account of how the American networks labelled him — MSNBC never using the word whistleblower and calling him a CIA leaker, CNN taking a year to change, and Fox, he says, being the only outlet that defended him at the time — offered as evidence that the label a case receives is drawn along political lines rather than factual ones.
  • Phil Donahue — American talk-show host who, John Kiriakou discovered seven years after the fact, had been secretly paying his weekly newspaper column fee — $400 a week for nine years, routed through Reader Supported News — because Donahue had learned that Kiriakou came out of prison broke and did not want him sleeping in his car.
  • Quoted on NPR — John Kiriakou's discovery, via a standing Google alert on his own name, that National Public Radio had cited a DeProgram discussion between him and Ted Rall in an article on Palestinians killed while waiting for food — an outlet he had walked out on years earlier.
  • Remains of the Day (book) — John Kiriakou's book, announced for publication by Simon and Schuster in March 2026, billed as a definitive guide to the historic cemeteries of Washington DC and the first in a planned series; the second installment will cover the Mafia graves of New York City.
  • 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 debate with the Mossad director — John Kiriakou's account of his first appearance on Piers Morgan's programme, where he debated a former director of the Mossad who he says could not stop chuckling, and the exchange about Israeli espionage that ended in "no comment".
  • The Hall of States — The Washington office building at 444 North Capitol Street where, in John Kiriakou's floor-by-floor description, most of the capital's television news operations share an address — NBC and MSNBC on the ground floor, Fox on the fifth, PBS and Democracy Now on the sixth, and Newsmax in the basement in a single room.
  • The Knight Ridder panel — At an April 2022 Assange benefit in Washington, John Kiriakou described a Zoom panel on which two former Knight Ridder reporters spoke for ninety minutes without once mentioning Julian Assange, and one of them, asked why, said he saw Assange as an activist rather than a journalist.
  • The lapsed film rights — John Kiriakou has sold the rights to his life story three separate times — to Universal, 20th Century Fox and Paramount — and all three studios let the option lapse, telling him there was too much detail and too many stories to fit into two hours.
  • The Laura Ingraham exchange — John Kiriakou's account of an on-air exchange with Fox News host Laura Ingraham about torture, in which she told him she hated his position and he replied that anyone who wants torture as an instrument of policy should have the courage to go to Capitol Hill and change the law rather than pretend the existing law does not apply.
  • The 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 New Castle News — The Pennsylvania local paper John Kiriakou says he tries to scan every day and can no longer afford — $250 a year for a sixteen-page paper with no Wednesday or Sunday edition, edited by a 28-year-old, in a region he describes as a news desert.
  • 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 play the CIA killed — A stage play about John Kiriakou's case, written in 2015 by the screenwriter Scott Burns for a New York theatre, which Kiriakou says was never performed because the CIA applied enough pressure on the theatre owner to stop it — an account he offered as a counterpoint to the Reality Winner play that was running unmolested at the same moment.
  • 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.
  • A spy's guide to a city — The premise of the third season of John Kiriakou's Dead Drop podcast: that a CIA officer reads a city in a wholly different way from a tourist. The tourist looks for the Parthenon or the Eiffel Tower; the officer is thinking about surveillance, counter-surveillance and surveillance detection, and about not being shot from behind a building.
  • The Washington Post under Bezos — John Kiriakou's running account of the decline of a newspaper he subscribes to and no longer recognises — an editorial board he says has gone wholly right-wing and obsequious to its owner, foreign bureaus and sports and local coverage cut back, a comment of his own rejected for criticising Jeff Bezos, and his own short list of what he would want the paper to be instead.