Category: Objects

13 articles in this category

• Abu Zubaydah's diary — The notebook captured with Abu Zubaydah, containing drawings and poetry, over which the CIA and the FBI came to deep disagreement — an FBI psychologist calling it the rantings of a crazy person and John Kiriakou insisting it showed creativity in a man who was not crazy at all.
• "Beyond Your Dreams" — The gloss a host gave John Kiriakou on his first trip to China when he asked what the beautiful car with the BYD badge was — and the answer he got when he asked why he had never heard of it, which was that the United States is the only country where they are not sold.
• Hypersonic missiles — John Kiriakou confirms that hypersonic missiles are real and that Russia, China and Iran all have them; that a weapon travelling 2,500 miles an hour cannot be defended against; and that Iran holds too few of them to do anything but make each one count.
• The SpongeBob shirt — The bright red SpongeBob SquarePants shirt, a Christmas present from his children, that John Kiriakou happened to be wearing when Abu Zubaydah opened his one good eye and realised the Americans had him.
• The booby-trapped Christmas cards — Among the devices al-Qaeda left behind in positions it was forced to evacuate in Afghanistan, John Kiriakou describes a detonator laid flat inside a Christmas card, so that opening the card would take the reader's hands off.
• The can of ravioli — John Kiriakou's confession that he eats tinned ravioli cold, straight from the can, and refuses on principle to pay more than ninety-nine cents for it — used, when the price reached $2.49, as his own answer to the polling finding that Americans care about prices more than anything else.
• The colour-coded badges — The CIA's badge system as John Kiriakou describes it — blue for the top secret compartments everyone in the building holds, green for contractors, yellow for the language instructors cleared only to secret, red for the man in the cafeteria doughnut shop and the woman who vacuums at night — and the lettered suffixes that were dropped once the letters themselves gave the game away.
• The FLETC badge — The shiny gold badge John Kiriakou carried before joining the CIA, issued after he trained at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center — and which he insists never made him a law enforcement officer, a distinction he uses to deny the same status to ICE agents and federal prison guards.
• The Hyundai robots — The South Korean robots John Kiriakou cites as the answer to a promise the Pentagon has been making for decades — long-life batteries solved by a Hyundai subsidiary, robots ready to go to market that can get into a self-driving car and do the grocery shopping, and his question of why DARPA has not managed it.
• The lapis lazuli paperweight — The chunk of raw lapis lazuli John Kiriakou says he took from Osama bin Laden's house in Afghanistan and still keeps — described on air as magnificent, and agreed on air to have probably served as bin Laden's paperweight.
• 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 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 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.