KiriPedia KiriPedia The Free Encyclopedia of John Kiriakou's World

Category: Operations

Articles in this category

  • Cold cell — A CIA interrogation technique in which a stripped detainee is chained to a ceiling eyebolt in a cell chilled to 50°F, then doused with a bucket of ice water at hourly intervals; never authorized; documented to have killed at least two prisoners.
  • Enhanced interrogation techniques — The CIA's post-9/11 interrogation program; described by John Kiriakou as torture and as a euphemism designed to insulate the responsible officials from legal exposure.
  • Hummus — The CIA's documented use of pureed hummus in coercive rectal feeding of detainees; one of the unauthorized interrogation techniques exposed in the 2014 Senate Torture Report and the practice for which John Kiriakou has become most widely associated in popular culture.
  • Revolutionary Organization 17 November — Greek far-left urban guerrilla group active 1975–2002; the deadliest terrorist organization in Greek history
  • Sleep deprivation — A CIA interrogation technique used against high-value detainees post-9/11; the agency was authorized to deny prisoners sleep for up to 12 days continuously; people died; at least one detainee was rendered permanently clinically insane.
  • Walling — A CIA interrogation technique in which a detainee is slammed against a wall; designed on paper to use a padded fiberboard surface and a rolled towel around the neck, but applied in practice against bare concrete-block walls without protective measures, producing in at least one case permanent brain damage.
  • Blackwater — The private military contractor founded by Erik Prince that ran the CIA's Global Response Staff and, until shut down by Leon Panetta, a global assassination program; staffed at the board level with former CIA officers including Cofer Black as Vice President.
  • Ground Branch — The land-operating component of the CIA's Special Activities Division; the unit whose secrecy and personnel composition — predominantly former SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force operators on secondment to the agency — gave the 2025 Dalton Fischer Podcast episode its subtitle, "The Most Secret CIA Unit."
  • Global Response Staff — The CIA's protective-security program for case officers operating in high-threat environments; run for the agency by Blackwater; especially active in Baghdad's Green Zone during the Iraq War, where movement between fixed locations was treated as life-threatening.
  • 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.
  • MK-Ultra — The CIA's mid-twentieth-century umbrella program of mind-control, behavioral-modification, and biological-warfare experimentation, encompassing subprojects such as MK-Chickwit and MK-Seesaw; active 1952–1975; documented practices included LSD dosing of unwitting American citizens in CIA-rented brothels and the aerosolized release of pathogens into the San Francisco fog; 80% of the program's documentation was destroyed by the CIA in defiance of a 1975 preservation order from Senator Frank Church.
  • Operation Mockingbird — The CIA's mid-twentieth-century program of recruiting and managing American journalists as influence assets; in John Kiriakou's account, no longer operationally necessary in the contemporary period because the U.S. media voluntarily reprints CIA-supplied material, and in at least one documented case sends articles to the agency for clearance before sending them to its own editor.
  • Special Activities Division — The CIA's paramilitary arm; described by John Kiriakou as having two organizationally distinct components — the pre-9/11 SAD, a covert-action division within the Directorate of Operations, and a post-9/11 special activities group within the Counterterrorism Center, staffed largely by personnel on secondment from Delta Force, SEAL Team 6, and other special-operations units.
  • Tuesday morning kill list — Weekly CIA targeting meeting instituted by John Brennan in 2009 during his service as Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism in the Obama administration; produced a written list of individuals to be killed in the following week; per John Kiriakou, the program was a source of pride within the Obama administration and was made operationally possible by the targeting-software sophistication of the period.