Category: Organizations

71 articles in this category

AIPAC — The American Israel Public Affairs Committee — the U.S. political organization that, in John Kiriakou's framing, ought to be registered as a foreign-lobbying entity but is not, and that wields decisive electoral power against U.S. elected officials who express support for Palestinian human rights.
American Psychological Association — The world's largest body of psychologists, which John Kiriakou cites constantly for one devastating datum — its research shows people begin to lose their minds at around day seven without sleep, and begin to die at day nine as their organs shut down. Mitchell and Jessen were nonetheless authorized to keep chained, naked prisoners awake for up to twelve days, which is why Kiriakou insists sleep deprivation was always worse than waterboarding. The organization's own role in the interrogation program later became the subject of an internal revolt and a 500-page independent report.
Amnesty International — The human rights organization whose torture report forms part of John Kiriakou's core defense — the CIA's crimes were already public knowledge before he confirmed them on ABC, and the Justice Department's own declination letter said so — and the organization whose silence during his prosecution he cannot forgive. He begged Amnesty for a one-sentence statement and got a New Yorker subscription instead; it took Ai Weiwei to change their minds, and by then he was walking out of prison.
The Analysis Corporation — Arlington, Virginia–based [private intelligence firm](/wiki/private-intelligence); one of two companion entities (alongside Arrais Corporation) created as LLC pass-throughs for retired Senior Intelligence Service personnel; John Brennan was appointed its CEO in 2005.
Arrais Corporation — Private intelligence firm; companion entity to The Analysis Corporation; originally an LLC pass-through for retired Senior Intelligence Service personnel from the CIA's operations side; subsequently acquired by IBM for over $1 billion.
Aryan Brotherhood — The white prison gang that adopted John Kiriakou on his first day at FCI Loretto. Two hours in, two Aryans with swastika neck tattoos walked into his cell to check his paperwork — not a rat, not a "chomo" — and invited him to the Aryan table, which ran from hardcore Nazis at one end to merely white guys at the other. A rumor that he had been a CIA assassin earned him the nickname "the Muslim killer," which he never corrected; asked directly, he answered "we all did stuff we weren't proud of — it was wartime," and the Aryans loved it. He sat with them a year before the Italians took him in.
Black Cube — Israeli [private intelligence firm](/wiki/private-intelligence) staffed by former Mossad personnel; reportedly used by attorney David Boies in the Jeffrey Epstein litigation; named by John Kiriakou as a representative of the no-compunction operating posture characteristic of Israeli private and public intelligence.
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.
Blueprint for Free Speech — The Australian non-governmental organisation that drafts whistleblower protection legislation and markets it to governments around the world, and which hired John Kiriakou in 2015 to help write Greece's law. Its board is mostly academics and transparency activists; Kiriakou credits it with successes in Canada, Zambia, Jamaica and Ukraine, and names its founder and director as Suelette Dreyfus, whom he describes as a co-founder of WikiLeaks with Julian Assange.
Cameo — The personalised-video app John Kiriakou joined in February 2026 and turned into an unexpected second career — around 2,600 videos, roughly 900 of them in his first month alone. Half are birthday messages and most of the rest are requests for CIA stories, but about two hundred have been appeals for advice or a pep talk, and three of those people later told him he had talked them out of suicide.
Central American Task Force — CIA unit that led the agency's early-to-mid-1980s effort to overthrow the Sandinista government and support the Contras in Nicaragua. John Kiriakou describes serving as assistant to the unit's head as one of his first, and most controversial, CIA jobs; he denies the accusation that the CIA trained Contra and Salvadoran insurgents to garrote nuns, saying the agency instead worked to stop such atrocities, while acknowledging it was associated with people who did terrible things.
Church Committee — U.S. Senate investigative committee operating in 1975–1976 that examined domestic intelligence abuses by the CIA, FBI, and NSA; per John Kiriakou, the Church Committee — alongside the concurrent Pike Committee in the House — was the last genuine moment of legislative oversight over the intelligence community, born of a national consensus that government had gone dangerously off course. Its work led to the creation of the permanent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which Kiriakou says ceased to function as real oversight roughly seven years after its founding.
CIA feeder schools — John Kiriakou's correction to the assumption that Georgetown is the CIA's principal university pipeline — George Washington University, he says, sends more people to the agency than Georgetown does, the first applied intelligence master's programme in the country was at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania, and he himself teaches intelligence studies to a largely American cohort at the University of Salamanca in Spain, many of whom end up at the CIA.
CIA National Resources Division — The Central Intelligence Agency's domestic intelligence-collection arm, created in the 1980s by Director William J. Casey
CIA Political Psychology Division — The Central Intelligence Agency unit founded by Dr. Gerald Post in the 1970s to produce long-distance psychiatric evaluations of foreign leaders
Central Intelligence Agency — U.S. foreign intelligence service; John Kiriakou's employer from 1990 to 2004 and the central institution of KiriPedia
Clock Tower X — The American firm John Kiriakou described as being paid $6 million by the Israeli government to make ChatGPT more pro-Israeli by generating content, gaming algorithms and managing AI frameworks.
Code Pink — The women-led peace group co-founded by Medea Benjamin. John Kiriakou first met them as a Senate staffer — he was the man who threw them out of a hearing he had produced, and got a lecture from Senator Shaheen for it. When he was arrested they were "right there next to me"; they threw his going-away party on the roof of the Hay-Adams, commissioned a folk group to sing a song rewritten about him, and quietly arranged for Roger Waters to pay off the second mortgage so his family could keep the house. He calls them his angels, and the one institution in American life he still trusts.
Congressional intelligence oversight — John Kiriakou's standing criticism of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee — that unlike the armed services and foreign relations committees, they do not perform oversight at all: "They're just cheerleaders." His illustration is a sitting committee chairman who summoned him privately, then asked whether Kiriakou would write the criticism publicly on his behalf.
Consortium News — Independent investigative news outlet John Kiriakou has written for since at least 2017, founded by Polk Award-winning journalist Robert Parry, who broke major stories on Iran-Contra. Kiriakou's columns there have covered John Bolton's exit, the entrapment of Maria Butina, his own first tour in Saudi Arabia and the 2019 Ukraine-call whistleblower. He says PayPal permanently shuttered the outlet's account and briefly seized its funds before backing down under public pressure, while still refusing to reinstate it.
Contra rebels — The right-wing Nicaraguan insurgency armed by the Reagan administration against the Sandinista government. In John Kiriakou's account they were conservatives, right-wingers, in some cases fascists, and disgruntled military officers; they were split into a northern group the United States armed and a southern group that financed itself by selling cocaine — a distinction that became the pivot of the Gary Webb affair, and that Kiriakou uses to answer the CIA's standing denial that it had anything to do with the drug trade.
Counterterrorism Center — The CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC) — the unit where John Kiriakou spent the defining years of his operational career. He joined in the late 1990s as the only officer in the entire CIA fluent in both Greek and Arabic, served as chief of counterintelligence in the bin Laden unit, watched the Center swell from a few hundred employees to nearly 2,000 by September 12, 2001, and it was to CTC that he walked back down in May 2002 to refuse the torture program — the moment, he says, the CIA began to turn on him.
CovertAction Magazine — The muckraking outlet "exposing covert action since 1978" — and one of John Kiriakou's three long-running syndicated column homes, alongside Consortium News and ScheerPost. Kiriakou joined its podcast arm, the CovertAction Bulletin, appearing on panels with Peter Dale Scott and Pepe Escobar, and jokes that the Pentagon's browser-plugin credibility warnings — red check marks against outlets like CovertAction — are the surest sign it's worth reading.
French intelligence (DGSE) — The French foreign intelligence service; characterized as exceptionally talented, exceptionally aggressive, and routinely lethal in the conduct of its operations
FBI — Kiriakou says FBI agents were sticklers for the law in a way the CIA never was — and that the bureau 'leaks like a sieve.'
Five Eyes — The intelligence-sharing partnership of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand
GeoRisk Solutions — The political risk consultancy John Kiriakou founded with the dean of the University of Salamanca's intelligence studies programme, staffed with academics and a former assistant secretary of state, with offices in Salamanca and Washington and a stated business of selling cost-effective country and regional risk analysis to banks, funds and companies.
Government Accountability Project — The Washington whistleblower-advocacy law firm and NGO, known as GAP, whose attorney Jesselyn Radack took John Kiriakou's case after his 2012 arrest and told him he was a whistleblower whether he thought so or not.
Ground Branch — The land-operating component of the CIA's Special Activities Division, staffed almost entirely by former Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 operators rather than career officers; per John Kiriakou its job is to kill or kidnap anyone judged a threat to the United States, and its work is so secret that everyone in the office knew what they did and nobody mentioned it.
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.
Hamilton 68 — A company founded by former CIA, FBI, NSA and Director of National Intelligence officials that rates news sites as reliable or unreliable, contracting mainly with the Pentagon to flag articles on government computers with green or red check marks; John Kiriakou says it threatened Consortium News with a "Kremlin apologist" red-check designation, after which PayPal permanently suspended the outlet's account and confiscated its funds.
Hezbollah — Lebanese Shia militant organization and political party. Per John Kiriakou, Israel's strategic goal regarding Hezbollah is not to defeat it outright but to keep Lebanon in a state of chaos that serves Israeli interests. He cites two Israeli operations: the simultaneous pager-detonation attack that decapitated Hezbollah's leadership, which he called 'the most incredible operation I've ever seen,' and the strike that killed former leader Hassan Nasrallah by leveling an entire complex and killing roughly 300 people — which he characterized as a war crime.
Human Rights Watch — The organization whose 2005 report that the CIA was torturing its prisoners — two years before John Kiriakou's ABC interview — anchors his defense that he confirmed rather than revealed the program. It is also the middle link in the chain that ended in his arrest: working with the John Adams Project, Human Rights Watch employed the investigator who carried a classified name from journalist Matthew Cole to the Guantánamo defense attorneys, and when the FBI walked that chain backwards it arrived at Kiriakou's door.
In-Q-Tel — The CIA's openly acknowledged venture capital arm; provided Palantir Technologies its first $1.5 million in seed funding; in John Kiriakou's account the principal vehicle by which the agency finances private-sector development of technologies it intends to use.
International Criminal Court — The Hague tribunal created by the Rome Statute, which has charged Benjamin Netanyahu with war crimes and crimes against humanity. John Kiriakou supports it as the necessary successor to Nuremberg, notes that neither the United States nor Israel is a signatory, and observes that a forced landing in a signatory state would oblige that country to arrest Netanyahu.
International Spy Museum — The Washington museum of espionage. John Kiriakou, who gives private tours of it, describes its room on the CIA torture program as a video loop in which only the torturers are given a voice — and in which he, the officer who exposed the program, is never mentioned.
ISI — Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the CIA's principal counterterrorism partner during John Kiriakou's 2002 posting. Per Kiriakou, there were effectively 'two parallel ISIs': one made up of Sandhurst-trained, FBI-schooled professionals he calls heroes who risked their lives on counterterrorism, and another — 'people with long beards who gave you a dirty look' — who had created Kashmiri terrorist groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed and were attacking Shia mosques and Americans. Because of this, the CIA never told the ISI the identity of high-value targets, referring to Abu Zubaydah only as 'Mr. Fish.'
ISIS — The Islamic State, in John Kiriakou's account, is an American policy failure made flesh — created because a faction decided al-Qaeda was not radical or violent enough, founded by Baghdadi while he sat in a U.S. military prison in Iraq, armed with hardware captured from the U.S.-supplied Iraqi army, and — per an email he cites from Hillary Clinton to John Podesta — funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Kiriakou repeatedly punctured the anti-ISIS coalition's logic: ISIS operated in seven countries while the U.S. bombed two, and Turkey had no real quarrel with ISIS at all — their common enemy was the Kurds.
Italian intelligence services — John Kiriakou's assessment of the Italian services as very good and very close partners of the CIA — except in the Abu Omar case, when they refused to help, were ignored, and responded by investigating the CIA and identifying twenty-one of its officers.
Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) — Iranian opposition group that John Kiriakou describes as 'a quasi-communist cult' and a former U.S.-designated terrorist organization. Founded by a husband-and-wife team in the 1960s and based in northeastern Iraq, the MEK launched cross-border terrorist attacks into Iran and, per Kiriakou, attempted to murder the American ambassador and the senior U.S. general in Iran — carrying out anti-American attacks for decades. After Saddam Hussein expelled them they relocated to Paris; current leader Maryam Rajavi is widely believed to have killed or had killed her vanished husband to take over. In 2009 the MEK hired high-powered Washington lobbyists (from Howard Dean to Rudy Giuliani) to get off the terrorism list, and Kiriakou says it is now funded by Israel and used as assassins-for-hire in Tehran.
MI6 — The United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service, the foreign-intelligence service of the British government and the closest CIA liaison partner under the Five Eyes framework. Per John Kiriakou, MI6 was the parent organization that asked Truman after WWII to set up a 'central intelligence agency' on the model of its own service — making the CIA in effect MI6's little brother. Kiriakou's stated view of the historical relationship: MI6 saw the CIA as its little brother, then after the empire fell apart as its big brother, and then after 9/11 as 'strangers' because U.S. policy became 'simply to kill everybody.'
Middle East Forum — The publication — 'clearly an Israeli publication,' in John Kiriakou's words, and one he had never heard of before a Google alert surfaced it — that ran a piece by the political adviser to the Israeli foreign minister calling Kiriakou antisemitic and describing his writing as evidence of 'the rot' in the American intellectual left. Kiriakou took the phrase as a compliment and says the episode shows how closely Israel monitors even small independent outlets.
MOSSAD — Israel's primary external intelligence service; characterized by John Kiriakou as universally hostile in his and his CIA colleagues' professional dealings with it ("never had a positive encounter with Mossad"); operates almost exclusively in the operational rather than analytical domain; the CIA is, per Kiriakou, categorically forbidden from spying on it.
National Endowment for Democracy — U.S. federally chartered organization characterized by John Kiriakou as a proxy for CIA propaganda — the funding vehicle by which the agency promotes pro-U.S. political leaders in foreign countries; explicitly not an operational entity in the boots-on-the-ground sense.
National Intelligence Council — Body housed at the CIA comprising the most senior analysts drawn from across the entire intelligence community. Its officers — National Intelligence Officers (NIOs) — hold positions at the Senior Intelligence Service level and are responsible for long-range strategic analysis on specific portfolio areas, as well as the production of National Intelligence Estimates. Per John Kiriakou, learning that the NIO for Warning had held the same job for forty-two years and just received a waiver to stay until seventy was the moment he first believed in the existence of the deep state.
National Security Council — The White House body that, in John Kiriakou's telling, sat on the pro-war side of every fight that defined his era — gung-ho for the Iraq invasion alongside Cheney's and Rumsfeld's offices while the CIA, State Department, and Joint Chiefs opposed it; the place where an official predicted Iraqis would "throw flowers at us"; a signature stop in the approval chain for both the torture program and covert action findings; and the perch from which John Brennan, as its number two, urged the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against Kiriakou.
NSA — Kiriakou on the agency whose Utah facility boasts room to store every American's calls, texts and emails for the next 500 years.
Office of Leadership Analysis — CIA analytic office — internally called LDA, for Leadership Development Analysis — founded by CIA psychiatrist Jerome Post, where John Kiriakou was hired at the start of his CIA career and spent his first seven and a half years as Saddam Hussein's classified psychological profiler. His first assignment, given on his first day, was covering Iraq and Kuwait, a portfolio his boss described as so quiet the office sometimes went days without a single incoming cable.
Palantir Technologies — U.S. data-analytics and intelligence-software company; received its first $1.5 million in seed funding from the CIA's In-Q-Tel venture-capital arm around 2002; characterized by John Kiriakou as functionally inseparable from the CIA in 2025, drawing the majority of its revenue from agency contracts and operating across DARPA, NSA, and the broader U.S. national-security apparatus.
Pan Quake — An open-source, nonprofit, advertising-free social media platform hosted in Iceland on geothermal power and built on a content blockchain, conceived by Suzie Dawson and promoted by John Kiriakou as a brand ambassador from 2021. Kiriakou described its offshore incorporation and subscription model as deliberate defences against the attacks he expected from the CIA and NSA, and later said its Icelandic bank account was frozen at the FBI's request over the platform's association with Julian Assange supporters.
Palestine House — The Washington, DC meeting space and gallery for pro-Palestinian human rights groups, artists and musicians that John Kiriakou describes as newly opened on Capitol Hill — housed in a building donated by a Lebanese-American property developer, running programming several nights a week, and headed by Miko Peled.
Petra Bank — Jordan-based bank founded by Ahmed Chalabi and used by the entire Iraqi refugee community in Jordan; per John Kiriakou, looted of $36 million in a single night when Chalabi transferred every dollar to secret accounts abroad and fled to Syria in the trunk of his secretary's car — bankrupting every Iraqi in the country, driving some to suicide, and earning a death sentence the CIA later had lifted so he could front the Iraqi opposition.
PFLP — Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Palestinian armed group co-founded by George Habash and Ahmed Khatib, college roommates at the American University of Beirut. It is one of the Arab organizations John Kiriakou worked against during his Athens tour, where a semi-secret 1980s deal let the Arab groups transit Greece unmolested so long as they did not kill Greeks. Kiriakou's chance paper on Khatib made him the White House expert on the occupation governor of Kuwait in August 1990, and two of the Front's retired cadres later sat across a table from him in Jordan for a Sacha Baron Cohen shoot.
Pike Committee — U.S. House investigative committee operating in 1975–1976 in parallel with the Senate's Church Committee; per John Kiriakou, the two committees together were the apex — and the last genuine exercise — of congressional oversight of the CIA, staffed by heavyweights and followed by a golden age that lasted only until Iran-Contra. Their work created the permanent House and Senate intelligence committees, which Kiriakou says degraded within a decade into cheerleaders for the agency.
PricewaterhouseCoopers — The Big Four accounting firm that keeps intersecting John Kiriakou's story — as a target of the corporate human-source intelligence he collected after leaving the CIA, as the audience of 140 partners he told his Pakistan recruitment story to ("what I did and what you do really isn't that different"), as the auditor that spent three years trying to find the Pentagon's money before giving up, and as the Greek government's book-cooking auditor in the debt crisis, never prosecuted.
Prison Legal News — The longest-running publication produced by and for current and former prisoners in American history, co-founded by former prisoner Paul Wright, and a recurring source in Kiriakou's account of Bureau of Prisons practice.
Publications Review Board — The CIA office that must clear anything a former officer publishes. John Kiriakou says everything he writes goes to it — books, articles, "even a letter to the editor of Home and Garden magazine" — and describes how the turnaround tracked his standing at the agency: his first book took 22 months to clear while the leadership hated him; his most recent six cleared in days.
Revolutionary Organization 17 November — Greek far-left urban guerrilla group active 1975–2002; the deadliest terrorist organization in Greek history
Senate Intelligence Committee — The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — the CIA's designated overseer, which John Kiriakou credits with the torture report's unimpeachable method (6 million contemporaneous CIA field cables) and simultaneously dismisses, along with its House counterpart, as "little more than cheerleaders for the CIA" since the mid-1980s. It sits in the official whistleblower channel he calls a proven dead end, and its own investigation was famously spied on by the very agency it oversees.
Senior Executive Service — Highest tier of the U.S. federal civil service, above GS-1 through GS-15 pay grades; per John Kiriakou, members of the SES — and its agency-specific equivalents such as the CIA's Senior Intelligence Service — are the career officials who functionally operate the federal government across presidential administrations, serving thirty to forty years while presidents come and go every four or eight, and are protected from dismissal by the Civil Service Act.
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.
The Taliban — The Afghan movement John Kiriakou describes as loyal to nobody and, in 2001, genuinely baffled by the American invasion: its leadership held that sheltering al-Qaeda was a cultural obligation to a guest rather than an alliance, that it had never taken up arms against the United States, and that Washington was welcome to fight al-Qaeda on Afghan soil. He supported the Doha peace process but judged the Biden-era power-sharing letter an abandonment, arguing that any deal without guarantees on women, girls' education and the vote returns the country to the 1990s.
The 1994 women's class action — A class action brought by female CIA employees who had been passed over for promotion produced, in John Kiriakou's account, a judicial finding that the Agency had documented its own crime and a remedy of an across-the-board two-level promotion for every woman at the CIA.
The CIA and Iridium — John Kiriakou's account of the Central Intelligence Agency buying the satellite telephone company Iridium when it was unprofitable and about to go out of business, because the agency needed the network — a purchase he places alongside its acquisition of Intelsat, and which he encountered personally when he had to rent the phones for Afghanistan.
The Intercept — The investigative news outlet that published Daniel Hale's drone leak; John Kiriakou notes that the same Intercept reporter, Matthew Cole, was involved in cases that led to the exposure of both Kiriakou himself and NSA leaker Reality Winner — though he insists Hale outed himself rather than being burned by the outlet.
The ISI as two organizations — John Kiriakou's working model of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence during his time as CIA chief of counterterrorism operations there: one half made up of British-trained officers he calls great counterterrorism partners, and another half that created, trained, financed and armed the Taliban — a split that left him deciding case by case whom he could trust.
The NYPD intelligence post — The New York Police Department position — deputy commissioner for intelligence — that John Kiriakou says traditionally goes to someone coming out of the CIA, and which he uses to explain why the agency is indifferent to who wins a New York mayoral election so long as the post and its liaison with the joint terrorism task force survive.
The two ISIs — Asked how much cooperation he got from Pakistan's intelligence service after 9/11, John Kiriakou answered that the honest answer was two answers: the counterterrorism officers he worked with had all been trained in America and Britain, while the men who gave him the stink eye in the corridors of ISI headquarters were the ones who had created the Taliban.
Turning Point USA — The conservative youth organization founded by Charlie Kirk out of the Tea Party and anti-tax movement to work university campuses for Trump's MAGA message. John Kiriakou treats it as the vehicle that brought first-time young voters into MAGA as a movement, credits its campus events as genuine dialogue despite disagreeing with Kirk on most issues, and judges that it cannot survive its founder's death intact.
United Food and Commercial Workers — The huge K Street labor union where a young John Kiriakou — from a family with a long labor history — was working when Dr. Jerrold Post's class assignment changed his life: shadow your boss for a week and write his psychological profile. Kiriakou's boss was a mean old-school organizer whose back had been broken by scabs; halfway through the week Kiriakou called him a racist ("which he was"), and the resulting paper diagnosed the man as a sociopath and potentially dangerous. The paper is what put Kiriakou on the CIA's radar.
The whistleblower support network — The informal circle of American national security whistleblowers that John Kiriakou describes as 'something of a club' — Daniel Ellsberg, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis, Thomas Drake, Jesselyn Radack and others — whose members in the Washington area meet socially and without which, Kiriakou says, none of them could have got through it.