Category: People

231 articles in this category

Abraham Bolden — The first African-American Secret Service agent assigned to a presidential detail; per John Kiriakou, he quite literally saved John F. Kennedy's life in Chicago in October 1963 and was subjected to overt racism by fellow agents, who told him to his face they would not protect Kennedy from assassination because of his civil-rights sympathies.
Admiral William Crowe — Former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff; visited Bahrain during John Kiriakou's posting there, with Kiriakou assigned as his control officer; present during Kiriakou's "I have my eye on you" handshake confrontation with the Bahraini Prime Minister, Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa.
Abu Zubaydah — Detainee captured by John Kiriakou's CIA team in Pakistan in March 2002; the first subject of the agency's enhanced interrogation techniques program; subjected to both approved and unauthorized techniques including the cockroach-in-coffin treatment exploiting a documented insect phobia.
Adnan Khashoggi — Saudi arms dealer and Iran-Contra middleman whom John Kiriakou says was mentioned 'all the time' at the CIA — in pointed contrast to Jeffrey Epstein, whose name he never once heard there.
Afia Sadiki — Pakistani-American scientist arrested in Afghanistan in 2008 and convicted in the U.S. of attempting to shoot two FBI agents; per John Kiriakou, who covered the arrest as a terrorism consultant for ABC News, newer evidence indicates she never had a gun and never fired at anyone, and her claim that the CIA seized her three children at arrest has never been resolved for the youngest, who would now be 18.
Ahmed Chalabi — Iraqi exile and founder of the Iraqi National Congress; per John Kiriakou, a Shia-Kurdish con man who looted Petra Bank in Jordan of $36 million in the 1980s, was sentenced to death in absentia, was pardoned at CIA request, then pocketed $6 million in CIA seed funding for the INC and bought a Mayfair house in cash; later resurrected by Dick Cheney to feed the Pentagon fabricated WMD intelligence used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Ahmed Khatib — Iraqi-installed occupation governor of Kuwait announced on August 2, 1990, hours after the invasion; medical doctor trained at the American University of Beirut whose mother had been a Sudanese slave in the Kuwaiti royal household; college roommate of George Habash and co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Ai Weiwei — Chinese contemporary artist and pro-democracy activist; designer of the Beijing Olympic Stadium; per John Kiriakou, produced a Lego portrait of him as one of 178 political prisoners in the series, with Kiriakou's panel positioned next to Martin Luther King Jr.; the work is now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
Alan Dershowitz — American attorney and Harvard Law professor; John Kiriakou describes debating him on Piers Morgan's show over Jeffrey Epstein, telling Dershowitz he would have wanted to see him "hanging from a tree" had he sought leniency for Epstein as an Israeli spy — and cites attorney David Boies's on-air statement that Dershowitz was far more than Epstein's lawyer, also serving as his publicist, friend, and a guest on Epstein's island.
Alec Baldwin — Actor with whom John Kiriakou recounts a bitter falling-out over a planned off-Broadway play about his case — Baldwin calling him a liar at their first lunch, briefly attaching to the project, then dropping out without a word.
Aldrich Ames — Senior CIA officer — a GS-15 who rose to chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet branch — who spied for the KGB. Per John Kiriakou, Ames's first act of betrayal was selling the identities of two CIA agents to the Russians for $50,000 to pay off a credit-card debt; both agents were immediately executed. He ultimately caused the deaths of twelve people, accumulated $2 million, bought a house in Arlington for that amount, drove a Jaguar to work on a $70,000 salary, and built an in-ground pool with a gazebo — all while being known throughout the office as a daily drunk. A 27-year-old officer sat on the initial security file for eighteen months. Analyst Sandy Grimes ultimately caught him.
Alex Karp — Co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies; subject of a biographical assessment commissioned from John Kiriakou by an unnamed interest group; characterized as militarily-industrially conservative despite a Democratic Party registration, religious, extremely patriotic, and "driven by profit."
Alex Padilla — U.S. Senator from California who was forced to the ground and handcuffed at a June 2025 press event after identifying himself as a sitting senator; per John Kiriakou, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's claim that he failed to identify himself was false, and the White House's stated interest in prosecuting him was legally baseless because sitting senators have congressional immunity while acting in the course of their duties.
Alfreda Bikowsky — Senior CIA officer who headed Alec Station and, before that, served as its chief of operations, overseeing the CIA's torture program; per John Kiriakou, "bad news from the get-go," and part of a failed attempt with Rich Blee to turn a San Diego al-Qaeda cell into double agents.
Ali Hassan al-Majid — Saddam Hussein cousin known as "Chemical Ali" and "the Butcher of Kurdistan"; per John Kiriakou, also briefly served as the Iraqi-installed governor of occupied Kuwait — "the Butcher of Kuwait" — and was engaged in the wholesale slaughter of Kurds in the north, Shia in the south, and Kuwaitis under occupation.
Ali Soufan — FBI special agent who handled Abu Zubaydah immediately after his March 2002 capture; through patient, respectful interrogation produced the only actionable intelligence ever obtained from the detainee, including the first identification of "Mukhtar" as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Ali Mohamed — Egyptian-American former U.S. Army sergeant who trained at Fort Bragg while secretly working for Egyptian intelligence, later trained some of the 9/11 hijackers and other al-Qaeda operatives, and was arrested in connection with the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings before disappearing under the George W. Bush administration; John Kiriakou speculates he was actually a double agent working for al-Qaeda — or possibly Israeli intelligence — against his CIA handlers.
Andres Serrano — American artist; in the 1980s the creator of Piss Christ — a beaker of urine containing an inverted crucifix — which so enraged President Ronald Reagan that he cut off funding to the National Endowment for the Arts. Per John Kiriakou, also the photographer of a torture-chamber series at Tate Modern, London, in which one panel is a photograph of Kiriakou next to a panel of a U.S. military torturer.
Allen Dulles — Long-serving CIA director whom John Kiriakou calls a 'monster' — a United Fruit board member who helped overthrow Guatemala's Arbenz, whose bust greeted visitors at CIA headquarters, and who was, unlike James Angleton, aware of his own guilt.
Andrew Warren — Former CIA officer and station chief who, per John Kiriakou, was protected and lavishly funded by his supervisor "Mary Margaret," then convicted of raping 23 women — videotaping every attack — before a post-prison religious conversion and further sexual assault convictions.
Andrew Bustamante — Former CIA officer who sells CIA-style training online; John Kiriakou identifies him as the lone critic of his work hosting a show on a Russian network, and argues Bustamante's training business — open to anyone who pays — is the more problematic of the two.
Anwar al-Awlaki — American-born al-Qaeda propagandist; in 1993 the imam of the Falls Church, Virginia mosque visited by John Kiriakou's CIA Arabic-language class on a field trip; in 2001 the cleric at whose mosque the 9/11 hijackers prayed the night before the attacks; killed by U.S. drone strike in Yemen in approximately 2011.
April Glaspie — U.S. Ambassador to Iraq in the run-up to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait; per John Kiriakou, delivered to Saddam Hussein — on a State Department cable from Secretary James Baker — the line that the United States had "no position on inter-Arab disputes," which Saddam read as a green light to invade.
Arkady Shevchenko — Soviet diplomat and Undersecretary General of the United Nations who secretly spied for the CIA before defecting to the United States in 1978 — described by John Kiriakou as the single most important spy the CIA ever had inside the Soviet power structure.
Arnon Milchan — Israeli-American Hollywood producer and, per John Kiriakou, an Israeli super-spy and arms dealer for LAKAM; central to a Netanyahu corruption charge, and named in FBI documents alongside Netanyahu in the smuggling of U.S. nuclear secrets.
A.Q. Khan — Pakistani nuclear scientist and the architect of Pakistan's bomb, who ran a black-market proliferation network that, per John Kiriakou, smuggled nuclear material and technology to North Korea and Libya. Kiriakou says the U.S. could easily have killed him — 'we knew where he lived, we knew how he spent his day' — but the Saudi government insisted the U.S. leave him alone, which Kiriakou calls a grave mistake and speculates was because the Saudis were pursuing their own nuclear capability. Khan was eventually pardoned by Pervez Musharraf, ending all investigations.
Asel al-Ghabandi — Kuwaiti resistance figure during the 1990–91 Iraqi occupation; per John Kiriakou, a "bona fide hero" whose telephone reporting on Iraqi troop movements, roadblocks, atrocities, and the location of inspections reached the CIA every single day via NSA [call interception](/wiki/the-intercept) — Kiriakou's account of the resistance figure who best understood how to weaponize the certainty that the Americans were listening to everything.
Bahrain Prime Minister "Mr. 10 Percent" — John Kiriakou's account of Bahrain's long-serving prime minister, the Amir's uncle, universally nicknamed "Mr. 10 Percent" for allegedly requiring a 10 percent cash cut on business deals — a cold, calculating figure Kiriakou calls "the definition of corruption," pointedly excluded from the national motto, yet credited with turning Bahrain into the Gulf's banking hub.
Avril Haines — Per John Kiriakou, a National Security Council official and later CIA deputy director who personally approved lethal drone strikes, including the killings of American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki, his teenage son, and a nephew, none of whom were given due process.
Barack Obama — 44th U.S. president; in John Kiriakou's account, Obama publicly recounted refusing Benjamin Netanyahu's demand to bomb Iran and calling Israel's threat to use nuclear weapons a bluff — a bluff Kiriakou says Donald Trump later believed.
Bashar al-Assad — President of Syria; John Kiriakou recounts warning Senator John Kerry to stop publicly calling Assad 'my dear friend' after a speech enraged Washington's Lebanese community, with Kerry citing motorcycle rides they had taken together to the Golan Heights.
Barry Pollock — Washington defense attorney who represented Julian Assange; John Kiriakou credits Pollock with negotiating the deal that let Assange be processed in Saipan — the U.S. district closest to Australia — rather than be brought to Virginia.
Bernie Kerik — Former New York Police Department Commissioner; the person who, in 2018, introduced John Kiriakou to Rudy Giuliani for what became Giuliani's $2 million pardon-extortion attempt.
Benazir Bhutto — Pakistani politician; twice Prime Minister of Pakistan; characterized in KiriPedia's source corpus as personally corrupt and married to an even more corrupt husband
Bezalel Smotrich — Israeli far-right minister whom John Kiriakou, alongside Itamar Ben-Gvir, blames for leaving Israel unprepared on October 7 by insisting any attack would come from the West Bank rather than Gaza.
Bill Binney — Former NSA technical director whom John Kiriakou cites as having debunked the DNC hack: Binney analyzed the upload speed of the leaked emails and concluded they could only have been copied in person to a thumb drive, not taken remotely by Russia.
Bill Buckley — CIA station chief in Beirut kidnapped by Palestinian Islamic Jihad in March 1984; tortured at length over fifteen months; killed in captivity; the case from which the agency derived a generation of operational-security lessons including the abandonment of single-point tracking devices in CIA officers' personal kit.
Bill Burns — Career U.S. diplomat named CIA director in 2021. John Kiriakou wrote a positive op-ed on his appointment, calling him "finally, an adult in the room," but says Burns ended up serving as the Biden administration's de facto Secretary of State and was drawn into the CIA's culture of drone warfare, rendition, and domestic spying.
Bill Clinton — 42nd U.S. president whom John Kiriakou describes as wholly disinterested in intelligence — briefed by the CIA only twice in eight years, with Vice President Al Gore taking the daily briefing instead and relaying anything important.
Bill Richardson — U.S. Congressman, Ambassador to the United Nations, Secretary of Energy, and Governor of New Mexico; became friends with John Kiriakou at McClarty Associates; promised Secretary of State in exchange for endorsing Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary; ultimately offered Commerce instead, then CIA director informally, before withdrawing his Commerce nomination.
William J. Casey — Director of Central Intelligence under the Reagan administration; creator of the CIA's domestic intelligence-collection arm
Billy Wall — Long-serving CIA paramilitary contractor; U.S. Army Special Forces ("Green Beret") veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam; holder of approximately seventeen Purple Hearts (license plate "17 HITS"); resident of Niceville, Florida; died in his nineties.
Bob Baer — Former CIA case officer; per John Kiriakou, "pretty famous"; the subject of George Clooney's film Syriana; pulled out of northern Iraq by the Clinton White House in the 1990s after [NSA intercepted](/wiki/the-intercept) a communication revealing he was developing a network of sources to assassinate Saddam Hussein — National Security Adviser Sandy Berger called CIA and threatened him with a conspiracy charge.
Bob (CIA HR) — Pseudonym for the CIA officer who served as director of human resources for the agency in the late 1980s and personally oversaw John Kiriakou's hiring
Bob Grenier — Career CIA officer who served as station chief in Islamabad before, during, and after 9/11; later associate deputy director of operations for policy support and Iraq Mission Manager; John Kiriakou's boss and, for one year, his supervisor as executive assistant.
Brett McGurk — Senior U.S. diplomat; John Kiriakou cites reporting that McGurk was caught in a sexual encounter atop a U.S. embassy while overseeing the campaign against ISIS, offering it as an example of the adultery culture he considers a security risk.
Brian Kelly — Chief of counterintelligence at the CIA; framed by FBI counterintelligence chief Robert Hanssen — the actual Soviet/Russian mole — as the source of executed agents; spent a year and a half on leave without pay, surrounded around the clock by FBI agents, while his daughter was approached and told her father would face the death penalty if he did not confess.
Brian Ross — American investigative journalist and seven-time Emmy Award winner who was a prominent reporter at ABC News when, in December 2007, he conducted the on-camera interview with John Kiriakou that produced the first public confirmation by a U.S. official that the CIA waterboarded prisoners. Per Kiriakou, Ross called him out of the blue with the assertion that a source said Kiriakou had personally tortured Abu Zubaydah; Kiriakou's decision to give the interview anyway — driven by the conclusion that 'Brian Ross's source is at the White House and they're going to pin this on me' — became the pivot point of his entire post-CIA life.
Bruce Fine — John Kiriakou's longtime attorney; former Deputy Attorney General under President Reagan and former General Counsel of the Federal Communications Commission; Harvard Law and Berkeley graduate; present at the 2018 Trump International Hotel meeting at which Rudy Giuliani's aide solicited $2 million from Kiriakou in exchange for a presidential pardon.
Carlos the Jackal — Venezuelan-born militant (Ilich Ramírez Sánchez) active in the 1970s and 1980s; per John Kiriakou, 'the Osama bin Laden of the 70s and 80s.' Kiriakou spent his Athens posting trying to identify the middleman linking Carlos to the Greek terrorist group 17 November, then six months working the lead with MI5 in London; Carlos was finally run down by CIA contractor Billy Waugh in a Khartoum vegetable market and captured in 1994.
Caspar Weinberger — U.S. Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan; John Kiriakou cites Weinberger's assessment that Jonathan Pollard's espionage caused "grave damage" — the highest category of harm — to U.S. national security.
The CIA Insider's Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection — Book by John Kiriakou drawing on his experience as a surveillance detection instructor at the CIA and as a private surveillance training consultant. The book covers the techniques used by intelligence professionals to identify whether they are being followed — including the four-phase surveillance detection route, concealment device placement and retrieval, and counter-surveillance strategy — adapted for use by corporate executives, journalists, and others who want to confirm whether they are being followed.
Cofer Black — Former head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center during and immediately after the September 11 attacks; principal architect of the agency's paramilitary turn on September 12, 2001; later Vice President of Blackwater under Erik Prince.
Clint Goswick — Fellow federal prisoner of John Kiriakou at FCI Loretto; a devout Christian and Wichita Falls, Texas heating-and-air-conditioning business owner convicted of drug conspiracy and a gun charge despite never having used, possessed, manufactured, or distributed drugs.
Colin Powell — U.S. Secretary of State whose 2003 UN testimony made the case for the Iraq war; John Kiriakou says the white powder in Powell's prop tube was nothing, and that Powell's own chief of staff later told him the presentation was knowingly 'sold.'
Condoleezza Rice — U.S. National Security Advisor on 9/11; John Kiriakou recounts that he and Cofer Black had a meeting scheduled with her that morning over a mundane request to pull a few cables from an obscure declassified report to protect elderly former assets.
Cori Bush — Former U.S. Representative from St. Louis (Missouri's 1st congressional district); cited by John Kiriakou as one of the two named cases of AIPAC successfully primarying an incumbent for delivering a House floor speech describing the Gaza war as a "wholesale massacre of Palestinian civilians."
Craig Murray — Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan whom John Kiriakou cites as a whistleblower of extreme torture: during a meeting at the Uzbek intelligence service, Murray heard screaming, walked in, and saw a man being boiled in oil — reporting it cost him his career.
Curveball — Cryptonym for the German-handled Iraqi defector whose fabricated WMD intelligence the German BND laundered to the CIA in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War; per John Kiriakou, in fact a dishwasher at a Shish Kebab restaurant who scraped fake reports from newspaper articles and told the Germans he was an Iraqi scientist with access to weapons of mass destruction; the Germans refused to let the CIA meet or polygraph him, and his fabricated intelligence — biological, chemical, nuclear, and long-range delivery — became one of the central pillars of the Bush administration's WMD case.
Daniel Hale — Per John Kiriakou, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale — an NSA contractor and drone targeting analyst who exposed an 80% civilian death rate in the U.S. drone program, was ordered to fire on two young girls his superior called "goats," and was sentenced to 45 months (of which Kiriakou says he actually served about 18) despite prosecutors seeking nine to eleven years.
David Petraeus — Retired U.S. Army general and director of the CIA who, per John Kiriakou, confirmed the names of ten covert CIA operatives to his biographer and girlfriend and was never criminally charged — a contrast Kiriakou cites repeatedly as proof that his own prosecution under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was selective. Kiriakou's explanation for the disparity: Petraeus had not blown the whistle on the torture program and embarrassed the agency.
David Ransom — U.S. Ambassador to Bahrain during the period of John Kiriakou's posting there; characterized by Kiriakou as one of the finest people he worked for in his CIA career
Dianne Feinstein — Longtime Democratic U.S. senator from California and Senate Intelligence Committee chair; per John Kiriakou, one of the greatest disappointments on Capitol Hill — fully bought into the intelligence community even after CIA director John Brennan called her a liar over the committee's finding that the CIA had monitored Senate investigators, a finding that proved true.
Dick Cheney — U.S. Vice President under George W. Bush. Per John Kiriakou — recounting CIA Director George Tenet's memoir — Cheney intercepted the presidential finding authorizing the CIA's enhanced interrogation program in the Oval Office anteroom and took it from Tenet before Bush could sign it. Tenet later concluded the president probably never actually signed the finding and probably told the truth when he said he had no idea the program was taking place. Kiriakou characterizes Cheney as the one who actually ran foreign policy, intelligence policy, and defense policy during the Bush years.
Dick Clarke — Counterterrorism czar at the National Security Council; a Clinton-administration holdover whom the incoming George W. Bush team, per John Kiriakou, sidelined as "this gay guy yelling about terrorism" — preferring to focus on China — even as he, alongside CIA Counterterrorism Center chief Cofer Black and Director George Tenet, was warning that an al-Qaeda attack on the United States was imminent.
Donald Rumsfeld — U.S. Secretary of Defense during the post-9/11 torture program; John Kiriakou recounts Rumsfeld dismissing sleep deprivation as a real technique by pointing to his own standup desk — missing, Kiriakou says, what prolonged, forced sleeplessness actually does to prisoners.
Donald Trump — 45th and 47th U.S. president. Per John Kiriakou, a man genuinely convinced he was doing right by bombing Iran, "duped" by the same Netanyahu nuclear bluff Obama once rejected — and, at the same time, the most blindly pro-Israel president in history, an admirer of autocrats who has never once criticized Vladimir Putin, and prone to gestures — from the Gulf of America to a since-abandoned "Department of War" rename — that test the edges of his actual authority.
Donnie Reynolds Jr. — Tennessee businessman and antique-firearms collector serving a life-plus-75-year federal sentence at the Communications Management Unit in Terre Haute, Indiana; per John Kiriakou and Marty Gottesfeld, a scapegoat for the fallout of the ATF's Operation Fast and Furious after refusing to become an undercover cartel weapons source.
Edward Snowden — Former NSA contractor who in 2013 disclosed the scope of U.S. [mass surveillance](/wiki/mass-surveillance), including the Section 702 collection program. Per John Kiriakou — who counts Snowden among the small group of national-security whistleblowers prosecuted under the Espionage Act — Snowden was 'stuck between two awful slippery slopes': breaking his oath and chain of command on one side, and on the other catching something 'cut and dry against the Constitution' that no one would act on. Kiriakou notes Snowden could not use his chain of command (as Kiriakou could not, his own chain being Jose Rodriguez), and that Judge Leonie Brinkema had reserved the Snowden case for herself before he fled the country.
Eli Cohen — Israeli Mossad spy who infiltrated Damascus in the early 1960s under cover as a wealthy Syrian-Argentine businessman; per John Kiriakou, he was on the verge of being named deputy defense minister of Syria before being detected through a burst-transmission intercept and publicly hanged.
Elon Musk — Per Kiriakou, a chance 2009 meeting with a then-comparatively modest Elon Musk at a Washington hotel bar, used to frame a broader argument that Musk's wealth explosion to $446 billion by 2024-2025 came "on the backs of the American people," and that Musk and Jeff Bezos both lost billions in the wake of Trump's tariff announcements.
Eric O'Neill — Former FBI analyst placed as Robert Hanssen's nominal assistant in the final months of the FBI's mole investigation; his role was to observe Hanssen and detect tradecraft slip-ups that would confirm Hanssen as the mole. After Hanssen's arrest, O'Neill resigned from the FBI, citing the stress of the operation. Subject of the 2007 film Breach.
Erik Prince — Founder of Blackwater; CIA non-official-cover officer with a 201 file; identified publicly by Leon Panetta in front of the House Intelligence Committee; lives in Dubai outside U.S. jurisdiction; in popular culture invoked, alongside Elon Musk, as the composite figure for the billionaire in the Tyrell Vanto film featuring John Kiriakou.
Felix Rodriguez — Cuban-American CIA officer and Bay of Pigs veteran; involved in the Vietnam War and reportedly present at the killing of Che Guevara; distinct from [Jose Rodriguez](/wiki/jose-rodriguez), the post-9/11 CIA official.
Francis Gary Powers — U-2 pilot whose 1960 shoot-down over the Soviet Union and subsequent capture the CIA initially denied any knowledge of, denying not only that he was CIA but that he was U.S. government at all, until trading him in a bridge-of-spies prisoner exchange. Buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Per John Kiriakou, after his U-2 career Powers ended up piloting a Los Angeles traffic helicopter, and was killed when it crashed.
General Abdul Rashid Dostum — Northern Alliance Afghan warlord; overseer of the November–December 2001 Dasht-i-Leili massacre; characterized by John Kiriakou as a serial defector between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance and as a psychopath.
George Habash — Co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; college roommate at the American University of Beirut of Ahmed Khatib, the doctor whom Iraq installed as occupation governor of Kuwait on August 2, 1990.
George Tenet — Director of Central Intelligence from 1997 to 2004, spanning the September 11 attacks and the early enhanced-interrogation program; identified by John Kiriakou as John Brennan's institutional patron at the agency; the figure who ordered the Five Eyes intelligence services to "open the files" to each other in the early 2000s.
Gerald Bull — British inventor of the "big gun" — a barrel so large it had to be leaned against a mountain — first offered to Israel and rejected, then sold to Iraq under Saddam Hussein; assassinated by Mossad in Brussels once Iraqi engineers solved the cracking problem with a barrel-smoothing sleeve nicknamed "the condom," after which the Israelis also bombed the gun itself.
Ghislaine Maxwell — British socialite and convicted sex offender; per John Kiriakou, her father Robert Maxwell was a prolific Mossad spy, and she is the likely conduit through whom Jeffrey Epstein was introduced to and recruited by Mossad.
Gina Haspel — Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Trump's first term; known to John Kiriakou and others at the CIA as "Bloody Gina"; per Kiriakou, flew out to the secret black site to sit in on one of the enhanced-interrogation torture sessions "just because she could," personally supervised the torture of USS Cole bombing suspect Rahim al-Nashiri, and later fed the CIA's torture tapes into an industrial document grinder after being explicitly told by White House Counsel not to destroy them.
Gore Vidal — American novelist and essayist; per John Kiriakou, a Sidwell Friends/St. Albans/Phillips Exeter alumnus who enlisted after Pearl Harbor rather than attend college, wrote the controversial 1948 novel The City and the Pillar, won a National Book Award in 1993, and was buried near his one lasting partner, Howard Austen, and his boyhood best friend, James Trimble, who was killed at Iwo Jima.
Gust Avrakotos — CIA case officer, John Kiriakou's operations mentor, and a central figure in Charlie Wilson's War — the prolific, divisive covert-war veteran Kiriakou credits as the greatest teacher of his adult life.
Harold James Nicholson — Former CIA Station Chief, Singapore; the third major modern CIA mole for the Russians after Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. Per John Kiriakou, Nicholson was a senior officer at the CIA Counterterrorism Center during Kiriakou's tenure there. Sentenced to 31 years and seven months in 1997. While in prison, attempted to recruit his own son to act as a courier between him and the Russian intelligence service so his espionage payments could continue to compound for his eventual release — and was caught when his son walked up to the Russian embassy in Washington under FBI surveillance.
Hassan Nasrallah — Long-serving Secretary-General of Hezbollah, killed in an Israeli strike on a complex in southern Lebanon; the strike, which killed approximately 300 people in addition to Nasrallah, decapitated Hezbollah's leadership and is characterized by John Kiriakou as a war crime under international law.
Hillary Clinton — Former U.S. Secretary of State and 2016 presidential candidate; John Kiriakou describes her as arguably the most neoconservative candidate Democrats could have nominated, more militarist even than her husband, and credits her — separately — with correctly describing Iran as a military dictatorship run by the IRGC rather than a genuine theocracy.
Heather Saunders — Widow of British Brigadier General Stephen Saunders, the British defense attaché in Athens assassinated by Revolutionary Organization 17 November on April 22, 2000; per John Kiriakou, the person whose post-assassination Greek-television statement — "this organization is not a political organization nor is it a phantom group; it's a gang of criminals" — for the first time since 17 November's 1975 founding turned Greek public opinion against the group.
How Can I Keep from Singing — Biography of folk singer Pete Seeger and John Kiriakou's stated favorite book. Per Kiriakou, Seeger was the most important man in his life besides his father and grandfather; the two exchanged Christmas cards for years, and Seeger rallied publicly to Kiriakou's defense during his prosecution. Kiriakou identifies Seeger's 1958 defiance of HUAC — pleading the First Amendment rather than the Fifth and going to prison for it — as the model for how he wanted to live his own life.
Hussein Kamel — Saddam Hussein's son-in-law and Iraq's Minister of Industry and Military Industrialization; defected to Jordan in January 1993 with his brother Saddam Kamel out of fear of Uday Hussein; demanded U.S. weapons and air cover in exchange for cooperation but refused to disclose WMD locations; per John Kiriakou, the CIA burned him with a planted Arab-press leak that triggered Saddam to destroy his chemical-weapons stockpile.
Ilhan Omar — U.S. Representative whom John Kiriakou credits with sponsoring a rewrite of the Espionage Act in two consecutive Congresses — legislation he says is dead on arrival with a Republican House because of who she is.
Imran Khan — Former Prime Minister of Pakistan; subsequently deposed and imprisoned; his political party, the PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf), sent John Kiriakou a formal demand for apology after a November 2025 Indian-media interview in which Kiriakou observed that India would prevail over Pakistan in a conventional conflict; Kiriakou's reply has not been transcribed in polite company.
Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa — Amir of Bahrain from 1961 until his death in 1999; per John Kiriakou, who was posted to Bahrain 1994–1996, a short, "roly poly," sweet-natured ruler who kept an open beach palace for Westerners, disliked Jordan's King Hussein, and was heartbroken by the Columbine shooting even as he privately could not grasp why he should extend more support to his own Shia majority.
Itamar Ben-Gvir — Israel's far-right Minister of National Security; John Kiriakou cites him as a convicted hate-crime felon placed in charge of security in Gaza and the West Bank over his victims, blames his insistence that any attack would come from the West Bank for diverting forces before October 7, and cites the death-penalty law passed under his portfolio for Palestinian detainees as the first reinstatement of capital punishment in Israel since it was abolished in 1956, excepting only the execution of Adolf Eichmann.
Jack Teixeira — Massachusetts Air National Guard reservist arrested in April 2023 for leaking classified Pentagon documents to a small Discord server. John Kiriakou, discussing the case the day after Teixeira's arrest, initially suspected a covert action program rather than a genuine leak, ultimately concluded Teixeira was not a whistleblower, and predicted — correctly — that he would be charged under the Espionage Act and take a plea bargain.
Jamaal Bowman — Former U.S. Representative from New York; cited by John Kiriakou alongside Cori Bush as the second documented case of AIPAC successfully primarying an incumbent House member for criticizing Israeli conduct in the Gaza war.
James Clapper — Director of National Intelligence under Obama; John Kiriakou recounts Clapper being pressed by Senator Rand Paul on whether the president could legally use a drone to kill an American on U.S. soil who had never been charged — the eventual answer being yes.
James Angleton — Long-serving Chief of the CIA Counterintelligence Center; the figure under whose tenure — per a first-day-on-the-job anecdote relayed by an unnamed Kiriakou CIA mentor — an entire wall of CCI files at agency headquarters consisted of dossiers on American citizens, in violation of the statutory prohibition on CIA domestic surveillance.
James Fishback — Florida gubernatorial candidate whom Kiriakou says he never personally endorsed, despite viral claims and a since-deleted tweet posted by his assistant; Kiriakou calls Fishback's stance on Israel well-considered but distances himself from Fishback's other stated positions, including a proposed sin tax on OnlyFans creators, an immigration moratorium, and comments Kiriakou calls racist.
Jane Harman — Former U.S. Representative from California who served as ranking member and later chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Per John Kiriakou, Harman was present in the room when congressional leadership was briefed on the CIA's enhanced interrogation program; when reporters later asked her about the program, she denied knowing about it. Kiriakou told the New York Times she had been in the room, after which Harman revised her account to say she had left early and that an aide remained as a notetaker.
Jason Leopold — Bloomberg investigative journalist; characterized by John Kiriakou as the leading practitioner of Freedom of Information Act litigation against U.S. [intelligence agencies](/wiki/intelligence-agencies); broke the Hillary Clinton private-email-server story; whose FOIA suit against the CIA Office of Public Affairs produced documentary evidence that NBC's chief national-security correspondent had been sending articles to the CIA for clearance before sending them to his own editor.
Jean Gately — The CIA officer who commanded the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation and, decades later, served alongside John Kiriakou as an elderly contractor at the CIA's Pakistan station, where he still blamed Kennedy for the defeat — 'We could have won that thing.'
Jeff Fahey — American actor; star of the Tyrell Vanto film in which John Kiriakou made his acting debut in late 2025; characterized by Kiriakou as generous with his time and on-set advice.
Jeffrey Epstein — Convicted sex offender; per John Kiriakou, was "an Israeli access agent" rather than a CIA asset, because the CIA collects foreign intelligence and Epstein's targets — Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Prince Andrew — were not foreign. Kiriakou further holds that Epstein did die by suicide in federal custody, because in the Bureau of Prisons the cameras never work and the guards are always asleep.
Jeffrey Sterling — Former CIA officer convicted of nine felonies, including seven counts of espionage, after giving a New York Times interview about a racial discrimination lawsuit he had filed against the CIA. Per John Kiriakou, Sterling was not accused of spying for a foreign country; his underlying case was that the CIA had passed him over for promotion and told him explicitly it was because of his race. Daniel Ellsberg asked Sterling to go to trial specifically so the constitutionality of the Espionage Act could be challenged; Sterling did, was convicted, and was sentenced by Judge Leonie Brinkema to what she described as 'Kiriakou plus 12 months.'
Jennings Randolph — Longtime U.S. Senator from West Virginia who, in a phone call John Kiriakou made to thank him as a college student, gave him the advice he says shaped his life: always do the right thing, not the expedient one.
Jennifer Keenan — FBI agent who partnered with John Kiriakou in Islamabad on the handling of an unreliable walk-in informant who had confessed to firing a rocket at the American embassy in 1996. After the informant's leads to weapons caches in Peshawar and a safe in Multan both turned up empty, Kiriakou and Keenan decided to lure him back to the embassy and arrest him on the strength of his original confession, which carried no statute of limitations.
Jerrold Post — American political psychiatrist and CIA officer who recruited John Kiriakou into the agency in 1988 through the CIA's covert campus recruiting program, working undercover as a George Washington University professor; founder of the CIA's Political Psychology Division (also called the Office of Leadership Analysis). Held a bachelor's, master's, and PhD in psychology and a PhD in political science, all from Yale, plus an MD from Harvard, and authored a dozen books on the psychology of world leaders and terrorists. Per Kiriakou, Post identified in him not just writing talent but "sociopathic tendencies" — and, when Kiriakou later blew the whistle, called to congratulate him, telling him that reaction proved he was not a true sociopath. Died of COVID-19, approximately 2022.
Jerry Falwell Jr. — Evangelical leader and former president of Liberty University; John Kiriakou recounts that Falwell personally recruited him to lecture at Liberty's Jesse Helms School of Government after his whistleblowing, with the reasoning that "torture is not Christian."
Jesselyn Radack — American national-security attorney and former Justice Department ethics official who directs the whistleblower-defense practice at the Government Accountability Project. Per John Kiriakou, Radack was herself driven out of the Justice Department, had her law license threatened, and was placed on the no-fly list after blowing the whistle in the John Walker Lindh case; she went on to represent Kiriakou after his 2012 arrest and, separately, helped connect him to a path to reach Edward Snowden in 2013.
Jim Pavitt — Long-serving CIA Deputy Director for Operations during the early post-9/11 period; characterized by John Kiriakou as "a legendary officer and a really great guy"; mocked John Brennan openly within the agency for Brennan's recurring stated ambition to head his own intelligence agency.
Joe Biden — 46th President of the United States; Vice President during the first Obama term; at John Kerry's December 2009 Christmas party, recognized John Kiriakou from a 15-year-prior conversation about a mutual hometown friend, and openly told a Kiriakou colleague within Kiriakou's hearing — and across the room from Kerry — that he disliked the colleague.
Joby Warrick's Washington Post resignation — John Kiriakou's account of his friend Joby Warrick, a multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, resigning from the Washington Post because investigative journalism at the paper was dead — amid an 80% staff reduction since Jeff Bezos bought the paper.
Joe Weisberg — Former CIA Counterterrorism Center officer and colleague of John Kiriakou who resigned abruptly, saying he did not have it in him to convince people to commit treason, then moved to Hollywood and created the television series The Americans.
Joseph Wilson — Former U.S. Ambassador to Niger and former Deputy Chief of Mission in Baghdad; husband of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame; in 2003 traveled to Niger at CIA request to investigate the Bush administration's claim that Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium for a nuclear weapon, found no such Iraqi approach had occurred, and published a New York Times op-ed debunking the claim — triggering the administration's retaliatory outing of his wife.
John Bolton — Former U.S. National Security Advisor; John Kiriakou predicted his 2019 departure from the Trump administration based on White House chatter, citing Trump's premium on loyalty and Bolton's habit of publicly contradicting the president — including reportedly joking the U.S. would be in four different wars if he had his way.
John Brennan — Former Director of the CIA; characterized in KiriPedia's source corpus as the principal architect of the agency's enhanced interrogation program and as having plotted against an elected President
John Kerry — U.S. Senator from Massachusetts; chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during John Kiriakou's 2009 service as the committee's senior investigator; subsequently U.S. Secretary of State; characterized by Kiriakou as a coward who buckled under CIA pressure on the Dasht-i-Leili reopening and as personally fixated on his perceived theft of the Secretary of State position by Hillary Clinton; the famously thrown medals were duplicates purchased at the post exchange.
John Kiriakou — American former CIA counterterrorism officer, whistleblower, author, and podcast host
John McCain — Late U.S. Senator from Arizona who gave the most consequential Senate-floor defense of John Kiriakou — declaring that 'if it weren't for John Kiriakou, the American people would never have had any idea what the CIA was doing in their name' — and sponsored the McCain–Feinstein amendment banning torture.
John McCone — Director of the Central Intelligence Agency on November 22, 1963; per John Kiriakou's retelling of an account from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., responded to Bobby Kennedy Sr.'s same-day question "Tell me your people didn't do this" not with denial but with "I don't know who did it."
John O'Neill — Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's New York field office for counterterrorism; "brash, flawed" but, per John Kiriakou, "spot-on about Osama bin Laden — 100 percent correct." Mentored FBI Arabic translator Ali Soufan. The principal subject of Lawrence Wright's book The Looming Tower.
John Paul II and the CIA — John Kiriakou's account that CIA old-timers took credit for helping make the Polish cardinal John Paul II pope — a political move to weaken the Soviet Union — and that his later recognition of the state of Israel was seen as a bonus for the West.
John Ratcliffe — CIA director under Trump's second term; per John Kiriakou, a "bombthrower" he mostly disagrees with politically but supports as a needed disruptor for the agency, though Kiriakou doubts Ratcliffe has the wherewithal to meaningfully reform the CIA — noting that if Bill Burns couldn't do it, Ratcliffe likely can't either.
John Rendon — Self-described "professional propagandist"; organizer of the pre-distributed American flags waved by Kuwaiti crowds on the 1991 Kuwait Liberation Day; in 2008 hired John Kiriakou (alongside Karl Rove) to produce op-eds attempting to rehabilitate the U.S. travel ban imposed on Indonesian general Joko Widodo.
John Walker Lindh — American citizen captured while fighting alongside the Taliban in late 2001; present at the Qala-i-Jangi fortress in northern Afghanistan at the start of the prisoner uprising that killed CIA officer Mike Spann.
Jonathan Pollard — U.S. Navy civilian intelligence analyst convicted in 1985 of spying for Israel; the canonical proven case of Israeli espionage against the United States; cited by John Kiriakou in his 2024 Piers Morgan debate with a former Mossad director who denied any Israeli spying on the U.S.
Jose Rodriguez — Senior CIA officer of the post-9/11 era; identified by John Kiriakou as among those responsible for crimes committed in the name of national security; described as believing himself to be a good guy.
Joseph B. Chambers — Civil War Medal of Honor recipient buried at Oak Park Cemetery in New Castle, Pennsylvania, whose grave John Kiriakou discovered as a child while looking for salamanders — sparking a lifelong interest in history.
Joko Widodo — Indonesian general; former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Indonesia; banned from the United States on human-rights grounds for personally killing six pro-democracy college student protesters by stabbing each in the heart in front of the others; subsequently elected Vice President of Indonesia; subject of an unsuccessful 2008 reputation-rehabilitation campaign conducted by John Rendon's firm with Karl Rove and John Kiriakou.
Juan Guaidó — Venezuelan opposition figure whom the United States recognized as interim president starting in 2019; John Kiriakou dismisses him as having been, in substance, nothing more than a George Washington University grad student, and says the U.S. attempt to install him — followed later by María Corina Machado — failed because Venezuelan support for Nicolás Maduro rests on loyalty to Chavista revolutionary ideology rather than to Maduro personally.
Josh Shapiro — Governor of Pennsylvania; veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, in which he served during his late-teen kibbutz year before returning to U.S. citizenship; cited by John Kiriakou as an example of the loyalty question raised by Jewish-American elected officials who have served the Israeli state.
Joshua Schulte — Former CIA Directorate of Science and Technology engineer; source of the 2017 Vault 7 WikiLeaks disclosure of the agency's offensive technical capabilities; currently serving a 40-year federal sentence for espionage; maintains his innocence.
Kathy Rumler — Obama White House counsel whose Epstein-file emails show her repeatedly trying to introduce Jeffrey Epstein to CIA director John Brennan; John Kiriakou notes she personally received a rare CIA award from Brennan and, as the White House's top lawyer, would have been the final legal authority approving the Tuesday-morning kill list.
Karl Rove — U.S. political strategist; manager of George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns; in 2008 engaged with John Kiriakou and John Rendon on the unsuccessful effort to rehabilitate the U.S. press reputation of Indonesian general Joko Widodo, who was banned from the United States on human-rights grounds.
Kamala Harris — Vice President under Joe Biden and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee; per John Kiriakou, installed as the party's nominee without a competitive primary despite having failed to reach the 2020 Iowa caucus, and closed out her 2024 campaign courting the Cheney family as a symbol of American values.
Ken Dilanian — Chief national-security correspondent at NBC News and MSNBC; documented — through a Jason Leopold Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the CIA — to have sent his own articles to the CIA Office of Public Affairs for clearance before sending them to his own editor.
Khaled El-Masri — German grocery-store owner; rendered by the CIA in 2003 because his name — Khaled the Egyptian — happened to match that of a different Khaled the Egyptian whom a sister agency had reported was traveling to Albania to bomb the U.S. embassy. Tortured in Cairo to within an inch of his life. Released when Egyptian interrogators concluded he was the wrong man. Per John Kiriakou, returned to Germany with a waist-length beard and a Quran, telling a reporter: 'All I want to do is kill Americans.'
Khaled Mashal — Senior Hamas political leader; survived a 1997 Mossad poisoning attempt in Amman, Jordan; the operation's failure and the political fallout in Jordan are the canonical example, in John Kiriakou's account, of Israeli operational hostility carried out in friendly third-country territory without regard for the diplomatic consequences.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — Mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks; identified to the CIA by Abu Zubaydah, in the course of FBI interrogator Ali Soufan's rapport-based debriefing at the black site, as the man behind the kunya "Mukhtar" the agency had been hunting since at least 1996 for the Bojinka plot; per Kiriakou's relay of his self-account, radicalized by news video of an Israeli soldier with his boot on the neck of a Palestinian woman.
Kim Philby — The British MI6 deputy director secretly working for the KGB — and, in John Kiriakou's telling, James Angleton's best man and his child's godfather; his decades of betrayal broke Angleton, and he escaped from Beirut through a bathroom window to Moscow.
Larry Raviv — Fellow federal prisoner of John Kiriakou, convicted of murder-for-hire after taking out a life insurance policy on his business partner to pay off a $100,000 mob gambling debt and hiring a hitman to kill him. Raviv negotiated a 20-year sentence, down from what would normally be life without parole, by testifying against the hitman, who died of a heart attack while awaiting extradition trial. Kiriakou later engineered a violent beating against Raviv after Raviv called him a "rat" for being summoned to the lieutenant's office for a Jake Tapper interview.
Lawrence Wilkerson — Colonel and chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell; John Kiriakou says Wilkerson told him on his program that Powell's UN case for the Iraq war was knowingly 'sold' to the public.
Leon Panetta — CIA Director under President Obama (2009–2011) and subsequent Secretary of Defense; per John Kiriakou, the official who on arrival as Director shut down the Blackwater-operated CIA worldwide assassination program — and in the course of explaining the decision to the House Intelligence Committee publicly outed Erik Prince. Also one of Kiriakou's two go-to examples (with David Petraeus) of senior intelligence figures who disclosed the identities of covert CIA officers without consequence while Kiriakou himself was prosecuted for the same statute.
Leonie Brinkema — U.S. federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia — informally the 'Espionage Court' — a Reagan appointee John Kiriakou calls "a hanging judge." Per Kiriakou, Brinkema systematically reserved all major national security cases for herself rather than allowing them to be distributed randomly among judges, and ruled in Kiriakou's case that his reason for blowing the whistle was legally irrelevant and that classified documents could not be used in his defense — effectively making it impossible to mount one.
Les Wexner — Ohio billionaire retail magnate; John Kiriakou cites Vanity Fair allegations that Wexner funneled millions to Jeffrey Epstein as his 'tax advisor,' offering it as evidence for his own view that Epstein's money and access served the Israelis.
Louis Farrakhan — Leader of the Nation of Islam; per John Kiriakou, issued a perfectly timed statement during Kiriakou's imprisonment at FCI Loretto identifying him as a hero of the Muslim people for standing up for human rights — protecting Kiriakou from the prison's Muslim population at a moment when the Aryans were simultaneously protecting him under the cover story that he was a "Muslim hunter."
Mack McLarty — U.S. political consultant and Bill Clinton's former White House Chief of Staff; founder of McLarty Associates (formerly Kissinger McLarty), at which John Kiriakou was given a private office and part-time secretary in 2008.
Maher Arar — Canadian-Syrian political-science professor at the University of Toronto; in 2002, returning from a family visit in Tunis, was seized by the FBI at JFK at CIA request, secretly rendered to Damascus, and tortured by Syrian intelligence for eight to nine months until they concluded he was the wrong man. The U.S. denied any involvement to the Canadian government until Arar's wife produced a credit-card receipt from his return flight. He sued the U.S. and lost on national-security grounds, then sued the Canadian government and won six million dollars. Per John Kiriakou, his case is the canonical illustration of the CIA rendition program rendering the wrong person.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh — Senior Hamas figure assassinated by Mossad in a Dubai hotel room in January 2010; the operation has been studied by intelligence services worldwide for its tradecraft, in particular the unsolved question of how the assassination team locked the hotel-room door from the inside after killing him.
Mahmud (alias) — Pseudonym for an Egyptian al-Qaeda fighter recruited by John Kiriakou in an unnamed country during the early 2000s
Manuel Noriega — Panamanian dictator and one of the most notorious drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere who, John Kiriakou notes, was a paid CIA source for decades before being driven from the Vatican embassy in Panama City by U.S. forces blasting death metal and captured in the 1989 invasion.
Marco Rubio — U.S. official whom John Kiriakou identifies as the real motivator behind pressure on Venezuela; Kiriakou argues Venezuela is not a meaningful drug threat to the U.S. and that Rubio simply wants Maduro gone.
Maria Butina — Russian gun-rights activist convicted in the United States of failing to register as a foreign agent; John Kiriakou cites her case as an example of the "process crime" of FARA violations, contrasting the severity of her 18-month solitary-confinement sentence with federal guidelines calling for 0-6 months.
Mark Lanzotti — John Kiriakou's best friend in prison — an Italian sentenced to triple life without parole for a first-time nonviolent meth conspiracy he was the only man to voluntarily leave; Kiriakou wrote the appeal that won his release, and he is now the top-selling realtor on the Jersey Shore.
Mark McDougall — U.S. criminal defense attorney; part of John Kiriakou's defense team in the 2012–2013 Espionage Act prosecution; the attorney whose framing of the case — "your problem is you think this is about justice and it's not about justice; it's about mitigating damage" — Kiriakou credits as the argument that persuaded him to take the final plea deal.
Martha Kesler — Long-serving CIA Syria analyst; author of the standard-issue analytical primer "Syria: Fragile Mosaic of Power"; John Brennan's first supervisor and the figure who first fired him from the agency, before being herself fired by Brennan when their roles inverted under George Tenet's patronage.
Marty Gottesfeld — American hacktivist and computer security engineer, convicted for a 2014 denial-of-service attack on Boston Children's Hospital in protest of the treatment of patient Justina Pelletier; a fellow federal prisoner of John Kiriakou who has publicly taken up the case of Donnie Reynolds Jr.
Mary Margaret Graham — CIA Senior Intelligence Service officer and later Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Collection under John Negroponte — described by John Kiriakou as a career "reports officer" who had never personally recruited a source, and as his difficult chief of station in a later domestic assignment.
Matt DeHart — American Army veteran and whistleblower prosecuted on charges including child pornography that the Justice Department later admitted, in court, did not exist; per John Kiriakou, DeHart fled to Canada at the first sign of military trouble, was returned to the U.S., and was held without bond as a flight risk.
Matthew Cole — American national-security journalist whose reporting tradecraft, per John Kiriakou, has led to the federal incarceration of five whistleblowers — including Kiriakou himself. In Kiriakou's account, Cole emailed him in 2010 ostensibly researching a book on the rendition of Abu Omar, asked Kiriakou to confirm the surname of a CIA officer who appeared in Kiriakou's own first book under the alias 'John', and Kiriakou's confirmation was the act of confirming a covert officer's identity for which he was eventually prosecuted under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
Michael Hastings — American investigative journalist whose 2013 death in a single-vehicle Los Angeles car crash is invoked by John Kiriakou as the canonical real-world referent for the CIA car-remote-takeover capability disclosed in the 2017 Vault 7 documents.
Mike Baker — Former CIA case officer; John Kiriakou's predecessor as the CIA's lead officer working the Revolutionary Organization 17 November problem in Athens; characterized by Kiriakou as "the real deal" and as having laid the groundwork for the operations Kiriakou subsequently inherited.
Mike Hayden — Director of the National Security Agency on September 11, 2001; subsequently Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President George W. Bush. Per John Kiriakou's relay of NSA whistleblower Tom Drake, on the morning of 9/11 Hayden told NSA personnel the agency had been 'waiting for a 9/11 so that they could implement the bigger program and grab everybody's electronics' — despite the agency's founding charter forbidding it from intercepting the communications of U.S. persons.
Mike Mastrovito — Twenty-five-year Secret Service veteran; founder and first director of the Secret Service Intelligence Division; later, after a forced retirement, a CIA contractor specializing in Greek terrorism; close colleague of John Kiriakou in Athens. Started his career at the end of the Eisenhower administration, was in Dallas with President Kennedy, and was effectively removed from the Secret Service after Sarah Jane Moore's 1975 attempt on President Ford — having interviewed Moore two weeks earlier on a threatening letter she had sent.
Mike Scheuer — Founder and chief of "Alec Station", the CIA unit dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden in the years before September 11, 2001; per John Kiriakou — alongside his New York FBI counterpart John O'Neill — "100 percent correct" about bin Laden, and uniformly hated for it inside the agency.
Mike Spann — CIA officer; first American killed in combat in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks; killed during the November 2001 Qala-i-Jangi prison uprising; worked in the Counterterrorism Center bullpen alongside John Kiriakou.
Mitchell and Jessen — The two American psychologists who pitched the CIA's enhanced interrogation program to Director George Tenet at a cocktail party in late October 2001; designers of the program and its theoretical underpinning, "learned helplessness."
Mohamedou Ould Slahi — Mauritanian citizen, medical student in Germany at the time of his 2001 detention; held at Guantánamo Bay for fourteen years on the basis of one phone call from his cousin asking him to relay news of a family death to a second cousin who was in al-Qaeda; identified by John Kiriakou as one of the most morally significant figures of the post-9/11 period; subject of the film The Mauritanian; became a personal friend of Kiriakou's after both men were released.
Mohammed Atef — The actual
Mort Halperin — Former Assistant Secretary of State, Assistant Secretary of Defense, and senior director of the National Security Council; author of the law John Kiriakou was convicted of violating (the Intelligence Identities Protection Act); wrote to President Obama stating that this is not why he wrote the law and that Kiriakou should be pardoned.
Muhammad Atar — Nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; subjected by the CIA to the walling interrogation technique against a concrete-block wall without protective equipment, producing permanent brain damage that has prevented him from participating in his own defense.
Noelle Dunphy — Former aide to Rudy Giuliani; independently corroborated to the New York Times John Kiriakou's account of Giuliani's 2018 $2 million pardon-extortion attempt, after Giuliani's subsequent sexual harassment of her caused her to come forward.
Norman Schwarzkopf — U.S. Army general and commander of CENTCOM during the 1991 Gulf War; per John Kiriakou, the architect of the "visionary" flanking maneuver that bypassed Iraq's fortified Kuwait–Saudi border, struck from the north, and produced the Highway of Death.
Pervez Musharraf — Pakistani general and military dictator who ruled during John Kiriakou's 2002 posting as CIA chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan. Per Kiriakou, the United States 'essentially just purchased Musharraf,' paying tens of millions in cash to the ISI and meeting him several times a week — and in return 'he would let us do whatever we wanted.' Kiriakou says Musharraf, fearing the nuclear arsenal could fall into terrorist hands, unofficially turned control of Pakistan's nuclear weapons over to the Pentagon. Musharraf later pardoned proliferator A.Q. Khan.
Pete Seeger — American folk singer; John Kiriakou's personal hero alongside his father and grandfather; pleaded the First Amendment (rather than the Fifth) before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958 and was sent to prison for it (later overturned on appeal); befriended by Kiriakou over decades of concert-going and correspondence; rallied to Kiriakou's defense after Kiriakou's 2012 arrest; the subject of Kiriakou's favorite book, How Can I Keep From Singing?
Peter Mandelson — British politician; described by John Kiriakou as the former British ambassador to Washington and as someone likely to be charged with serious crimes in connection with Jeffrey Epstein.
Peter Strzok — Senior FBI counterintelligence officer who, per John Kiriakou, oversaw the FBI operation that included a fake Japanese-diplomat sting designed to induce Kiriakou to commit espionage, and who personally placed Kiriakou in handcuffs when he was arrested on January 12, 2012. Kiriakou did not learn Strzok's identity until 2017, when a Washington Post reporter called to ask for comment on Strzok's firing.
Peter Thiel — U.S. venture capitalist; co-founder of Palantir Technologies; subject of a biographical assessment commissioned from John Kiriakou by an unnamed interest group alongside Palantir CEO Alex Karp.
Phil Ochs — 1960s–70s protest folk singer; John Kiriakou retells a story from Pete Seeger about the night Ochs — who had fallen into depression after being unable to sing following a mugging in Africa — called Seeger just before taking his own life.
Plato Cacheris — Legendary Washington, D.C. defense attorney who served as John Kiriakou's lead counsel in his 2012–2013 Espionage Act prosecution. Per Kiriakou, when discovery revealed the FBI had run a fake-diplomat sting against him, Cacheris explained the government's posture bluntly: 'Because they have a shit case and they know it's shit, and that's why we're going to trial.' He spent most of the case urging trial, then drove to Kiriakou's house on decision day and said 'You stupid son of a bitch — take the deal.' Cacheris also represented FBI spy Robert Hanssen.
Prince Muhammad bin Naif — Saudi prince and former head of Saudi intelligence; survivor of an al-Qaeda assassination attempt by a suicide bomber who concealed an explosive device internally in his own body, in approximately 2009.
Ramzi bin al-Shibh — Alleged September 11 co-conspirator declared clinically insane by the Pentagon's psychiatrist as a result of CIA sleep deprivation; the U.S. Defense Department has stated that he cannot be tried.
Reza Pahlavi — The exiled Iranian crown prince whom John Kiriakou dismisses as an Israeli-backed fantasy candidate to rule Iran — a man who has not lived there since his teens, supported mainly by Beverly Hills exiles, whom Kiriakou says 'wouldn't survive the walk from the plane to the terminal.'
Richard Helms — CIA director who, per John Kiriakou, ordered the destruction of all MK-Ultra documents on the same day the Church Committee explicitly told him not to destroy them. He was held in contempt of Congress and fined roughly $100 — a sum Kiriakou says colleagues chipped in a dollar or two each in the hallway to cover. Because of the destruction, only about 15% of the MK-Ultra record survives, having been misfiled in a financial-records warehouse.
Richard Perle — Prominent neoconservative adviser to the George W. Bush White House whom John Kiriakou credits with planting the idea of invading Iraq in Dick Cheney's mind the day after 9/11.
Richard Welch — CIA Athens station chief assassinated December 23, 1975; the first victim of [Revolutionary Organization 17 November](/wiki/revolutionary-organization-17-november)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — Son of Robert F. Kennedy; the source of an anecdote John Kiriakou repeats in which, on the day of the JFK assassination, RFK Sr. asked CIA director John McCone "Tell me your people didn't do this," and McCone answered only "I don't know who did it."
Robert Hanssen — FBI counterintelligence chief and Soviet/Russian mole; framed CIA counterintelligence chief Brian Kelly as the source of compromised assets — leading the FBI to surveil Kelly for a year and a half and threaten his family with the death penalty — before Hanssen himself was identified as the actual traitor.
Robert MacLean — TSA whistleblower; the person to whom John Kiriakou first described Rudy Giuliani's 2018 $2 million pardon-extortion attempt the same evening it occurred, and who in turn tipped the FBI (which declined interest) and then the New York Times.
Robert Maxwell — British media proprietor and father of Ghislaine Maxwell; described by John Kiriakou as "a prolific Mossad spy — that's a historic fact," and as the likely family channel through which Jeffrey Epstein was introduced to Israeli intelligence.
Robert Mueller — Director of the FBI in the years after September 11, 2001; per John Kiriakou, the official who, upon learning on July 31, 2002 that the CIA had won presidential approval to take primacy over Abu Zubaydah's interrogation away from the FBI's Ali Soufan, withdrew not just FBI personnel from the black site but every FBI employee from the country itself within 48 hours — "we know what these CIA guys are going to do; they're going to go completely nuts; we don't want any part of it."
Roger Waters — Founding member of the British rock band Pink Floyd; outspoken supporter of Palestinian human rights; anonymously paid off John Kiriakou's second mortgage during his federal prison sentence, sparing his wife and children the loss of the family home; only discovered to be the benefactor years later; subsequently a personal friend of Kiriakou.
Ron Wyden — U.S. senator and the lone real challenger of the CIA on the intelligence committees; John Kiriakou faults Wyden for challenging the agency only 'by the agency's rules' — refusing to read the Senate torture report into the record, and admitting at a dinner that fighting harder would cost him his security clearance.
Ross Ulbricht — Founder of the online marketplace Silk Road, sentenced to life plus 75 years before being pardoned by President Trump; John Kiriakou met Ulbricht's mother and sister two weeks before the pardon and calls the length of the original sentence a sickening miscarriage of justice.
Roy Cohn — Closeted McCarthy-era prosecutor and fixer, later a mentor, advisor and attorney to Donald Trump from the 1970s onward; per John Kiriakou, one of the darkest, ugliest figures in modern American history, who — while closely allied with a similarly closeted J. Edgar Hoover — was central to ruining the lives of gay men, and who died of AIDS in the 1980s alone and unloved.
Rudy Giuliani — Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and Mayor of New York City; in 2018 attempted to extort $2 million from John Kiriakou in exchange for arranging a presidential pardon from President Trump; the attempt was reported to the New York Times by Kiriakou himself and corroborated by Giuliani's then-aide Noelle Dunphy after Giuliani sexually harassed her.
Sacha Baron Cohen — British comedian and actor; per John Kiriakou, "a comedic genius" who hired Kiriakou as a Middle East script advisor for the film Bruno, and whose attempt to film in Jordan without notifying the Jordanian Intelligence Service resulted in King Abdullah II personally greeting him at the Royal Palace.
Saddam Hussein — President of Iraq from 1979 until the 2003 U.S. invasion; subject of John Kiriakou's CIA portfolio from January 1990 onward, in which capacity Kiriakou became, at age 25, "Saddam Hussein's intelligence community biographer" and the analyst who briefed President George H. W. Bush in the Oval Office on the morning of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Sandy Berger — National Security Adviser under President Bill Clinton; per John Kiriakou, the official who shut down CIA case officer Bob Baer's mid-1990s plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein from northern Iraq, by calling the CIA after an NSA intercept and threatening Baer with a conspiracy charge unless he was recalled.
Sandy Grimes — CIA analyst who, per John Kiriakou, was the person who actually broke the Aldrich Ames case. After a 27-year-old security officer sat on an Ames file for eighteen months without action, Grimes independently noticed that Ames made $100,000–$150,000 bank deposits within days of every trip to Mexico City — the pattern that identified him as a spy. After Ames's arrest, she submitted a hot-wash paper recommending 27 reprimands across the chain of command that had promoted a known alcoholic into the most sensitive counterintelligence position in the CIA. Director John Deutch responded with strongly worded letters for seven. Grimes resigned in 1993.
Sarah Jane Moore — American who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in San Francisco in September 1975, two weeks after Mike Mastrovito of the Secret Service had interviewed her at her apartment regarding a threatening letter she had sent to the president. Per John Kiriakou, the case Mastrovito identified as having ended his Secret Service career.
Saud Nasir Al-Sabah — Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States in the run-up to the 1990 Iraqi invasion; per John Kiriakou, "just a lovely, lovely man, very generous with his time"; the diplomatic channel through which the CIA, working from the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington, communicated its escalating June–July 1990 warnings that Iraq was preparing to invade.
Sebastian Gorka — Former Trump administration deputy assistant; subject of John Kiriakou's second attempted pardon transaction in 2018, in which Gorka asked Kiriakou for $5,000 at a book launch at the Trump International Hotel in exchange for tweeting at the president on his behalf. Kiriakou refused.
Sharon Scranage — CIA secretary stationed in Ghana in the 1980s; the only other American besides John Kiriakou to have been charged under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982; revealed the names of CIA officers and sources in Ghana to a Ghanaian intelligence-service lover during pillow talk, leading to the execution of the named sources by Ghanaian authorities; sentenced to nine months in prison.
Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad — Amir of Kuwait during the 1990 Iraqi invasion and the 1991 liberation; per John Kiriakou, "a very kind and decent man and a leader who genuinely loved and cared for his people"; the subject of a CIA cable Kiriakou wrote from Taif which led President George H. W. Bush to invite the Amir to Washington for "the red carpet treatment" — after which the Amir returned with renewed focus on driving the Iraqis out.
Sheikh Saad al-Abdullah — Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Kuwait during the 1990–91 Iraqi occupation; per John Kiriakou, the day-to-day leader of the Kuwaiti government-in-exile in Taif — "very military," "hands-on," "the best leader Kuwait had for that situation," meeting twenty hours a day with everyone who needed to be met and simultaneously managing the Kuwaiti resistance on the ground.
Sheldon Adelson — American casino magnate and Republican megadonor; in John Kiriakou's account of the Jonathan Pollard case, Adelson sent his private jet to fly Pollard from prison to Israel upon his release, and Kiriakou says his political influence continued after his death through his widow, Miriam Adelson.
Shireen Abu Akleh — Al Jazeera journalist, U.S. citizen and Greek Orthodox Christian; John Kiriakou recounts that she was shot in the face by an Israeli sniper while wearing clearly marked press gear, and that the IDF then beat pallbearers at her funeral.
Skip Gnehm — U.S. Ambassador to Kuwait at the 1991 liberation; per John Kiriakou, "one of the finest men I've ever worked for anywhere in the world"; led the reopening of the U.S. embassy in Kuwait City on Liberation Day with the cable "American Embassy Kuwait City is now open for business"; famously complained that he could not stop Kuwaitis from writing pro-American graffiti on the side of the embassy.
Saint Nectarios of Aegina — Early-20th-century Greek Orthodox saint whom John Kiriakou identifies with more than any other and carries a photograph of in his wallet; falsely accused and driven from his post, Nectarios forgave his accusers, and posthumous miracles led to his canonization.
Stephen Saunders — British defense attaché in Athens assassinated by Revolutionary Organization 17 November in March 2000
Steve Kappes — Former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; encountered by John Kiriakou in the lobby of the Sanaa Marriott during Kiriakou's final Yemen trip as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigator.
Steven Lawless — American with top-secret clearance recruited as a spy for Greece's National Intelligence Service (EYP) in a provocative mid-1990s operation run by the country's conservative government. Per John Kiriakou, who did not know Lawless personally, the case was so sensitive that his handler reported directly to the EYP director out of fear the CIA had planted a mole inside the service. Lawless was caught, served about seven years, and was given Greek citizenship on release.
Ted Rall — American editorial cartoonist; two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist; co-host with John Kiriakou of the daily news-commentary podcast "Deprogram," launched in September 2025.
Thomas Drake — Former senior NSA executive and whistleblower. Per John Kiriakou, Drake's first day at the NSA was September 11, 2001; he later objected internally to a mass-surveillance program, exhausted the chain of command, and was charged with nine felonies including seven counts under the Espionage Act, with prosecutors seeking 35 years before all charges were dismissed the night before trial.
Thomas Massie — Republican U.S. Representative from Kentucky known for a constitutionalist voting record and consistent opposition to foreign military intervention; per John Kiriakou, a principled America-First congressman who votes with the president on the vast majority of issues, and whose opposition to U.S. funding of Israel and foreign wars is the only plausible explanation for the roughly $30 million spent by the Israel lobby to unseat him in a primary.
Three Felonies a Day — Book by Harvard Law professor Harvey Silverglate, cited by John Kiriakou, arguing that the United States is so overcriminalized and so overregulated that the average American going about normal daily life inadvertently commits three felonies every day. Kiriakou cites the book in the context of warrantless government surveillance: if authorities decide they want a particular person, they can obtain that person's metadata, sift it for technical violations, and destroy their life — without any genuine predicate offense.
Tom Drake — NSA whistleblower; per John Kiriakou, the source for the statement that on the morning of September 11, 2001, NSA Director Mike Hayden told agency personnel NSA had been 'waiting for a 9/11' to implement the mass-electronic-surveillance program that NSA's founding charter forbids.
Tommy McHale — Highly decorated Port Authority of New York and New Jersey detective who worked as a terrorist hunter alongside John Kiriakou in Islamabad, Pakistan after 9/11; a survivor of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing whose best friend died on 9/11.
Trita Parsi — Iran scholar; in a Foreign Affairs piece published August 10, 2025, predicted a renewed Israeli–Iranian war by the end of August 2025; described by John Kiriakou as "one of the greatest Iran scholars on the planet."
Tucker Carlson — American broadcaster and former Fox News host; a personal friend of John Kiriakou's for years, appearing on Kiriakou's radio and podcast work and hosting him roughly a dozen times on his own Fox show. Kiriakou calls him possibly the most brilliant and best-informed person he has ever encountered, and relays Glenn Greenwald's belief that Carlson could win the presidency — an idea Carlson privately dismisses.
Tyrell Vanto — Hollywood screenwriter and director; son of Jesse Vanto; friend of John Kiriakou; wrote and directed the late-2025 film in which Kiriakou made his acting debut.
Uday Hussein — Eldest son of Saddam Hussein; described by John Kiriakou as so dangerous a successor-in-waiting that Saddam's two sons-in-law — Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel — defected to Jordan in January 1993 specifically out of fear of him.
Valerie Plame — Covert CIA case officer whose identity was publicly outed by the Bush administration in retaliation for her husband, former U.S. ambassador to Niger Joseph Wilson, publishing a New York Times op-ed debunking the administration's claim that Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. Per John Kiriakou, Plame's CIA career ended on the day her cover was blown — she could never travel overseas under cover again; no one was prosecuted for the leak.
Vernon Walters — U.S. Army general who served as Deputy Director of the CIA, Ambassador to Germany, Ambassador to the United Nations, and as Nixon's occasional secret envoy to foreign leaders. Per John Kiriakou — who met him at an early-career analysts' dinner — Walters said the only time he was ever afraid for his safety was during a secret Nixon-ordered peace mission to Fidel Castro in Cuba, when it occurred to him that Castro could poison him and no one but Nixon would know he was there: 'I wouldn't trust Nixon to call my wife.' Then he looked at Castro and thought: 'I can take this scrawny son of a bitch.'
Volodymyr Zelensky — Per Kiriakou, the Ukrainian president whose corruption he was directed not to discuss publicly by unnamed contacts, and whom he accuses of personally pressuring Ukrainian billionaires he publicly opposes for large donations, predicting the money then flows offshore to places like London, Dubai, or Geneva.
Wesley Clark — Retired U.S. Army four-star general and former Clinton administration adviser; per John Kiriakou, "a very good guy" and the public source of the now-famous account that, in the week of 9/11, the Pentagon was ordered to draw up a plan to overthrow seven governments — Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and one other — on the theory that they would fall like dominoes.
Will Hurd — Former CIA case officer, congressman and OpenAI board member whom John Kiriakou says he mentored at the agency; Kiriakou cites him as an example of the intelligence and tech worlds merging.
William Donovan — General William "Wild Bill" Donovan — Medal of Honor recipient, decorated World War I veteran, Wall Street figure, and founder of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Per John Kiriakou, Donovan became the natural first leader of American centralized intelligence after President Truman cleared the path by lying to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover — telling him the new CIA would be a division of the FBI to get him to drop his opposition.
William and Elizabeth Friedman — American cryptologists who, per John Kiriakou, broke the Nazi Enigma encryption largely by exploiting a single known fact: every German communication ended with 'Heil Hitler' — sometimes spelled out, sometimes abbreviated 'HH.' Working outward from the letters H, E, I, L, T, R, they cracked the code one letter at a time. Their work led directly to the founding of the National Security Agency. Both are buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
William Webster — Director of Central Intelligence during the 1990 invasion of Kuwait; the only person to have served as both Director of the FBI and Director of the CIA; per John Kiriakou, "a lovely man … just a very kind, nice man" — and a "giant" to whom Kiriakou first briefed at 4 a.m. during the invasion task force, with fifteen minutes' warning.