KiriPedia KiriPedia The Free Encyclopedia of John Kiriakou's World

Category: People

Articles in this category

  • 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.
  • 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
  • William J. Casey — Director of Central Intelligence under the Reagan administration; creator of the CIA's domestic intelligence-collection arm
  • 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
  • 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
  • Gerald Post — American political psychiatrist, CIA officer, recruiter, and founder of the agency's Political Psychology Division
  • Gust Avrakotos — CIA case officer; mentor to John Kiriakou; figure in *Charlie Wilson's War*
  • 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.
  • 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 Kiriakou — American former CIA counterterrorism officer, whistleblower, author, and podcast host
  • 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.
  • Mahmud (alias) — Pseudonym for an Egyptian al-Qaeda fighter recruited by John Kiriakou in an unnamed country during the early 2000s
  • 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."
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Richard Welch — CIA Athens station chief assassinated December 23, 1975; the first victim of [Revolutionary Organization 17 November](/wiki/revolutionary-organization-17-november)
  • Stephen Saunders — British defense attaché in Athens assassinated by Revolutionary Organization 17 November in March 2000
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 Richardson — U.S. Congressman, Ambassador to the United Nations, Secretary of Energy, and Governor of New Mexico; promised Secretary of State in exchange for endorsing Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary; ultimately offered Commerce instead, which he declined.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Jason Leopold — Bloomberg investigative journalist; characterized by John Kiriakou as the leading practitioner of Freedom of Information Act litigation against U.S. 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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."
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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."
  • 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.