Category: People

459 articles in this category

Aafia Siddiqui — Pakistani-American neuroscientist arrested in Afghanistan and convicted in the United States of attempting to shoot FBI agents; per John Kiriakou, who covered the arrest as a terrorism consultant for ABC News and has followed the case since, she never had a gun and never fired, the bullet holes offered as proof predated her capture, and the CIA took her three children — two later recovered, the youngest never found.
Abdul Amir al-Jamri — The Bahraini cleric who led the Shia opposition during the 1990s uprising, and whom John Kiriakou interviewed for a human rights report in 1991 — an interview that had the Bahraini prime minister demanding, within the hour, that both American officers be expelled from the country.
Abdul El-Sayed — Physician and Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidate in Michigan's 2026 Democratic Senate primary. John Kiriakou, who discloses a $100 donation to the campaign, presents him as the test case for whether the electability argument still works for establishment Democrats.
Abigail Spanberger — Governor of Virginia from 2025 and, before Congress, a CIA officer alongside John Kiriakou in the Counterterrorism Center — whom he calls a perfectly nice person who would have been a middle-of-the-road Republican in the 1970s and 1980s, and whose victory speech, to his surprise, said all the right things.
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.
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.
Admiral William Crowe — Former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and former CENTCOM commander who had lived in Bahrain, author of the "pound for pound" formula every Bahraini and every American ambassador quotes, and the visiting dignitary John Kiriakou was assigned to escort — a week that ended with the Bahraini Prime Minister refusing to let go of Kiriakou's hand.
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.
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.
Al-Julani — The former al-Qaeda commander and, per John Kiriakou, co-founder of ISIS who was installed as president of Syria and received at the White House. Kiriakou's initial reading was that no one moves from a ten-million-dollar American bounty to a state visit in months without being a long-term CIA asset — until a senior Turkish official told him over dinner that al-Julani was Turkey's: 'We created him from nothing and we installed him in Syria.' Kiriakou judged that version more plausible than his own.
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.
Aldrich Ames — Senior CIA officer — a GS-15 who rose to chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet branch — who spied for the KGB for nine years. Per John Kiriakou, Ames walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington in April 1985 and sold the identities of two CIA-recruited double agents for $50,000 to clear a debt run up by his second marriage; both were executed. He went on to identify more than thirty agents, compromise over a hundred clandestine operations, cause at least twelve deaths and take more than $2 million, while being known throughout the agency as a daily drunk and promoted at every turn. The KGB protected him with a decoy mole hunt; analyst Sandy Grimes caught him by matching his handler meetings to his bank deposits.
Alec Baldwin — Actor with whom John Kiriakou recounts a bitter falling-out — Baldwin calling him a liar over lunch at a meeting about a play in which Baldwin was to play him, later attaching to a Kiriakou TV pitch that AMC bought the next day, then quitting for HBO and killing the deal without a word.
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.
Alexander Acosta and the sweetheart deal — The US attorney who gave Jeffrey Epstein his 2006 non-prosecution agreement and later said he had been ordered to — a chain of command John Kiriakou traces upward to an attorney general famous for his powerlessness, and therefore to somebody above him whom nobody has ever named.
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 Abdullah Saleh — President of Yemen for decades, close to both Saudi Arabia and the United States until Yemen's 1990 Security Council vote on Kuwait, after which his country collapsed into civil war; he fled to Saudi Arabia and was killed by a bomb planted in the palace where he had taken refuge.
Ali from Newark — The Black shot caller at FCI Loretto, near the end of a twenty-five-year drug sentence, who came to embrace John Kiriakou at the close of his term and tell him how much he respected him — a friendship possible only because Kiriakou had decided on arrival to ignore the prison's racial divisions.
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 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.
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.
Allen Dulles — Long-serving CIA director whom John Kiriakou calls a 'monster' and a 'very dark figure in American history' — a United Fruit board member who ran the agency that overthrew Guatemala's Árbenz, who went to Truman's house to talk him out of criticising the CIA, and who stayed in touch with the men Kiriakou believes killed John F. Kennedy.
Amaryllis Fox Kennedy — Former CIA non-official-cover officer who worked under commercial cover as an international art consultant, later a Trump campaign manager and nominee for deputy CIA director. Per John Kiriakou, Senator Tom Cotton threatened to filibuster her appointment; the president responded by naming her deputy national security adviser instead — a job Kiriakou considers more powerful, since the CIA director reports to the national security adviser.
Amir — The pseudonym John Kiriakou gives the Muslim, ethnically Arab domestic officer sent on temporary duty to Pakistan to help with the Abu Zubaydah hunt — the colleague who drove them into India by GPS, drank the roadside tea and had diarrhoea for six weeks, and invented the textile-baron cover story on the spot.
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.
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.
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.
Angela Merkel — German chancellor whose mobile phone the NSA was intercepting, in what John Kiriakou treats as the cleanest illustration of the two-tier American attitude to surveillance: the interception of one of Washington's closest allies was big news, Hillary Clinton flew to Germany to apologise, and — per Kiriakou — the United States then did it again. Asked about it in Berlin, his answer was that intercepting her phone is exactly what he wants the CIA to be doing.
Another Bentley — The scene John Kiriakou describes from a meeting with Benazir Bhutto during her exile in Dubai — a five-million-dollar palace on the Gulf, a car pulling up outside, and Bhutto saying that so help her God, if her husband had come home with another Bentley she would kill him — which Kiriakou uses as his measure of Pakistani political corruption.
Anthony Fauci — American physician and public-health official whose pardon John Kiriakou condemned as "unacceptable" in a May 2026 Fox News appearance. Kiriakou's objection is partly personal: his cousin George was, he says, the second person in Ohio to die of COVID, in very early 2020. Kiriakou confined himself to the pardon and to his own family's loss, and made no claim of his own about the origin of the virus.
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 NODIS cable from Secretary of State James Baker — the line that the United States took no position on Arab-Arab border disputes, which Saddam is widely held to have read as a green light to invade. Kiriakou, who was in the CIA operations center the night her reporting cable came back, holds that she got a bum rap.
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.
Arianna Huffington — Founder of the Huffington Post and the accidental amplifier who turned John Kiriakou's prison writing into a phenomenon. His first Letter from Loretto went to his attorney, then to a friend running Firedoglake who — unknown to Kiriakou — was close to Huffington; she plastered it as a banner headline and it drew over a million hits, bringing CNN and 60 Minutes to the prison gates. She published his open letter to Snowden, ran the diesel-therapy exposé that triggered the "hands off John Kiriakou" campaign, and came to Loretto herself with two young journalists.
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.
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.
The astrophotographer lawyer — The Philadelphia attorney who represented Ken Schaefer's victim and who, in John Kiriakou's account, was flown to Israel as the guest of a school he had shown his telescope to — and there asked by a government minister to make the case go away.
Avril Haines — Per John Kiriakou, the National Security Council lawyer who decided whether names could lawfully go on John Brennan's kill list — and said yes in almost every case — before becoming CIA deputy director during the agency's hacking of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then Director of National Intelligence. Kiriakou calls her appointment the disastrous half of a week in which Biden also named Bill Burns, and says she has never had to answer for any of it.
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.
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.
Barbara Leaf — American diplomat, assistant secretary of state for the Near East, and — in John Kiriakou's description — an old friend of his. He cites her trip to Damascus, made within days of al-Julani taking power and alongside the special envoy for hostage affairs, as the moment American recognition was traded for the lifting of the ten-million-dollar bounty on the new Syrian leader.
Barrett Brown — American journalist and former Anonymous associate whom John Kiriakou describes as one of the most intelligent writers and analysts he has ever encountered, with long-standing mental health problems and a two-decade heroin addiction he has now been clear of for at least a year, expelled from the United Kingdom and relocated to Mexico.
Barry Eisler — Former CIA officer turned bestselling novelist, and a recurring guest of John Kiriakou's, who describes him as one of the very few former intelligence officers to have succeeded at storytelling outside the secret world as thoroughly as he did inside it.
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.
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.
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
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.
Bernie Moreno — Republican senator from Ohio and father-in-law of Congressman Max Miller. John Kiriakou raises, without asserting, the possibility that Moreno's two-year public silence about the abuse of his daughter was the product of blackmail.
Bernie Sanders — United States senator from Vermont. John Kiriakou, who watched him daily from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, describes Sanders holding open breakfast in the Senate cafeteria for anyone who walked in — insisting only that they call him "Bernie" — and names him the one 2016 candidate willing to talk about shrinking the military.
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. Asked by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity to examine the science, Binney analyzed the speed of the upload and concluded the emails could only have been copied in person to a thumb drive, not taken remotely by Russia — an argument he later made to Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Kiriakou calls him a friend, the most brilliant person he has met on electronics, and a member of the whistleblower circle he belongs to.
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, and the one senior appointment John Kiriakou has endorsed without qualification — a man he has known for thirty years, "apolitical to a fault," untouched by torture, Guantánamo or the secret prisons, and the only figure he thought had the standing to reform the agency. Kiriakou wrote an op-ed calling him "finally, an adult in the room," and says Burns ended up serving as the Biden administration's de facto Secretary of State before being drawn into the CIA's culture of drone warfare, rendition and domestic spying.
William J. Casey — Director of Central Intelligence under Reagan; creator of the CIA's domestic collection arm, architect of the purge that installed a businessman with no intelligence experience as deputy director for operations, and — per John Kiriakou — the man whose campaign to cut Congress out ended the only period of real intelligence oversight the United States has ever had.
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 Pulte — The housing developer serving as acting Director of National Intelligence after Tulsi Gabbard's resignation. John Kiriakou, relaying the assessment of people who know him, calls him smart, personally decent and completely loyal to Trump — while saying he could not find the ODNI with a map and a GPS unit, and predicting his sole function will be to fire the president's enemies.
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.
Billy Waugh — 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.
Blue — The FCI Loretto correctional officer, widely considered the most unpopular in the prison, who covered his own nameplate with masking tape so released prisoners could not find him — and who told a colleague of John Kiriakou's that he would never touch the CIA man because of the press attention.
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 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.
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 Trout — Washington defense attorney, Plato Cacheris's partner at Trout Cacheris, and one of the eleven lawyers who represented John Kiriakou: the "elegant southern gentleman" who told him, "If you were my own brother, I would beg you to take this deal."
Bowe Bergdahl — The American soldier who walked off his base in Afghanistan, was captured by the Haqqani network and handed to the Taliban, and was repatriated in a prisoner trade — a man John Kiriakou says was treated as a traitor although he was not one.
Brad Birkenfeld — The UBS banking whistleblower, who was prosecuted and imprisoned before winning a $104 million settlement from the Treasury Department and spending it on the legal defence of other whistleblowers. John Kiriakou uses him as the measure of the gap between financial and national-security whistleblowing, and names him among the visitors whose devices he believes were copied at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
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 Kelley — 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 Fein — John Kiriakou's longtime attorney and one of his closest friends; a Harvard Law-trained constitutional scholar, former Deputy Attorney General under President Reagan and former General Counsel of the Federal Communications Commission. Fein took the call from Jared Kushner's attorney that opened Kiriakou's first pardon track, sat beside him at the 2018 Trump International Hotel meeting at which Rudy Giuliani's aide solicited $2 million for a presidential pardon, and is his co-author on a long-planned book about the CIA's record of failure.
Buzzy Krongard — The executive director of the CIA — the agency's third-ranking officer — who sat on the board of Johns Hopkins Medical Center and, on learning that Abu Zubaydah had been captured wounded, had the hospital's top trauma surgeon flown to Pakistan on a CIA jet.
Caleb Maupin — American journalist and Marxist commentator, a recurring guest on John Kiriakou's radio programme The Backstory, whom Kiriakou introduces as one of the best-informed people out there. Kiriakou endorses his analysis of automation and capitalism while noting he does not agree with all of it, and proposed putting him on air opposite a libertarian economist.
Candace Owens — The commentator whose claims about the killing of Charlie Kirk John Kiriakou has publicly declined to accept. He credits her reach and her intelligence and rejects her method, citing an earlier occasion — a conference call he says he was on — at which she claimed irrefutable proof that the Italian government had stolen the 2020 election and that its release would return Donald Trump to office.
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.
Carter Page — Trump campaign adviser against whom, per John Kiriakou, the FBI lied to the FISA court multiple times in order to obtain surveillance warrants. Kiriakou offers the episode as evidence less of a conspiracy than of an assumption — that at that level, with everything classified, officials believe the truth will simply never come out.
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.
Charles Samuels — Director of the Bureau of Prisons during Kiriakou's incarceration, and the official to whom Kiriakou publicly appealed over the heads of the Loretto staff in a letter from Loretto.
Charlie Kirk — American conservative activist, founder of the movement John Kiriakou calls the centre of MAGA's youth vote, and — in the only meeting between them — a seventeen-year-old lobbyist Kiriakou watched run a Senate press conference and concluded was going places. Kiriakou disagreed with him on roughly eighty per cent of the issues, ranked his generational political impact alongside Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy Sr., and notes that Kirk had turned against Israeli conduct in Gaza shortly before he was killed.
Christopher Hitchens — British-American journalist and author who, at John Kiriakou's telling, argued that CIA waterboarding was 'nothing … not a big deal,' underwent a filmed waterboarding in 2008, tapped out after roughly seventeen seconds, and suffered panic attacks thereafter. Kiriakou knew him and corresponded with him — the experiment happened because Hitchens thought Kiriakou was exaggerating — and remained an admirer of the writer and an opponent of his politics on Iraq.
Chuck Grassley — The senior senator from Iowa, and in John Kiriakou's assessment the one member of Congress who has taken whistleblower protection seriously as a legislative project — a count he has variously put at one finger, at two names, and at four out of 535. Grassley wrote the whistleblower protection statutes, speaks every year at the National Whistleblower Day luncheon, and is the name Kiriakou gives prospective whistleblowers as the single friendly ear on Capitol Hill. Kiriakou's personal verdict is colder — Grassley, he has said, never did anything for him.
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.
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.
Clive Stafford Smith — The British human rights lawyer who represents Aafia Siddiqui, described by John Kiriakou as a man who has never charged a client a dollar in his life, lives on donations, holds an OBE for his human rights work, and represented sixty-six Guantanamo detainees — securing the release of every one of them.
Clyde Hall — The imprisoned Ohio congressman John Kiriakou says served at his prison a few years before him, whose remark on release — that he had made some of the best friends of his life inside — Kiriakou thought insane at the time and came to understand after his own sentence.
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.
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.'
Colonel Khaled — The ISI chief in Lahore who worked alongside John Kiriakou through the Abu Zubaydah operation — a man who had never wanted to be a soldier, who spent their first meeting drawing Kiriakou's portrait instead of taking notes, and who explained the spliced telephone wires that nearly derailed the hunt.
Condoleezza Rice — U.S. National Security Advisor on 9/11; John Kiriakou had a meeting booked with her that morning, watched her tell George Tenet to "take one for the team" rather than correct the record on Abu Zubaydah, and offers her failure to act on the CIA's warnings as his alternative to any theory that the attacks were allowed to happen.
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."
Cook — The elderly Kentucky prisoner who worked with John Kiriakou in the FCI Loretto chapel, finished a 20-year child pornography sentence, and was back inside within four months facing 60 more — the case Kiriakou uses to answer critics of civil confinement.
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 Duggan — The former US Marine pilot and naturalised Australian citizen held in Australian custody for three years, uncharged in Australia, while the United States sought his extradition over flight training given in China years earlier. John Kiriakou submitted an affidavit in the case on the effects of solitary confinement, has spoken to both his Australian and American legal teams, and argues the selective prosecution "just stinks of politics" — and that extradition would end the case: "if he is extradited to the US, he's lost."
Daniel Ortega — The president of Nicaragua, and the case John Kiriakou contrasts with Cuba: where he read the 2021 Cuban protests as a test run, he said Nicaragua's circumstances — a social security shortfall, a rise in the price of bread, and eight opposition party leaders arrested and imprisoned before an election — amounted to grounds for a real uprising.
Daniel Pearl — The Wall Street Journal correspondent murdered in Pakistan in 2002, whom John Kiriakou met at the American embassy in Islamabad on the day he disappeared and tried to talk out of the meeting — and whose killing was later confessed to twice, by two different men.
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.
Dave Phillips — The FCI Loretto prisoner who claimed to have been a CIA operations officer and whom John Kiriakou exposed as a fake by testing him on agency vocabulary — a possessive, risk-taking companion who planted shanks on a pedophile, was caught, and was shipped to another prison.
David Boies — The American litigator John Kiriakou has appeared alongside on Piers Morgan's programme, and whose observation about Alan Dershowitz — that he was not merely Epstein's attorney but his publicist — Kiriakou treats as the key distinction in the case.
David Hicks — Australian national captured in Afghanistan in late 2001 and held at Guantanamo, whose case John Kiriakou uses as the measure of what the Australian government can achieve for one of its citizens when it decides to act — and therefore as the indictment of its slowness over Julian Assange.
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
Deuce Martinez — The former CIA analyst whose business card was the basis of two of the three Espionage Act charges brought against John Kiriakou. Kiriakou scanned and emailed the card — which showed Martinez had gone to work for Mitchell and Jessen, the firm of the torture programme's architects — to a New York Times reporter and later to an ABC News reporter. The judge threw the espionage counts out.
Dewey Clarridge — The CIA operations officer John Kiriakou calls a legendary figure and a giant of the 1980s — prosecuted over Iran-Contra, and the man who said publicly that Saudi Arabia already had nuclear weapons. Kiriakou believes him, holds that the Saudis financed the Pakistani bomb and were repaid in access to it, and believes Clarridge was also involved in the movement of cocaine into the United States.
Dianne Feinstein — Longtime Democratic U.S. senator from California and chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Per John Kiriakou, one of the greatest disappointments on Capitol Hill — an unusually friendly chairwoman who exercised no real oversight, good on torture and a cheerleader for the CIA on everything else. She co-authored the 2015 McCain-Feinstein Amendment that reiterated the federal ban on torture, and she blocked Gina Haspel's promotion in 2013 before publicly warming to her in 2018.
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 — The White House counterterrorism chief John Kiriakou describes as the most highly respected non-ideological counterterrorism professional in government — demoted by the incoming Bush administration, ignored when he warned Condoleezza Rice that a terrible attack was coming, and, on Kiriakou's account, lied to by CIA director George Tenet about al-Qaeda operatives already inside the United States.
Dimitris Koufodinas — The primary assassin of Revolutionary Organization 17 November, known as the Black Hand because everything he touched died — the one member who briefly escaped the collapse of the group, and who was found on a nudist beach on a Greek island.
Dmitry Polyakov — GRU colonel run as a CIA agent by Sandy Grimes, and one of the assets burned by Aldrich Ames. Per John Kiriakou, Polyakov's loss is why Grimes took Ames's treachery personally — the analyst who eventually broke the case had handled one of the men it killed.
Donald Rumsfeld — U.S. Secretary of Defense during the post-9/11 torture program and, per John Kiriakou, joined at the hip with Dick Cheney in pushing the Iraq war from inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Kiriakou recounts Rumsfeld dismissing sleep deprivation as a real technique by pointing to his own standup desk, and names him among the war criminals who would be prosecuted in any other country.
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.
Dr Oz and the Armenian hospices — John Kiriakou's reaction to a television segment by Mehmet Oz alleging fraud by Armenian-run hospices in Los Angeles — that a man he identifies as a veteran of the Turkish special forces zeroing in on Armenians in California is not a coincidence, and that each of the administration's appointees appears to arrive with a racial scandal of their own.
E. Jean Carroll — The plaintiff whose persistence John Kiriakou singled out for deep respect — she kept suing after the political tide turned against her, and won an award he put at eighty-three or eighty-five million dollars on a day when Donald Trump won almost everything else in the federal courts.
Ed Martin and the pardon file — The US pardon attorney whose office John Kiriakou directed supporters to write to, and the message a mutual friend brought back from him: that he was the third person that day to call about Kiriakou, that Kiriakou should relax, and that his file was literally on Martin's desk. Kiriakou's advice to letter-writers was to send physical mail rather than email.
Ed Schultz — American broadcaster, a friend of John Kiriakou's and later his colleague at RT, whom Kiriakou cites twice over: as a man forbidden by MSNBC to discuss Bernie Sanders during a primary, and as a dead man still being labelled a Russian government mouthpiece four years after his death.
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.
Elliott Abrams — The Reagan-era assistant secretary of state whose 2023 appointment to a Biden administration advisory board John Kiriakou treated as proof that neoliberal and neoconservative foreign policy are the same policy with interchangeable players — a man who pleaded guilty over Iran-Contra, was pardoned, helped sell the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction case, and then served Donald Trump on Iran and Venezuela.
Elon Musk — Kiriakou met Musk by chance at a Washington hotel bar in 2009, when he was worth $1 billion and talking about Tesla, SpaceX and colonizing Mars.
Eric Holder — Attorney General of the United States under Barack Obama, and the head of the Justice Department that reopened and then brought the 2012 prosecution of John Kiriakou. In Kiriakou's account Holder personally doubted that the espionage charge was sound, told John Brennan so in writing, and signed off on it anyway.
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.
Fidel Castro — The Cuban leader John Kiriakou uses as his standing example of a relationship the United States could have had and chose not to — a rebel who liked America and had pitched in its minor leagues, written off because Washington had already committed itself to Batista. Castro also recurs across Kiriakou's account of the CIA as the agency's most-attempted assassination target, as the man who never cashed the rent cheques for Guantánamo, and as the figure American policy is still fighting years after his death.
Frances Haugen — The Facebook employee John Kiriakou refuses to call a whistleblower — arguing that against the legal definition, bringing to light waste, fraud, abuse, illegality or threats to public health or safety, she qualifies as a corporate spokesperson whose motive was to improve the company's bottom line, not to expose wrongdoing.
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.
Frank Russo — The former auditor of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, who shared a bunk with John Kiriakou at FCI Loretto — a corruption defendant who cooperated against Jimmy Dimora, was marked in prison as a rat, and whom Kiriakou describes as a sweetheart with a hilarious sense of humour who won everybody over anyway.
Frank Serpico — The New York police officer John Kiriakou calls one of the giants of the twentieth century and ranks with Daniel Ellsberg among its greatest whistleblowers — a man shot in the face whose police colleagues did not call an ambulance, and whom Kiriakou counts as a friend.
Frank Snepp — The CIA analyst who wrote Decent Interval, and whom John Kiriakou calls a giant — one of the great analysts of his generation, practically the first to say publicly that the United States was losing in Vietnam and committing atrocities there, who paid for it with his career and spent most of the rest of his life fighting the agency's publications review board.
Gary Johnson — The former Republican governor of New Mexico and Libertarian nominee for president who wrote to John Kiriakou in prison, wrote separately to Attorney General Eric Holder asking that he be released — a letter Kiriakou learned of only later through a Freedom of Information Act request — and telephoned him within days of his coming home.
Gary Schroen — The senior CIA officer whom John Kiriakou describes as legendary and who, with a small team of agency special operations officers, was the first CIA group into Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks — going in, Kiriakou says, on something like September 12, and later writing a book about it called First In.
Gavin Newsom — The California governor John Kiriakou described in 2023 as the consummate Democratic Party insider waiting his turn — a Pelosi relative who married into the Brown family, doing everything the Biden operation asked of him, including a pointless surrogate trip to Idaho, on the calculation that Joe Biden would not reach the nominating convention.
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; as a young Lebanese medical student he was the 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 — a connection John Kiriakou carried into the Oval Office that day.
George H.W. Bush — The 41st president — and the one John Kiriakou briefed a number of times, finding him "far more worldly" than the others, as befits a former CIA director. Kiriakou credits him with throwing away his presidency by keeping his word and stopping short of Baghdad, faults the ceasefire's helicopter loophole that let Saddam slaughter the Shia, calls him the last president to give the Arabs a fair shake — cutting off loan guarantees until Israel stopped building settlements — and traces the second Iraq war's personal edge to Saddam's 1993 attempt to assassinate him.
George McGovern — The 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, whose landslide defeat John Kiriakou identifies as the pretext for creating superdelegates. As a George Washington University sophomore in 1983, Kiriakou wrote to McGovern offering the campus theater for a campaign launch; McGovern telephoned him personally, announced his 1984 candidacy there, and afterwards took him home for tuna sandwiches made by his wife.
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.
George W. Bush — 43rd President of the United States. In John Kiriakou's telling, Bush signed the August 1, 2002 executive order that authorized the CIA torture program, spent years telling the public "we don't torture," and — days after Kiriakou's 2007 ABC interview — blamed torture on "a rogue CIA officer" while walking from the White House South Portico to Marine One, a moment Kiriakou instantly read as the White House preparing to pin the program on him. Bush also ordered the FBI removed from Abu Zubaydah's black site, flew the bin Laden family out of the country after 9/11, and loosened the assassination ban of Executive Order 12333.
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.
Greta Zimmer Friedman — The Austrian-born dental assistant John Kiriakou found listed on Find a Grave as a "pop culture icon" — the woman a sailor grabbed and kissed in Times Square on V-J Day 1945, misidentified for years as a nurse, buried at Arlington, and whose story Kiriakou tells as the reason he writes cemetery books.
Gul Rahman — Prisoner who froze to death in a CIA cold cell at the Salt Pit black site in Afghanistan; the only death in the torture programme the agency acknowledges, and the third claim in the civil suit brought against James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. John Kiriakou says nobody has ever been brought to justice for it.
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.
Hamid Karzai — The president installed in Afghanistan after the American invasion, whom John Kiriakou uses as the standing illustration of what occupation actually buys: after twenty years and more than a trillion dollars, Karzai was 'little more than the mayor of Kabul' — and did not control all of Kabul either. The line began as a joke among Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, and Kiriakou used it to Senator John Kerry's face ten years into the war.
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.
Heather Kiriakou — John Kiriakou's wife, a senior CIA analyst who — in his account — was one of the best analysts in the entire intelligence community and who lost her job at the agency for no reason other than being married to him. She sat off camera at his December 2007 ABC News interview and told him afterwards that he had said nothing classified.
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.
Henry Kissinger — The former secretary of state John Kiriakou calls the biggest living war criminal — "the butcher of Cyprus, the butcher of Chile" — and blames, via the declassified record, for keeping the Greek junta in power. Kiriakou met him once as a new CIA officer, jokes that your natural impulse on meeting him "should be to become involuntarily violent," and marvels that both parties treat him as a foreign policy god. Yet he concedes the dark craftsman his due: Kissinger had goals, realpolitik was real, and it was Kissinger who got Nixon to China.
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.
Hillary in a Kamala suit — John Kiriakou's assessment of the incoming Biden administration three weeks after the 2020 election: Biden as Obama 2.0, Kamala Harris as "Hillary in a Kamala suit", and a career prosecutor whose drug sentencings he says ruined thousands of lives.
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.
H. R. McMaster — National Security Adviser during the May 2017 controversy over Donald Trump's disclosure of intelligence to Russian officials, whose public defence — that the president had not been briefed on the source of the information — John Kiriakou treated as a fork in which either answer reflects badly on McMaster himself.
Hugh Francis Redmond — The first CIA officer to die in the line of duty, per John Kiriakou — a Special Activities Division officer sent to Shanghai in 1946 under cover as an ice cream machine salesman, arrested by the Chinese communists in 1951, held and tortured for nineteen years, and declared a suicide by Beijing in 1970. The CIA denied he had ever worked for it until his name was declassified and added to the Wall of Honor.
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.
"I only wanted to kill Jews" — In the hospital room at a Pakistani military base, after telling the wounded Abu Zubaydah that fifty thousand people had been in the towers and that he was not the victim, John Kiriakou says the prisoner answered that he had only wanted to kill Jews and had been overruled.
Ian Henderson — The British colonial police officer who ran Bahrain's intelligence service during John Kiriakou's posting there — a man Kiriakou says even the heir presumptive to the throne was afraid to name aloud, and whom Kiriakou, seated at the crown prince's table at a dinner for George H. W. Bush, mistook for a corpse.
Ibrahim Traoré — John Kiriakou's assessment of the military ruler of Burkina Faso — a young officer who took power promising a return to democracy, and who in Kiriakou's account has grown increasingly irrational, criminalising homosexuality, abolishing the electoral commission and moving to expel foreigners.
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. Kiriakou has also sat at her table — in January 2026 he was one of about twenty guests at a dinner where Omar described the federal operation in Minneapolis and the budget manoeuvre that funded every part of the government except Homeland Security.
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.
The Italians at Loretto — The mafia contingent at FCI Loretto — men with last names like Gambino, Bonanno, Lucchese, Genovese, DeCavalcante — who adopted John Kiriakou in his second year, largely because he hated the FBI as much as they did. The cast included the boss of the Gambino family (in on a dozen-plus murder counts, the man who replaced John Gotti), Pete the Bonanno captain across the hall who asked why he sat "with those Nazi retards," and a crooked guard on the payroll delivering pork loin and fresh mozzarella. When the FBI later came to Kiriakou's door asking him to inform on Pete, his answer was "get off my property."
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.
J. Edgar Hoover — The FBI's founding director — 48 years in the chair — whose opposition nearly strangled the CIA at birth. Per John Kiriakou, Truman lifted Hoover's objection to the National Security Act of 1947 by disingenuously assuring him the CIA would be a division of the FBI; the lie seeded the two agencies' permanent mutual hatred. Kiriakou also credits Hoover with perfecting the annual ritual the CIA later copied — scaring Congress witless and demanding budget increases — and with controlling Hollywood's FBI image so tightly that no film could be made without his approval.
Jack Devine — A former CIA officer John Kiriakou worked for briefly in 2001 or 2002, and describes with real warmth as a great officer and a true believer — while flatly rejecting his insistence that the agency was never involved with cocaine. Asked to choose between Devine and a thirty-year DEA veteran who agrees with him, Kiriakou picks the DEA man.
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.
Jake Tapper — CNN anchor who drove to FCI Loretto to interview the imprisoned John Kiriakou — and who asked President Obama at a press conference why he had insisted on prosecuting a man who exposed a crime, a question Obama answered by walking away from the podium. Tapper's visit was the head of a media wave that began with a smuggled-out letter on the Huffington Post, and it became Kiriakou's protection inside; even a guard known as a psychopath left him alone rather than find CNN parked beside his car.
James Angleton — Long-serving chief of CIA counterintelligence; in John Kiriakou's account the man whose wall of files at headquarters were all dossiers on American citizens, who was best man at Kim Philby's wedding and never recovered from learning Philby was the mole, and who — per the declassified JFK files — ordered CIA officers to recruit Lee Harvey Oswald.
James Clapper — Director of National Intelligence under Obama, and in John Kiriakou's account the standing example of two arguments at once — that lying to Congress carries no consequence at the top of the intelligence community, and that career military officers make poor intelligence chiefs because they cannot tell a president no.
James Comey — Former FBI director indicted under the second Trump administration, whose prosecution John Kiriakou reads as a search for charges to fit a man rather than evidence of a crime — and which he expects to collapse, unlike the parallel case against John Brennan.
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.
James Morris — A close friend of John Kiriakou's who served seventeen years of a twenty-year sentence for a crime committed at sixteen, found on release that a violent felony conviction closed off employment, made his own way to Turkey and across the border into Syria, spent two years fighting alongside the Kurds against ISIS, and later took his own life.
James Risen — The New York Times reporter whose refusal to testify in the Jeffrey Sterling prosecution — through the Fourth Circuit, the Supreme Court and a Justice Department climbdown — John Kiriakou treats as the precedent that a later administration would want to overturn by making an example of a journalist.
James Woolsey — Director of Central Intelligence for twenty-three months at the start of the Clinton administration, forced out over his refusal to discipline anyone after the exposure of Aldrich Ames, and later chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton; John Kiriakou notes that his family attributed four years of illness before his death to Havana syndrome.
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.
Jared Kushner — Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser during the first Trump administration, and the first person inside the White House to open a channel on John Kiriakou's pardon. After Trump saw Kiriakou on Tucker Carlson's show, Kushner's attorney called Kiriakou's attorney Bruce Fein; the meeting that followed produced a request for a one-page paper — three-quarters of it Kiriakou's story, the last quarter an argument for how pardoning him would help Trump get re-elected — after which Kiriakou never heard back.
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.
Jason Miyares — The Cuban-born Republican attorney general of Virginia whom John Kiriakou expected to be a right-wing disaster and found instead to be excellent — a judgement he says is hard for him to make about a conservative Republican, and which he repeated on the night Miyares was unceremoniously thrown out of office.
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.'
JD Vance — Vice president and 2028 Republican front-runner, whose Joe Rogan interview admitting the administration "mishandled the Epstein files" John Kiriakou reads not as candour but as an authorised manoeuvre — and whose passing remark that any documents tying Epstein to intelligence "wouldn't exist in 2026" Kiriakou treats as a matter-of-fact accusation that the CIA destroyed evidence.
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.'
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.
Jennifer Matthews — CIA analyst who was made chief of base at Khost, Afghanistan without operational or security training in order to complete the tour requirement for promotion, and who was killed there with six other officers by a Jordanian double agent she had gone outside the fortified perimeter to greet with a birthday cake.
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.
Jeremy Hammond — The hacker held in contempt for refusing to testify against Julian Assange before a grand jury. John Kiriakou's point about his case is administrative rather than constitutional: Hammond was pulled out of the Bureau of Prisons drug and alcohol programme two months short of completing it, forfeiting the eighteen months it would have taken off his sentence — a penalty that applied whether or not he ever agreed to testify.
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."
Jesse Jackson — American civil rights leader and two-time presidential candidate whose hospitalisation in November 2025 John Kiriakou discussed at length — explaining progressive supranuclear palsy, the condition Jackson was diagnosed with two years after Parkinson's, from his own family's experience of the same disease, and giving a poor prognosis.
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 Bamford — The author John Kiriakou credits with having written the definitive book on the NSA and with first making Americans aware of the surveillance state. Kiriakou highlights Bamford's 2023 book Spy Fail for a claim he says should have been front-page news and was not: that the FBI lost ten of its Chinese sources because Peter Strzok's counterintelligence unit had a Chinese mole inside it.
Jim Jordan — Republican congressman from Ohio and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. John Kiriakou describes a genuinely divided view of him: one of only four members of Congress he names as a friend of whistleblowers, and simultaneously the chairman whose Weaponization subcommittee he says is a partisan counterfeit of the Church Committee — with the whole question settled against Jordan by the Ohio State wrestlers who told him their team doctor was abusing them.
Jim Moran — Twelve-term Democratic congressman from Northern Virginia and John Kiriakou's own representative, who took the floor of the House to call for his release and a presidential pardon, and wrote twice to the director of the Bureau of Prisons asking that his constituent receive halfway-house time. In Kiriakou's account he was one of only a handful of elected officials willing to help at all.
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.
Jimmy Dimora — The Cuyahoga County official convicted in the corruption case that also sent John Kiriakou's FCI Loretto bunkmate Frank Russo to prison — the man Russo testified against, and who in Kiriakou's account received a draconian sentence and will die in prison.
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 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.
Joe Rogan — The podcast host whose show John Kiriakou finally sat for in October 2025 — an experience that began with signing a non-disclosure agreement and ended with his verdict that Rogan is "a nice guy, very down to earth, very normal." The first thing Rogan asked, walking into the studio ten minutes late: "Hey, do you know my friend Mike Baker?" Kiriakou defends Rogan as unfairly characterized as a right-winger, and had long cited the show as the venue where Zuckerberg admitted Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story at the FBI's behest.
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, wrote a well-regarded novel that sold poorly, and created the television series The Americans — which Kiriakou calls the best intelligence show ever made and one hundred per cent true to life, and every script of which the CIA redacted.
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. Per John Kiriakou, one of the most dangerous men in America and the real driver — with Elliott Abrams — of the 2019 pressure campaign against Venezuela; the signature at the National Security Council through which a covert action finding passes on its way to the president. Kiriakou predicted his 2019 departure from the Trump administration on the basis of White House chatter and Trump's premium on loyalty.
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 Durham — United States attorney for Connecticut appointed to investigate the origins of the Russia inquiry. Speaking in December 2019, John Kiriakou described Durham as having obtained John Brennan's call logs, his emails from his time as CIA director, and the contemporaneous notes Brennan took in meetings with other agency heads — and read Durham's own insistence that this was a criminal investigation rather than an inquiry as pointing at process crimes: false statements and perjury.
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 Larson — The twenty-eight-year congressman from Connecticut's first district whose primary defeat John Kiriakou reads as a verdict on both the Democratic Party's campaign theory and the age of its incumbents.
John le Carré — British novelist and former MI6 officer, the subject of a full episode of John Kiriakou's Dead Drop podcast. Kiriakou's argument is that le Carré is the only spy novelist to have changed the business of spying itself — supplying its working vocabulary, from 'Joes' and 'lamplighters' to 'honey trap', and shaping how officers understood their own world.
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 supported as a needed disruptor for the agency — "a good guy, expert in what he does," though "not a visionary thinker" and, on Kiriakou's later assessment, a neocon who has outmanoeuvred Tulsi Gabbard for primacy over U.S. intelligence. Ratcliffe told the White House the CIA had no objection to pardoning Kiriakou.
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 at the start of the prisoner uprising that killed CIA officer Mike Spann. In John Kiriakou's account his case matters less for what Lindh did than for what was done around him — the false claim that he had been read his rights, the destruction of the career of the Justice Department lawyer who said so, and his place on the docket of the one judge who reserves national-security cases for herself.
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.
Jon Ossoff — United States senator from Georgia, whom John Kiriakou places among the rare honest figures on Capitol Hill and grades at the top of his case-officer rankings. Kiriakou also notes a family connection to the wartime liberation of Greece.
Jon Stewart — American broadcaster, on whom John Kiriakou publicly accepted a correction from a viewer, and about whom he tells a single unflattering story from their one meeting.
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.
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 the principal example of the loyalty question raised by American elected officials who have served the Israeli state — a disqualification Kiriakou states in absolute terms, and one he judges to have ended Shapiro's national prospects.
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.
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.
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. Kiriakou, a lifelong progressive, says her pursuit of Dick Cheney's endorsement is what decided him against voting for her.
Karl Rove — U.S. political strategist; manager of George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns; in 2008 he and John Kiriakou were hired by John Rendon to rehabilitate the reputation of an Indonesian general banned from the United States on human-rights grounds — a job Kiriakou says produced four unpublishable op-eds and nothing else.
Kathryn Ruemmler — 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.
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.
Ken Schaefer — The FCI Loretto prisoner who told others he was inside for securities irregularities, was in fact convicted of transporting a child for sex, fled to Israel on bail, and — after John Kiriakou exposed and confronted him — offered money to prisoners to have Kiriakou attacked.
Kevin Shipp — Former CIA officer and whistleblower whose case John Kiriakou read about in the Washington Post and who, Kiriakou says, believed he was entirely alone until Kiriakou reached out to tell him he was not — an episode Kiriakou uses to illustrate the isolation that follows a national security disclosure.
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 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.'
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 — recruited in college and directed to join the service — 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. Kiriakou ranks the Cambridge ring as damage at historic levels, above any modern comparison.
Kimberly Guilfoyle in Athens — John Kiriakou's assessment of Kimberly Guilfoyle's appointment as American ambassador to Greece — that she got it because Donald Trump Jr. wanted her out of the way, a manoeuvre he compares to Saddam Hussein's habit of exiling successful generals as ambassadors — and his reluctant conclusion that Greece could have done worse.
King Abdullah II of Jordan — The Jordanian monarch whom John Kiriakou rates as knowing more about the Middle East than anyone else who leads or studies it, and as almost never wrong across twenty-five years of foreign-policy predictions. Kiriakou recounts the deathbed succession that made him king against his own expectations, and his refusal after October 7 to accept Palestinian refugees on the grounds that doing so would deliver Israel the ethnic cleansing it wanted.
Kiriakou and Cenk Uygur — A grievance John Kiriakou carried for a decade — that Cenk Uygur had spent thirty minutes attacking him over his first letter from prison — resolved live on air in July 2026 when Uygur produced his archive, found no such segment, and both men concluded it had been mistaken identity.
Kiriakou's Cypriot ancestry — The DNA result showing John Kiriakou to be 24 per cent Cypriot — his largest single ancestry — which corrected a family belief that the line came from Crete and coincided with an invitation to address a Cypriot diaspora conference.
Origin of the Kiriakou name — The Kiriakou surname originates in a clerical error at a Rhodes courthouse, where John Kiriakou's great-great-grandfather, arrested for stealing a potato while starving, gave a patronymic that was written down as his family name and never corrected.
Kiriakou's father and grandfather — The two men John Kiriakou names as the greatest influences on his life: a grandfather with a third-grade education who pushed his children through doctorates and handed his grandson an 11th-century gold coin dug from a Greek garden, and a father, an elementary school principal, who was twice passed over for promotion because he refused to pay the bribe the school board demanded. Kiriakou says that refusal is what made him a whistleblower.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis — The Greek prime minister John Kiriakou names when asked which world leader he would put in Donald Trump's place — a choice he qualifies by admitting he did not vote for the man the first time and has since been pleasantly surprised.
Larry Devlin — CIA officer and former chief of station in the Congo, whose memoir Chief of Station, Congo was published on his instruction the day after he died — never submitted to the agency's Publications Review Board. John Kiriakou cites it as an act of nerve he admits he does not have.
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.
Laura Loomer — The American activist who publicly called John Kiriakou a Russian spy, a Russian asset and a common criminal. Kiriakou consulted a lawyer as he had over an earlier attack, was advised that she carried too little weight to be worth suing, and let it go; he reads her later reversal on Russia and Ukraine as the calculation of someone who has accepted she will never be given a government job.
Lawrence Wilkerson — Retired Army colonel, chief of staff and closest friend to Secretary of State Colin Powell; John Kiriakou counts him among the most consequential military whistleblowers, cites his count of 108 deaths in military custody, and says Wilkerson confirmed on air that Powell's UN case for the Iraq war was knowingly "sold."
Lenín Moreno — President of Ecuador during the final year of Julian Assange's asylum in the country's London embassy. John Kiriakou, speaking four days before Assange's removal, called Moreno a two-faced traitor who was trading Assange for American money, tariffs and debt relief, and dismissed the INA Papers accusations against Assange as factually untrue.
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.
Leonard Peltier — The American Indian Movement prisoner John Kiriakou names when asked which cases deserve attention alongside Assange's — an old and ailing man whom he calls factually innocent, and whose continued imprisonment he offers as evidence that the system's incentives run only one way.
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.
Liam O'Grady — The Eastern District of Virginia judge who sentenced Daniel Hale, and who in John Kiriakou's account surprised the courtroom twice: with a sentence of 45 months rather than the far longer term expected, and with a recommendation that Hale serve it in a low-security prison where he could be treated for depression and addiction. The Bureau of Prisons ignored the recommendation and sent him to the communications management unit at Marion instead.
Lindsey Graham — Republican senator from South Carolina who died in July 2026, and John Kiriakou's standing shorthand for the permanent war caucus — a "show horse" rather than a workhorse, a "chameleon" who "never saw a war that he didn't want to jump into with both feet," and, on posthumously released documentary footage, a man offering the US Air Force to bomb a country America was not at war with.
Correctional officers at FCI Loretto — Kiriakou's portraits of the staff at FCI Loretto — including two officers who tried to trick him into a fight, a lieutenant forced out of several prisons for harassment, and an officer whose abuse of prisoners he successfully reported.
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."
Louise Mensch — The former British parliamentarian who attacked John Kiriakou on social media, prompting the only defamation action he describes having threatened. On his lawyer's advice he demanded a retraction; Mensch retracted in full and kept a pinned apology on her account for six months.
Luis Elizondo — Why John Kiriakou never booked the best-known public advocate for unidentified aerial phenomena on his RT programme: viewers kept insisting Elizondo was an expert, so Kiriakou researched him and found chiefly Elizondo saying he was an expert. He says he does not know what the man is an expert on, and that it was not a fit for the show.
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.
Macron and the airplane steps — Asked what he thought was behind the French president's bruised appearance at Davos, John Kiriakou gave the blunt answer — "honestly, I think she hits him" — and dated his own change of mind to the footage at the top of the airplane steps.
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 and Iran policy — John Kiriakou's answer to who was actually driving American policy toward Iran in 2026: with the Vice President, the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs all reported as opposed, and with Marco Rubio holding both the State Department and the National Security Adviser's job, the policy was Rubio's.
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.
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.
María Corina Machado — The Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate whom John Kiriakou rates no higher than Juan Guaidó: a figure in a permanently divided right-wing opposition who commands no armies and no troops. He reads the prize itself as part of the propaganda campaign against Maduro, and expects that if Maduro leaves the next leader of Venezuela will be a senior military officer rather than a civilian politician.
Marjorie Taylor Greene — American congresswoman whom John Kiriakou, despite deep political disagreement, has repeatedly credited for breaking with her party on the Epstein files, on military aid to Israel, and on Gaza. He describes her as courageous for pressing Donald Trump to release the files unredacted, and says the pressure ultimately forced her out of Washington.
Mark Lanzalotti — The prisoner John Kiriakou describes as his closest friend at FCI Loretto and one of the finest human beings he has known — a first-time non-violent drug defendant sentenced to triple life without parole for refusing to inform, the prison's foremost cook and bookie, and the man whose release Kiriakou secured by writing his Second Chance Act petition.
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 MacGann — The Uber whistleblower whose case John Kiriakou presented on his own programme: a 52-year-old Irishman who ran the company's lobbying across Europe, the Middle East and Africa from 2014 to 2016, and who later handed 124,000 pages of internal documents covering 2013 to 2017 to the Guardian. Kiriakou's account turns on one point — that the opportunity Uber marketed to low-income drivers was never what it claimed, and that the company's leadership knew it from the beginning.
Mark McDougall — U.S. criminal defense attorney; chairman of the white-collar defense practice at Akin Gump Strauss and a law professor at Georgetown, who joined John Kiriakou's defense team pro bono in the 2012–2013 prosecution. Two separate Washington lawyers independently warned Kiriakou on the same day that McDougall was "the meanest man in Washington"; Kiriakou says he was never anything but kind to him, liked him best of the eleven attorneys on the case, and credits the line that persuaded him to take the final plea — "you think this is about justice, and it's not about justice; it's about mitigating damage."
Mark Polymeropoulos — The CIA officer John Kiriakou describes as a friend who was in his first tour when Aldrich Ames blew his identity, was brought in from the cold, and later became station chief in Moscow — an appointment Kiriakou characterises as a deliberate thumb in the Russians' eye: the officer their spy had burned, put in charge of operations against them.
Mark Warner — Vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and former governor of Virginia. John Kiriakou reports being told, by a congressman who had campaigned for his release, that Warner had said in a room he should be hanging from a tree; he counts Warner among the Democrats who switched at the last minute to confirm Gina Haspel, and cites him as evidence that congressional oversight of the CIA is a joke — and then, asked to grade him, puts him at the top of the scale anyway.
Marlon Beard — The career drug dealer who shared a cell with John Kiriakou at FCI Loretto and told him to keep writing when shakedowns over the Letters from Loretto were being used to provoke the other prisoners against him — advice Kiriakou credits with making him double down.
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.
Martin Luther King Jr. — The civil rights leader whose Letter from Birmingham Jail John Kiriakou explicitly honored in naming his own Letters from Loretto, and whose example — with Mandela and Gandhi — anchored Kiriakou's decision to forgive his prosecutors: "I only lost two years of my life, not 35." Kiriakou's parents marched for civil rights with King; he quotes King's line about preaching nonviolence while his government is the world's major purveyor of violence, and lists King's assassination among the acts attributed to the unelected security state.
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 Jane Stevens — The lawyer who represented John Kiriakou through his custody dispute — who told him to wait for Monday and go to court, was ignored, and then got the assurance from a hostile police chief that let him walk into the hearing without being arrested.
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.
Max Blumenthal — American investigative journalist and a personal friend of John Kiriakou, whom Kiriakou calls one of the most brilliant people he has ever encountered and singles out for an ability to assemble scattered fragments into a picture 'in a way that almost no one else I know is able to do.' Kiriakou also recounts Blumenthal's arrest outside the Venezuelan embassy, where he says video showed Blumenthal was the one assaulted, and counts him among the independent journalists under the same official pressure he is.
Max Miller — Republican congressman from Ohio, married to the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno. John Kiriakou treats the domestic abuse allegations against him, and his father-in-law's eventual public statement, as a scandal capable on its own of costing Republicans a Senate seat, a House seat and the Ohio governorship.
MBS and Netanyahu asked Trump to attack Iran — John Kiriakou's account that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu jointly went to Donald Trump and asked him to attack Iran — a move Kiriakou finds hard to reconcile with MBS's own years of work to improve Saudi relations with Tehran.
Medea Benjamin's broken arm — John Kiriakou's account of Egyptian authorities breaking the arm of the CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin while arresting her, as she attempted to reach the Rafah crossing to escort a food shipment into Gaza — an incident he offers as a measure of what Egyptian policing of the border looks like in practice.
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 and John Kiriakou's direct predecessor in Athens on the 17 November problem; "the real deal," in Kiriakou's phrase, until a botched surveillance operation got him expelled from Greece and forced out of the agency the same day he expected a commendation.
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 Huckabee — The United States ambassador to Israel under Donald Trump, and the subject of a public call for resignation from John Kiriakou after Huckabee received Jonathan Pollard at the American embassy. Kiriakou's assessment separates two charges: Huckabee is not a traitor but an idiot who did not think the meeting was a big deal, and a former governor of a small state who still behaves as though he can set policy without the State Department or the National Security Council.
Mike Johnson — Speaker of the House during the fight over the Epstein files, whose procedural manoeuvres John Kiriakou reads as a sustained attempt to prevent his own party from ever having to vote — first by blocking the motion in the Rules Committee, then by adjourning the House until September so that nothing at all could be voted on — and whose midterm framing of Democrats as communists Kiriakou dismisses outright.
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 Sara Jane Moore's 1975 attempt on President Ford — having interviewed Moore two weeks earlier on a threatening letter she had sent.
Mike Pompeo — CIA director and later Secretary of State under Trump. John Kiriakou read Pompeo's 2017 speech branding WikiLeaks a "hostile non-state intelligence service" as the groundwork for an Espionage Act case against Julian Assange in the Eastern District of Virginia — the "Espionage Court" where Kiriakou himself was prosecuted. Friends who briefed Pompeo told Kiriakou he was extraordinarily bright but wrong on Iran; Kiriakou's own verdict soured permanently when Pompeo named Gina Haspel deputy director, flirted publicly with reinstating torture, and called Chelsea Manning a traitor — a crime she was never convicted of.
Mike Rogers — Former Republican congressman from Michigan and repeat Senate candidate, who lost narrowly in 2024 and ran again in 2026. John Kiriakou singles out his campaign advertisement calling Abdul El-Sayed a communist Trojan horse as an insult to the intelligence of Michigan voters.
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 and, in John Kiriakou's telling, the first of his own colleagues to die in the line of duty in the war that followed; killed during the November 2001 Qala-i-Jangi prison uprising; worked ten feet from Kiriakou in the Counterterrorism Center bullpen. Kiriakou, who lives within walking distance of Arlington National Cemetery, still visits his grave.
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.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — The last Shah of Iran, whom John Kiriakou describes as an absolute monarch and dictator who ran a bloodthirsty intelligence service against his own citizens, held formal diplomatic relations with Israel, and sent Iran's oil to the United States and the United Kingdom. Restored to the throne after the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, he left the country on a ski vacation in February 1979 and never returned.
Mohammed Atef — The actual
Mohsen Rafighdoost — Iranian journalist and political figure whom John Kiriakou identifies as a co-founder of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the propaganda voice behind the audio tapes distributed in Iran before the 1979 revolution; interviewed on the PBD Podcast, he conceded that the Shah's regime held only 3,000–3,500 political prisoners rather than the 100,000 opposition figures claimed at the time and that the Shah was, in his own judgment, a better man than Ayatollah Khomeini.
Mojtaba Khamenei — The successor named as Iran's leader after the assassination of Ali Khamenei, and John Kiriakou's reading of the choice — that the only real objection is the shared surname, which exposes Iran to charges of hereditary succession, but that the appointment was an act of defiance aimed squarely at Donald Trump's declaration that he would choose Iran's next leader.
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.
Muammar Gaddafi — Libya's ruler and, in John Kiriakou's telling, the cautionary tale that teaches every proliferator never to disarm. In February 2003 the CIA's Steve Kappes secretly visited Gaddafi with an ultimatum — the U.S. was about to overthrow Saddam, and Libya would meet the same fate unless it surrendered its weapons of mass destruction. Gaddafi complied — and was later overthrown and lynched anyway, "at the insistence of the United States." A bad guy, Kiriakou stresses, but one Washington had a healthy working relationship with, who hated al-Qaeda as much as America did; flipping sides to destroy him was "a terrible policy error" that left anarchy.
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.
Naftali Bennett — The former Israeli prime minister, cited by John Kiriakou through 2026 for the position that Turkey would be the next target after Iran — a claim Kiriakou uses to identify the second obstacle, alongside Iran, to the Greater Israel project, and which by May 2026 he was stating in his own voice as an active Israeli intention rather than a Bennett prediction.
Nicholas Burns — The United States ambassador to Greece during John Kiriakou's Athens tour — an envoy Kiriakou says he has always disliked and disrespected, whose unpopularity extended to his own staff, and whom he credits with exactly one good decision: drawing the assignments for a presidential visit out of a hat.
Nick Bryant — Investigative journalist, activist and co-founder of Epstein Justice, author of The Franklin Scandal, and a repeat guest on John Kiriakou's programme, where Kiriakou describes him as knowing the Epstein case better than anybody else in America.
Nigel Farage — John Kiriakou's assessment that Nigel Farage was a fringe joke five years ago and is no less fascistic now, only accepted — and his prediction that if Farage becomes leader of the Conservative Party it will be the end of that party as a viable political force.
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.
Ola Bini — The Swedish programmer and friend of Julian Assange arrested in Ecuador in 2019 on the order of President Lenín Moreno, whose open-ended detention John Kiriakou treats as the collateral consequence of the same government's decision to hand Assange to the British.
Oliver Stone — American film director with whom John Kiriakou struck up a friendship after his release from prison. Stone optioned the rights to one chapter of Kiriakou's first book, co-developed an unmade History Channel series with him, blurbed his book on Abu Zubaydah, and was among the public figures who campaigned against the Bureau of Prisons' attempt to shut down Kiriakou's prison blog. The two disagree sharply over whether the CIA killed John F. Kennedy.
Omar al-Bayoumi — The Saudi national who housed and funded two of the 9/11 hijackers in California; John Kiriakou describes him as a Saudi intelligence officer working under a ghost job, places him at President Bush's Crawford ranch before the attacks, and says the CIA blocked the 9/11 Commission from investigating him.
Oscar Blandón — The senior Contra leader whom Gary Webb's reporting identified as running the cocaine operation that moved product from Nicaragua to Los Angeles, and one of two men named in the Dark Alliance series.
Osama bin Laden — Founder and leader of al-Qaeda and the central target of the manhunt that shaped John Kiriakou's counterterrorism career. Per Kiriakou, bin Laden came from a billionaire Saudi construction family, was never one of the CIA-funded Afghan mujahideen, overruled subordinates who wanted to attack Israel and insisted the 9/11 attacks hit the United States to crash its economy, escaped Tora Bora dressed as a woman, and spent his final years next to Pakistan's equivalent of West Point — where, Kiriakou says, you would have to be a "mental defective" not to know he was there. Kiriakou believes the United States never intended to capture him alive.
Patrick Bet-David — The podcast host whom John Kiriakou described on another programme as a hardcore Zionist and a total backer of Reza Pahlavi, and who then played the clip back to him on air. Kiriakou withdrew the characterisation on the record, one of the few occasions where he has retracted a public statement about a named individual.
Paul Wright — The former prisoner who founded the Human Rights Defense Center and co-created Prison Legal News — the longest-running publication produced by and for current and former prisoners in American history — and whose reporting John Kiriakou draws on for the finding that the Bureau of Prisons' own grievance system increases prison violence.
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 Calabrese — The senior Bonanno family member at FCI Loretto, known as Peter the Rabbit, who challenged John Kiriakou over his friendship with the cooperating witness Frank Russo and told him Russo brought dishonour to the Italians.
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 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.
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.
Phil Donahue — American talk-show host who, John Kiriakou discovered seven years after the fact, had been secretly paying his weekly newspaper column fee — $400 a week for nine years, routed through Reader Supported News — because Donahue had learned that Kiriakou came out of prison broke and did not want him sleeping in his car.
Phil Mudd — Former CIA and FBI official turned television commentator, whom John Kiriakou uses alongside John Brennan as an example of a pattern he says governs Washington: senior intelligence alumni making escalating on-air accusations against Donald Trump as a route to a network contract or a return to government.
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.
Piers Morgan — British broadcaster whose panel show became John Kiriakou's 2025 sparring ring — "the equivalent of a WWE Smackdown with Alan Dershowitz<Cite s="2026-06-27-deep-focus-report-john-kiriakou-on-iran-endless-wars-and-u-s-fo" t="9:18" />." Paired with Scott Horton against Dershowitz and former Mossad chief Moshe Yaalon, Kiriakou said on air that Israel spies on the United States and that Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli access agent, drawing a chuckle from the general and the claim that spying stopped when Pollard was caught — "General, with all due respect, that's just simply not true." Morgan's producer had to instruct the polite ex-spy not to be afraid to interrupt.
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.
Plato Kacheris — A spelling variant of the name of John Kiriakou's lead defence attorney, who appears in the auto-generated transcripts as both "Kacheris" and "Cacheris". The article on him is at Plato Cacheris.
Presidents asleep in meetings — John Kiriakou's answer to who is the highest-profile person he ever saw fall asleep in a meeting — George H. W. Bush — together with his explanation that presidents do it all the time because the demands on their time leave too few hours in the day, and his father's account of Ronald Reagan doing it constantly.
Prince Andrew — British royal, now Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, named repeatedly by John Kiriakou as one of the un-recruitable principals whose access made Jeffrey Epstein valuable to a foreign intelligence service. Kiriakou has asked why Andrew was never charged over conduct with minors, reads his alleged provision of classified Ministry of Defence documents to Epstein as evidence of espionage rather than vanity — and expects him to face no criminal consequence at all, because the statute of limitations has run.
Prince Muhammad bin Naif — Saudi prince, former head of Saudi intelligence and briefly crown prince, described by John Kiriakou as the golden boy of the royal family and the West's preferred successor. He survived an al-Qaeda assassin who detonated a bomb concealed inside his own body at an open house in Riyadh, was decorated at CIA headquarters for surviving it, and was then overthrown and placed under arrest by Muhammad bin Salman.
Qasem Soleimani — The Iranian general killed by an American drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020. John Kiriakou, speaking the following morning, called him arguably the second most important person in Iran and a potential successor to the supreme leader, relayed the Iranian comparison that killing him was worse than killing Petraeus or Mattis — 'this is like killing Pence' — and dismissed talk of de-escalation as a pipe dream.
Ralph Nader — American consumer advocate and perennial third-party presidential candidate. In January 2013 Nader co-signed a letter to the president asking for John Kiriakou to be pardoned; weeks later Kiriakou thanked him by name at his portrait unveiling as a steadfast supporter whose backing he described as humbling. Nader's 2000 independent run also anchors Kiriakou's account of how third-party candidates were shut out of the presidential debates.
Ramzi bin al-Shibh — Alleged September 11 co-conspirator, captured in Pakistan in the summer of 2002 and taken to a secret prison rather than to trial. John Kiriakou, who is often wrongly credited with his capture, cites him as the clearest demonstration of what torture cost the United States — declared clinically insane by the Pentagon's own psychiatrist as a result of CIA sleep deprivation, and therefore untriable.
Ray McGovern — Former senior CIA analyst turned antiwar dissident, and one of John Kiriakou's closest friends — "like a brother to me." Kiriakou began working at the CIA on the Monday after the Friday McGovern retired in January 1990, so the two never overlapped inside; they became comrades in the whistleblower world instead. McGovern coined the "MICIMATT" framing Kiriakou often borrows, went into Putin's office with Oliver Stone for a 40-minute meeting, and — per Kiriakou — believes 9/11 was a conspiracy, a view Kiriakou affectionately notes is far from his own.
Reality Winner — National Security Agency linguist imprisoned for sending a single classified page on Russian interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept. John Kiriakou attributes her arrest to the two reporters who received it, and to a printer-tracking countermeasure they appear not to have known about; he also treats her prosecution as an operation that served the intelligence community on three fronts at once.
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 — and who, in Kiriakou's telling, illegally destroyed most of the agency's JFK material as well. He was held in contempt of Congress and fined a nominal sum that colleagues covered by passing a hat down the corridor to his office. Because of the destruction, only about 15% of the MK-Ultra record survives — largely financial records, from which the program had to be pieced back together.
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)
Richard D. Wolff — American Marxian economist, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a recurring guest of John Kiriakou, who calls him one of his favourite people and says he feels smarter after every conversation; Wolff's appearances supply Kiriakou's audience with a class analysis of tariffs, federal debt and the periodic crashes of capitalism.
Rick Praau — Career CIA officer, chief of operations at the Counterterrorism Center and previously of the Special Activities Division, whose retirement memoir John Kiriakou reviewed critically in Covert Action Magazine. Kiriakou's objection is not to what the book contains but to what it omits — published reports that before joining the agency its author was investigated by Miami-Dade police over seven contract killings for the Medellín cartel. The surname is given here as the source transcript's auto-captions render it and may be mis-transcribed.
Ro Khanna — Democratic congressman from California, whom John Kiriakou describes as one of the very few selfless people in Congress and grades highly in his case-officer rankings.
Robert David Steele — The former intelligence officer and podcaster whose death during the COVID-19 pandemic John Kiriakou was asked to explain. Kiriakou, who had appeared on his show, calls him a sweet man who died of the disease, and offers a blunt assessment of his work: he did not believe most of the conspiracy theories he promoted, but they brought him an audience.
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 Kelley 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 family channel through which the Epstein operation, in Kiriakou's phrase, was "kept all in the family."
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."
Robert the arsonist — The Australian prisoner who became John Kiriakou's roommate at FCI Loretto — convicted of burning down a Buffalo motor vehicles office over a sales tax dispute, a pathological liar who Kiriakou concluded was a clinical sociopath, and whom he says was easy to manipulate because he was an excitement junkie.
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 and a recurring guest on his programme.
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.
Rosario Ames — Colombian cultural attaché recruited to work for the CIA, and the second wife of Aldrich Ames. Per John Kiriakou, Ames began an affair with her in Mexico in 1981 in violation of agency regulations; when he brought her and her mother to America his first marriage collapsed, and their taste for high living put him deep enough in debt that he walked into the Soviet embassy to sell it away. She was arrested alongside him at their Arlington home in 1994 and served four years of a 63-month sentence before returning to Colombia.
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.
Salman bin Hamad — The Bahraini heir presumptive who became John Kiriakou's friend during his 1994–96 posting — president of the Bahrain Center for Studies and Research and patron of the environmental association, both of which fell in Kiriakou's economic brief, and a companion on nights out at a nightclub by the naval base.
Sandy Berger — National Security Adviser under President Bill Clinton, and a recurring figure in John Kiriakou's account of the Clinton years from three directions — as the official who shut down CIA case officer Bob Baer's mid-1990s plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein and threatened him with a conspiracy charge; as the customer who commissioned the National Intelligence Estimate entitled *Iraq — Saddam's Next 12 Months*, which Kiriakou wrote; and as the man standing in the corridor in Athens when the president was left alone with his notetaker.
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.
Sara 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.
Sarah Adams — A former CIA open-source analyst and frequent television commentator on terrorist threats, whom John Kiriakou dismisses in unusually direct terms: that she never held access to classified information, that she analysed press rather than intelligence, and that she has built a living out of predicting imminent disaster.
Sarge — The FCI Loretto correctional officer John Kiriakou named in a Letter from Loretto for swearing at him and trashing his cell — conduct he later learned was not merely a Bureau of Prisons infraction but a misdemeanour crime, and one of two offences he says the letter inadvertently exposed.
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.
Savas Kalenderidis — Greek intelligence officer, national hero and personal friend of John Kiriakou's, who was involved in the operation to protect the PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan at the Greek embassy in Nairobi in 1999 — an operation that ended when Turkish and Kenyan intelligence diverted part of Öcalan's motorcade and seized him. Kiriakou flatly denies the claim that the CIA and Turkish intelligence tried to kill Kalenderidis there.
Scott Horton — American antiwar journalist and interviewer whom John Kiriakou calls one of the most brilliant people he has ever engaged with, and the man he found sitting opposite Alan Dershowitz and Danny Ayalon when both he and Horton were called in as last-minute fill-ins on a Piers Morgan panel about Jeffrey Epstein and Israeli espionage.
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.
Sergey Lavrov — Russian foreign minister, and previously Russian ambassador to the United Nations during John Kiriakou's assignment there, where the two worked the same Security Council. Kiriakou describes him as the most admired diplomat in the building — the most powerful, important and strategic ambassador there despite operating with far smaller resources than his American, British, French and Chinese counterparts, and better than most of the American diplomats Kiriakou worked for. When Lavrov was abruptly sidelined in late 2025, Kiriakou's reading was retirement rather than disgrace.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr — The scholar of Islamic philosophy under whom John Kiriakou studied Shiism as an undergraduate. Kiriakou calls him probably the most important Shia Muslim scholar in the world, notes that he is the father of Vali Nasr, and remarks that at ninety-eight he is still teaching.
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 Adelson sent his private jet to fly Jonathan Pollard from prison to Israel, paid out of his own pocket to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, and functions as Kiriakou's standing unit of measurement for what political money can buy — including in the negative, as the patron the Libertarian Party never had.
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.
Sigurdur Thordarson — The FBI's key witness against Julian Assange, described by John Kiriakou as a convicted paedophile, a convicted embezzler and a self-admitted liar — one of three facts he lists, alongside the bugging of the Ecuadorian embassy and the reported plot to kidnap or kill Assange, in asking whether judges can keep such things out of their heads.
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.
Stansfield Turner — Admiral and Director of Central Intelligence under Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981; named by John Kiriakou as one of only two CIA directors he considers good, because he tried to rein the organization in, and remembered inside the agency for the October 1977 mass firing of Directorate of Operations officers that CIA officers call the Friday Night Massacre.
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.
Stephen Saunders — British defense attaché in Athens assassinated by Revolutionary Organization 17 November in March 2000
Steven Lalas — 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.
Suzie Dawson — New Zealand activist and journalist, chief executive of Talk Liberation and the driving force behind the Panquake platform. John Kiriakou, who has known her for years and serves as the platform's brand ambassador, describes her as the most dogged person he has ever known — a characterisation he traces to her defence of Julian Assange before Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy.
The Syrian bodyguard — The 330-pound guard captured alongside Abu Zubaydah, whose gunshot wound John Kiriakou examined and found ringed by a dinner-plate powder burn — evidence that contradicted the official account and left Kiriakou with a question about Pakistani intentions he says he will never be able to answer.
Ted Rall — American editorial cartoonist and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist; co-host with John Kiriakou of the daily news-commentary podcast "Deprogram," launched in September 2025 and by late 2025 running every weekday morning.
Terry Albury — FBI special agent in Minneapolis, prosecuted under the Espionage Act after photographing the Bureau's own internal study of racism and sending it to The Intercept. The FBI identified him from security-camera footage of every computer that had opened the memo. John Kiriakou — who says the reporter who received the document gave him up, tweeted at the publication about it, and stayed in touch with Albury through his sentence — treats him as one link in a chain of Intercept sources who went to prison, and as one rung on a ladder of steadily lengthening national-security sentences.
The Ai Weiwei encounter in Berlin — John Kiriakou met the artist Ai Weiwei by pure chance on a Berlin street while dragging a suitcase to the airport after a board meeting — an encounter that led to a tour of Ai Weiwei's studio and a signed iPhone case bearing the Lego portrait the artist had made of him for an exhibition at Alcatraz.
The Ann Coulter dinner — John Kiriakou's account of an unplanned dinner in Los Angeles around 2016 at which a college friend arrived with Ann Coulter, and of finding her interesting, well-informed and lovely — from which he concludes that the public hatred she trades in is an act, and one he says she has seriously cashed in on.
The Armenian podcasters — Three naturalised Armenian-American podcasters who, independently of one another, told John Kiriakou during a week in Los Angeles that the Turks were outspending and out-lobbying Armenia in Washington — and his reply as a dual Greek citizen.
The au pair who became a Stockholm police officer — A young Swedish woman who lived with John Kiriakou and his then wife in Arlington, Virginia for a year around 2016. The daughter of Syrian Christian refugees, she went home to join the Stockholm police and, because she spoke fluent Swedish, English and Arabic, was posted to community outreach in a minority neighbourhood — a placement Kiriakou took at the time as evidence of a progressive Sweden he later concluded he had misread.
The Belgian intelligence director — The brother of John Kiriakou's oldest friend, a Belgian exchange student at his high school, who rose to run Belgium's intelligence service and become deputy prime minister — and the exchange in which Kiriakou answered the standard defence of an intelligence chief's prejudices with his own experience.
The CO who wanted the CIA — A young correctional officer at FCI Loretto once pulled John Kiriakou aside and asked in a whisper how to get into the CIA; when Kiriakou told him he was bright and did not belong there, the man explained that both his parents and his grandfather had been correctional officers and that his wife would never leave Loretto, a town of twelve hundred people.
The colleague who went to Microsoft — In 2000, John Kiriakou's supervisor left the CIA for Microsoft to do what he called "some really cool social media stuff" — a phrase that meant nothing to Kiriakou at the time, and which he later read as an early sign of the deliberate placement of intelligence officers inside technology companies.
The cousin who stopped speaking — An older first cousin told John Kiriakou after his conviction that he could no longer speak to him because Kiriakou had brought shame on the family; Kiriakou's reply was to point out that the cousin had imported drugs from Colombia, had appeared in the Washington Post as a mayor's cocaine dealer, and had fled to Greece until the statute of limitations expired.
The Crenshaw text messages — John Kiriakou's account of taking his girlfriend's phone at midnight, finding a message from Dan Crenshaw asking what she was wearing, and texting back that he was her boyfriend and Crenshaw should ask his own wife — who had a ten-month-old baby at the time. Kiriakou says the woman showed him other messages that were filthy, and that she had saved them in case she needed to use them.
The Egyptian intelligence chief's son — A coincidence John Kiriakou reported from Oxford, Ohio in November 2025: his own son's marketing professor turned out to be the son of Muhammad Farag, head of the Egyptian intelligence service some thirty-five years earlier, whom Kiriakou had met in Cairo when the professor was a boy of seven or eight — and the two families went out to dinner together.
The Emir of Bahrain's verdict — The judgement John Kiriakou says the Emir of Bahrain delivered to him at his beach house — that George H. W. Bush was the last American president to give the Arabs a fair shake — and Kiriakou's reasons for agreeing with it.
The family that spans the spectrum — John Kiriakou's Greek relations, offered as a political cross-section: his grandmother's first cousin sat on the politburo of the Communist Party of Greece, a close cousin was elected governor of the Dodecanese for the Conservatives, he has everybody in between — and all of them, to his bafflement, love the American ambassador.
The George Mason confrontation — The videotaped encounter at George Mason University in which former CIA director John Brennan poked a questioner in the chest — an incident John Kiriakou says at least a dozen friends sent him, and which showed him, for the first time in thirty-five years of knowing the man, a frightened John Brennan.
The Graham Senate succession — John Kiriakou's comment on the appointment of Lindsey Graham's sister to serve out the remainder of his Senate term, and her announcement that she would run for a full term of her own — a candidacy whose only qualification, in Kiriakou's assessment, is her relation to the late senator.
The hundred-and-fifty-foot limousine — A detail John Kiriakou recalls from his years as a congressional staffer — that Mitch McConnell lived in a townhouse four doors from the Hart Senate Office Building, roughly a hundred and fifty feet away, and took a limousine to work every morning anyway, to be booed by staff as he passed.
The Imran Khan request — John Kiriakou's account of Imran Khan's dealings with the United States — that while still prime minister Khan warned the Americans he would start blaming them for everything, drawing the reply that they were blamed for everything anyway; and that after his arrest he got word out asking for help, which produced an approach to his former wife Jemima Goldsmith and a refusal from Pakistan.
The Kiriakou children — The five children of John Kiriakou, and what they do — a bond trader, an elementary school music teacher, a college junior studying supply chain economics, a sophomore who has not yet decided, and a fourteen-year-old. None of them, to their father's declared relief, has any interest in the CIA.
The Kurd from Terre Haute — An Iraqi Kurd who reached the modified communications management unit at FCI Loretto after four years inside the CMU at Terre Haute, and who told John Kiriakou that the only way out was to keep your mouth shut for years.
"The least I could do" — Told that he had kept another whistleblower from slipping, John Kiriakou declined the credit and described the work in the plainest possible terms: getting somebody out of the house for three or four hours, or taking them to dinner, because so many people had done exactly that for him when he was at his lowest.
The Libertarian Christmas party — The party John Kiriakou attended in a townhouse in Old Town Alexandria, held at the end of January because — being Libertarians — the organisers could not get their act together in December, and at which the head of the Libertarian Party of Virginia asked him to run for governor and was refused on the spot.
The magazines that bought her freedom — John Kiriakou's account of his grandmother's imprisonment by the collaborationist government in wartime Athens, and of his grandfather buying her release from a prison guard with American magazines — after which the couple escaped to the United States.
The Mallios argument — The confrontation John Kiriakou describes with his mentor Gust Avrakotos while the two worked the 17 November task force — Kiriakou remarked in passing that the group's second victim, the Greek police chief Mallios, had been a torturer under the junta; Avrakotos slammed him against a wall; and the exchange that followed became the basis of their friendship.
The manager's ranking — John Kiriakou's answer to a viewer who asked whether he would ever appear on Joe Rogan's show alongside Mike Baker — that his new manager, who represents some very senior people, told him he is more highly sought after than Baker is, so there is no reason to legitimise him.
The open letter to Edward Snowden — The letter John Kiriakou wrote from prison in 2013 to Edward Snowden, sent privately through a shared attorney and carrying three pieces of advice — hire the best national-security lawyers available, cultivate a base of support on Capitol Hill, and never under any circumstances talk to the FBI — which went viral and reached its addressee only because Arianna Huffington published it.
The postcards for Daniel Hale — The letter-writing appeal John Kiriakou ran for Daniel Hale in May and June 2021 — naming Hale as the whistleblower most in need of help, posting his jail address publicly, and relaying from the prisoner himself the exact rules a letter had to satisfy to reach him: ten stamps a week, plain unlined white paper, black ink, and no photographs.
The professor and the Ellsberg profile — The story John Kiriakou says his CIA recruiter told him — that in 1971, as founder of the unit producing long-distance psychological profiles of foreign leaders, he was handed a file on Daniel Ellsberg, refused to profile an American citizen, and later discovered his boss had done it anyway under his name, which he testified to before the Watergate Committee.
The quarterback with a personal chef — The former New York Giants quarterback John Kiriakou says lived in the next row of cells at FCI Loretto — serving a long sentence for a Ponzi scheme, paying every prison gang $500 a month for his safety, and employing another prisoner to cook him three meals a day from food stolen out of the cafeteria.
The Rashid family — The dynasty that controlled the Arabian peninsula before the House of Saud, and John Kiriakou's account of meeting one of its descendants while stationed in Saudi Arabia — a man who told him the kingdom had once been theirs.
The restaurants in witness protection — What became of the foreign intelligence officer John Kiriakou recruited in Athens — resettled in the United States under a made-up name, given citizenship for his family and seed money to start again, and last heard of owning seven restaurants — and the resettlement package Kiriakou says the CIA offers a burned agent.
The thirty-year-old nominee — The nominee to head the Office of Special Counsel who withdrew in October 2025 after text messages surfaced in which he acknowledged a Nazi streak — and John Kiriakou's separate objection, which was that a man six years out of school has no business running an office at the Justice Department in the first place.
The translator for the Italian occupation — John Kiriakou's grandmother — the only one of three sisters sent to school, a teacher who then taught Italian soldiers to speak Greek during the occupation, a lifelong royalist on Greek politics and a Democrat in America — and the divided household from which his own account of the Greek civil war descends.
The Trump appointees to the Court — John Kiriakou's assessment that Donald Trump's Supreme Court appointees have been surprisingly good, and that the justices he regards as disasters — Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — were appointed by more moderate presidents.
The twenty-seven cousins — John Kiriakou has said Daniel Ellsberg was a hero in his family before he was six years old — because seven of his twenty-seven first cousins on his mother's side fought in Vietnam believing what they had been told, and it was Ellsberg who showed the family that all of it had been a lie.
The two officers who changed — John Kiriakou's account of two colleagues he liked as junior officers and watched become something else — one who rose to deputy director for counterterrorism at both the CIA and the FBI and whom he calls a war criminal, and one who took over the bin Laden unit and became, in his phrase, a stone cold killer.
The Walmart phone call — John Kiriakou's account, from a White House friend, that Jared Kushner personally telephoned the chief executive of Walmart to find a job for a woman whose life sentence Donald Trump had commuted, and rang back every six months to check on her.
The White House pastry chef — John Kiriakou's former next-door neighbour, a White House pastry chef who was in the building when Donald Trump came to meet Barack Obama four days after the 2016 election, and who told Kiriakou that the president-elect looked sick and looked scared.
The woman escorted from the White House — Before John Kiriakou spoke to ABC News, someone else had already blown the whistle on the CIA's secret prisons — a woman at the White House whom he respected deeply, who was escorted out of the building, stripped of her badge and told never to come back, and who has always insisted it was not her.
Thomas Dewey — New York prosecutor, governor and twice-defeated Republican presidential candidate, discussed by John Kiriakou for two reasons: the explanation he encountered for Dewey's 1948 loss to Harry Truman — that Dewey's short-cropped moustache reminded an intensely anti-fascist American public of Adolf Hitler — and Dewey's refusal, at sixty-seven, of Richard Nixon's 1969 offer to make him Chief Justice of the United States.
Thomas 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.
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 Alexandrovich — Senior Israeli cyber security official arrested in Las Vegas in August 2025 on multiple counts of child pornography after being caught in an undercover police sting targeting child sex predators, and immediately permitted to board a plane back to Israel — a case John Kiriakou uses as a live illustration of the rule that Israel does not extradite Jews.
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.
Tony Blinken — American secretary of state under Joe Biden, and a former colleague of John Kiriakou's on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose desk Kiriakou inherited. Kiriakou calls him a lovely and very smart man who was completely over his head in the job — a great intellect who belonged at a think tank rather than in the cabinet, and who owed every position of his adult life to thirty years of proximity to Biden. In Kiriakou's account the proof is that the sensitive diplomacy of the Biden years was handed instead to CIA director Bill Burns, the de facto secretary of state.
Tony Mendez — The CIA exfiltration specialist who got the American diplomats sheltering in the Canadian embassy out of revolutionary Tehran in 1979 by inventing a fake science-fiction film production — the operation dramatised in *Argo*. John Kiriakou calls him "a giant in the history of the CIA", says the same of his wife, and rates the operation among the greatest the agency has ever carried out.
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."
Truck — The convicted serial killer at FCI Loretto who sought John Kiriakou's approval, claimed to have run guns to Angolan rebels in a shrimp boat, and beat a prisoner unconscious after Kiriakou told him the man had called him a pedophile.
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.'
Vladimir Putin — President of Russia. Per John Kiriakou, Putin twice raised joining NATO — floating it to Bill Clinton and later telling Barack Obama Russia would like to explore membership — and was refused both times; Kiriakou has never believed Putin wants to conquer Ukraine or Eastern Europe, argues U.S. hostility toward Russia is driven by defense contractors and a permanent wartime economy, and notes the irony that Putin was the anti-communist the U.S. itself backed in the Yeltsin era.
Volodymyr Zelensky — Kiriakou says he was told not to discuss Zelensky's corruption publicly, and calls the Oval Office dressing-down of him set up in advance.
Walter Pincus — The Washington Post reporter who, in John Kiriakou's account of the Gary Webb affair, took the CIA's side of the cocaine story and put it on the paper's front page — wrong, and Kiriakou believes knowingly so.
Wesley Clark — Retired U.S. Army four-star general and former Clinton administration adviser; per John Kiriakou, "a very good guy", "one of the very, very few people at that level", and the public source of the account that in the weeks after 9/11 the Pentagon was working to a memo listing seven governments to be overthrown. Kiriakou treats Clark's story as corroborated by his own — on 6 May 2002 a CIA security officer told him, in the course of signing him onto the agency's most sensitive programmes, that the United States would invade Iraq the following year.
Whether anyone is still looking for Zawahiri — Asked in December 2019 why Ayman al-Zawahiri had never been found, John Kiriakou offered a speculation he was careful to label as an outsider's: that the United States might simply have stopped looking for him, because al-Qaeda had become largely irrelevant and attention had moved to ISIS.
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 had President Truman's ear and insisted the new agency be independent rather than a division of the FBI; he was among the men who sat down with visiting MI6 officers in New York in 1946–47 and sketched out a centralized intelligence service on pads of paper, and he became — in Kiriakou's telling — the first director of the CIA, over the sustained opposition of J. Edgar Hoover.
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 Proxmire — Democratic senator from Wisconsin, elected in the special election following Joseph McCarthy's death, whose monthly Golden Fleece Award targeted wasteful federal spending. John Kiriakou describes Proxmire as a recurring irritant to the CIA — which, he says, repeatedly saw its concealed budget line items exposed to ridicule because the cover stories invented to hide them looked exactly like waste.
William Webster — Director of Central Intelligence during the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and before that a federal judge and Director of the FBI; per John Kiriakou, "a lovely man … just a very kind, nice man" and "a giant in my mind" — the director Kiriakou first briefed at four in the morning, on fifteen minutes' notice, during the Kuwait task force, and who sat two seats away from him in the Oval Office on the morning of the invasion.
Winsome Earle-Sears and the machine gun — John Kiriakou's verdict on the lieutenant governor of Virginia who ran for the top job in 2025 — that she is a nut, that her earlier campaign photographs showed her smiling and holding a machine gun, and that at the gubernatorial debate she had to be repeatedly slapped down for talking over her opponent.
Yasser Arafat — Leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who appears in John Kiriakou's account at the two moments he treats as decisive for the Palestinians — backing Saddam Hussein after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which cost the Palestinian middle class its standing across the Gulf, and walking out of the last Clinton-era peace talks with a divided map of Jerusalem already on the table.
Zbigniew Brzezinski — National security adviser to Jimmy Carter, named in John Kiriakou's account of Afghanistan as an architect of the policy of luring the Soviet Union into a war there — a policy Kiriakou says literally destroyed the country and set the conditions for the Taliban.
Zohran Mamdani — John Kiriakou's assessment of the New York mayoral candidate in September 2025 — a smart young man running a very good campaign, surrounding himself with older seasoned New Yorkers rather than going in like a bull in a china shop, and gaining rather than losing ground the more the establishment attacked him.