Category: Places

116 articles in this category

A virtual state of war with Venezuela — John Kiriakou said in February 2025 that he was mystified by the choice of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, describing him as a neoconservative in the mould of George W. Bush, and predicted that on Venezuela the second Trump administration would simply continue the Biden policy — which had itself continued the first Trump policy — leaving the two countries in what he called a virtual state of war.
Abbottabad — The Pakistani garrison city where Osama bin Laden was found and killed — named for a British major who was Pakistan's first military trainer, home to the Pakistani military's leadership, and in John Kiriakou's judgement the last place bin Laden could have lived unnoticed by the Pakistani state.
Spies of Arlington National Cemetery — On the Walk With History podcast, John Kiriakou — author of Remains of the Day: A Definitive Guide to Washington D.C.'s Historic Cemeteries — toured Arlington National Cemetery and told personal and historical stories about the intelligence figures buried there, including OSS founder William Donovan, deputy CIA director Vernon Walters, codebreakers William and Elizabeth Friedman, slain station chiefs Richard Welch and William Buckley, U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, and Mike Spann, the first CIA officer killed after 9/11.
Bab al-Mandab — The strait where the Horn of Africa nearly meets the south-western tip of the Arabian Peninsula, which John Kiriakou identifies as one of the few American national interests in Yemen and as a chokepoint whose closure would push the global economy into recession.
The Bab el-Mandeb — The strait between Yemen and the Horn of Africa through which everything leaving the Suez Canal must pass — narrower than the Strait of Hormuz, in John Kiriakou's account the one genuine American national interest in Yemen, and the reason Israel has offered diplomatic recognition to Somaliland in exchange for a military base.
The Bahrain water table — The prehistoric aquifer that surfaces in Bahrain — running, in John Kiriakou's telling, from the Atlantic beneath the whole of Africa — which until the 1970s gushed out of the ground in natural springs and made the island an oasis, and which overdevelopment has since dropped some thirty-five feet.
Bahrain's force majeure — John Kiriakou's explanation of Bahrain declaring force majeure on its energy commitments during the 2026 Iran war — why it is catastrophic for Bahrain and irrelevant to the global oil market, since the kingdom produces and consumes about a hundred thousand barrels a day and sells only the output of a small offshore field gifted to it by Saudi Arabia.
Bahrain's naturalisation policy — John Kiriakou's account of how the Bahraini royal family changed the sectarian arithmetic of the country over thirty years — importing Syrians and naturalising Indian and Pakistani Sunni Muslims until a population that had been two-thirds to three-quarters Shia was closer to half and half.
Beirut — The Lebanese capital John Kiriakou confirms was a genuine espionage playground — though he dates the peak to the 1950s through the mid-1970s, when Beirut was the Paris and the banking centre of the Middle East, and when, beneath the CIA, KGB and Israeli presence, "more secretly the French ran the place." He also explains why the enormous new American embassy there is about fortification rather than a regional CIA headquarters.
Bluffdale NSA Data Center — The NSA's purpose-built facility in the Utah desert, characterized by John Kiriakou as having storage capacity for every phone call, text message, and email of every American for the next 500 years.
China's base in Djibouti — Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the abandoned French base the Djiboutians offered to the Americans and the Chinese took a share of — split down the middle by a chain-link fence, the only Chinese military installation outside China, and the centrepiece of John Kiriakou's argument that China is not an expansionist power.
Củ Chi tunnels — The 250-kilometre tunnel network dug by the Viet Cong outside Saigon, which John Kiriakou visited in 2026 and could not physically enter. He attributes the tunnels' viability to the malnutrition of the people who dug them.
The Green Line in Nicosia — The division of Nicosia between the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish-occupied north, which John Kiriakou toured in July 2026 and described as maintained through deliberate humiliation rather than any interest in settlement.
Destroying the Dome of the Rock — John Kiriakou's agreement with Tucker Carlson that a Zionist extremist plan to demolish the Dome of the Rock and build a third temple would be the event that starts the Third World War — and his additional prediction that it would also be the beginning of the end for the Israeli government and all of its support.
The Dilmun burial mounds — The ancient grave mounds standing in the Shia villages of Bahrain — ordinary ones ten or twenty feet high, royal ones fifty — which John Kiriakou took visiting friends and family to see, and which sat in the same villages the government was raiding at night during the uprising.
Djibouti — The small Horn of Africa state a few miles across the water from Yemen that hosts Camp Lemonnier — the American drone base for the Yemen and Somalia wars, inherited from the departing French, and shared with China's only overseas military base behind a fence down the middle, in what John Kiriakou calls the worst kept secret in the world.
Balochistan drone base — Secret CIA drone surveillance base in southwestern Pakistan's Balochistan region; its location was inadvertently disclosed when investigative journalist Jason Leopold filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Pentagon aviation-fuel-delivery records and identified an outsized fuel flow to the otherwise-undocumented base.
Dubai as Iran's window — John Kiriakou's explanation of why Iran did not hit Dubai hard during the 2026 war: the city is full of Iranian businessmen and is Iran's outlet to the Western world and its principal means of evading sanctions.
Eastern District of Virginia — The U.S. federal district covering northern Virginia — home to Langley, the Pentagon, DHS and much of the intelligence-contractor industry — which John Kiriakou calls 'the espionage court' because the Justice Department files the great majority of its national security prosecutions there and because, in his telling, no national-security defendant has ever won a case in it; Kiriakou, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Jeffrey Sterling were all charged there.
The Eastern Mediterranean gas field — The natural gas discovered off the south-eastern coast of Cyprus and running toward Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, which John Kiriakou identifies as the real source of Greek–Turkish tension. Turkey feels excluded although none of the gas lies in its waters; and although the founding agreement acknowledged a Palestinian share, Israel decides its size — an amount Kiriakou predicts will be zero.
Eastern State Penitentiary — The Philadelphia prison where, per John Kiriakou, solitary confinement was invented in 1829 — a neo-Gothic stone penitentiary of tiny cells arranged as spokes around a central guard post, each containing a bed, a chair, a table, a chamber pot and a Bible, on the theory that a man left alone with scripture would emerge a law-abiding Christian. What happened instead, Kiriakou says, is that everybody went insane — and the practice was kept anyway, because it worked as punishment.
Embassy fortification after 9/11 — The post-2001 rebuilding of American embassies as hardened compounds, which John Kiriakou explains as a direct answer to Iranian Revolutionary Guard reconnaissance of diplomatic premises. His illustration is Doha: an embassy sitting above a grocery store in 1990, and an embassy occupying an entire city block and fortified "nine ways from Sunday" today.
Embassy movie night — The weekly diversion John Kiriakou remembers from his posting to Pakistan after September 11th, when the station worked seven days a week and fourteen hours a day: on Wednesday nights the ambassador hosted a film in the embassy's small theatre, and the audience shouted at the screen and threw popcorn at whatever they had managed to get hold of.
Faisalabad Hospital — The hospital where a dying Abu Zubaydah was taken after the raid of March 2002 — open windows, animals in the corridors, mosquitoes on open wounds, and a bar of Irish Spring soap used as a pincushion for reusable syringes — which came under fire from the street while he was on the operating table.
Faisalabad — The Pakistani textile city of some seven or eight million people where Abu Zubaydah was captured in March 2002 — concrete, mud and corrugated tin in John Kiriakou's description, with a brand-new glass-and-steel McDonald's standing in the middle of it.
Falls Church mosque — Large mosque on Route 7 in Falls Church, Virginia; the site at which John Kiriakou, in 1993 as a CIA Arabic-language trainee, met then-imam Anwar al-Awlaki on a class field trip; the same mosque at which the September 11 hijackers prayed the night before the attacks.
FCI Loretto — U.S. Federal Correctional Institution in Loretto, Pennsylvania; the low-medium-security prison at which John Kiriakou served 23 months of a 30-month sentence following his 2013 Espionage Act–era plea deal; the originally ordered "minimum security work camp" placement was countermanded — per Kiriakou, on Brennan's direct intervention — to place him in the actual prison alongside the general population.
Fort Gordon — The U.S. Army installation in Georgia where NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, interviewed on Kiriakou's show, worked as a contractor linguist before her arrest.
George Washington University — The Washington university where John Kiriakou took a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies and began a master's in legislative affairs, and where a professor who was in fact a CIA spotter recruited him into the agency — an institution that recurs throughout his account as the place his intelligence career began, as the venue of his first CIA tests, and later as a classroom he taught in himself.
Greater and Lesser Tunb Islands — Two small, largely uninhabited islands in the Persian Gulf, belonging to the emirate of Sharjah in the UAE, occupied by Iran in a 1990s incident John Kiriakou recounts as CIA analyst; Kiriakou correctly predicted the UAE would not go to war over them given Sharjah's heavy trade dependence on Iran, and has since used the case against 2026 speculation that the United States would seize them back.
The Greek community of Warren, Ohio — The Greek-American community John Kiriakou's mother and first wife both came from — overwhelmingly from the island of Chios, closely enough knit that his divorce started a fistfight in a coffee house between men who had never met him.
The Greek health care system — John Kiriakou's description of Greek health care as a two-tier system in which the private sector buys nothing but position in the queue — a procedure that takes eleven or twelve months on the public system takes one or two privately, and the care itself is the same.
Greenland — The Danish territory the United States has spent years talking about acquiring; John Kiriakou reports two flatly contradictory readings from his own contacts — a White House friend who says Washington is serious and will lean on a Cold War treaty to claim it is already de facto American, and a Republican friend who says the whole thing is a grenade thrown to distract the press — and warns that taking it by force would end NATO.
Guantanamo Bay — U.S. naval base in Cuba; site of CIA detention operations during the post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program; briefly served by John Kiriakou as interim Chief during the summer of 2002.
Haiti — A country John Kiriakou studied for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he found that the seven largest merchant families — the families that run the entire Haitian economy — are white. He treats Haiti's poverty as manufactured rather than accidental, and its unrest as a story the American press declines to cover.
India — The country John Kiriakou names as his least favourite of all the places he has worked — not, he stresses, for poverty or danger, both of which he has seen worse of, but for the caste system and "the way Indians treat one another." His illustration is an afternoon in Hyderabad when two separate restaurants refused to admit the driver he had invited to lunch.
Kandahar — The southern Afghan city and province that recurs across John Kiriakou's Afghanistan material — site of one of the two al-Qaeda training camps Abu Zubaydah founded, whose commanders were captured in the same March 2002 raids; the town Bill Clinton said he would have had to destroy, killing 300 innocents, to kill bin Laden in the 1990s; and a stop on Kiriakou's Senate-era heroin-poppy investigation, when the military helicoptered him down before refusing to let him walk the poppy fields.
Kashmir — The disputed territory John Kiriakou says is front and centre for every Pakistani and largely absent from Indian minds, and on which his own sympathies lie with Pakistan — a promised 1940s referendum that never happened. He also describes the appearance that ended his participation in South Asian media: an Indian programme cut his pro-Pakistani answer, aired only his prediction that India would win a conventional war, and the death threats resumed.
Kharg Island — The island where most of Iran's oil is refined, and in John Kiriakou's assessment a standing target whose destruction would be a crisis for world oil prices. It was bombed in the 1980s, causing a global price shock; Kiriakou considers a repeat by the United States or Israel possible, and expects the Iranians to answer it rather than absorb it.
Kiriakou's Athens house — The five-storey house in the northern Athens suburb of Kifissia that John Kiriakou found for himself after refusing the embassy's offer — no square rooms, a balcony off every one of them facing a different way, and a garden with a 200-year-old olive tree whose oil the family cooked with for two years.
Kuwait as a sectarian model — John Kiriakou's nomination of Kuwait as the one country in the Middle East to have managed a transition toward a workable form of democracy and sectarian coexistence — an argument he makes without concealing that it began with the royal family bulldozing an entire Shia neighbourhood in the early 1980s.
The Lahore safe house — The ten-bedroom house in the best neighbourhood of Lahore that the CIA bought outright for two million dollars in cash in March 2002, on a cover story invented on the spot — that its buyers were textile barons — and from whose roof the team could catch seven satellites.
Langley — The Virginia location of CIA headquarters and, in John Kiriakou's usage, shorthand for the agency's permanent power. It's where he worked as the CIA's lone Iraq-Kuwait analyst — told to start on Iraq "because nothing ever happened there" — where a cafeteria conversation invited him into the torture program, where he walked past the Kryptos sculpture every day for fifteen years without solving it, and the place agencies return to after apologizing to Congress, "where of course nothing ever changes." When a host suggested the real government of America is out in Langley and Washington's white marble is for show, Kiriakou's answer was: "that's about the shape of it."
Liberty University — Evangelical university in Lynchburg, Virginia — the largest in the world — where John Kiriakou taught for several years as an adjunct professor of intelligence studies in the Jesse Helms School of Government. He says he warned the school he disagreed with it on 95% of the issues and was hired anyway, on the dean's reasoning that "torture's not Christian"; he enjoyed the post while clashing constantly with the institution over the treatment of Middle Eastern Christians.
The Litani River — The largest natural water source in the Middle East, which John Kiriakou says makes southern Lebanon more valuable than oil — and the northern edge of the depopulated strip he describes Israel creating there.
Mexico City as an espionage hub — John Kiriakou's assessment of Mexico City as one of the world's principal centres of international espionage, alongside Vienna, London, Paris and Washington — driven by a gargantuan American embassy that Russian services target from next door — and his reading of why Mexico simply ignored a dossier of suspected Russian officers handed over by the Biden administration.
More money on security in Athens than Beirut — John Kiriakou's measure of how dangerous Athens was for American officials at the turn of the century — that the United States spent more on security there than in Beirut — and the consequence he says followed: no diplomatic plates, because they would make Americans easier to identify and kill.
Mount Weather — U.S. government continuity-of-government underground facility on the Virginia–West Virginia line
National Whistleblower Day — John Kiriakou has called National Whistleblower Day an event no whistleblower or supporter should miss — held every year in the Kennedy Caucus Room, which he describes as not merely the biggest room on Capitol Hill but the most historic single room anywhere on it, having hosted every major Senate hearing from the sinking of the Titanic to Watergate and Iran-Contra.
New Castle, Pennsylvania — John Kiriakou's home town, an hour north of Pittsburgh on the edge of Amish country — a rust-belt city of roughly 40,000 to 50,000 people when he was growing up and around 18,000 to 20,000 now, whose decline he measures by the arrival of DEA and ATF field offices. It is also where, aged eight or nine and hunting salamanders in Oak Park Cemetery, he found the grave of a Medal of Honor private and acquired the lifelong interest in cemeteries that became a book.
The Nordeen house — The embassy housing on Deliyani Street in Athens that John Kiriakou refused on arrival in 1998 — the house outside which the American defence attaché had been blown to pieces by 17 November, his head landing on the neighbouring roof.
Oman — The Gulf sultanate John Kiriakou singles out as America's most durable friend in the region and its most useful channel to Iran — a country that has acted as go-between for Washington and Tehran many times, and which he argues should be approached again in place of carrier deployments and public threats.
Pakistani corruption and democracy — John Kiriakou's assessment that corruption in Pakistan is so deep and so broad that a genuinely functioning democracy is almost impossible there — set against a long history of military coups, a habit of imprisoning former prime ministers, and his insistence that Imran Khan should not be in a cell.
Pakistani prisons — John Kiriakou's flat refusal, in a discussion of Imran Khan's detention, of the idea that a Pakistani prison offers VIP treatment to a former prime minister — grounded in his having visited many of them himself during the period when the CIA was locking people up there.
The Peace and Friendship Bridge — A bridge across the narrow Pakistan–China frontier that John Kiriakou saw advertised on billboards across Pakistan while serving there, and the exchange it produced with a Pakistani general: asked why so much was being made of it, the general said the Chinese were the only friends Pakistan had who had never turned on them — and then looked at Kiriakou.
Pickaxe Mountain — The Iranian site whose ongoing excavation Benjamin Netanyahu publicised in July 2026 and which Donald Trump, in response, said he already knew about — using the exchange to tell an ally publicly not to brief the press ahead of him. John Kiriakou reads the episode as Netanyahu attempting to move American public opinion and Trump refusing to be moved.
Romania and US military positioning — John Kiriakou's assessment that Romania has become the United States' next staging option toward the Middle East, because Greece is full and Turkey is pursuing its own course.
Salt Pit — A CIA black site north of Kabul — a former Soviet, then Taliban, dungeon the CIA took over for its post-9/11 detention programme. Gul Rahman froze to death there in a cold cell, a technique John Kiriakou considers worse than waterboarding and says killed several prisoners; he suspects others were killed off the books and never reported.
Saudi Arabia as an open-air prison — John Kiriakou's verdict on the country he served in — 'the biggest open air prison in the world' — together with his account of what the ambassador's life there is like inside the residence and outside it, the two ambassadors he served under, and the annual migration of the entire Saudi government to Jeddah to escape the heat.
Saudi influence in Egypt — John Kiriakou's account of Saudi Arabia's role in Egypt — not merely supporting the government that displaced the Muslim Brotherhood but bankrolling it and ensuring its survival — which he places within a history of Saudi interference in Egyptian internal affairs reaching back to the nationalist revolution of 1958.
Television in Saudi Arabia — John Kiriakou's firsthand description, from his own residence in the kingdom, of Saudi broadcast television — permitted last in the region and only once a senior cleric was persuaded it could carry the Quran around the clock — and of the three channels that resulted, one of which occasionally interrupted religious programming with an episode of an American sitcom.
Somaliland — Self-declared breakaway state in the Horn of Africa that Israel became the only country in the world to recognize as independent, gaining a military base positioned roughly 30 seconds' flight time from Yemen; John Kiriakou, who visited Somaliland while posted with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Djibouti, describes it as a functioning city of about 100,000 unconnected to Mogadishu, al-Shabaab, or piracy.
Somaliland and Israeli recognition — Israel's diplomatic recognition of Somaliland, which John Kiriakou describes as a trade: recognition no other state offers, in exchange for an air base within reach of Yemen. He calls it the one smart move in Israel's response to the Mecca Agreement.
South Pars and the North Dome — The gas field beneath the Persian Gulf that Iran and Qatar share, and John Kiriakou's explanation of why the Israeli strike on the Iranian third was not an accident: hit one and you hit the other automatically, and Israel had reason to want Qatar hit.
Spanish enclaves in North Africa — Ceuta and the smaller Spanish territories on the Moroccan coast, held under treaties more than four centuries old. In John Kiriakou's account they are colonial remnants that Morocco resents, that Israel has used to needle Spain over its criticism of Israeli occupation, and that United States policy now formally describes as an occupation.
Church of Saint Porphyrios — The Greek Orthodox church in Gaza that John Kiriakou describes as the oldest continuously operating church in the world; per Kiriakou, Israel bombed it while 24 women and children were sheltering inside.
Strait of Hormuz — The shipping chokepoint at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and the centre of gravity of the 2026 Iran war in John Kiriakou's account — a strait whose only navigable deep water lies on the Iranian side of the maritime border, closed not by Iran's aggression but, as he insists, by the American and Israeli attack that provoked it: "The Strait of Hormuz was open. We're the ones that forced the closure."
Strawberry Fields — The CIA's nickname for a secret black-site annex at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base used for the post-9/11 detention and interrogation program.
Tarpon Springs — The Greek sponge-diving town on the Florida gulf coast that John Kiriakou calls one of his favourite places — settled for a century by divers from Kalymnos, the island immediately north of the one his own family comes from, and, in his verdict, the site of absolutely incredible Greek food.
Taybeh — The only fully Christian village in the West Bank, home to the Holy Land's oldest brewery; John Kiriakou recounts it being set on fire and its Marian festival attacked by the IDF with drones, helicopters and stun grenades.
The Addis Ababa zoo — A visit John Kiriakou made to the zoo in Addis Ababa on a free half-day, where he watched keepers force a screaming donkey into the lion enclosure — and noted the two-tier admission price charged to foreigners.
The Alaska glacier — The visitor centre John Kiriakou saw on a 2016 trip to Alaska with Gary Johnson, built at the foot of a glacier close enough to touch from the observation deck and by then a quarter of a mile away from it — an image he uses as the plainest available demonstration of climate change, and one he refuses to let pass as a joke.
The Arlington house — The 1,200-square-foot house John Kiriakou bought with his Pakistan overtime and danger pay for $347,000, sold two years later for $721,000, and now values at a million — the anchor of his repeated argument that his own children can never live in the Arlington, Virginia neighbourhood they grew up in.
The armour at Union Station — John Kiriakou's eyewitness account of stepping off an Amtrak train at Washington's Union Station in August 2025 to find two armoured personnel carriers and a .50 calibre machine gun trained on the entrance — and of tourists posing for photographs with the National Guardsmen deployed in the parts of the city where, he says, there is no crime.
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 Baltimore tunnel — The rail tunnel built in 1850 just north of Baltimore that John Kiriakou names as the physical reason the American northeast has no high-speed rail — it is too narrow to admit a high-speed train, so every train on the corridor must be built to fit through it.
The Bridgeton and the tanker escorts — John Kiriakou's recollection of the 1980s American naval escort of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, and of seeing the SS Bridgeton — then the largest oil tanker in the world, set ablaze by the Iranians — from a boat in the Persian Gulf.
The cats of Athens — John Kiriakou's explanation for why there are no rats in Athens — the enormous population of street cats that tourists feed at restaurant tables — offered as a contrast to Washington, where he says the rats are the size of small dogs.
The Chinese embassy in London — John Kiriakou's assessment of the Chinese mission planned for London — an embassy occupying an entire city block that would be the largest in the world, approved over street protests, and which he calls 'the mother of all spy dens.' He contrasts it with Washington's refusal of the same proposal, and predicts China will now build such embassies everywhere.
The CIA barber shop — The barber in the basement of CIA headquarters, which John Kiriakou visited once on the reasoning that it saved a trip across town and found stocked with Playboys and Penthouses — one of several amenities, alongside a dry cleaner and a post office substation, that made the building function as a self-contained town.
The density of spies in Washington — John Kiriakou's claim that there are more spies in Washington DC than anywhere else in the world, that the FBI's counterintelligence division does nothing but try to root them out, and that the job cannot be finished short of becoming North Korea.
The east Mediterranean gas partnership — John Kiriakou's explanation for why the Greek government is solidly pro-Israel while the Greek public is solidly anti-Israel: Cyprus sits on an ocean of natural gas, and the Greeks, Cypriots, Israelis and — to a lesser extent — Egyptians lift it together and share the money. The arrangement drives Turkey to distraction, and in his reading puts Greek–Turkish relations on track to get worse.
The Egyptian berm — The earthwork Egypt built along its Gaza frontier more than a year before July 2025, which John Kiriakou describes as a defence not against Palestinians but against Israel — built because Cairo feared the border being thrown open from the other side, and because Egyptian troops would not fire on two million people.
The empty Church of the Holy Sepulchre — A video John Kiriakou describes watching during the 2026 Iran war — the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem completely deserted, filmed beside the Edicule that covers the tomb of Christ, with nothing audible but air raid sirens. He offers it alongside Israeli footage he reads as evidence that the country knows it is in trouble.
The Farm — The CIA's clandestine training facility in Virginia; site of approximately 80% of all CIA operational training
The fox that ate the scraps — The small grey desert fox that lived on the grounds of the Baja resort, which the cook told John Kiriakou would finish anything left on the plate — and which, every single night, defecated on exactly the spot he crossed to reach his outdoor mini fridge.
The French in the streets — John Kiriakou's stated admiration for how quickly the French take to the streets, offered while questioning Ted Rall about the chances of violence during the 2025 French political crisis, alongside his observation that he could not recall a French president ever resigning.
The General Assembly circus — John Kiriakou's view of the annual United Nations General Assembly, which he calls the Super Bowl for global politics and which he disliked more than almost anything else in his CIA career. His last tour was at the United Nations in New York, where the September session brings the city to a halt and makes the American mission almost unreachable.
The Hall of States — The Washington office building at 444 North Capitol Street where, in John Kiriakou's floor-by-floor description, most of the capital's television news operations share an address — NBC and MSNBC on the ground floor, Fox on the fifth, PBS and Democracy Now on the sixth, and Newsmax in the basement in a single room.
The hundred-drachma coins — How demonstrators in Athens broke the windows of the American embassy during John Kiriakou's posting there in 1999 — with hundred-drachma coins the size of an Eisenhower dollar, worth about a quarter, followed by paint-filled balloons fired from slingshots.
The Islamabad guest house — The sixteen-room guest house in Islamabad that CIA officers took over entirely during the post-9/11 deployments — a place John Kiriakou says the agency still will not let him name, which came with breakfast, dinner and laundry for about thirty-five dollars a day against a per diem of five hundred.
The Lafayette Square tents — The long-running protest encampment across from the White House that a New Jersey congressman wanted removed by force in 2025, and John Kiriakou's observation that tents have stood on that spot for as long as he has lived in Washington — since 1982.
The move to Fort Myer — John Kiriakou's report that Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem all moved with their families onto Fort Myer army base into housing reserved for one- to four-star generals — 'the mother of all gated communities' — after Miller sold his Arlington house to escape protesters chalking his public sidewalk.
The Parthenon-view condo — The eighth-floor Athens apartment John Kiriakou has been watching on the Greek property app Spitogatos, whose price fell from €600,000 to €250,000 after the city banned new Airbnb conversions — and the golden-visa buying that had emptied the residential market in the first place.
The Pentagon and the Pakistani arsenal — What John Kiriakou says he was told unofficially while stationed in Pakistan in 2002 — that Pervez Musharraf had turned control of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal over to the United States, and that the Pentagon controlled it — and Pakistan's insistence in the years since that this was never true, which Kiriakou says would be the more worrying answer.
The Puerto Rico thirds — The division of Puerto Rican opinion John Kiriakou says was given to him on the island by a mid-level government official — a third for independence, a third for statehood, a third for leaving things exactly as they are — and the official's conclusion that because of it, nothing will ever change. Kiriakou has repeated the split in his own voice as an argument that Puerto Rico is a colony but not a settler colony, and doubts statehood will ever come.
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 referee in a Greek-Turkish war — John Kiriakou's assessment, given in Athens in 2025, that Greece cannot count on the United States taking its side against Turkey — Washington would position itself as an honest broker between the two — but that NATO support, particularly from Italy, France, Germany and Britain, would make Greece able to cope even without American leadership.
The resort with no air conditioning — The Baja California resort where John Kiriakou spent a month filming in 2025 — built in the 1960s as a commune by long-haired left-wing Angelenos funded by Thomas Hart Benton's daughter, a dozen buildings on the southernmost tip of the peninsula, no air conditioning, and nothing whatsoever to do unless you dive.
The royal family at Taif — John Kiriakou's first overseas assignment sent him at twenty-five to the Kuwaiti government in exile at Taif in Saudi Arabia, where he found a king weeping over a dug-up rose garden and repeated a mantra to a despondent royal family: we are going to get you your country back.
The Saigon CIA station photograph — The Pulitzer-winning image of evacuees climbing a ladder to a helicopter during the fall of Saigon in 1975. John Kiriakou, who talked his way onto the roof in 2026, points out that the building most Americans take for the embassy was in fact an apartment block that secretly housed the CIA's Saigon station.
The Siemens control room — The underground surveillance facility in Dubai that John Kiriakou says he was given a tour of — built by Siemens, five storeys of monitors covering every inch of the city — and the taxi crash he watched unfold on the wall in real time.
The Solomon Islands trip — The reporting trip John Kiriakou announced for July 2026 — ten days on Guadalcanal with Jeremy Kuzmarov of CovertAction Magazine, travelling via Fiji, to cover the dispute between the United States and China over access to Japan's Second World War military bases.
The synagogue in Damascus — John Kiriakou's account of visiting an operating, practising Jewish synagogue in Damascus, and the forecast he attaches to it — that he would not bet money on the safety of Christians, Jews, Alawites or any other religious minority in Syria under the present government or any other, whatever else is said of Bashar al-Assad.
The tarantula on the mini fridge — The wildlife of the Baja resort as John Kiriakou catalogued it — rattlesnakes everywhere, an emailed instruction never to go barefoot, shoes shaken out before every midnight walk to the mini fridge kept outdoors, a flashlight in hand, and one night at three in the morning a tarantula sitting on the fridge itself.
The whiskers rule — John Kiriakou's description of the cultural practice he says American personnel encountered with some regularity in Afghanistan — that a boy who has not yet reached puberty is treated as available for sexual abuse — and his account of what he understood to have happened, and not happened, at Abu Ghraib.
Tora Bora — Mountainous cave complex in eastern Afghanistan that served as an al-Qaeda redoubt after the September 11 attacks. Per John Kiriakou — chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan at the time — the CIA killed al-Qaeda military-affairs chief Mohammed Atef there in October 2001, and Tora Bora was the backdrop to the hunt for the senior al-Qaeda leadership that culminated in the capture of Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou also recounts an Egyptian al-Qaeda fighter he later recruited who survived a cruise-missile strike on a Tora Bora cave — one of only two who came out alive, his ears bleeding, describing the explosion as the most hideous sound he had ever heard.
Turkey and a safe zone in Iran — John Kiriakou's response to the Turkish president's suggestion that, in the event of an attack on Iran, the Turkish army would establish a safe zone inside Iranian territory — that Ankara would love nothing more, having previously taken Iraqi, Cypriot and Syrian territory, and that pan-Turkism is a subject most people are unaware of.
United States–DRC relations — John Kiriakou's account of why American policy toward the Democratic Republic of the Congo is quietly comfortable while the east of the country is in chaos: the United States buys as much Congolese rare earth metal as can be dug out of the ground, and the central government's weakness against Rwanda is a problem Donald Trump claimed to have solved for the purposes of a Nobel Peace Prize case, with a peace Kiriakou says lasted a couple of weeks.
Warrenton Training Center — A secret CIA communications facility in Warrenton, Virginia, which — per John Kiriakou — the KGB used as a decoy to protect Aldrich Ames. When Ames warned Moscow in 1986 that he feared becoming a suspect, a Soviet case officer told a CIA contact that the mole was posted to Warrenton; agency mole hunters then spent almost a year investigating ninety employees there and produced ten suspects, none of them Ames.
Washington, rat central — John Kiriakou's account of the rat population of Washington, D.C. — one he saw the size of a small dog, and the night he drove to Southeast Washington at quarter to two in the morning to collect two eighteen-year-olds whose van had been stolen, and found them panicking not about the theft but about the rats eating a sleeping homeless man's toes.
What we owed Mexico — John Kiriakou's answer to why American and Mexican cooperation against the cartels achieves so little: the federales are incorruptible and outgunned, the government does not control parts of its own territory, and the United States spent a century punishing Mexico instead of helping it develop — allowing four families to own the entire economy.
Where he slept in Afghanistan — John Kiriakou's inventory of his own Afghan accommodation across a decade of trips — a shared tent on the first visits, a tent of his own once ("living high on the hog"), the officers' quarters at Bagram once the American foothold was serious, and a three-star Afghan hotel when he returned as a private citizen to get the Kite Runner children out.
World Trade Center — The twin towers whose burning image reached John Kiriakou on the little TV of Cofer Black's secretary — he compared it aloud to the 1930s Empire State Building accident, protested that the day was too clear not to see the tower, and watched the second plane hit as the words left his mouth. Kiriakou ties the towers' story back to the neglected files of the 1990 Kahane assassination and the 1993 bombing, whose captured plotters said they had meant to kill 200,000 by collapsing the buildings into each other — and to John O'Neill, the al-Qaeda-obsessed FBI man who became WTC security chief and died there on his first days at work.
Yemen — Country on the southern Arabian Peninsula; setting of five John Kiriakou trips between 1990 and approximately 2010, spanning the country's brief unification, its civil war, and its present condition as a high-threat operating environment for U.S. and allied diplomatic personnel.
Youngstown Sheet and Tube — The Ohio steel producer whose closure John Kiriakou treats as the moment the economy of his hometown region ended; he remembers the day it shut and classmates weeping in the school hallways because their fathers had lost their jobs, and dates the collapse of New Castle, Pennsylvania to it.