KiriPedia Kiripedia The Free Encyclopedia of John Kiriakou's World

Category: Programs

8 articles in this category

  • Enhanced interrogation techniques — The CIA's post-9/11 interrogation program; described by John Kiriakou as torture and as a euphemism designed to insulate the responsible officials from legal exposure.
  • MK-Ultra — The CIA's mid-twentieth-century umbrella program of mind-control, behavioral-modification, and biological-warfare experimentation, encompassing subprojects such as MK-Chickwit and MK-Seesaw; active 1952–1975; documented practices included LSD dosing of unwitting American citizens in CIA-rented brothels and the aerosolized release of pathogens into the San Francisco fog; 80% of the program's documentation was destroyed by the CIA in defiance of a 1975 preservation order from Senator Frank Church.
  • Operation Mockingbird — The CIA's mid-twentieth-century program of recruiting and managing American journalists as influence assets; in John Kiriakou's account, no longer operationally necessary in the contemporary period because the U.S. media voluntarily reprints CIA-supplied material, and in at least one documented case sends articles to the agency for clearance before sending them to its own editor.
  • Tuesday morning kill list — Weekly CIA targeting meeting instituted by John Brennan in 2009 during his service as Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism in the Obama administration; produced a written list of individuals to be killed in the following week; per John Kiriakou, the program was a source of pride within the Obama administration and was made operationally possible by the targeting-software sophistication of the period.
  • Vault 7 — The 2017 WikiLeaks disclosure of thousands of pages of CIA Directorate of Science and Technology documents — leaked by agency engineer Joshua Schulte — revealing CIA technical capabilities including remote takeover of internet-connected cars, conversion of smart-TV speakers into covert microphones, and the planting of Russian or Persian language fragments in foreign systems to mislead attribution.
  • Section 702 — Section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act under which the U.S. government conducts warrantless electronic surveillance; per John Kiriakou the principal post-9/11 mechanism by which the CIA, NSA, and FBI surveil American citizens; renewed by Congress every two years over the objection of a small bipartisan minority; the subject of an estimated 200,000+ illegal FBI database queries — per the Brennan Center for Justice, including ~78,000 misused queries over a two-year window; the disclosure that Edward Snowden made public in summer 2013.
  • Afghan heroin policy — The post-2001 U.S. policy in Afghanistan of protecting, and per John Kiriakou actively encouraging, the cultivation of heroin poppy. Under the Taliban in 2000 Afghanistan produced 0% of the world's heroin; by 2009 under American occupation it produced 93%. Per a DEA officer Kiriakou consulted with on the policy paper he was preparing for Senator Kerry, the strategic rationale was that nearly all of the heroin flowed to Iran and Russia, addiction in those countries was considered desirable as a long-run societal weakener, and the same logic now operates in reverse with Chinese fentanyl flowing into the United States.
  • Scholar-in-Residence program — The current CIA recruitment program, in operation as of the late 2020s, under which the agency places retiring senior officers as 'CIA Scholar in Residence' professors at major American universities. Per John Kiriakou, the program serves as the agency's principal university-recruitment channel since the 1993 Equal Employment Opportunity Act forbade the older practice of having professors covertly recruit students into the CIA. Officers identified as scholars in residence are openly disclosed; the recruitment work continues, just no longer in secret.