Category: Programs

24 articles in this category

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.
Astrology at the CIA — John Kiriakou's confirmation that astrology played a role in CIA work in the 1950s and early 1960s as part of MK-ULTRA, alongside time travel and teleportation — and his explanation for why: officials with unlimited budgets and no obligation to report to the public reasoned that there was probably nothing to it, but that if there were, it would make them a star.
The CIA and Hollywood — The CIA's standing arrangement with the film industry, as John Kiriakou describes it: a branch inside the Office of Public Affairs whose only job is to cooperate with Hollywood studios, on the model the FBI has run since the 1950s, so that what comes out of Hollywood carries a pro-agency message. Kiriakou notes it is technically illegal for the CIA to propagandise the American public and says that is exactly what happens every time an agency-linked film is released.
CIA and NSA exotic programs — Two obscure U.S. intelligence programs John Kiriakou has discussed — a late-1980s FBI/Defense Department investigation into a senior NSA officer who came out as a member of the Church of Satan and was accused of ritual sacrifice (which found no evidence), and a 1990s CIA battlefield laser weapon designed to blind rather than kill enemy soldiers, shelved after lawyers determined it violated international law.
COINTELPRO — The FBI programme of warrantless surveillance and disruption directed at Americans, and one of the four abuses John Kiriakou names when explaining what the Church Committee actually investigated. He treats it as the historical benchmark for what a real congressional inquiry into the security agencies looks like — and, through the campaign against Martin Luther King, as proof that the state will destroy a citizen it considers a threat.
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.
Guantánamo Bay detention camp — Per John Kiriakou — as chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after September 11, 2001 — the Guantanamo detention facility began as a temporary holding measure intended to last two to three weeks while the CIA and Justice Department determined which federal district court should try each prisoner, not as a long-term detention infrastructure. The Rawalpindi jail had reached capacity, Pakistani intelligence demanded the prisoners be removed, and CIA headquarters directed Kiriakou to load them onto a C-12 cargo plane and fly them to Cuba.
Israeli Nuclear Program — Israel's widely assumed but officially unacknowledged nuclear arsenal; per John Kiriakou, the conventional wisdom within the CIA is that Israel possesses between 120 and 220 nuclear weapons, and the U.S. government's refusal to formally acknowledge this is driven by a specific legal obligation under the Glenn-Symington Act, which would require cutting off all foreign aid to any nuclear-armed country not party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Education at FCI Loretto — The classes, drug programme and good-conduct rules at FCI Loretto, which Kiriakou described in a letter from Loretto as correcting nothing — and which taught him, he wrote, how to cook methamphetamine and defraud a mortgage company.
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.
MK-ULTRA in Canada — John Kiriakou's confirmation that many MK-ULTRA experiments took place on Canadian soil, and his explanation of why: the CIA asked the Canadian intelligence service for help with its anti-Soviet, anti-Chinese remote-viewing and LSD work, and the Canadians gladly gave it.
Operation Midnight Climax — Sub-project of the CIA's MK-Ultra program, conducted in San Francisco. Per John Kiriakou, the CIA rented a safe house and paid sex workers to bring men back to it, where agents dosed the men with LSD without their knowledge or consent, then observed their behavior through one-way mirrors. The operation followed an earlier phase in which the CIA had dosed its own employees; when that produced suicides, it moved to using unconsenting members of the public.
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.
RDAP program — The Bureau of Prisons' Residential Drug and Alcohol Program, which can shave 12 to 18 months off a federal sentence; John Kiriakou repeatedly advises fellow whistleblowers that, combined with good behavior and a halfway house, it can turn a five-year sentence into as little as two and a half years.
The Russian illegals program — The Russian practice, described by John Kiriakou, of recruiting people — sometimes as children — training them abroad and inserting them into Western countries as sleepers who live ordinary lives for decades until they are activated. Kiriakou says a group of illegals was broken up by the FBI in his own Arlington, Virginia neighbourhood and traded for American spies, and that he knows a former KGB sleeper in Brooklyn who refused activation after the birth of his daughter.
San Bernardino iPhone Case — The 2015–16 legal standoff in which Apple refused to unlock the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone for the FBI, which instead paid an Israeli firm $6 million to crack it — though, per John Kiriakou, the intelligence that could have disrupted the attack never came from the phone at all.
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.
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.
The Afghan Zero Units — The CIA-trained Afghan paramilitary units whose surviving members were resettled in the United States, and John Kiriakou's account of why so many of them have broken down: recruited without training or therapy, taken out at night to kill their own tribesmen and extended family, promised the land of milk and honey, and then met on arrival with no work permit, no treatment and no help at all.
The secret prisons the heads of state did not know about — John Kiriakou's account of how the CIA's black sites were established — as arrangements struck directly between the director of the CIA and the head of the host country's intelligence service, in some cases without the knowledge of that country's own head of state — and his statement that he learned the extent of the system only years after leaving, by reading the press.
Thin Thread — Competing NSA programs at the center of the post-9/11 mass-surveillance turn. Per John Kiriakou, on September 11, 2001 NSA Director Michael Hayden implemented Operation Thin Thread — which 'vacuums up every phone call, every text message, every email, every bit of metadata from every American' — and reportedly called 9/11 'the greatest possible gift to NSA.' Three NSA officers (Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and Ed Loomis) had built a competing program, Stellar Wind, that could collect the same data while protecting Americans' identities; Hayden chose to grab everything instead. Kiriakou says it was Tom Drake's effort to report the illegality that destroyed Drake.
Torture and morale inside the CIA — John Kiriakou's account of what the torture programme did to morale at the CIA — a compartment so tight that nobody knew for six or eight months, a workforce that split between objectors and true believers who enjoyed the work, and a pullback by George Tenet around 2005 that ended active torture at the secret sites while leaving the prisons open and Guantanamo untouched.
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.