Brian Ross
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Brian Ross is an American investigative journalist and seven-time Emmy Award winner who, while at ABC News, conducted the December 2007 on-camera interview that produced the first public confirmation by a U.S. official that the CIA had waterboarded prisoners.

The call (December 2007)

Where he was when the phone rang

Kiriakou traces the immediate backdrop to the CIA's destruction of its torture tapes: he says Gina Haspel, who later became CIA director during Trump's first term, and who had previously served as commandant at "Site Green," a black site, giving her a personal stake in their destruction, oversaw the project, and that the tapes were physically destroyed in an industrial grinder. By his account, in December 2007 his career and second marriage were going well and he had largely stopped thinking about al-Qaeda since leaving the agency, when he received the call from Ross. The call reached him at his desk at Deloitte, two and a half to three and a half years after he had resigned from the CIA.

"A source says you tortured Abu Zubaydah"

By 2007 Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International had reported that al-Qaeda prisoners were being tortured, and what ABC News put to Kiriakou when it telephoned was something more specific and more personal, "they had information that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah." Ross said he had a source who claimed Kiriakou had personally tortured Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou's response: "That was absolutely false. I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah. I've never laid a hand on Abu Zubaydah or any other prisoner." Ross's reply: "Well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself."

He has given the denial in the same terms across every retelling: that it was absolutely untrue, that he had been the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah, that he had never laid a hand on him or any other prisoner, and that Ross's source was either grossly misinformed or a liar, "I never have laid a hand on anybody, least of all Abu Zubaydah", "the only person who was ever kind to Abu Zubaydah.", "I said that was absolutely untrue. I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah, and I had never tortured anybody." Invited to come on the programme and defend himself, he did not accept immediately; he said he would think about it.

The reporter's trick

Kiriakou did not at the time recognise the invitation as a reporter's standard technique, and says he only understood it afterwards, "I learned later that this was an old reporter's trick." He attributes the blind spot to his own career: "I didn't know that that was a reporter's trick because I had never met a reporter before. I was a CIA undercover officer. I'm not going to meet with reporters."

What changed his mind

What converted a deflection into an appearance was what George W. Bush did over the following days. At a press conference the president looked directly into the camera and said: "We do not torture." Kiriakou told his wife, herself a senior CIA officer, "He is a bald-faced liar. He's looking the American people in the eye and he's lying to us."

Two days later, on the Friday, Bush left the South Portico of the White House to walk to the helicopter for Camp David. A reporter shouted a torture question. Bush stopped, turned, and said: "Well, if there is torture, it's because of a rogue CIA officer."

Kiriakou's conclusion was immediate. He said to his wife: "Brian Ross's source is at the White House and they're going to pin this on me.", rendered in another telling as "Brian Ross's source is at the White House and they're going to try to pin this on me,", and called Ross back to accept, having decided to give the interview and "just tell the truth." In the four or five days before the taping he settled it: whatever he was asked, he would answer truthfully "and then just let the cards fall."

The interview

What he said on camera

At the ABC News studios on Dale Street in Washington, Kiriakou decided that whatever Ross asked, and Ross had not told him in advance what the questions would be, he would tell the truth. He made three statements that changed the course of the rest of his life: that the CIA was torturing its prisoners; that torture was official U.S. government policy, not the result of any rogue officer; and that the policy had been personally approved by the president. It was in the course of defending himself against the accusation that he had made the disclosure the rest of the case turned on, that the CIA was torturing prisoners and "that it was official U.S. government policy. This was not the result of some rogue CIA officer just beating up a prisoner every once in a while. This was official policy that went all the way up to the president of the United States."

What Ross never asked

The accusation that had produced the invitation never made it to air. In Kiriakou's account, "he never even asked me on camera if I had tortured. He just went straight into the torture."

What he got wrong about Abu Zubaydah

In the original 2007 interview, Kiriakou stated that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded once and that it had worked. He now describes this as incorrect, and as the second of the two errors he names in how he gave the interview: the information circulating among officers inside the agency was wrong, and he repeated the false version on air in good faith. Zubaydah was in fact waterboarded eighty-three times.

The basis for the statement was that Mitchell and Jessen had reported to the CIA that they waterboarded Zubaydah once and he produced intelligence. The reality, revealed only in 2005 by the CIA Inspector General and declassified in 2009, was that FBI interrogator Ali Soufan had been getting actionable intelligence from Zubaydah daily through rapport-based interrogation, and Mitchell and Jessen had pulled Soufan's cables from the incompatible FBI computer system and retyped them as their own product.

The consequences

The crimes report and the FBI declination

Within twenty-four hours of the interview, the CIA filed what is called a crimes report against Kiriakou with the FBI. The FBI investigated from December 2007 to December 2008, then sent Kiriakou's attorney a declination letter, the information was already public via Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, and "torture is a crime, and it is illegal to classify a crime for the purpose of keeping it from the American people."

Brennan's memo

Three to four weeks later, Barack Obama was elected president. He named John Brennan Deputy National Security Adviser for Counterterrorism. Brennan sent a memo to Attorney General Eric Holder instructing him to charge Kiriakou with espionage. When Holder's lawyers concluded Kiriakou had not committed espionage, Brennan wrote back: "Charge him anyway and make him defend himself."

Banned from MSNBC

Kiriakou says he was later banned from MSNBC in an incident unrelated to Ross but downstream of the same public identity the Ross interview created. Booked for a pre-taped segment, he was fitted with a microphone and told the interview would start with a co-guest; host Ari Melber then turned to Kiriakou on air and introduced him as "convicted felon John Kuryaku" without warning. Kiriakou said "Motherfucker", a note he says he had written to himself off-script but which the host picked up, stood, and ripped off his microphone.

Working for ABC

"You ruined my life"

The consulting work came afterwards, and by Kiriakou's own account he asked for it. "I called Brian Ross and I said: you ruined my life, the least you could do is throw me a little bit of work. And so ABC brought me on as a consultant." He worked for the network through 2008 and into early 2009, when John Kerry offered him the senior investigator's job on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The night bin Laden was killed

Ross also reached him on the night Osama bin Laden was killed, calling to say something was happening at the White House and that the president had called a press conference for ten at night. Kiriakou's immediate answer was that they had got bin Laden, because no one beneath him would justify it. He went into the studio to wait for the story to break and was on air all night, leaving at seven the next morning and returning after a few hours' sleep.

What he would have done differently

The first of the two errors Kiriakou names is that he gave the interview without his attorney present, which he says he would never do again. He expected the interview to be a one-day story. Instead it extended through approximately fifty follow-up interviews, each pushing closer to classified material, generating criticism when he declined to add new disclosures. He has consistently maintained the original disclosure was correct and necessary, "somebody had to say something. We were committing a war crime, a crime against humanity", but that managing the aftermath without professional guidance was a mistake.

The three things, and the case that was closed and reopened

Asked in 2017 to restate what he had actually said, Kiriakou reduces the December 2007 interview to three propositions: "I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners; I said that torture was official U.S. government policy, it was not the result of a rogue CIA officer, as President Bush had suggested; and I said that the torture policy had been personally approved by the president himself."

The consequence was immediate and then, briefly, nothing: "within 24 hours the CIA filed a crimes report against me and the FBI began investigating me. They investigated me for a full year, until December of 2008, and then determined that I had not committed a crime, and they closed the case."

What he did not know at the time is the part he stresses. "A month later, after President Obama had been inaugurated and Eric Holder had been named attorney general, the CIA asked Holder to secretly reopen the case against me. And so the FBI investigated me for another three years, until January of 2012... they tapped my phones, they intercepted my emails, I was under surveillance. I had no idea any of that was taking place." What that produced was the email confirming a former colleague's last name.

The charges that followed went well past it: the Intelligence Identities Protection Act count, "three counts of espionage coming out of my original ABC News interview," and one of making a false statement "which my attorneys and I never really fully understood, I didn't really know what the false statement was." His own reading has not changed: "my case was not about leaking or about revealing the name, the name was never made public in any event. It was about whistleblowing, and it was because I aired the CIA's dirty laundry." Asked whether he would do it again: "Oh, in a heartbeat. In a heartbeat."

Cole on the investigative team

Kiriakou's account of how he came to know Matthew Cole places both men on Ross's team at ABC News: "We both worked for Brian Ross in the investigative team." Kiriakou was the counterterrorism commentator, alongside the former White House counterterrorism chief Dick Clarke; Cole was "a junior investigative reporter gathering content for Brian Ross to use in his reports." The two were not close, only "cordial to one another on those rare occasions when we would see each other."

Kiriakou states that Cole's departure from the network followed from the case: "he was asked to leave ABC News because of my case. He couldn't be trusted as a journalist. He had lied."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Abu Zubaydah
- John Brennan
- Espionage Act
