The chilling effect of whistleblower prosecutions
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John Kiriakou argues that national-security prosecutions are best understood as deterrence rather than law enforcement, and that the agencies involved want different things from them. "The CIA doesn't care about prosecutions. The CIA cares about sending a message ... The FBI, sure, they care about prosecutions, because that's how they get promoted."

Applied to his own case, the arithmetic of the sentence was beside the point: "the point wasn't to see how many years in prison I could get. The point was to frighten anybody else who was even considering blowing the whistle on waste, fraud, abuse or illegality."

The measured effect

Kiriakou gives one concrete measure of whether it worked. "A New York Times reporter told me that on the day of my arrest, every national security source that the New York Times had went completely silent. That's exactly what they wanted to happen."

The companion case he returns to is Thomas Drake, who followed every internal channel available to him and was charged with nine felonies including seven counts of espionage without ever having given classified information to a journalist. "Even though the charges against Tom were all dropped, the government declared victory, because they ruined him, and they made an example of him. So it silenced anybody else at NSA who was thinking of going forward."

He applies the same reading to witnesses who never face charges at all, where the career itself is the penalty. Of an unnamed government witness who testified in the matter that led to Anthony Fauci's pardon, Kiriakou said in May 2026: "This was a very brave thing he did. He put his reputation on the line today. He told the world exactly what the truth was. He will probably never work in government again because of it." The compensating gain he identified was public rather than personal, "but now we have an idea of what was being done secretly yet in our name." His framing of the episode was that concealment is the costlier course: "At the heart of this story is that it's always best to tell the truth. The truth always comes out."

Applied to Assange

Kiriakou applied the same logic to Julian Assange during his embassy confinement, arguing the CIA had no particular interest in a trial: "operationally it's better for the CIA the longer Julian remains in the embassy ... the message is, we have kept this man in what is in effect solitary confinement for the last six and a half years, and there's nothing he can do about it." What made an example necessary at all, on his account, was that WikiLeaks worked: "he created something that actually worked ... something that actually protected its sources and that actually exposed war crimes and crimes against humanity, and so they had to make sure that that ended."

He cautions against treating the pressure as coming from one place. The government, he says, is not acting as a monolithic organisation in such cases: the CIA has its own interests, the FBI and the Justice Department have theirs, and the White House and a State Department then led by Mike Pompeo have theirs again.

The count Kiriakou keeps returning to

The statistic he treats as self-explanatory: "between 1917, when the Espionage Act was passed into law, and 2009, three Americans were charged with espionage for speaking to the press. Just under Barack Obama, eight people were charged with espionage for speaking to the press. I think that says it all right there."

He attributes it to the president personally rather than to the department: "Barack Obama had a Nixonian obsession with national security leaks."

His own case is the illustration, and the part he stresses is the reversal: the Bush administration, whose programme he had exposed, "never charged me with a crime. In fact, they closed the case against me, concluding that I had not committed a crime. But the Obama administration secretly reopened the case."

The day the sources went silent

The most concrete measurement Kiriakou offers came from the press side. A New York Times national-security reporter told him that on the day of his arrest, every one of the paper's national-security sources went silent.

He treats that as the objective rather than a side effect: "that's exactly the goal in ninety-nine per cent of these whistleblower cases. The point isn't even necessarily to have you sentenced to a long stretch in prison, the point is to ruin you, so that it acts as a deterrent for other people who might be thinking of blowing the whistle."

Asked whether the deterrent works, he answered from the receiving end. "I can't tell you how many people, former CIA people, have told me that they thought about reporting on X, Y and Z, but then they saw what happened to me." What they saw, in his summary: a million dollars in debt, a wife who left, a lost house, a lost job, a lost clearance, and no further work in government or national security. "They actively ruin you. That's part of the program. Nobody wants that."

The full price list

Kiriakou separates the survivable losses from the permanent ones. Friends, former colleagues and even relatives walk away and never speak to you again, "that's hurtful, but you can live with that. You get to see who your friends really were anyway, and then you make new friends in a new community."

What cannot be recovered from is the rest: "you will never work in your field ever again. And on top of never working in your field, you have a national security felony conviction. So you lose your federal pension. You lose the right to vote. You lose the right to ever own a firearm. You're always a suspect in something." The surveillance outlasted the sentence, "it was years after I got home from prison that the FBI continued to follow me around, not all the time, but with some regularity."

His own trajectory is the illustration he offers: "I was one of the US government's leading experts on the Middle East, and I ended up stocking shelves at Michael's craft store on midnight shift, before I got a minimum wage job at a left-wing think tank, and then finally my wife left. She couldn't take it any more."

Why it is not personal

The point he insists on is that the ruin is instrumental. "They want you to be ruined, not because they specifically have it out for you. They're not sitting around a table saying, how can we screw" this individual. "What they're doing is saying: how can we use" her "as an example, where we make her so hurt that other people are going to look at her and say, you know, I was thinking about blowing the whistle, but look what they did."

In this telling he also puts a duration on the effect he measures it by: the New York Times reporter told him that on the day of his arrest every one of the paper's national security sources went silent "and stayed silent for six months. And that was the goal."

See also

- Thomas Drake
- Julian Assange
- Espionage Act
- Edward Snowden
- John Kiriakou
