Death threats against Kiriakou
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Death threats against Kiriakou began with his public disclosures about the CIA torture program and have continued, in distinct waves with distinct causes, for the next two decades. By 2026 John Kiriakou describes the change as one of frequency rather than kind: at first "maybe one a year, one every couple of years", and then, once he began speaking in support of Palestinian human rights, "every couple of days" and "very, very specific."

After the torture disclosures

Recalling the period in 2021, he said: "after i made my my revelations i got so many death threats that i actually had to had to leave the country for for a couple of weeks my wife and i uh took our kids to mexico just you know the fbi recommended that we go on vacation somewhere that at least two of these threats were credible and uh we should just make ourselves um scarce."

An earlier telling adds what happened at home before they left. The threats that followed the television interview were numerous enough that local police were called and a security car was posted in front of his house, and the FBI was itself receiving calls saying he was going to be killed; the family then spent, in this account, a week in Mexico, purely to be away from the area until it calmed down. The length of the trip varies between tellings, a week in the 2017 account, a couple of weeks in the 2021 one.

He raises the episode in the same breath as the absence of any public defence. The one message of support he singles out came privately and after the fact, from a retired deputy director of the CIA, and he says he kept it: "you've chosen a difficult road but i'm glad somebody did i just wish i had had the courage to do it myself." His verdict on what that amounted to: "that translated into nothing for me no support at all no public support i was ostracized by my cia colleagues."

Opposing the Haspel nomination

The second identifiable wave came from print. When Gina Haspel was nominated as CIA director, The Washington Post asked Kiriakou to write an opinion piece opposing her; he did it gladly and was given 1,200 words on the front of the Sunday opinion section, a "major soap box", which, he notes, led to half a dozen death threats. He offers it as evidence for the proposition he was arguing at the time, that the public does not really care.

The Pakistan wave

The most sustained wave came from a single sentence of analysis. Asked by an Indian outlet about a conventional India,Pakistan conflict, Kiriakou said India would probably win because it has five or six times the population, a claim he stresses was not even a criticism of Pakistan. The threats arrived faster than he could clear his inbox, and were followed by a letter, mailed to his home address by the president of Imran Khan's political party, demanding a written apology to Imran Khan, to the party and to the Pakistani people by the end of the day; Kiriakou has no idea how they obtained the address, refused in the coarsest available terms, and the death threats resumed. On one morning he counted 72 calls from the same man promising to spread his brains all over the street, and he now flags the risk in advance whenever the subject comes up: "every time I mention Pakistan, the death threats heap on." The anticipation has become a running feature of his commentary, he predicts a dozen more Pakistani threats before answering a question about Pakistani corruption, and warns that naming the worst country he visited with the CIA would earn him the same.

Palestine, Iran and the Epstein claim

The current wave he attributes squarely to his position on Palestinian human rights, and secondarily to statements about Israel and Iran that he makes knowing what follows, that the Israelis will destroy a city block to reach one man, or that the exiled Iranian claimant "would not survive the walk from the plane to the terminal" were he to return.

Saying without equivocation that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad access agent produced multiple threats, one of which he read out on air and attributed to a named New York rabbi: that there is "a place in the ovens" for him and for Jew haters like him, and shame on him for protecting a paedophile and a child trafficker because the man was Jewish. The name is rendered as Sima Scholar in one captioning and Simcha Scholar in the other; the latter appears in the later recording.

Asked about the threats received by Epstein's accusers, a graphic image of a mutilated woman captioned "so be quiet", and a threat in Hebrew reading "this is what will happen to you if you talk", Kiriakou drew a distinction he is careful about. The CIA does not do that, and he is not aware of any Western service that telephones people and threatens them; but many of his activist friends in Washington do receive such calls, sometimes in Hebrew and often in Farsi with Hebrew accents, and his educated guess is that this is something Mossad has long done, as it did against Iraqi exiles during the Iraq war.

The callers, and what he does about them

The mechanics are consistent: anonymous Google Voice numbers and untraceable VPN email accounts, blocked and immediately replaced, one caller worked through three numbers of escalating abuse before the death threats began, and had called eight times by the time Kiriakou described him on air. Another, obviously drunk, called at three in the morning to make direct threats. His standard reply is "Bring it on, tough guy", on the reasoning that real assassins do not announce themselves, least of all through anonymous numbers. He has also come to read the volume as a metric: a bad-mood morning of threats means the message is getting out and that people are frightened by the audience he has built. By 2026 he reports that some senders no longer bother to hide, attaching their name, telephone number and email address.

The FBI's posture has inverted since the torture-disclosure period, when it assessed threats and told him to leave the country. Kiriakou now says the Bureau has never once reached out to him, and does not have the manpower to care. The exception came when a caller who had promised to spread his brains on the sidewalk gave Kiriakou's own home address, and then asked when he had last spoken to his son, reciting the son's address. Told the first part, the agent said this happens to people all day long; told the second, he said "that's a crime." They took the case and found the man in four days, a man in New York who had seen an interview, taken exception to it and decided to silence him.

His own precautions are constrained by the conviction. Advised by a friend to take a concealed-carry course, he replied that he had already taken one and held a permit, but as a convicted felon he had to surrender his gun and can only recover the right with a presidential pardon, which is one of the two reasons he says he wants one. His lawyer's advice is to keep a low profile and be aware of his surroundings, which he treats as a joke. The working theory that reassures him is that he is too high-profile for anything to be done quietly, though, as he says, he is not blind, and he saw what happened to Charlie Kirk; he takes the threats seriously and has taken steps to protect himself.

See also

- CIA Torture Program Whistleblowing
- Gina Haspel
- Jeffrey Epstein
- Whistleblower psychology
- John Kiriakou
