Title: John Kiriakou’s Entire Life in 67 Minutes
Show: Echo Zip
Date: 2026-03-21
URL: https://youtu.be/qwEqr257Xgc
Duration: 67:00

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[00:00] In the spring of the year 2000, John Kiriakou was posted to Athens, Greece as a CIA officer. He was stationed in one of the most dangerous cities in Europe for American government personnel, a city where a Marxist terrorist organization called Revolutionary Organization 17 November had spent 25 years murdering CIA station chiefs, defense attachés, and American servicemen with near total impunity. He drove a fully armored BMW U540i, carried

[00:32] two firearms at all times, and had survived at least one attempt on his life. He was, by any professional measure, a man who had learned to anticipate danger. And yet, the most destabilizing thing that ever happened to him on Greek soil did not involve a motorcycle gunman or a surveillance team. It came from his 6-year-old son sitting on the bathroom floor watching his father shave. The boy, in the matter-of-fact way that only children can manage, relayed that he had advised his mother not to kiss someone named

[01:03] Stelios on the lips, explaining that she should only kiss his father. She told him to mind his own business. Kiriakou described the sensation of hearing this as feeling like he had been electrocuted. He wiped the shaving cream from his face. He went to the bedroom. He kicked the bed. And then, in what he would later identify as the most disciplined decision of a very eventful life, he chose to leave the house before he did something he would regret. He drove to the embassy.

[01:33] He went to work. Hours later, his wife was in a car accident, and he had to return to the scene where the other driver called her a vulgar name in Greek. The man spent 3 days in a coma, knocked out by Kiriakou, who was arrested, invoked diplomatic immunity, and the charges were eventually dropped. The lawsuit that followed was thrown out for the same reason. He described it, years later, in various podcast interviews as the only fight he had ever been in during his entire life. He said

[02:05] it almost casually. This is the way John Kiriakou tells stories, with structural elegance that places the most extraordinary detail exactly where it will land hardest. He has been telling stories about the CIA, about torture, about prison, about the American legal system, and about the permanent costs of telling the truth for nearly two decades. Something shifted in the last few years. Those stories found an audience far larger, far younger, and

[02:37] far more viscerally astonished than anything that had come before. What follows is the complete account of how a boy from a dying coal town in western Pennsylvania became one of the most consequential whistleblowers in American intelligence history, and what it cost him. The city of New Castle, Pennsylvania, sits about 45 miles north of Pittsburgh in Lawrence County, in a part of the state that spent the better part of the 20th century being quietly hollowed out.

[03:08] It was, for a long time, a prosperous place. The steel and tin industries provided work. The population at its peak hovered around 50,000 people. The city had parks and schools and civic pride and enough of the infrastructure of American middle-class life to sustain the convincing illusion of permanence. By the time John Kiriakou was growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s, the decline was already underway, though it would take several more decades to

[03:38] become undeniable. His parents were public school teachers. His father was an elementary school principal. There were two younger siblings. The childhood he describes was, in his own telling, quiet and essentially happy, organized around baseball, football, and the particular pleasure of exploring the large cemeteries near the family home, looking at old gravestones and tracing the names of the people who had built the institutions around him. The detail that towers over everything else from

[04:09] this period of his life is a shortwave radio. When he was 9 years old, his father bought a box of miscellaneous items at an auction for 50 cents. Inside was a broken shortwave radio. The father fixed it and gave it to his son. That night, the boy tuned in after dark, when atmospheric conditions allow shortwave signals to travel vast distances, and heard the BBC broadcasting from London. He heard Radio Moscow. He stayed up late

[04:41] listening. He began waking in the early hours of the morning, at 3:00 and 4:00, hoping that the atmospheric conditions were just right to catch some distant station he had not yet found. Within a few years, his father had constructed a 40-ft antenna tower in the backyard and run the wires into his bedroom. At 14, Kiriakou saved the money he earned from his paper route and spent roughly $1,000 on a professional-grade shortwave unit, which, in 1978, was a

[05:13] genuinely serious financial commitment for a teenager. It is a small detail, but a revealing one. It is evidence of a specific quality of mind, one oriented toward the world beyond immediate experience, fascinated by distance and by the fact that invisible signals could cross oceans and reach a bedroom in a Pennsylvania town. That quality of mind would define his entire career. The other formative moment he has discussed at length came in the winter of 1975,

[05:45] when he was 11 years old and visiting his grandparents for Christmas. His grandfather mentioned that someone had killed the CIA man in Athens. His father, with a contextual fluency that surprised young Kiriakou even at the time, explained that the CIA had people all over the world working with foreign governments, and that the man in Athens was probably not spying on Greece, but working alongside Greek intelligence. That murdered man was Richard Welch, the CIA station chief, shot dead on December

[06:18] 23rd, 1975. 30 years later, John Kiriakou would be stationed in Athens working on the task force trying to identify and dismantle the very organization that had killed Welch. He grew up knowing he wanted to be a spy. He told his parents when he was nine. He told his father again at 16 during a car ride past Fraser's Pond on Old Plank Road, specifying that he wanted to work in the Middle East. His father suggested dentistry. He declined.

[06:50] He applied to only one university. George Washington University occupies a stretch of Foggy Bottom in Washington, D.C., two blocks from the White House. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was one of only three universities in the United States offering a degree program in Middle Eastern Studies. For a young man who had decided at nine that he wanted to be a spy in the Arab world, the choice of institution was less a decision than an inevitability.

[07:21] Kiriakou studied Islamic theology as his concentration within Middle Eastern Studies, learned Arabic, and immersed himself in the history and politics of a region that most Americans at the time regarded primarily as the source of a recent oil embargo and an ongoing hostage crisis. He stayed for a master's degree in legislative affairs with a concentration in foreign policy analysis. He worked at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union's International Headquarters to help pay

[07:51] his way through graduate school. The recruitment happened during his master's program in a class called The Psychology of Leadership, taught by a man named Dr. Jerrold Post. Post was not, as it turned out, a conventional professor. He held a PhD in political science, a PhD in psychology, and a medical degree, and his actual affiliation was with the Central Intelligence Agency, for which he was working undercover as a faculty member.

[08:23] Post had founded what would become the CIA's Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, a division devoted to producing psychological profiles of foreign leaders. He was, in the mid-1980s, one of the most intellectually distinctive people in the American intelligence community. The class assignment that precipitated the recruitment was conceptually straightforward. Students were to shadow their professional supervisors for a week and produce a psychological

[08:53] analysis. Kiriakou spent the week observing his supervisor at the labor union, a man he found threatening, volatile, and deeply uncomfortable to be around. The paper he submitted concluded that this supervisor was a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies. He cited psychological literature extensively. He received an A. Dr. Post added a note asking him to come by after class. In

[09:25] Post's office, with the door closed, Post explained that he was a CIA officer working undercover, that he was identifying candidates who would fit the agency's culture, and that he believed Kiriakou was such a candidate. He asked whether he would like to join. Kiriakou said yes. Post picked up the phone, called a contact, described Kiriakou as a strong prospect, and within minutes had written an address on a scrap of paper, and told him to be there in 20

[09:55] minutes. What followed was a months-long process of psychological evaluation, background investigation, physical testing, and polygraph examination. The initial assessment took place in a nondescript office in Rosslyn, Virginia, where three evaluators who identified themselves only by professional discipline, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and an anthropologist, asked him to describe his relationships with his parents, and then asked him

[10:26] twice whether he had ever betrayed a friendship. He answered no both times. They told him that was the answer they had been looking for. They collected urine, blood, and hair samples and sent him home. The polygraph examination, conducted several weeks later at CIA headquarters, was the most nerve-racking part of the process for him. The examinations were designed not primarily to catch criminals, but to rattle candidates and observe how they responded to discomfort and uncertainty.

[10:58] In practice, examiners would sometimes tell candidates they were reacting to a question they were not in fact reacting to in order to see whether the candidate would capitulate and construct a false confession or maintain their position under pressure. Kyriacou passed in 40 minutes. Kyriacou joined the CIA in 1990 as an analyst assigned to the Iraq desk, a posting that initially struck his supervisor as so low stakes that he described Iraq as a training account, a

[11:30] place where nothing ever happened. That assessment would be tested within months of Kyriacou's arrival. On August 2nd, 1990, Iraqi forces crossed the Kuwaiti border in the early hours of the morning. Kyriacou arrived at CIA headquarters to find his supervisor telling him to keep his jacket on. They were going to the White House. He had been to the White House once before as a tourist. He was 26 years old. In the Oval Office, alongside President George

[12:02] H.W. Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and CIA Director William Webster, Kyriacou briefed the room. When the President asked about the occupation governor Iraq had installed in Kuwait, Kyriacou was able to answer with unexpected depth. He had written an article about the man a month earlier purely out of personal curiosity. The governor was a physician, the son of a woman who had been enslaved in the

[12:33] Kuwaiti royal household, a practice common on the Arabian Peninsula until 1955, and had been the college roommate of George Habash, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine at the American University of Beirut. When Vice President Quayle heard the name Habash, he exclaimed and the meeting ended. Kyriacou reflected years later that no one in Newcastle would ever have believed where he was that morning. He spent the first half of his

[13:06] CIA career as an analyst. Writing the President's Daily Brief and other intelligence assessments consumed by the most senior officials in the American government. He covered the Middle East through the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He developed a reputation as precise, psychologically acute, and unusually effective at explaining the motivations of foreign actors whose backgrounds and contexts were opaque to most American policy makers. But the analytical role

[13:38] eventually began to feel insufficient. He wanted to be in the world he was writing about. The transition from analyst to case officer, from the person who interprets intelligence to the person who produces it, was unusual in the agency's career structure, but not unprecedented. He applied, was accepted, and was sent through the CIA's operational training program at the clandestine training facility in Virginia, known informally as the farm.

[14:09] The farm covered an enormous range of competencies, surveillance and counter-surveillance, weapons qualification, evasive driving, parachuting, lock picking, and the foundational tradecraft cycle of spotting, assessing, developing, and recruiting human sources. Kyriacou discovered at the farm that he had a natural aptitude for operational work. He tested first in his class in weapons qualification, despite having never owned or fired a gun before

[14:41] arriving. He excelled at the driving exercises. His instructor suggested he consider competitive shooting. He left the farm with a lifelong habit of never establishing predictable patterns in his movements, varying departure times, routes, and routines every single day. His Arabic language training deepened to a level that native speakers consistently found striking. During an early overseas posting in Bahrain, he accompanied the American ambassador to a

[15:13] meeting with a senior Bahraini Minister of Religious Affairs who had never in his career encountered an American whose mastery of classical Arabic was at the level Kyriacou demonstrated. This linguistic capacity was far from a mere professional asset. It was, in the way that deep language acquisition always is, an opening into the interior of a culture, its humor, its poetry, its particular ways of constructing trust and signaling respect. His first major

[15:45] overseas assignment as a case officer was Athens, Greece from 1998 to 2000. Athens at that time was one of the most dangerous postings in the American intelligence world. The United States government spent more on security in Athens than in any other city in the world, including Beirut, a fact that reflected the presence of revolutionary organization 17 November, which had been responsible for 28 murders since its founding in 1975,

[16:17] and a second organization called Popular Revolutionary Struggle. Both groups had operated for decades without a single member being identified or arrested by Greek authorities. Kyriacou, who had been transfixed by the murder of Richard Welch since hearing about it at his grandparents' Christmas table in 1975, now found himself assigned to the task force specifically charged with identifying and dismantling the organization responsible. He moved

[16:48] through Athens fully armed at all times and maintained the counter-surveillance habits his training had instilled. He worked with both Greek intelligence services and British liaison partners on the terrorism problem, and he recruited agents. The dangers were not abstract. A British Brigadier General named Steven Saunders, who had recently become Kyriacou's neighbor in the city, was shot and killed by 17 November gunmen in June 2000 while driving on a central

[17:20] Athens Boulevard. The subsequent manifesto the organization released stated clearly that they had initially been surveilling Kyriacou, who they had correctly identified as a CIA officer, but had determined that his armored BMW made the attack too dangerous to execute. They had then redirected their attention to Saunders, whose vehicle bore a British Embassy license prefix. Saunders became the proxy target because Kyriacou was too well protected to kill.

[17:51] When Kyriacou's supervisor read the relevant passages of the manifesto, the evacuation order came within the hour. He was driven directly to the airport. His wife was collected from their residence. Their children pulled from school. The family was on a Delta flight to New York within hours. A CIA team packed and shipped their belongings. The station later confirmed that surveillance photographs Kyriacou had taken during a family outing, showing a

[18:21] man in a parked red car maintaining a fixed position over an extended period, documented that surveillance of his household had been underway before the Saunders murder. There was a second serious incident. This one occurring during a posting to a Middle Eastern country after Athens. Kyriacou was handling what he believed to be a recruited asset, who was in reality a double agent working for an adversarial intelligence service. The double agent had received instructions to identify

[18:52] and kill the CIA station chief, a role his handlers believed Kyriacou occupied. When a colleague at the station learned of these instructions, Kyriacou was alerted. He lured the man to a hotel rooftop under a pretext, and together with liaison security partners who entered simultaneously from an adjoining room, apprehended him. A search of the asset's residence, conducted under cover of a staged propane emergency that evacuated the surrounding neighborhood,

[19:23] produced a substantial cache of weapons, mines, grenades, and rocket launchers. The entire network was dismantled in a single operation. These are the kinds of operations that rarely surface in public accounts of intelligence work. They are improvised, sometimes farcical, sometimes genuinely dangerous, and always dependent on the specific human being at their center making the right call under conditions no training exercise can fully replicate. Kiriakou

[19:54] was promoted. His career was ascending. He had built a record both in analysis and operations that would have been the foundation of a distinguished and long career had the events of September 11th, 2001 not changed the trajectory of everything. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, John Kiriakou was at CIA headquarters in Langley when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. By the time United Airlines

[20:25] Flight 175 struck the South Tower 17 minutes later, the nature of his next assignment was already beginning to take shape. The CIA, which had been watching Al-Qaeda's escalating operational tempo through the 1990s, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 East Africa Embassy attacks, the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden Harbor, was confronted with a catastrophic confirmation that its understanding of the threat had been

[20:57] insufficient and that its response would now need to be total and immediate. Nearly 3,000 people died on September 11th. The fourth hijacked aircraft, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, roughly 45 miles from Newcastle, where Kiriakou had grown up. The particular geography of that detail was not lost on him. Within weeks of the attacks, the American military campaign in

[21:27] Afghanistan began. American air power, combined with Northern Alliance ground forces, to drive the Taliban from Kabul by mid-November 2001. But the military campaign's success in routing the Taliban created a secondary problem that would define Kiriakou's next assignment. Al-Qaeda's core leadership and its operational network did not dissolve. They moved. Hundreds of fighters and dozens of operational figures crossed the porous mountain

[21:58] border into Pakistan's federally administered tribal areas and into Pakistani cities. The CIA's problem shifted from identifying where Al-Qaeda was to finding where it had gone. Kiriakou was posted to Pakistan as the CIA's chief of counterterrorism operations in the country. His mandate was straightforward in its formulation and extraordinarily difficult in its execution. Find, capture, or kill Al-Qaeda

[22:29] leadership. The operational environment he entered was one of the most complex the agency had ever worked in. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate was simultaneously an essential partner and a deeply unreliable one. An agency that maintained relationships with militant groups the CIA was trying to dismantle, that had competing institutional interests, and whose senior officers' loyalties were, in some cases, genuinely unclear. Kiriakou had to build

[23:01] productive working relationships with ISI while conducting operations that sometimes depended on information they did not have or information that had to be withheld from ISI because of penetration concerns. The practical work was relentless. He ran a network of Pakistani informants. He coordinated raids with Pakistani security forces. He processed intelligence that came in fragmentary and often contradictory forms, trying to construct usable

[23:33] pictures of operational activity from fragments of cell phone intercepts, human reporting, and surveillance. He operated in a country where American government personnel were high-value targets, where hotels hosting foreign nationals were being surveilled, where vehicles were tracked, where a consistent pattern of movement was an invitation to an attack. The operation that would define this entire period and that would define the rest of Kiriakou's life was the hunt for a Palestinian man

[24:06] named Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein. He was known to the intelligence community by his kunya, his operational name, Abu Zubaydah. The CIA at that time believed Abu Zubaydah to be among the most senior Al-Qaeda figures accessible through active intelligence collection. He was assessed as a key logistics and facilitation node in the organization's operational structure, someone who had been involved in planning and supporting multiple attacks, and who had extensive

[24:38] knowledge of the network's personnel, methods, and ongoing planning. The tracking operation lasted approximately 6 weeks and was characterized by a quality that Kiriakou returned to repeatedly across his many interviews, the experience of near misses so specific and so frequent that they had a particular kind of psychological texture. The team would arrive at a location to find evidence of very recent occupation, food on a counter still

[25:09] fresh, a cigarette burning in an ashtray, a vehicle recently moved. Abu Zubaydah knew he was being hunted. He moved constantly, rarely sleeping in the same place twice, shifting between houses in Faisalabad with a discipline that demonstrated considerable operational awareness. In late March 2002, acting on intelligence that placed Abu Zubaydah in a specific residential compound in Faisalabad,

[25:41] the CIA and Pakistani security forces executed a simultaneous series of raids on multiple sites across the city. A coordination designed to prevent warning signals traveling between locations before all sites were secured. In the raid on Abu Zubaydah's location, he was shot multiple times. At least one of his associates was killed. He was taken into custody in serious and unstable medical condition. Kiriakou and

[26:11] three FBI agents present at the scene carried Abu Zubaydah on a stretcher to a waiting aircraft. Abu Zubaydah was handed over to a team that Kiriakou was not cleared to identify and the destination was not disclosed to him. This was the compartmentalization principle applied in its most absolute form. Each participant in the operation knew only their specific piece of it and no one knew more than they operationally needed to know. Kiriakou's piece of the

[26:42] operation had ended. The capture was, by any measure, one of the most significant counterterrorism successes of the post-September 11th period. For Kiriakou personally, it was the culmination of 6 weeks of intensive operational work in extremely difficult conditions. He had led the operation. He had delivered the result. By any standard of professional recognition, a promotion and accommodation were the appropriate institutional responses. Neither came.

[27:15] What came instead was a question asked in a cafeteria. Several months after the capture, in May 2002, Kiriakou was standing in the sandwich line at CIA headquarters when a senior officer from the Counterterrorism Center approached him and asked, in the same tone one might use to inquire about a training course or a conference, whether he would like to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. It was the first time Kiriakou had heard that phrase. He asked what it meant. The

[27:47] officer described 10 specific techniques. Some were relatively mild, an attention slap, a belly slap, physical positioning designed to cause discomfort without lasting injury. Others were considerably more extreme. Waterboarding involved strapping a subject to an inclined board, covering the face with cloth, and pouring water over it to produce the physical experience of drowning. The cold cell technique stripped a detainee naked, chained them standing to an eye bolt in

[28:18] the ceiling in a position that prevented sitting, kneeling, or lying down. Chilled the room to approximately 50° Fahrenheit and drenched the subject with ice water at regular intervals. Sleep deprivation was authorized at durations that, according to American Psychological Association research, exceeded the threshold at which human beings begin to suffer permanent psychological damage. The officer confirmed the program had been cleared by the Justice Department and personally

[28:50] authorized by the president. Kiriakou asked for time to think. He went to the seventh floor, the executive level of CIA headquarters, and knocked without an appointment on the door of a very senior officer with whom he had worked years earlier in the Middle East. He described what had just been proposed. The senior officer's response was immediate and precise. Whatever euphemism was being used, this was a torture program. Torture produced unreliable intelligence. It was a slippery slope.

[29:23] Someone would eventually go too far and kill a prisoner, and when that happened, there would be a congressional investigation and people would go to prison. The advice was to stay away from it. Kiriakou went back downstairs and declined. He was, as he later learned, the only one of the 14 officers asked that day who refused. The repercussions within the institution were swift. Despite having just led the capture of the most significant Al-Qaeda figure in custody since September 11th, Kiriakou

[29:55] was passed over for promotion. The head of the Counterterrorism Center stated in his promotion panel that Kiriakou had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism. A colleague who was also a brigadier general in the Army Reserve told Kiriakou privately that people were calling him the human rights guy behind his back and that this was not a compliment. A separate senior officer, seeing that Kiriakou's name had been omitted from the promotion list, promoted him out of cycle. But the

[30:27] damage to his standing within the post-September 11th CIA, where the institutional culture had hardened in ways that made his refusal seem like a judgment on those who had complied, had been done. He was effectively marked. The Central Intelligence Agency's enhanced interrogation program is now a matter of extensive public record, documented most comprehensively in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report on CIA detention

[30:58] and interrogation activities, released in December 2014. The program began in 2002, was carried out at a network of secret detention facilities outside the United States, and involved techniques that the Senate report concluded were more brutal than had been represented to oversight bodies, produced little or no actionable intelligence that could not have been obtained through other means, and in several cases resulted in the deaths of

[31:28] detainees. What Kiriakou witnessed from his position as executive assistant to the CIA's Deputy Director for Operations gave him a panoramic view of the program's effects very early in its implementation. In that role, he had access to cables coming back from the black sites. He read accounts from CIA officers who had not expected what they encountered and who were requesting curtailment of their assignments, ending their tours early at significant cost to their own careers,

[32:00] because they could not continue to participate. A secretary who happened to be present during an interrogation session fainted and left the country. CIA officers were writing back to headquarters expressing shock and stating plainly that they had not signed up for this. The intelligence picture was also deeply troubling. Abu Zubaydah had been providing genuinely valuable intelligence to the FBI under the rapport-based interrogation methods of Special Agent Ali Soufan, including

[32:32] identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by his operational pseudonym, a breakthrough that gave investigators the key link in the chain leading back to the September 11th attacks, and went completely silent within 12 hours of the CIA taking over his interrogation and initiating the enhanced techniques. He remained silent. Soufan was eventually withdrawn from the operation along with all other FBI personnel. The two contract psychologists who designed the

[33:03] program, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, ultimately received approximately $81 million from the CIA. They had reverse-engineered the military SERE program, which was designed to train American soldiers to resist enemy interrogation techniques, and proposed those same techniques as a framework for extracting information from Al-Qaeda prisoners. The logical problem at the heart of this approach was that SERE resistance training was designed to teach people to resist techniques that

[33:35] do not reliably produce accurate information in the first place. Adapting those techniques as an offensive interrogation methodology did not address the fundamental problem. People under severe physical and psychological duress will say whatever they believe their interrogators want to hear. At least two detainees died from the cold cell technique, specifically from hypothermia. The Senate report documented these deaths. When detainees died in CIA custody at

[34:06] the black sites in those early years, standard practice was to bury them near the interrogation facility with minimal documentation. One case that Kiriakou described across multiple interviews involved a detainee whose death was reported back to headquarters. The response from headquarters was an instruction to place the body in ice while officials determined what to do. When decomposition began, a decision was made to bury the man. Abu Zubaydah's heart stopped during a waterboarding

[34:38] session. He was revived by a physician who was present precisely for this purpose, and the enhanced interrogation continued. The Abu Ghraib scandal broke publicly in April 2004 concerning military detention rather than CIA black sites. The Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International all published assessments stating that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. In November 2005, the Washington Post

[35:08] reported the existence of the CIA black site network. President George W. Bush said publicly and repeatedly that the United States did not torture. John Kiriakou was by this point out of the CIA. He had left the agency in 2004, primarily because his children had moved with his first ex-wife to Ohio, and he needed to be near them. He had watched and waited for someone inside the CIA or the administration to publicly acknowledge what was happening. No one

[35:40] did. In December 2007, Brian Ross of ABC News called John Kiriakou at home. Ross said he had a source claiming that Kiriakou had personally tortured Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou told him that was categorically false. He had never laid a hand on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner. Ross offered him the opportunity to come on television and say so. Kiriakou had never spoken to a journalist and did not know this was a standard technique

[36:12] reporters used to secure reluctant interviews. He said he would think about it. That week, President Bush held press conferences at which he was asked about the international human rights organizations' assessments that the CIA was torturing prisoners. At the first two, he said the United States did not torture. At the third, pressed further, he said that if there was torture, it was the work of a rogue CIA officer. Kiriakou understood immediately what

[36:42] this framing meant. The White House was laying the groundwork to identify a scapegoat, and the most visible person associated with the Abu Zubaydah operation, who had already been publicly identified as a human rights dissenter within the Counterterrorism Center, was an obvious candidate. He called Ross back and agreed to the interview. The interview aired on ABC News on December 10th, 2007. In it, Kiriakou made three statements that would determine the course of the

[37:14] rest of his life. He said the CIA was torturing its prisoners. He said that torture was official United States government policy. And he said the policy had been personally approved by the President of the United States. He later acknowledged in various interviews that one factual claim he offered that day was incorrect. He said that waterboarding Abu Zubaydah had produced actionable intelligence. This was something he had heard second-hand from colleagues and accepted as true. The

[37:45] Senate Intelligence Committee report and the subsequent testimony of FBI Agent Ali Soufan established that the actionable intelligence on Al-Qaeda's structure and on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was produced before the CIA took over the interrogation through Soufan's rapport-based methods, not by the enhanced techniques that followed. Within 24 hours of the broadcast, the CIA filed a crimes report against Kiriakou with the FBI alleging

[38:17] that he had revealed classified information. The FBI investigated him for a full year. In December 2008, the Justice Department sent his attorney a declination letter declining to prosecute. The letter stated that the information Kiriakou had disclosed was already public through the human rights organizations' reports, and more critically, that torture is a crime and that it is illegal under American law to classify a crime for the purpose of concealing it from the public. No

[38:48] charges. He and his wife went to dinner to celebrate. Three or four weeks later, Barack Obama was inaugurated as president. Among his early national security appointments was John Brennan as Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism. Brennan had been, by Kiriakou's account, the Executive Director of the CIA during the period when the enhanced interrogation program was created and implemented, and had been among those who advocated for it. He had also been,

[39:21] for professional and personal reasons that Kiriakou traced back more than 15 years, someone who harbored a deep professional dislike of Kiriakou. Brennan sent a memo to Attorney General Eric Holder instructing him to charge Kiriakou with espionage. Holder's response, documented in discovery materials eventually disclosed to Kyriakou's legal team, stated that the Justice Department's lawyers did not believe Kyriakou had committed espionage. Brennan replied telling

[39:53] Holder to charge him anyway and force him to defend himself. The subsequent investigation ran from 2009 to 2012. FBI agents tapped Kyriakou's phones and monitored his email during this period. He was working at the time as the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Senator John Kerry. In January 2012, he received a call from the FBI requesting his cooperation on what they described as a

[40:25] matter similar to a previous situation in which he had assisted them. He went to the Washington Field Office. The two agents who met him said they had just finished reading his book and enjoyed it. Then they told him they were raiding his house at that very moment. He asked to speak to his attorney. That single request was the only reason he was not arrested on the spot. One of the agents present during the interview was later identified as Peter Strzok, who would become publicly prominent several years

[40:55] later in connection with the investigation into Russian election interference. Strzok was heard asking whether Kyriakou had implicated himself. The answer was no, so he was allowed to leave. He was charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage. The specific charge that ultimately held was a single count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, a law that had previously been used to prosecute exactly one person, a CIA

[41:28] secretary, who during an affair with a member of Ghanaian intelligence, had disclosed the identities of CIA officers and their sources, several of whom were subsequently executed. That woman received 9 months in prison. The Justice Department initially offered Kyriakou 45 years. He declined. They offered 10 years, then eight, then five, then three and a half. His lead attorney, the legendary Washington criminal defense

[41:59] lawyer Plato Cacheris, who had represented figures in some of the most significant national security prosecutions in American history, including Aldrich Ames and Monica Lewinsky, told him the declining offers were unprecedented in his 52 years of practice. Usually, the government's offers go up, not down. The declining trajectory meant they knew their case was weak. But the venue was the problem. The Eastern District of Virginia, sometimes called the espionage court,

[42:32] drew its jury pool from Northern Virginia communities, where a significant percentage of residents worked in the intelligence community or for intelligence contractors. No national security defendant had ever won a case in that court. Kyriakou's jury consultant, who came through a connection to O.J. Simpson's trial team and worked without charge, confirmed this assessment directly. In any other federal court in America, he would recommend going to trial. In the Eastern

[43:04] District of Virginia, the case was unwinnable. He accepted a plea agreement. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison, of which he served 23. The Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania, sits in the mountains of Cambria County, roughly 80 miles east of Pittsburgh. It is a low-medium security federal facility, which is to say that by the stark spectrum of American incarceration, it occupies a middle ground between the minimum security work camps and the

[43:35] harder, more violent medium security prisons. That relative designation obscures the essential reality of what incarceration means, the complete and permanent absence of control over any meaningful aspect of one's own existence. Every meal, every waking hour, every movement, every conversation, all of it governed by institutional rules enforced by people with no particular interest in the person before them. Kyriakou arrived at Loretto

[44:07] expecting to be placed at the minimum security work camp across the street from the main facility. At sentencing, his attorneys had requested this placement. The government had not objected and the judge had agreed. When he presented himself at the entrance, the guard processing him indicated that his paperwork placed him in the main prison, not the camp. He later learned, through contacts who remained inside the institutional network, that John Brennan, reportedly furious that the

[44:37] sentence was not longer, had used whatever administrative leverage was available to ensure Kyriakou's assignment was made as difficult as the law allowed. Kyriakou made a deliberate decision in that processing moment. He said nothing. He raised no objection. He understood that visible resistance in a prison intake process was the shortest path to solitary confinement. And that solitary confinement would be considerably worse than whatever the general population presented. He was

[45:09] processed in silence, given his clothing and bedding, and walked to a cell designed for four men that was housing six. 20 minutes after he settled in, two men appeared at the cell door. The first had a a tattoo that covered his entire neck and extended onto his face. The second had a word tattooed across his eyelids, visible in full every time he blinked. The first man ran through an intake questionnaire in rapid succession. Was Kyriakou gay? Was he a

[45:42] rat? Was he a child er? Having received satisfactory negative answers to each question, he extended an invitation to sit with the Aryan Brotherhood in the cafeteria. Kyriakou, who had operated in Pakistan, Greece, and the Middle East, who had survived an assassination attempt by Greek terrorists, accepted this information with the equanimity of a man who understood that in an unfamiliar and dangerous environment, temporary alliance is a survival tool.

[46:13] Within a few days, a member of the Nation of Islam appeared with a copy of the organization's newspaper. He conveyed that Minister Louis Farrakhan had designated Kyriakou a hero of the Muslim people and that the Nation of Islam community would offer no difficulty. The messenger declined to shake hands on theological grounds, but delivered the message clearly. The development that changed everything came from a different direction entirely. A front-page New York Times story had

[46:45] announced, the Sunday before Kyriakou's Thursday arrival, exactly which facility he would be assigned to. An Italian-American inmate named Mark Lanzilotti, a man who had no obligation whatsoever to do what he did, had read the story and taken it upon himself to circulate through every Italian-American inmate in the facility and educate them about a distinction they apparently had not previously considered necessary. The CIA

[47:16] was a foreign intelligence service that had spent decades fighting the threats that kept America safe. The FBI was domestic law enforcement, cops, and in the moral taxonomy of a federal prison, cops were rats. The CIA was not the enemy. Kyriakou was to be welcomed. When Kyriakou arrived on Thursday, the Italian-American contingent, the smallest organized group in the prison by numbers, but commanding a respect

[47:47] that had nothing to do with numbers, received him. Within days, word had traveled through every population in the facility. Kyriakou was with the Italians. The practical consequence was total and immediate. Nobody bothered him. Among his immediate neighbors in the cell block was a senior member of the Bonanno crime family. The two men established an early routine. They exchanged newspapers in the morning, Kyriakou's New York Times for his neighbor's New York Post. On weekends,

[48:20] they watched football together. When the neighbor asked, some days into this arrangement, why Kyriakou had been sitting with the Aryan Brotherhood in the cafeteria on his first days, Kyriakou explained the circumstances of his arrival. The neighbor told him simply that from that point forward, he was with the Italians. He was never with the Aryans again. The prison administration, or forces using the prison administration as their instrument, made several attempts to create additional difficulties. On one

[48:52] occasion, Kyriakou was summoned to the lieutenant's office and shown a photograph of another inmate, an Iraqi-American serving time on a terrorism-related charge. He was told that after a brief encounter with Kyriakou the previous day, this man had telephoned a number in Pakistan and received instructions to kill Kyriakou. Kyriakou was skeptical. The inmate was Kurdish, spoke Arabic and Kurdish, and would have had no operational use for a

[49:23] contact in Pakistan in either of those languages. He nevertheless gave the man a wide berth in the yard for weeks. Eventually, he approached the man directly and asked whether the prison staff had told him a symmetrical story, that Kiriakou had called Washington and arranged for his death. The man confirmed that this was precisely what he had been told. Both men understood immediately. The administration, or someone directing the administration, had attempted to manufacture a violent confrontation

[49:54] between them. The Iraqi-American inmate was transferred out of the facility within days of that conversation. A second incident occurred in the yard. A bearded man approached Kiriakou with an extended hand, introduced himself as the former spokesperson for the Taliban, and proposed that they had a great deal in common. Kiriakou, who had spotted a guard in the tree line photographing the encounter with a telephoto lens, raised both hands visibly, stepped back, and stated loudly and explicitly that they

[50:26] had nothing in common, that he had spent half his career trying to kill people like him, and that the man should not make physical contact with him. The Taliban spokesman was transferred out of the facility 4 days later. He had been there for less than a week. The writing was perhaps the most significant thing Kiriakou did during his 23 months at Loretto. He was not permitted access to a computer. He wrote his second book longhand, a complete memoir of his CIA career, his

[50:58] prosecution, and his incarceration. Sitting in his cell and in the prison library, filling legal pads in a disciplined daily practice. He also wrote what he titled, in deliberate homage to Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 letter from Birmingham Jail, a letter from Loretto. In it, he described the conditions at the facility, documented a guard who had addressed him at mail call with a slur, and described the manufactured confrontation with the

[51:28] Iraqi-American inmate with enough specificity that the prison administration could not claim ignorance. His attorney forwarded the letter to Arianna Huffington, then running the Huffington Post. It was published with a prominent headline and received enormous traffic. CNN traveled to the prison to request an interview. The warden summoned Kiriakou to his office and threatened him with transfer to solitary confinement. Kiriakou, with what he later described as completely

[51:58] clear-headed calculation, told the warden that CNN was waiting in the parking lot, and that the transfer would produce national coverage the warden would find uncomfortable. He was never transferred to solitary. Six weeks before his release, his then wife called during one of their allotted phone conversations to tell him the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report had been released. The report confirmed and exceeded every substantive claim he had made in the December 2007 ABC News

[52:28] interview. Senator John McCain gave a speech on the Senate floor crediting Kiriakou specifically. "Without Kiriakou's disclosures," he said, "the American people would never have known what their government was doing in their name." One of the first calls Kiriakou received after returning home was from John McCain's chief of staff conveying the senator's personal welcome and asking what the senator could do to be of assistance. He came out of prison angry. He did not

[52:59] fully recognize the degree of his anger at the time. People in his life observed it and suggested he speak to a professional or consider pharmaceutical options, and he declined both on the grounds that nothing was wrong with him, and that he was ready to fight. He acknowledges now, with characteristic self-awareness, that he was not entirely wrong, that the anger was justified, but that its intensity was not serving him or the people around him. The practical situation was stark. He was a convicted

[53:30] felon. He was bankrupt, having spent approximately $2 million on legal fees across the years of investigation and prosecution. His pension had been confiscated. He had a master's degree and completed coursework toward a doctorate, extensive expertise in counterterrorism, the Middle East, and national security policy, and was unable to secure employment at McDonald's, Safeway, Target, or Uber. All declined to hire convicted felons. His second marriage

[54:03] did not survive the cumulative weight of imprisonment, financial collapse, and the emotional aftermath of everything that had preceded it. Senator John McCain, whom Kiriakou had gotten to know during his time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, attempted to address the pension issue through an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016. The amendment was written in language generic enough not to identify any individual, while specific enough to apply only to Kiriakou. It referred to

[54:36] every American convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act within a specific 30-day window in October 2012. McCain intended to insert it into a conference committee. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor, was not appointed to the conference committee, and died in August 2018 without completing the effort. The amendment was removed. The pension was not restored. Kiriakou's reconstruction of a working life proceeded through writing, speaking, and

[55:07] teaching. His first book had reached number five on the New York Times bestsellers list. His second, written longhand from prison, won the PEN First Amendment Award and Forward Reviews Memoir of the Year for its publication year. He taught a graduate-level course in the history of terrorism at the University of Salamanca in Spain. He developed syndicated newspaper columns running in approximately 200 small and mid-sized American papers. He started

[55:38] podcasts. He took consulting work where it was available. The Greek government, whose relationship with Kiriakou was shaped partly by his Greek-American heritage and partly by his years stationed in Athens, offered him citizenship within a day of his initial arrest. He accepted. After his release from prison, the Greek Parliament retained him to assist in drafting a new national whistleblower protection law, which was subsequently passed and then adopted by the European Union as a model

[56:10] framework for its member states. He found common cause, in ways that surprised some observers who expected political affiliations to remain more predictable, with populist Republicans, libertarians, and civil liberties advocates across the political spectrum. He has described this realignment without apparent awkwardness. The question of whether the government can weaponize its prosecutorial apparatus against individuals who expose its crimes is not inherently a left or right

[56:42] issue, and his own experience had demonstrated that the Obama administration was entirely capable of prosecuting truth-tellers. His efforts to secure a presidential pardon have been sustained and well-organized. He has submitted letters signed by a significant range of prominent figures. CIA Director John Ratcliffe stated publicly in early 2025 that the CIA had no objection to a presidential pardon. Former Director of National Intelligence

[57:13] Tulsi Gabbard issued a statement to the same effect. As of his most recent podcast appearances in 2025, the pardon had not been granted. He is in his early 60s. He has five children. He has essentially nothing in retirement savings. He describes his financial situation with characteristic directness. He will work until the day he dies because there is nothing else to fall back on. He made peace with that outcome a long time ago.

[57:44] For nearly two decades after his 2007 ABC News interview, John Kiriakou told his stories to audiences who had come specifically looking for them. People who had already formed a view about the surveillance state and wanted to hear from someone who had lived inside it. The audience was real and engaged, but it was bounded. It knew who he was. Then, without any particular planning on his part, something changed. The catalyst was an appearance on the

[58:14] podcast Diary of a CEO, hosted by Steven Bartlett. The appearance almost did not happen. Kiriakou received a call on a Friday evening from someone identifying themselves as calling from the show. He knew the podcast. He watched it regularly and told them so. They explained they had a last-minute cancellation and asked whether he could fly to Los Angeles the following morning, a Saturday. He checked his schedule. It was, for the first time in months, completely clear. He said yes.

[58:47] He flew to Los Angeles on Saturday morning, recorded the interview, went directly back to the airport, and took the overnight red-eye flight home to Washington. The appearance was logistically unremarkable. He had no particular reason to think it would perform differently from any other long-form conversation he had given. He was wrong. By the time he checked on the episode a few days later, it had accumulated millions of views. Young people, many of them encountering Kiriakou for the first time. Many of

[59:19] them not yet born when he blew the whistle on the torture program in 2007. Some of them not yet born when the September 11 attacks occurred. Had taken clips from the interview and distributed them widely across Tik Tok and other social media platforms. The clips circulated in forms that range from straightforward excerpts to remixed versions in which Kiriakou's voice had been pitch-shifted to sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks or slowed to produce a deep theatrical rumble. He described

[59:51] these remixed versions in later interviews as having been done in good fun, which based on the evident warmth with which he described the phenomenon, they clearly were. The outlet complex published an article about the moment under the headline, "Whistleblower becomes Tik Tok sensation with frequently shocking, sometimes hilarious, CIA insight." The headline captured something real about the specific quality of the audience's response. The stories

[1:00:22] Kiriakou tells are objectively extraordinary. To an audience encountering them without prior context, the natural response is a kind of delighted disbelief. By the time Kiriakou discussed the phenomenon in subsequent interviews, the Diary of a CEO episode had accumulated 5 and 1/2 million views. He described a realization that had come to him in conversation with an engineer named Chris Arnin. He had been mistaken in assuming over his years of public

[1:00:53] commentary that he was simply repeating the same stories to the same audience. That assumption was wrong because it misunderstood how audiences work. The audience does not stay fixed. Every day people who have never heard of John Kiriakou encounter the story for the first time. Every day there are people for whom the question of what the CIA did to its prisoners after September 11th and what happened to the man who told the public about it is entirely

[1:01:23] new. The Diary of a CEO appearance reached a substantial portion of those people simultaneously. And Tik Tok distributed the results across a platform optimized for exactly the kind of short, shocking, specific narrative that Kiriakou's stories naturally produce. There is a moment that John Kiriakou returns to in his interviews with some frequency, and it serves as a kind of anchor for everything else. The night before he left for prison, the director of the

[1:01:54] CIA's Counterterrorism Center, a senior officer who had once been his colleague, posted a message to him on social media with a laughing emoji advising him to be careful in the showers. Kiriakou gave himself a few hours to calm down. Then he wrote back a single sentence that he was on the right side of history and the other man was not. He has described what followed with quiet directness. He felt at peace. He went to prison the following morning. The claim of being on

[1:02:26] the right side of history requires history's cooperation to validate. In Kiriakou's case, the cooperation has been extensive. The Senate Intelligence Committee report confirmed the factual basis of everything he said in the 2007 ABC News interview. The conclusion that the CIA's enhanced interrogation program produced no actionable intelligence that could not have been obtained through other means is now formally part of the congressional record. Senator John

[1:02:58] McCain's endorsement, given on the floor of the United States Senate by a man who had personally survived years of torture as a prisoner of war, carries a weight that no administrative talking point has been able to dislodge. The counterargument, made most often by former CIA and administration officials, is that the program was a necessary response to an unprecedented threat at a moment of extraordinary national emergency. Kiriakou's response to this

[1:03:29] argument has been consistent for 18 years. The law does not contain an emergency exception for torture. The Federal Torture Act of 1946 does not say unless you really need to. The United Nations Convention Against Torture does not include a clause for special circumstances. The United States executed Japanese soldiers after World War II for waterboarding American prisoners of war. In January 1968,

[1:04:01] a photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner ran on the front page of the Washington Post. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to 20 years of hard labor at Leavenworth. In 2002, the same act was declared legal by the same government. His point is not that the decision makers were monsters. His point is that the decision was a

[1:04:31] deliberate choice to place the CIA above the law and that the consequences of that choice did not evaporate when the program ended. He also notes that not a single CIA official, administration lawyer, or political decision maker who authorized or implemented the torture program was ever charged with any crime. The one person who was prosecuted was the person who told the public the program existed. John Kiriakou is, in

[1:05:02] his own description, a third-generation Democrat who left the Democratic Party after the Obama administration prosecuted him. He has found common cause with people he never expected to agree with and lost the company of some he expected to keep. He describes himself as having learned that civil liberties are not a partisan concern and that the machinery of the state is indifferent to the politics of the person it is being turned against. He has five children. He has a long-term

[1:05:33] partner he describes with evident warmth. He produces podcasts frequently and maintains his newspaper column and teaches when he can. He is pursuing a presidential pardon. He will almost certainly work for the rest of his life because there is nothing in a retirement account that could otherwise support him. He says, with what sounds like complete sincerity, that he would do it again. That claim carries a different weight in his case than it does when people say it abstractly about things they have not

[1:06:05] yet had to survive. He has had nearly two decades to contemplate the full ledger, the divorces, the prison time, the permanent financial damage, the professional exile, the pension that was taken and never restored, the children who grew up with a father in federal custody. He has looked at that ledger and he says he would do it again. Somewhere in western Pennsylvania, in a town that has been dying for the better part of 50 years, there is no longer a 40-foot shortwave antenna tower in a

[1:06:36] backyard. The signals it once helped receive are still traveling through the atmosphere regardless. The boy who used to wake at 4:00 in the morning chasing signals from distant countries has become someone else entirely and has also not changed at all. History appears to have already begun making its assessment.
