The culture of secrecy and the truth
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The culture of secrecy and the truth is John Kiriakou's answer to a viewer question put to him near the end of the DeProgram broadcast of 19 November 2025: how did he decide what counted as truth in a world built on secrecy while he was at the agency, and did his understanding of the truth change after he left?

The host flagged the size of the question before handing it over, "unfortunately, we don't have two hours to answer this", and Kiriakou answered it in under a minute.

The answer

He began by disposing of the second half. "No. No."

Then the first, which he prefaced as something he says routinely. "I say this all the time. In our guts, we all know the difference between right and wrong, truth and fiction."

The danger, on his account, is not that secrecy hides the truth from you but that it corrodes your grip on a truth you already hold. "You just can't let that culture, that culture of secrecy, bastardise what you know to be the truth."

What holds it in place

The method he offers is not institutional. "And so you just have to trust in yourself, trust in your judgement, and know deep down that you always have to do the right thing, because the truth's going to come out." The host completed the sentence, "and you will be on the right side of it", and Kiriakou agreed: "it always does."

Why the brevity is the point

Kiriakou has spent years describing institutional mechanisms in exhaustive detail: approval chains, compartments, badge colours, the signature route a covert action programme has to climb. Asked how he personally distinguished true from false inside that machinery, he offered no mechanism at all.

That is consistent with the account he gives of his own decision to speak publicly about the torture programme, which he has never described as the output of a legal analysis. The claim being made here is that no procedure can supply the judgement, and that an officer who waits for one to arrive has already lost the thing at issue.

It is also, read another way, an unusually optimistic statement from a man whose own truth-telling cost him his career, his savings and two years in federal prison. The proposition that the truth always comes out is asserted rather than argued, and he does not claim it comes out in time.

See also

- CIA Torture Program Whistleblowing
- The legal definition of whistleblowing
- Central Intelligence Agency
- John Kiriakou
