Congressional intelligence oversight
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Congressional intelligence oversight, the work of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, is something John Kiriakou argues does not meaningfully happen. He raises it as the answer to an obvious question: if abuses inside the CIA are classified, and disclosing them is prosecutable, then who is supposed to be checking?

"A beef that I have"

Kiriakou introduces the subject as a personal grievance rather than an abstraction, "That's a beef that I have. I feel very strongly about that."

His comparison is with committees he regards as functional. Real oversight, in his account, happens with the Armed Services Committee, and to a slightly lesser extent with the Foreign Affairs and Foreign Relations Committees, bodies he knows from the inside, having served as a senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Set against those, his assessment of the intelligence committees is dismissive: "but the intelligence committees, forget it. They're just cheerleaders."

The chairman who wanted a proxy

The anecdote Kiriakou uses to demonstrate the problem is recent. A sitting senator, a committee chairman, called him a few weeks earlier and asked him to come up for a private meeting. Kiriakou agreed without hesitation: "of course. I'm a patriot. I want to serve my country."

What the meeting turned out to be about was a fight between two committee chairmen. Kiriakou's reaction was to point out how little standing he had in it: "Well, what the heck do you want me to do about it? I mean, seriously, who am I? I'm nobody."

The senator's request was that Kiriakou write something publicly, for a newspaper, making the argument the chairman would not make himself.

Asked directly whether he thought the senator was afraid, Kiriakou does not hedge: "Yes, I do... I do."

'It took all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance'

The earlier instance Kiriakou gives of the same fear is a conversation from just after his release from prison. Invited to a dinner at the Greek ambassador's residence, he found himself face to face with a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who came over to welcome him home and congratulate him.

Kiriakou did not take the greeting at face value: "Senator, I have to be honest with you. I expected more from you. I expected some support." The senator became angry, and his answer named the thing he had been protecting: "Look, it took all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance."

Kiriakou's reply inverted the job title. "Oh, you're afraid of them. I thought you were the overseer." His conclusion is the standing one: "They're all like that now. They're just cheerleaders."

What oversight would look like

Reviewing a scene in Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan in which a congressional committee openly challenges a CIA deputy director, Kiriakou called it "very powerful" and, in a perfect world, true, while saying it does not happen. His account of the consequence is a ratchet: the CIA "has a way of pushing the envelope and just waiting for government to push back. And that's not a reliable strategy, because it will keep pushing and pushing and pushing until we have a torture program and a secret prison program and an illegal renditions program and weaponization where they take down their domestic enemies."

The reason he gives is the absence of members willing to stand up, in either party, "and I regret that I have to even say this", so that a hearing of the kind the scene depicts "doesn't happen in real life. It should. It should happen every day. But it doesn't."

Cheerleaders, and the compartment problem

Kiriakou''s objection to the committees is twofold, and the second half undercuts any reform of the first. On their disposition: the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence "are supposed to be the two oversight committees, and they''re really not oversight committees so much as they are cheerleaders for the CIA." The consequence he draws is epistemic, assurances such as the claim that MK-Ultra ended in 1975 cannot be checked: "How do we know that? We don''t know it. We''re just supposed to take their word for it."

On structure, he argues that even a committee inclined to look would be locked out: any surviving program "would be so tightly controlled, so compartmentalised, that only the gang of four or the gang of eight would have access to the information anyway. And it would be so highly classified that they wouldn''t be able to say anything." Asked whether the president would know, he answered simply: "No, I don''t." The mechanism of the deference he illustrates with an encounter at a diplomatic dinner after his release from prison, in which a senator on the committee told him that speaking up for him would have cost his clearance.

How a new member is hooked

Kiriakou's older account of why the committees behave as cheerleaders is not that members are lazy but that they are recruited, in the technical sense. He states the premise flatly, "the CIA is very, very good at informally recruiting the people that it needs, especially on Capitol Hill", and when the interviewer objected that this made it sound sinister, he answered: "Well, it is. I mean, every CIA operations officer is trained in manipulation, and the only way that you can get ahead in life at the CIA is to recruit people."

The mechanism he describes needs no inducement beyond access. A member new to either intelligence committee sees a first blue-border report, or takes a first classified briefing, or gets a first look at a sensitive operation overseas, "and you know you've hooked them. You've made them a part of the team, and they want more. They want to be part of that club, part of that exclusive group that knows the country's darkest secrets." Offered the interviewer's phrase for it, the key to the executive bathroom, he accepted it without qualification.

He draws the consequence for the torture programme specifically: the enhanced interrogation techniques "were all approved by the Senate and House Oversight Committee," so the members then serving "are in this up to their necks just like the CIA leadership is, even though they may deny it. They knew about it. They did nothing to stop it. They approved of it."

Pressed that this let the agency's own staff off the hook, he narrowed rather than retreated. Officers in the field did cable back that this was torture and ask to come home, and were allowed to come home, but "nobody ever talked. Nobody ever went public and said, this is wrong. We shouldn't be doing it. I fault them for that." The greater fault he still placed on the leadership.

Where the agency sits in the hierarchy

Asked directly in May 2026 whether the CIA can overrule the president, Kiriakou's answer was categorical and went one rung further down than the question: "No, this CIA cannot overrule the president. The CIA cannot even overrule the Director of National Intelligence." The formal statement sits alongside his longer-standing argument that the DNI's authority over the agency is, in practice, "more of a dotted line", the hierarchy is not in doubt; its enforcement is.

On the same principle he ruled out the agency taking documents from the office above it by force: "The CIA can't raid offices, least of all the offices of the Director of National Intelligence." His verdict on the prospect was that it broke the model entirely, "Real life is not supposed to work this way. This is crazy."

The window, and its closing

Asked whether the CIA is dangerous to American freedom, Kiriakou answered that it is "antithetical to American freedom, only because we've allowed it to be."

He dates the exception precisely: "there was this wonderful period from roughly 1975-76 until about 1982 where congressional oversight of CIA was real and it was hands-on. We're talking about the Church Committee becoming the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Pike Committee becoming the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and they really were hands-on overseers, as we needed."

"By 1982, with the war in Nicaragua, the gloves came off. Next thing you know, we're arming them with the help of the Iranians and Saudi middlemen, and cocaine's coming into the country, and the thing just went off the rails."

The ratchet

The behavioural rule he says he learned across his career: "they will push, push, push, push until somebody pushes back. And if nobody pushes back, well, they've just claimed new territory, and they're not giving it up."

Which is where he places the committees now: "really little more than cheerleaders for the CIA, rather than being overseers and controllers of the CIA. It's going to take another Church and Pike Committee, period, to rein the CIA in. And technology is so advanced now, I'm not even sure that that's possible."

Put to him as regulatory capture, he agreed, and named the trump card that ended arguments: "for many, many years now, all anybody at the CIA ever had to say was 9/11. And everybody would just drop whatever it is they were pushing back on."

Three co-equal branches, in theory

Asked in April 2026 what would fix the problem of undisclosed foreign funding of American commentators, Kiriakou's answer was structural: "this is exactly why we need robust oversight rather than the cheerleaders on Capitol Hill that we have. We need people who are really going to provide independent oversight."

He locates the failure in the relationship between the branches rather than in any committee's staffing. The Constitution describes "three co-equal branches, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial", "but that's just not how we treat it. The legislative has ceded its authority to the executive."

The mechanism he describes is symmetrical, and he is careful to make it so: with a Republican in the White House, Republicans on Capitol Hill "are going to do everything they can to support the president and to pass the president's legislation", and with a Democrat in the White House the Democrats in Congress do the same. "That's not what the founding fathers envisioned." The product of that arrangement is "these so-called oversight committees that don't oversee anything. They just egg them on."

His worked example of the consequence is the buried Senate documents, where neither a senator nor the leadership could produce a route to disclosure.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- CIA culture of lying
- Senate Intelligence Committee
- Jeffrey Sterling
