Heather Kiriakou
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Heather Kiriakou is John Kiriakou's wife and was herself a career CIA officer. He has described her as a senior officer and really one of the best analysts in the entire intelligence community. 

The ABC News interview

She was present for the moment that ended both their careers. Asked whether he had understood at the time that his December 2007 interview with Brian Ross would change his life, Kiriakou said he really did not think he had done anything wrong, and that his wife had gone with him that day to ABC News and sat just off camera. When he finished, he asked her how he had done. She said great. He asked whether he had said anything classified. She said no, you did great.  He had no idea, he says, that it was going to become a major international story within a day or so, or that the CIA would report him to the FBI the very next day. 

Losing the job

At the February 2013 unveiling of his portrait, Kiriakou told the room that Heather had lost her job at the CIA just because she was married to him. He said he was sorry about that and that it was really the wrong thing for them to have done, adding, with a qualification he has repeated elsewhere, that their lives were better now that neither of them was connected to the agency. She had been, he said, completely rock solid in support of him, and he could not possibly have got through it without her. She could not attend the unveiling; she had the flu.  

On September 11

The two were already together on the day of the September 11 attacks, when she was his girlfriend and also a CIA officer. Kiriakou has described abandoning his car in traffic on the George Washington Parkway, meeting her at his apartment, watching the Pentagon burn from the roof, and going out to try to give blood before the queues defeated them, at which point he said this was ridiculous and they needed to go back to work, and they walked back to the car and returned to headquarters together. 

Accused of leaking to her husband

Before the prosecution, the pressure on Kiriakou reached his wife directly. She was then a senior CIA officer, and the agency accused her of passing classified information to him for the purpose of an op-ed he had written. His answer was documentary: the material in the piece had come from two United Press International reports and from a South American foreign ministry''s website. "And they would back off." He describes the episode as part of a settled routine rather than an isolated incident, "this sort of became our life", one that also involved FBI surveillance of the household and her being summoned to the agency''s office of security.

Classified lunch

Kiriakou uses his own correspondence with his wife as the illustration of how far the classification habit ran. He would email her, "who was also a senior CIA officer", to ask "do you want to meet for lunch," and classify the message Secret HUM 4-82, the authority every agency employee holds. Her answer, "sure, let's meet in front of the deli at 12," came back classified the same way.

"Well, it's not secret that I want to meet my wife for lunch. It's not secret that we're going to meet at noon in front of the deli. But that's just how you're taught, how you're trained to do it." The episode anchors his account of classified email and over-classification.

The taped inquiry

The fullest account Kiriakou gives of the interview describes it as staged. The office of security put a camera on her and opened with the disclaimer "this is not an investigation, it's an inquiry, but we're going to tape it," followed by "what do you think should be done with people who leak classified information?", which Kiriakou calls "a totally loaded question."

Her answers were procedural and short. Told the op-ed was the issue, she pointed out it had been cleared by the publications review board. Told that a line in it was nonetheless top secret, she objected that her husband had no access to top secret information, and was told "but you do." At that point "she said, I think I've said enough, and she got up and walked away."

The line in question, and where he had actually found it, is at the Bolivian visa line.

The Office of Security calls

In April 2022 Kiriakou described something he said he had learned only within the previous couple of months, and called colder than the 45-year offer: that throughout his prosecution "my now ex-wife was reporting back to the CIA's Office of Security all of my plans." He would come home from meeting his lawyers and tell her the strategy, "and she would call the CIA and tell them what my legal strategy was."

He dates her acknowledgement precisely, "she admitted to that in open court six weeks ago", and reaches for the totalitarian comparison directly: the fear of a society that turns "husband against wife and children against their parents" is "real."

The day of the plea

Kiriakou has repeated one thing his wife said to him on the day he took his plea, and credits it as the observation that reorganised his understanding of his own case. What angered her most that day, she told him, was not the sentence: "one of the things that makes me so angry today is that somebody's going to get promoted for this."

He has since generalised the remark into a reading of national-security prosecutions at large, in which agents and attorneys advance by accumulating convictions rather than by establishing crimes.

"Are you talking to the DNC?"

Kiriakou uses a domestic exchange as his example of how far the view he is arguing against had penetrated the agency itself. Around 2012 his then wife, a CIA officer, "told me that we had not faced an enemy in generations as strong and as evil as Russia. And I said, are you insane?" Asked to confirm that this was his wife and that she was in the CIA, he confirms both, and gives his reply to her: "what are you, talking to the DNC?"

He files it under a wider disappointment in people whose judgement he had trusted. "These people were my friends, my colleagues. We went through a lot together. I trusted their intellect. These really are some of the best and brightest in the country. I'm still in touch with many of them. And I'm shocked and saddened that they believe all of the CNN and MSNBC propaganda that people from the Democratic National Committee are spouting." The closing line of the interview is of a piece: "I'm afraid of nuclear war, and I'm sickened that the people whose intellects I trusted are not."

The answer he gives through the family

Asked in February 2015, days after his release, whether he would do it all again, Kiriakou did not answer with the principle. He answered with the household: "I would do it again. As terrible as it's been, as difficult as it's been, I have a family that is rock solid in its support of me, and a family that knows right from wrong. Torture is wrong."

Only then does the principle arrive, and it arrives as a consequence of the first answer rather than as its ground: "I'm proud to have played a role in the end of torture as US government policy, and I would do it all again."

See also

- Brian Ross
- The Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait
- CIA,FBI interagency rivalry and 9/11
- John Kiriakou
- CIA adultery culture
- Ralph Nader
