Mike Pompeo
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Mike Pompeo served as Donald Trump's first CIA director and later as Secretary of State. John Kiriakou tracked his tenure closely, and mostly with alarm.

The WikiLeaks speech

When Pompeo declared that WikiLeaks would be treated as a "hostile non-state intelligence service," Kiriakou heard something specific: the director laying the groundwork for a probable Espionage Act case against Julian Assange, likely in the Eastern District of Virginia, the same district where Kiriakou was prosecuted, where Jeffrey Sterling was prosecuted, and where charges were filed against Edward Snowden. In the district known as the Espionage Court, he warns, a national security defendant "doesn't have a prayer."

Bright, establishment, wrong on Iran

Kiriakou's sourcing on Pompeo was direct: highly placed CIA friends who briefed him many times, including a close friend with more than a dozen briefings before Pompeo became director, reported an extraordinarily bright man who understood the issues, had no real political ties to Trump, and wanted to do right by the agency, though he was "wrong on a couple of things, like Iran." Mike Hayden's early prediction, which Kiriakou relays: Pompeo's only job would be to protect CIA officers from Donald Trump.

But Kiriakou's structural read was dimmer. Pompeo was "completely establishment", West Point, conservative Republican congressman from Kansas, House Intelligence Committee: "we're not going to get any outside-the-box thinking from the likes of Mike Pompeo." And then, rather than drawing a deputy from committee staff, Pompeo named Gina Haspel, the veteran of the torture program, as the CIA's deputy director. That, Kiriakou says, is when whatever hope he had evaporated.

The turn on Israel

Kiriakou identifies Pompeo's directorship as the point at which the CIA's institutional resistance to Israeli demands gave way. Asked in July 2026 whether the agency now works for the United States or for Israel, his answer was reluctant and unqualified: "I hate to say this, but the only conclusion that I can draw is that it's working for Israel." The reasoning turns on who is at the top and what the agency is for. "The CIA is a policy support organization. It's not a policy organization. It's supposed to do what the president tells it to do", but "historically, it had pushed back against Israel." Then "you get Mike Pompeo in there, who might as well be the head of Mossad for his support of Israel, [and] everything begins to change."

He treats Pompeo as one half of a mechanism rather than a cause on his own, pairing him with the pressure from Capitol Hill: where "practically everybody is taking money from AIPAC" or is primaried for refusing it, "you lose that independence, and the next thing you know you are working for the Israelis." Elsewhere he calls Pompeo simply "one of the foremost Zionists on Capitol Hill" and says it is "not possible to be more pro-Israel."

Torture and treason talk

Pompeo said "here and there" that he was open to reinstating torture. Kiriakou's answer was legal, not rhetorical: the National Defense Authorization Act amendment reiterated the prohibition and listed the Bush-era techniques as illegal, "Mike Pompeo can say he likes torture," but the law is the law.

When Harvard's Kennedy School invited Chelsea Manning as a fellow, Pompeo withdrew from a Harvard forum, writing of Manning's "identity as a traitor." Kiriakou called the statement ridiculous and hypocritical: "Mike Pompeo isn't as smart as he would like to think he is", treason has a legal definition, Manning was never convicted of it, and what Manning did was whistleblowing: bringing to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, or illegality.

The turn at Langley

Asked in July 2026 whether the CIA still works for the United States, John Kiriakou gave an answer he prefaced with reluctance, "I hate to say this, but the only conclusion that I can draw is that it's working for Israel", and named Pompeo as the hinge.

His reasoning rests on a distinction he stresses repeatedly: "the CIA is a policy support organization. It's not a policy organization. It's supposed to do what the president tells it to do." Historically, though, it had pushed back against Israel. Pompeo, whom Kiriakou describes as one of the foremost Zionists on Capitol Hill before taking the job and who "might as well be the head of Mossad" for his support of Israel, was guiding policy, and everything began to change.

Kiriakou places that alongside sustained congressional pressure: with practically everybody taking AIPAC money, and members primaried if they do not, "you lose that independence and the next thing you know you are working for the Israelis."

"The only person less popular than Mike Pompeo"

Asked flatly for his view of Pompeo, Kiriakou's answer is "Pompeo is a scum." The evidence he offers for how the man was regarded inside the building is secondhand but specific: a friend of his who served in the CIA's Office of Security was one of Pompeo's bodyguards. Over lunch, Kiriakou asked how things were going. The reply was that "the only person who is less popular than Mike Pompeo is Mrs. Mike Pompeo", that she would snap her fingers and send the detail to collect her dry cleaning or shovel snow, while the officers reflected that they were there to protect her husband.

'A move that was made in order to help de-escalation'

The morning after the killing of Qasem Soleimani, Pompeo appeared on Fox & Friends and said, in Kiriakou's summary, "that this was a move that was made in order to help de-escalation, and that by killing Soleimani we saved untold numbers of lives of Muslims."

Kiriakou's reaction was to the category of claim rather than its content: "we're in Orwellian craziness right now." What he found equally telling was the reception, "all the nattering nabobs on Fox just nodded their heads over and over, like that made total sense: that by taking out the number two most powerful person in Iran, that's going to help bring peace to the region and it's going to make Muslims safer. That's what we're dealing with here."

The three plans, and who stopped them

Kiriakou says he was "sickened" by Michael Isikoff's Yahoo News report but "not at all surprised," and puts unusual weight on its sourcing: Isikoff is a Pulitzer winner who made his name at Newsweek, and "he was able to get 30 current and former intelligence officers to talk to him for this report. So it's not like just one guy said, oh, Pompeo wanted to kill Julian Assange."

The plans as he describes them escalate. If Assange left the Ecuadorian embassy he would be snatched off the street and rendered, either to the Eastern District of Virginia to face trial, or to Guantánamo "to be held until they could figure out what to do with him." If he could not be rendered, "shoot him dead in the street." And a third: if he reached one of London's airports and boarded a Russian embassy flight, the CIA was authorised to shoot out the tyres of the aircraft to stop it taking off. "Now this is an act of war."

Why it did not happen is, he stresses, an educated guess rather than inside knowledge. A covert action programme goes from the CIA general counsel to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, then to the National Security Council's general counsel, then to the national security adviser for signature, and only then to the president. His reconstruction: it reached the NSC, and the national security adviser said "are they out of their minds? We are going to assassinate a Five Eyes citizen, a citizen of Australia, who has never faced his accusers in a court of law? We're going to murder him in broad daylight in the street in Knightsbridge, London?", "somebody, probably the national security adviser, was the adult in the room and killed it."

He reads the thirty sources as the second half of the same story: enough people inside knew of the planning to conclude "this is above and beyond, we've got to say something, because people have lost their minds."

The manoeuvre that would have kept all of it from Congress is treated at the counterintelligence exemption.

See also

- Julian Assange
- Gina Haspel
- Chelsea Manning
- Mike Hayden
- Espionage Act
