Ron Wyden
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Ron Wyden is the U.S. senator John Kiriakou calls the only member of the congressional intelligence committees who will challenge the CIA, but "only using the agency's rules." Kiriakou says he and others begged Wyden to read the Senate torture report into the record under the Constitution's speech-and-debate clause, as Mike Gravel once did with the Pentagon Papers; Wyden refused. At a dinner after Kiriakou's release, Wyden admitted, "it took all my energy just to not lose my security clearance", "you're afraid of them," Kiriakou concluded. He notes Wyden famously asked James Clapper whether the intelligence community spied on Americans, yet kept the underlying secret himself.

In a separate telling of the same dinner, Kiriakou places it at the Greek ambassador's residence shortly after his release: Wyden approached him and said, "Hey, welcome home. We were really rooting for you. We were pulling for you." When Kiriakou pushed back that he had expected more support, especially from Wyden, Wyden again gave the security-clearance answer. A third telling supplies the words Wyden used and the conclusion Kiriakou drew from them. Dating the dinner to 2015, shortly after his release, and putting the guest count at about thirty, he says that when he told Wyden he had expected him to stand up for him, Wyden "got angry" and answered: "look, it took all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance." Kiriakou treats the reply as the moment a general fact became concrete, "that's when I realized that even the overseers are afraid of them", and states the inversion plainly: the vice chairman of the oversight committee is the boss, and they should be afraid of him, "and it was the opposite."

The same answer had been given on a separate occasion and to a different person. During the fight over Gina Haspel's nomination in the spring of 2018, one of Kiriakou's attorneys approached Wyden to ask whether he would join Rand Paul's threatened filibuster; Wyden replied, "look, I'd like to, but it takes all my energy just to not lose my security clearance." Kiriakou's reading of the exchange goes further than it does in the dinner tellings: the reply is "not leadership ... not oversight," but rather the agency setting the agenda while "the overseers are commanded to fall into line. And time and time again, they do." In the same conversation he credits Wyden as one of the few members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who has actually raised the torture issue at all.

Kiriakou names Wyden as one of the few members of Congress he believes truly represents good values, though he wishes Wyden were bolder. He also notes that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, created in 1975, have largely become cheerleading organizations for the CIA, with Wyden as one of the few exceptions on the Senate side.

See also

- Senate Torture Report
- James Clapper
