John McCain
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John McCain was a long-serving U.S. Senator from Arizona, the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, and, in John Kiriakou's account, the most prominent legislative advocate of his post-prison rehabilitation, and, per Kiriakou, a leading figure in the traditional neo-conservative, pro-war faction in American politics. McCain also sponsored the McCain-Feinstein amendment, which formally and permanently banned torture.

Senate-floor defense of Kiriakou

In December 2014, six weeks before Kiriakou's release from FCI Loretto, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the executive summary of its report on CIA detention and interrogation, the document subsequently known as the Senate Torture Report. McCain, on the floor of the Senate, made what Kiriakou identifies as the single most consequential public defense of his whistleblowing:

> If it weren't for John Kiriakou, the American people would never have had any idea what the CIA was doing in their name.

Kiriakou recounts this moment in several tellings, most of them anchored to the same phone call: six weeks before his release, he called his wife from prison and she told him the Senate Torture Report had just been released, proving everything he had said was true, and that McCain had gotten up on the floor of the Senate and said the country owed him a debt of gratitude, because without his whistleblowing the American people would never have known what their government was doing in their name. In a separate context, Kiriakou says McCain, the primary author of the McCain-Feinstein amendment permanently banning the CIA's torture techniques, which Barack Obama signed into law in the summer of 2015, later gave an interview stating that if Kiriakou had not spoken out, the bill would never have become law. John Kiriakou says that when the report was released, McCain also called him an American hero on the Senate floor.

Torture in Vietnam: the 1965 Packers

Kiriakou cites McCain's own experience as a torture survivor, held and tortured in Vietnam, as an example of how interrogation resistance works: pressed for the names of the other men in his unit, an "entry-level" question, McCain instead gave his captors the names of the offensive line of the 1965 Green Bay Packers. Satisfied, they gave him a little food and stopped torturing him.

The post-prison welcome and the pension amendment

On Kiriakou's release, one of his first received calls was from McCain's chief of staff, who relayed McCain's "welcome home" and asked what could be done to be helpful. The CIA had, following Kiriakou's felony conviction, stripped him of his federal pension, "They drove me into bankruptcy and took my pension."

McCain's proposed remedy was a tightly drafted amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2016, designed exclusively to apply to Kiriakou:

> Every American convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act between October 1st and October 31st, 2012 shall hereby have his pension reinstated.

(Kiriakou is the only American falling within that window.)

McCain intended to insert the amendment into the NDAA via his seat on the conference committee. He was then diagnosed with the brain tumor that ultimately killed him, was removed from the committee, and the amendment was withdrawn. Kiriakou's pension has not been restored.

Working relationship through the Kerry years

McCain and Kiriakou had developed a personal connection during Kiriakou's 2009,2011 service as senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under John Kerry. Per Kiriakou, McCain would "go out of his way to shake my hand and say hi", to the visible jealousy of Kerry, who once needled them: "Why don't you two get a room or something?" Kiriakou's reply, in his recollection: "We have this connection over torture. McCain takes me seriously and I take him seriously." He says McCain's Senate office sat next to Kerry's, and McCain made a point of greeting him warmly "because he was tortured and I put my whole career on the line to call out torture."

As a label for a wing of the party

Kiriakou uses McCain's name as shorthand for Republican interventionism. Assessing the 2026 war with Iran, he contrasted Donald Trump's 2016 attacks on the Iraq war with the administration's conduct a decade later: "and now all of a sudden, it's as though it's John McCain's neoconservative Republican Party again." He applied the same label to Marco Rubio, calling him "sort of the successor to the John McCain wing of that party." See the Republican split over the Iran war.

The phone call

Six weeks before his release Kiriakou made one of the calls to his wife he was allowed every other day, for fifteen minutes, and asked how her day had been. She said it had been great: the Senate torture report had come out that day and proved that everything he had said was true, and McCain had risen on the floor of the Senate to say that the country owed Kiriakou a debt of gratitude because the American people would otherwise not have known what was being done in their name. Kiriakou's assessment of twenty-three months in prison is that he had sat there feeling sorry for himself, and that this single event made it all worthwhile. The McCain,Feinstein amendment, which formally and permanently banned torture, passed weeks later.

McCain is also the source of the line Kiriakou uses about what the torture programme cost the United States. Getting down into the mud, he says, was the error, and McCain put it best: "Never get into a fight with a pig. You're both going to get dirty, but the pig enjoys it."

The corridor, and the pension

Kiriakou's account of the relationship is built on physical proximity in the Senate. McCain's office was next door to John Kerry's, and Kiriakou was Kerry's intelligence adviser and senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2009 to the middle of 2011. Walking out with Kerry for votes, they would invariably run into McCain, who would come over to shake his hand and ask how he was. Kerry's eventual comment, "Why don't you and McCain get a hotel room?", Kiriakou answered seriously: it was not a joke to McCain, "because he was tortured for 7 years. He knows what this is like."

About four days after Kiriakou got home from prison, McCain's legislative director called to say the senator sent his welcome and wanted to know what he could do to help. Kiriakou's answer was his pension: "These damn Obama people, they took my pension. I'm going to have to work until the day I die." McCain worked to get it back, and did not finish, he developed brain cancer and died first. Kiriakou's note on the whole episode is that there was nothing he could ever have done for McCain in return: "He was only helping me because he was a good man."

He also ties the floor speech to a phone call from prison. Allowed to call his wife every other day for fifteen minutes, he asked six weeks before his release how her day had been and was told it was great, "because the Senate torture report came out today and it proved that everything you said was true." McCain spoke on the Senate floor the same day, saying the country owed Kiriakou a debt of thanks, because without him the American people would never have known "that the George W. Bush regime was a terrorist regime."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Senate Torture Report
- John Kerry
- FCI Loretto
