Central Intelligence Agency
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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is the principal foreign intelligence service of the United States. It is both the institution that trained and employed John Kiriakou for fourteen years and the institution that, through allied prosecutors, pursued him after he publicly described its post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program as torture.

Organization

The CIA is divided into directorates. Articles already exist for two of its internal divisions: the CIA National Resources Division, which handles domestic intelligence collection from American businesspeople returning from "denied areas," and the CIA Political Psychology Division, composed entirely of psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists studying phenomena such as how populations come to worship leaders, including how figures like Ayatollah Khomeini generated mass devotion. The division worked with the Directorate of Operations to produce analyses that could inform covert action and influence campaigns; Kiriakou noted it no longer exists.

Other entities mentioned in the source corpus, awaiting their own articles, include:

- Directorate of Intelligence (DI), analysis. Kiriakou's first seven years at the agency were spent here, including time as the chief CIA historian for Saddam Hussein in the period leading into the First Iraq War. As executive assistant to the deputy director of operations, Kiriakou says his boss repeated an almost-daily mantra: "The job of the CIA is to recruit spies to steal secrets and to analyze those secrets to provide the best informed analysis to the policymaker." Kiriakou has attributed the same daily mantra to two other former bosses in this position, a deputy director for operations he served under on the CIA's seventh floor, and, separately, Jim Pavitt, another deputy director for operations, who added that the job was specifically not to run multibillion-dollar satellite programs or to negotiate with mercenary contractors like Erik Prince. Analytic papers were written in a single unified CIA style with no author's name attached, and sometimes came back with the president's own handwritten marginal notes, Kiriakou recalls one reading "no way" with a smiley face, before being routed to the National Archives.
- Directorate of Operations (DO), case officers and covert action.
- Directorate of Science and Technology, one of four CIA directorates, which Kiriakou described as an entire directorate, not a room full of gadgets as depicted in James Bond films; a close friend of his eventually became the CIA's Chief Technology Officer at the Senior Intelligence Service level.
- Counterterrorism Center (CTC), the unit that doubled in personnel size within two to three days of September 11, 2001 as case officers and analysts were redirected and as paramilitary operators were detailed in from across the U.S. armed forces. Its post-9/11 operational floor was a large open bullpen with approximately 150 people in cubicles, so densely packed that the aisles were named; Kiriakou cited "Bin Laden Boulevard" and "Hezbollah Highway" as examples, allowing officers to say "I sit at the intersection of..." when giving directions. Private offices around the perimeter housed the chief, deputy chiefs for operations and analysis, deputy chief for military affairs, and group chiefs.
- Special Activities Division (SAD), the agency's paramilitary arm, which existed before September 11 as a standalone operations unit. A subcomponent of CTC, Special Activities Group (SAG), is the counterterrorism-focused paramilitary unit created after the attacks, staffed by operators loaned from the military (Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Army Rangers) or formally hired as CIA employees. Their stated mission: "kill or kidnap anybody who might be a threat to the United States, to an American citizen, or to an American installation." In practice, CTC special-activities work is primarily kidnappings, parachuting in, stealing a van, snatching targets off streets in Benghazi, Khartoum, Karachi, and similar environments. The work is highly classified; stars on the CIA's Wall of Honor for officers killed in this unit carry no names.

Kiriakou has described the CIA's total headcount as a closely guarded secret that has never been publicly revealed, but says it falls in the low tens of thousands. He has described the agency as organized into four directorates, Operations, Intelligence, Science and Technology, and Administration, with Operations and Intelligence, the case officers and the analysts, actually the two smallest of the four. The Directorate of Science and Technology, besides the Vault 7-era coding work described above, liaises directly with outside firms including Palantir and In-Q-Tel. Pre-9/11, CIA identification followed a color and letter code: blue badges for staff, green for contractors, yellow for secret-clearance-only personnel, and red for those barred from vaulted spaces; staff badges also carried a clearance letter, and Kiriakou's own carried an "H," for top-secret SI/TK/Gamma clearance, the highest tier without added compartments. In the early 1990s, the agency began creating fusion centers, a counterterrorism center, a counternarcotics center, a counterproliferation center, and a counterintelligence center, to bring Directorate of Operations and Directorate of Intelligence officers together and share information that previously never crossed between the two directorates; after 9/11 this consolidation became total, with officers agency-wide co-located and reading each other's traffic.

Internal cables are written exclusively in capital letters, a convention carried forward from 1950s teletype-era infrastructure and never updated. This all-caps convention is the substrate for the long-running Soylent Green cable easter egg, in which case officers spell out "Soylent Green is people" by scattering individual lowercase letters through their cables.

Kiriakou has also said capture-or-kill operations of the kind that defined the immediate post-9/11 period, when many al-Qaeda leaders were captured, rendered, or killed, are now very rare by comparison.

History: three eras and the oversight cycle

John Kiriakou has described three historical phases of the CIA: a pre-1975 agency that "did anything it damn well pleased", killing heads of state, importing heroin from Vietnam; a post-Church Committee CIA from 1975 to September 11, which operated under congressional oversight and gradually reassumed some power, especially under Reagan; and a post-9/11 CIA, which "just does anything at once again."

The Church Committee and Pike Committee in the mid-1970s nearly dismantled the CIA after discovering it had been murdering heads of state, overthrowing governments, and carrying out secret wars without congressional authorization. This produced the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 1976. In Kiriakou's assessment, those committees functioned as genuine oversight for approximately seven years, until roughly 1983,1986. Under Ronald Reagan and during the Iran-Contra period, they reverted to being cheerleaders for the CIA, a posture Kiriakou says has continued ever since. In a separate telling he gives the same arc a specific end date: reform lasted only until 1982, seven years after the 1975 reforms, at which point "the CIA was the old CIA again, doing the same CIA things it was doing in the '50s." He also says the CIA today does not meaningfully answer to its congressional oversight committees, to which it pays only lip service, and that under an administration like Trump's, which it can simply pretend does not exist, it answers to essentially nobody, a self-sustaining agency that, in Kiriakou's words, "operates in a in something of a governmental vacuum."

Executive Order 12333 tracks the same arc as a three-stage escalation of CIA killing authority. President Ford signed the original order in 1975 in response to the Church and Pike committees' findings, banning CIA assassinations, a prohibition that lasted only until Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 and CIA involvement in Central America resumed. Reagan amended 12333 to permit targeted killings of any person posing "a clear and present danger" to the United States, an American citizen, or an American installation. Post-9/11, the order was amended again to authorize CIA assassinations "at its discretion", essentially removing any threshold requirement. The institutional result, per Kiriakou: the CIA created formal killing programs with administrative structures, career panels and promotion panels where officers' job was specifically to travel the world and kill people. Fitness reports tracked which targets had been killed and which had been missed; missed targets meant being passed over for promotion.

Kiriakou dates the agency's first covert action to 1949: the overthrow of the Italian government, carried out under the same legal-approval chain later used for programs like enhanced interrogation, the case officer's idea moving up through the covert-action staff, the relevant regional office's in-house lawyer, the General Counsel's office, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, the NSC General Counsel, the National Security Advisor, and finally the president for a signature. He has stated this same distinction as a matter of institutional principle: "The CIA is not a policy organization. It's a policy support organization." Invasion and war decisions are made at the White House, the NSC, or the State Department, and only then filter down to the agency for implementation. He has separately named what he calls the CIA's real Cold War-era Cuba record as "nothing short of felonious" and, of the post-9/11 era specifically, called the agency's transformation into a paramilitary organization one of his "real regrets", insisting the CIA was never meant to function that way.

Kiriakou has connected the same bureaucratic dynamic, authority given is authority never returned, to September 11 specifically: "If you have 5,000 employees, you need 10,000." He calls 9/11 "the greatest gift" anyone could have given the intelligence community and its contractors, adding flatly, "Everybody got rich. Everybody."

Kiriakou's career and training

Kiriakou described the CIA's applicant screening process: approximately 2,500 applicants compete for every available position, and screening includes a deep review of all social-media accounts back to the date of creation, handed over voluntarily by applicants rather than intercepted. He dates the shift precisely: before September 11 there were roughly 200 applicants for every opening; after 9/11 that jumped to, and has stayed at, about 2,500 applicants per opening. The screening also narrowed by language, before 9/11 high-school-level French, German, Italian, or Spanish was an asset, but afterward the agency began looking specifically for Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Tajik, Uzbek, Korean, Mandarin, and Russian. His summary: "They can cut you if you look at them cross-eyed, and they'll just go on to the next person." His own hiring process began when the CIA's Director of HR, referred to as "Bob," directed him to report to the George Washington University Medical School auditorium on a Saturday morning at 8 a.m., where he found approximately three hundred applicants. The first test was a completely blank map of the world on which applicants had to fill in every country's name; Kiriakou, a lifelong map enthusiast, found it easy. During the pre-hire polygraph, the examiner told him he was reacting to one question; his primary fear was that it concerned his sexuality, but the question turned out to be about credit card usage. He passed, and the examiner winked when asked how he did.

A CIA psychiatrist later told Kiriakou that the agency actively seeks to hire people with sociopathic tendencies, not full sociopaths, who have no conscience and cannot be managed, but people who operate without the moral friction that would impair operational effectiveness; true sociopaths, she noted, sail through the polygraph because they feel no guilt. She produced material from Kiriakou's own personnel file documenting a group-interview question from his hiring: given a target who, after six months of cultivated friendship, was concluded to be unrecruitable, but whose economic data headquarters urgently needed, what would you do? Other candidates said to work harder or get the wives involved; Kiriakou answered, "Break into the Indonesian embassy and steal it." The interviewer told him: "That's exactly what you do." The psychiatrist's gloss, "A normal person would not break into a foreign embassy and steal classified documents", was, in Kiriakou's telling, offered as evidence of sociopathic tendency.

Kiriakou described CIA research infrastructure as he found it in 1989,1990: early computers called "Delta datas" with small green-screen displays; floor-to-ceiling rotating file cabinets holding physical files; all-source cable traffic arriving from CIA, State Department, NSA, the Defense Department, the Pentagon, and ships at sea; and keyword searches limited to subject areas an analyst was cleared for, he couldn't type "China" because he wasn't cleared for China.

The Farm

Case officer training is conducted at The Farm in Virginia, where approximately 80% of all CIA operational training takes place. Kiriakou's favorite course there was crash-and-bang counterterrorism driving: driving blindfolded, then having the blindfold removed with two seconds to identify whether an oncoming V-block was open-end-forward (crash through) or closed-end-forward (reverse out); spinning 180 degrees without stopping; and the basic survival principle of "getting off the X." He credited the course with his quick reaction time, and also attended an advanced course in the Nevada desert covering sand dunes and vehicle extrication.

He had never touched a real gun before firearms training. When the instructor asked who didn't own a gun, Kiriakou was the only one in the class to raise his hand, prompting the instructor to say: "Oh my god, we're going to have to start from the very beginning." He nonetheless tested first in his class of eight, was told he should consider competitive shooting as a career, and went on to win trophies in the sport.

A night exercise placed each of eight trainees alone in a room built to look like a flea-bag hotel room in El Salvador, complete with Hollywood-quality realism. Without warning, two men appeared at the door with a vacuum cleaner saying "housekeeping." Kiriakou said he didn't need housekeeping; the second man pulled a gun and shot him with two paint pellets. The instructor's debrief: "If you're in a shithole hotel in a shithole country and two people just walk into your room, kill them." All eight trainees failed the exercise.

Aquatic training did not take place at the Farm. Kiriakou described his sequence as conducted in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast: he flew to San Diego and boarded a submarine, his first time actually submerged rather than touring a docked vessel, where he was introduced to the crew as a VIP civilian and treated as an officer. The submarine surfaced off Northern California. He climbed out through the hatch, inflated a raft, and paddled to shore while the submarine submerged behind him; on the beach he stabbed the raft, buried it with a folding shovel, made his way to a designated landmark, executed a dead drop, and met with a source, an exercise he called "all very clandestine and very very fun."

The 9/11 transformation

Kiriakou described a fundamental institutional shift that occurred after September 11: the CIA stopped being primarily an intelligence organization and became primarily a paramilitary one, driven by the enhanced interrogation program, the drone program, and the expansion of covert action at the expense of collection and analysis. He described a complete cultural collapse in the same period: "After 9/11, everybody went nuts. They just went nuts. They acted like the law, whether domestic or international, meant nothing to us. We were the good guys. We had been wronged. We were going to take revenge. And you're either with us or you're against us. And if you're against us, then get out." He presented this as the institutional context in which the enhanced interrogation program was born.

Before 9/11, domestic surveillance of Americans by U.S. intelligence agencies was illegal "like in stone." Afterward, Kiriakou said, billions of dollars are spent spying on Americans across the NSA, CIA, FBI, and intelligence-community contractors, with the additional mechanism that authorities can now purchase Americans' metadata directly from carriers and social-media platforms without a judge's order, eliminating the warrant requirement entirely: "Nothing is secret. Nothing." Kiriakou nonetheless maintains the agency is legally forbidden from spying on American citizens, and says that twice in his own career an investigation's target turned out to be American, at which point the case was immediately dropped and handed to the FBI.

Kiriakou has said he believes the internet's development into a mass-surveillance tool for intelligence agencies was the plan from the start, not something that later "got away" from its designers: "It's doing exactly what they wanted to do." He traces his own first exposure to email to an overseas CIA station in the Middle East, where the station chief, on learning that a subordinate could send a message directly to headquarters without the chief's own knowledge, reacted with open alarm: "I don't like it. I don't like it one bit." He has also described viewing a wide range of contemporary news stories, from narratives about lenient judges to high-profile political incidents, through the lens of what he calls a "demoralization campaign" intended to build public appetite for martial law.

After 9/11, the CIA created two distinct special-activities components carrying out kill-or-kidnap operations abroad, described above under Organization. It also adopted dual-use technology, recognizing its potential for both military and civilian applications. The agency's traditional role, recruiting spies, stealing secrets, and analyzing them for informed policy decisions, was supplemented by, and eventually subordinated to, its paramilitary function of killing, capturing, and rendering threats to the United States. Kiriakou has said he personally captured and personally interrogated more than four dozen al-Qaeda fighters in the post-9/11 period, and that almost all of them told him they had no grievance against the United States until the U.S. bombed their village or killed a family member.

9/11 truther claims

Kiriakou has repeatedly rejected 9/11 controlled-demolition theories, saying the Twin Towers collapsed because they were built mostly of lightweight aluminum, like an aluminum can, structurally sound under a downward push but liable to buckle from a side impact, and that there was no need to destroy the buildings to justify a war that al-Qaeda had already provided the pretext for. He attributes the collapse of Building 7 to a large NYPD emergency-operations-center fuel store housed several floors beneath it, which he says was destabilized by the shockwave of the Twin Towers coming down. He has also said his friend former Governor Jesse Ventura believes the towers' interior was coated in "nanothermite paint", a claim Kiriakou dismisses as fabricated: "There is no such thing as nanothermite paint."

Legal cover and internal oversight

Kiriakou described the CIA's Office of General Counsel as performing three primary functions. First, it negotiates complex contracts with technology and intelligence contractors, among them Palantir, Abraxas Corporation, Amazon Cloud Services, and Elon Musk's various organizations. Second, it provides legal cover during Congressional testimony, when Kiriakou testified on Capitol Hill, a lawyer from the office sat beside him and told him, in direct terms, to shut his mouth. Third, and most consequentially, when CIA leadership wants to implement a program of questionable legality, the General Counsel's office coordinates with the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to redefine terms until the activity becomes legal on paper. Kiriakou stated that this approval chain was followed for the enhanced interrogation program, and gave his assessment of the lawyers involved: "They are rubber stamps for the operators. You bet they are." His broader conclusion: "The CIA, when it comes down to brass tacks, is an outlaw organization", the routine commission of espionage overseas is illegal under the laws of every country in which it is conducted, and is simply the nature of the work.

Kiriakou disclosed that many sensitive programs are classified too highly for the CIA's own Inspector General to be read in. He stated that if he had gone to the Inspector General to report the torture program, the IG genuinely would not have known what he was talking about, and that because the IG was not cleared for the program, Kiriakou himself could potentially have been prosecuted for espionage for disclosing it to an internal CIA oversight officer.

Kiriakou has described the CIA's Senior Intelligence Service, the agency's equivalent of the federal Senior Executive Service, as the body that functionally runs the CIA regardless of which administration is in office. Career officers at this level serve thirty to forty years, far outlasting any president, and are protected from dismissal by the Civil Service Act; when a president orders something this career layer opposes, the standard response is slow-rolling or simply waiting the president out. Of all CIA directors in the agency's history, only three have been career CIA officers; every other director has been an outsider, such as a former FBI director or a general. Kiriakou described appointing generals as historically a mistake: people reach four-star rank by agreeing with superiors, while the director's job requires the opposite disposition, the willingness to tell a president he is wrong. He describes the same phenomenon in plainer language as a "deep state", not, in his framing, a nebulous conspiratorial force, but simply the permanent federal bureaucracy: presidents come and go every four or eight years, and if a president orders that bureaucracy to do something it doesn't want to do, "you just ignore him."

Kiriakou is candid that this insulation from accountability extends to senior officials personally. He cited CIA Director John Deutch, appointed under Bill Clinton, who took home a classified laptop holding thousands of classified documents to help him write his memoir, and whose only consequences were a fine and the voluntary surrender of his security clearance. He also disclosed that when someone discloses potentially classified information publicly, on television, for instance, the CIA or the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will file what is called a "crimes report" with the Department of Justice; 99% of these reports are simply ignored.

Kiriakou has stated that the CIA raided the office of the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, seizing forty boxes of classified documents reportedly under review for declassification, including materials related to the JFK assassination: "The CIA, which is not a law enforcement organization, raided the office of the director of national intelligence for whom they work." Kiriakou attributed this characterization to reporting current at the time of the interview, in May 2026.

Tradecraft and technology

Kiriakou characterized intelligence work as ninety percent or more human skills, relationship-building, judgment, patience, with technology as a small complement, and described surveillance as among the most tedious parts of the job: sitting at a window watching an apartment across the street for days, with periodic relief after six hours.

The operational process for obtaining technical field equipment: an officer sends a cable describing the operation and specifying what capability is needed; officers from the Directorate of Science and Technology fly out with a sealed diplomatic pouch of gadgets, demonstrate options, and the field officer selects whatever is most appropriate. Kiriakou described one instance from his time as chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11, pursuing senior al-Qaeda leaders who made electronic mistakes rarely: two technology officers flew out with a range of equipment, none of which exactly matched the need, and built something from scratch in about a week, a device the team called "the magic box," which could zero in on a cell-phone signal. The limitation was that the target would turn his phone on only long enough to check voicemail, then remove the battery, so the magic box proved unhelpful.

Kiriakou has said the CIA has developed the capability to remotely take over a vehicle and control its operation, with a stated operational purpose of "make you drive off a bridge." He described this as part of a broader partnership between the CIA and companies including Palantir, Nvidia, and other technology firms, with the agency's work in virtual and augmented reality now approaching what DARPA does, a development he called "terrifying."

Recruitment tradecraft

Kiriakou described the moment of "breaking cover" in nearly every recruitment: the officer must finally tell the target, "I'm actually in the CIA," usually after months of cultivated friendship, by which point most targets have sensed it already, partly from the unlimited spending. He described recruiting a man who loved a city's skyline by renting a helicopter tour, and another who had fished with his father as a boy by taking him deep-sea fishing for marlin; the man cried catching one.

Recruitment spending has to be carefully calibrated to the stage of a relationship. A 1990s incident took the CIA over a decade to recover from: a first-tour officer took a foreign-ministry diplomat from an allied country to lunch and ordered a $2,000 bottle of wine. The diplomat immediately reported it to his country's FBI equivalent, suspecting a recruitment approach, and mass expulsions followed. Kiriakou illustrated the correct calibration with Greek practice: the bribe envelope there is called the fakelaki ("little envelope"), it might hold €10 or €100, but never €20,000.

Some recruitment practices required accommodating foreign customs that would otherwise be illegal for an American officer. Khat (qat) is a waist-high shrub whose leaves are chewed daily by Yemeni men, producing a mild stimulant effect "like drinking a pot of coffee." Khat is a Schedule I drug in the U.S. carrying a 20-year sentence, but a CIA officer trying to recruit a Yemeni tribal leader who invites him to the khat chew has to participate, so the agency authorized operations officers in Yemen to chew it. Kiriakou used the episode to argue that the agency must "attract more people who are willing to push the bounds without lapsing into illegality" domestically.

Kiriakou disclosed specific reward amounts the CIA paid for high-value captures: $25 million for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, $10 million for Abu Zubaydah, and $50 million for Nicolás Maduro. The agency always pays on the first day following a capture enabled by a source's tip, since failure to pay would destroy its reputation for reliability; payment can be made in any form, cash, gold, diamonds, land, or Bitcoin.

The CIA director holds a specific statutory authority to declare up to sixteen individuals per year American citizens, with the stroke of a pen, for the purpose of resettling intelligence sources in the United States, no other government approval required.

Kiriakou also described the CIA's rules for officers placed undercover in American companies: the CEO, director of security, and typically the board of directors must all approve in advance; the officer's job is to monitor foreign activities and collect intelligence from foreign nationals, not to spy on Americans; and because two paychecks cannot be collected simultaneously, a dedicated Treasury Department office manages the officer's taxes. He noted FBI plants in companies are more common than CIA ones, and more concerning in his view: "The FBI is there to put you in prison, that's how they get promoted."

Counterintelligence and adversary services

Kiriakou estimated the total number of foreign intelligence officers and CIA personnel operating inside the United States at 50,000 to 60,000, noting that anyone working at a major U.S. defense contractor, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, has even odds of encountering a foreign intelligence officer in the course of normal work. The three countries most actively running collection operations inside the U.S. are Russia, China, and Israel. On his first day at the CIA, the director of security told the new-hire class never to eat at a particular steakhouse on Route 123 near headquarters, the closest restaurant, because the KGB believed all CIA employees ate there and had filled it with officers waiting to overhear CIA people discuss work; Kiriakou said he has never eaten there.

Kiriakou described a Soviet-era intelligence approach called the Mosaic Concept: rather than risk the time and exposure required to recruit a human spy, Soviet intelligence would systematically read American open sources, newspapers, scholarly journals, trade publications, and assemble the pieces one tile at a time until the composite picture revealed what was effectively a classified program. His assessment: the Russians still use this approach.

He described a then-recent case as marking a shift in Chinese intelligence posture: a Greek Air Force colonel assigned to NATO's communications division, a highly classified position, was arrested and charged with spying for Chinese intelligence. He had been flown to China several years earlier at Chinese expense, a trip never disclosed to his superiors, and formally recruited there, given a dedicated cell phone, also undisclosed, and paid five to fifteen thousand euros per classified NATO document, transmitted as photographs sent back to China. The arrest came about because the CIA already had a penetration of Chinese intelligence; that asset identified the Greek colonel as a Chinese source and notified the Greek National Intelligence Service, which spent a year watching him before concluding there was no China-based handler in Athens. He was transmitting documents remotely and was ultimately arrested, confessing to everything; he faced twenty years, which Kiriakou expected to be imposed in full. Kiriakou characterized the development as disturbing, the first indication that China, which had previously shown little interest in NATO, had begun actively targeting the alliance.

Kiriakou also described a category of walk-in visitor that never appears in public discussion: the intelligence probe, an agent sent by hostile services, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, posing as a genuine defector but actually tasked with assessing American embassy security: camera locations, the thickness and bullet-resistance of glass and doors, how far into the building they can penetrate before being stopped, and how many people they encounter are armed, all logged for potential future attacks. Kiriakou noted that in one embassy where he worked, walk-ins were welcomed directly into the Marine Security Guard room, where the weapons were racked on the wall.

He described the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) as effectively two parallel organizations: one half, every officer of which was trained at Sandhurst, was the partner the CIA worked with productively against al-Qaeda; the other half, recognizable by their long beards, formed Jaish-e-Mohammed and Kashmiri liberation groups and financed the attacks on the Jewish community center and Western hotels in Mumbai. Kiriakou's summary: "They created the Taliban. Now they're working against the Taliban."

Iran is what the CIA terms a "denied area", a country where conventional intelligence-gathering is structurally impeded. The absence of an American embassy in Tehran since 1979 means CIA officers cannot operate under diplomatic cover or approach Iranian officials for recruitment using standard methods, leaving the agency demonstrably weak in developing human intelligence inside Iran and dependent on liaison services, in practice, MOSSAD, to fill the gap. Kiriakou stated that in his CIA experience, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were consistently the officials most opposed to military action, since those who had seen war were least willing to enter it again, and that prior to the Iran campaign, President Trump dismissed all the generals on the Joint Chiefs and replaced them with hand-picked individuals "perfectly happy to accept Israeli intelligence and go to war in Iran."

In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, Kiriakou described a similar internal split: the pro-war faction was the office of the Vice President, the office of the Secretary of Defense, and the NSC, while the anti-war faction was the CIA, the State Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom he described as always "the last ones to go to war", they argued "until the bitter end" against attacking Iraq because there was no exit strategy. During the earlier Iran-Iraq War, Kiriakou described the CIA's conduct as providing top-secret overhead imagery to whichever side was currently losing, increasing cooperation with Iraq, including satellite imagery, whenever Iranian forces advanced, and doing the same for Iran whenever Iraqi forces advanced. His characterization: "So it was hideous."

Kiriakou separately defended President Trump's reclassification of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations as substantive rather than cosmetic: the designation "frees up some agencies' abilities to act unilaterally" and frees up money for the CIA, NSA, and DoD to use against the cartels, "This is not window dressing."

Human costs: mental health, divorce, and discrimination

Kiriakou described mental illness as common among CIA officers, driven by what he characterized as "otherworldly" pressure. He said the agency has the highest divorce rate of any U.S. government agency, officers married four or five times is not unusual, and that his own two divorces were, in his words, "the record least number." He gave two examples of officer breakdown from his Pakistan posting: a colleague named Mark who disclosed on the day of an armed operation that he could not participate because he had beaten his wife and was therefore prohibited from carrying a firearm; and a Beirut desk officer he referred to as "Phil" or "Allan," who was "psychovac'd", evacuated for psychological breakdown and placed on no-travel status for six months for evaluation, making Kiriakou available to cover his meetings. The agency provides no formal training in coping with pressure, no breathing techniques, yoga, or mental-health protocols, which Kiriakou said is a direct cause of alcohol being "a problem at the agency." He personally took up Tai Chi, which he said helped immensely.

The CIA discriminated against women until 1994. A class-action lawsuit filed by CIA women in 1989 alleged decades of gender discrimination under which women could only aspire to be secretaries or intelligence assistants, "they were not going to lead anything." The women won in 1994; the judge's written decision stated he had "never seen a case where the defendant had so clearly documented its own crimes against the plaintiff." Every woman in the CIA received $100,000 and a two-grade promotion. The practical transition was disruptive, "a lot of things turned to shit very quickly" as officers with no recruitment or overseas experience were suddenly placed in charge of operations, but the situation stabilized over time and ultimately produced Gina Haspel as CIA director.

Kiriakou noted that the CIA and FBI are "full of Mormons," because Mormons tend to lead straight lives that pass polygraphs easily, and often speak difficult languages, Tajik, Belarusian, and others, learned on post-high-school missions, saving the agency the year or two and $500,000 it would otherwise cost to train a linguist.

Kiriakou has also offered a positive counterweight to his institutional criticisms: most people at the working level are "really, really smart," want nothing more than to serve the country and protect Americans, and "God knows they don't do it for the money." He said there is far more criminality inside the CIA than the public imagines, extending well beyond petty misuse of government credit cards, with some officers committing what he called "real crimes," empowered by convincing themselves that the CIA's authority and backing places them beyond accountability. Asked whether daily life inside the CIA is closer to the dramatic "Jack Bauer" image or to the sitcom The Office, Kiriakou said it's decidedly the latter, citing a running joke among colleagues not to touch a conference table when entering a meeting, because you never knew who had been having sex on it the night before.

Media, influence, and academia

Kiriakou stated that journalist Bob Woodward was given a memo by CIA Director George Tenet authorizing him to walk CIA headquarters freely, access Kiriakou described as extraordinary and inappropriate for a journalist. He described the CIA's Office of Public Affairs as having opened, within the decade before the interview, a dedicated branch whose sole job is to liaise with Hollywood studios and ensure that films involving the CIA portray it favorably; the FBI has run a similar program since the 1940s. The result, Kiriakou said, is a steady stream of pro-CIA films, among them Zero Dark Thirty, The Recruit, Argo, and the TV series The Americans.

More recently, Kiriakou said, the CIA has developed a strategy for podcasters and online creators as it became clear that long-form digital media reaches large audiences: identify a target demographic (for example, men aged 18,30), promote certain creators algorithmically to reach that group, and use the reach to propagate a specific, well-honed and repeated message, which could range from "support the CIA" to "any criticism of Netanyahu is antisemitism."

Kiriakou described the CIA's evolving approach to campus recruitment: until 1993 and the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, officers could approach students directly without public advertising; afterward, the agency was required to post positions at cia.gov, and developed the Scholar-in-Residence program as a workaround, retired CIA officers placed as professors at major universities across the country, officially and publicly identified as CIA Scholars-in-Residence, who notify the agency if they identify a promising student. In Kiriakou's characterization, the agency is doing exactly what it always did, now openly rather than covertly.

He also described findings from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by journalist Jason Leopold (Bloomberg, formerly LA Times), who had sued for correspondence between the CIA's Office of Public Affairs and American journalists after being initially denied, and won. Two findings stood out: a CIA email threatening a reporter that if he published an anti-CIA story, "you will never be invited to the Christmas party and we will not comment on any of your stories", after which the reporter withdrew the article; and that Ken Dilanian, chief national security correspondent at NBC News and MSNBC, had been sending his CIA-related articles to the agency for clearance before submitting them to his editors.

Separately, after 9/11, retired CIA operations officers who had formed the Arais Corporation, a legal LLC pass-through allowing them to collect intelligence income without the complexity of formal employment, found their post-career networking company worth enormous sums once IBM purchased it for over a billion dollars, making many of them "megamillions-lotto kind of rich." The parallel analysts' company, the Analysis Corporation, where John Brennan went, did not achieve the same result.

Presidential relationships

According to Kiriakou, the Presidential Daily Brief served a secondary purpose in the 1990s: the president's annotations and reactions were used to psychologically profile him, with analysts referring to the sitting president internally as "the first customer." He stated that Bill Clinton was briefed by CIA Director James Woolsey only twice during his eight years as president; Woolsey told him directly, "He never talked to me. I never understood that. We never had a conversation." Kiriakou's assessment: Clinton genuinely did not care about foreign policy but knew Al Gore did, so Gore was briefed six days a week for eight years and conveyed relevant information to Clinton himself.

During the Clinton administration, the president issued a directive that the CIA could not maintain relationships with any asset who had what Clinton called "a human rights problem", if a recruited asset was also running a Honduran death squad, the relationship was terminated. CIA officers initially laughed at the edict; as it was actually implemented, the reaction shifted to "Oh, oh, he's serious. This is actually working out. Okay, good for us." The policy held until September 11, 2001, after which, in Kiriakou's words, the pendulum "went so far after 9/11 that it's not yet swung back."

Kiriakou described a structural contradiction he witnessed during his 1994,1996 rotation to the State Department, serving at the American embassy in Bahrain as both economic officer and human-rights officer, a role that required him to produce the annual human-rights report due from every U.S. embassy worldwide. He would tell the Bahraini Minister of Interior: "Your Highness, you cannot pick up a 15-year-old boy off the street and beat him to death because he marched in a peaceful pro-democracy demonstration and then call his parents to come and pick up the body. I have to report that to Congress and they may cut off your arms sales." An hour later, a CIA officer would arrive with a different message: "Don't pay any attention to the human-rights guy. If we give you $10 million, we want you to open up a secret torture chamber, disappear people into it, torture them, and give us a transcript of what they say." Kiriakou's framing of the contradiction: "What are they going to do? Listen to John the human-rights guy, or listen to the CIA guy with the suitcase full of $10 million in cash?"

In the period just before September 11, 2001, while working in the Counterterrorism Center, Kiriakou described the agency's institutional attention as directed entirely toward China: "Right before 9/11 at the CIA, it was China, China, China, China. And I was like, ah, you know, they really should kind of divert some of their attention away from China and start looking at this terrorism situation in the Middle East."

After his release from prison, Kiriakou learned that the NSA had been intercepting his communications and sharing the contents with reporters at the New York Times, a reporter called and read back to him the substance of a private conversation he had had. He also described a senior CIA officer friend, with thirty-two or thirty-three years of service, who on his first day as a young officer in the Office of Counterintelligence was shown an entire wall of paper files and told by the secretary, "Whatever you do, don't go into those files." He went into them immediately. Every single file was on an American, patently illegal, in Kiriakou's assessment, and there were thousands of them.

He connected the reach of modern domestic surveillance to the NSA's Bluffdale data storage facility in the Utah desert, which he described as a massive complex built specifically for memory capacity: the NSA has publicly claimed it has enough storage there to hold every phone call, text message, email, and voicemail from every American for the next five hundred years, without a warrant. He connected this to Harvey Silverglate's book Three Felonies a Day, which argues that average Americans commit three felonies per day simply by going about normal life. Kiriakou's conclusion: "If they want to get you, they're going to get you. And there's nothing you can do to protect yourself." He characterized the facility as an assault on civil liberties.

Kiriakou has stated flatly that he believes privacy is not possible in 2026: Ring cameras report directly to law enforcement, and Alexa devices report directly to the NSA. The only meaningful protection would be going completely off-grid, no computer, no connectivity, no cell phone, and he considers even that unlikely to succeed. He placed responsibility on Congress, naming only Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, and one other legislator as having the political will to act, and concluded that three votes out of five hundred thirty-five will accomplish nothing.

Kiriakou's case for abolition

Kiriakou identifies a number of senior CIA officials of his era as personally responsible for crimes committed in the name of national security, including George Tenet, John McLaughlin, Michael Morell, Jose Rodriguez, Rick Pavitt, and John Brennan. Of these, he identifies Brennan as categorically distinct on the grounds that he "plotted against an elected president of the United States." He has said he has reached the same conclusion as Tucker Carlson: the CIA has become weaponized against people who don't conform to what its leadership wants, whether a whistleblower reporting illegal activity or a political figure the agency cannot control. He has separately said the CIA has historically plotted against sitting presidents going back well before Trump, citing Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as earlier targets.

Asked directly whether he considers the CIA evil, Kiriakou, who spent fifteen years there, said yes, while explicitly excluding the roughly 95% of employees he calls smart, patriotic, and honest people who simply want to serve their country. He states that the term "conspiracy theory" itself was created by the CIA, originally, in his account, to stop people from questioning the JFK assassination and the "magic bullet." As further examples of career CIA dissidents, he cites Philip Agee, who broke from the agency, published exposing books, and was allegedly pursued by the CIA in assassination attempts around the world, and Ray McGovern, a presidential briefer for two presidents over nearly thirty years who is now regularly arrested at peace marches. Kiriakou frames political ideology not as a single left-right spectrum but as a circle that varies by issue, and says that on the specific question of CIA power, the progressive left and the MAGA right converge: both, in his view, see the CIA as "a dangerous force. It's un-American and it needs to be addressed."

Kiriakou has offered a candid institutional self-assessment: the CIA missed nearly every major global development since its founding in 1947, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Soviet Union, the Suez crisis, the Iran hostage crisis, the Greek invasion of Cyprus, and 9/11. As one example, he cites a colleague's paper correctly predicting that Ayatollah Khomeini would die within twelve months and naming his likely successors, but never naming Ali Khamenei specifically, leaving the White House scrambling to identify him once he was named Supreme Leader. He said the agency is good at day-to-day presidential updates and recruiting minor peripheral figures around terrorist groups, but not at seeing the large picture: "Not as smart as we think we are." He has separately put it that on a tactical level, an assassination, a rendition, an international operation, the CIA is very good, but on the big, broad international trends it is "blind and dumb for the most part."

He has stated that if given the position of Director of National Intelligence, the first thing he would do is zero out the CIA's budget, describing the agency as a "malevolent force" that has been out of control for a very long time; asked directly whether the CIA is underfunded, he says no, it is overfunded, and simply not as good at its job as it wants the American public to believe. His argument is that everything the CIA does is duplicated by other agencies that do it better: the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research does analysis better than the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence; Defense Human Services does human intelligence better than the Directorate of Operations; DARPA and the NSA do science and technology better than the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. The United States has eighteen intelligence services in total; most countries have one or two.

Budget

The CIA's budget is one of the government's most closely guarded secrets, but has twice been accidentally leaked by senior intelligence officials. Kiriakou says a former deputy Director of National Intelligence, for whom he once worked, accidentally leaked the figure at roughly $20 billion about twenty years before a 2025 interview, which he guesses has since doubled. In a separate telling, he attributes an earlier leak of $44 billion to Mary Margaret Graham, roughly fifteen years before a 2025 interview, and estimates the true figure is now close to $100 billion. He says the CIA once hid a secret program under a cover name resembling a study of "monkeys' dating habits" specifically to bury it in the federal budget and avoid the scrutiny of Senator William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award for wasteful spending; today, he says, most of the CIA's budget is buried within the Pentagon's budget in the National Defense Authorization Act. He has drawn a parallel between the CIA's own funding strategy and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, saying that in secret budget hearings before appropriations committees the entire intelligence community invoked communism to justify funding increases until 2001, and terrorism ever since.

Kiriakou has stated he has spent approximately ten years collaborating with his friend and attorney Bruce Fein, a former deputy attorney general of the United States, on a book arguing that the CIA should be abolished. They have completed the outline and first chapter, with a thesis matching his self-assessment above: the CIA has missed every major international development since its founding, including the creation and fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Suez Crisis, the September 11 attacks, the Six-Day War, and the Yom Kippur War, "You name it, the CIA's missed it. They've just gotten it wrong every single time."

'The Church Committee reforms are undone' (September 2022)

On the 20 September 2022 Roundtable, the 75th anniversary of the CIA's creation, John Kiriakou said the reforms the Church Committee had imposed on the agency in the mid-1970s had "just Fallen by the wayside" twenty-one years after 9/11. The CIA, he said, now runs "an active assassination programme," refuses even to acknowledge the existence of the drone programme, ran "a secret prison system around the world," and carries out international kidnappings "they euphemistically call renditions." Kiriakou called for the creation of "a new Church Committee", a demand he attributes to "some important people", as the only remaining institutional check on the agency.

'Butts in seats', the contractor economy

Kiriakou characterises modern CIA staffing as heavily dependent on "butts in the seats", his shorthand for CIA-inside contractors from Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC who "don't really work for the CIA" but "punch information into a computer" or run clandestine programmes on the agency's behalf. The agency, he said, "doesn't have to pay for their health insurance or their pension contribution and everybody's happy," while "there's no accountability, there's nobody that has to answer to anyone." Kiriakou tied the arrangement to the observation that Washington, DC now has "more millionaires per capita" than "anywhere else in America, including Silicon Valley", "and it's not an accident."

'The director's memo about Bob Woodward'

On Consortium News Live in February 2023, John Kiriakou recounted the moment he says crystallised the CIA's post-9/11 attitude toward the press. Sitting as the executive assistant to the associate deputy director for operations, he watched from his own office door as Bob Woodward walked past "without a security escort, just walking around like he owned the place." Kiriakou asked his secretary if he had seen what he had just seen. She answered that the director had circulated a memo ordering "we've all been ordered to cooperate with him" because Woodward was writing a book on the Iraq War. Kiriakou reads the memo as the moment the agency stopped pretending it did not own the media: "they came to the realisation, I guess, that they controlled the media, they owned the media, why not let Bob Woodward walk around like he owned the place? He's going to write exactly what you tell him to write."

The agency and Kiriakou's imprisonment

Kiriakou reports being warned by one of his lead attorneys, before he reported to prison, that the CIA was very angry he had received such a light sentence, that the agency would do something to set him up, and that he should assume at all times that he was being watched. He treats the subsequent Taliban spokesman setup as the attempt that warning predicted.

On the purpose of the prosecution itself, his position is that the whole point was to silence him, and that it backfired: instead of silencing him it made him famous and gave him a voice, and rather than deterring him it emboldened him.

The agency also figures in his account of why he has not been pardoned. A message relayed to him from the White House Chief of Staff in July 2026 was that he will never receive a pardon, and that the obstacle is not any individual but the CIA as an institution: the agency reportedly said it does not care about Kiriakou personally, but that pardoning a CIA officer convicted of a crime would set a precedent it does not want set. See Kiriakou pardon request.

What the agency is actually for

Asked in 2023 why the CIA appeared able to drive a Justice Department prosecution, Kiriakou answered with the scope problem. "People generally don't realise just how authoritative the CIA is in areas of government where they shouldn't even be a part of the conversation."

His statement of the lawful remit is deliberately short: "the CIA's job, very simply, is to recruit spies, to steal secrets, and to analyse those secrets, to allow policymakers to make the best informed policy decisions. Period. That's it."

Against that he lists what it has acquired: "it shouldn't be up to the CIA to decide who's charged with a crime, who gets prosecuted with a crime; to create paramilitary forces; to carry out international kidnappings or torture programmes in archipelagos of secret prisons; to decide what Congress should and shouldn't know. None of that should be up to the CIA, but we've allowed the CIA, like we did with the FBI in the fifties, to just keep pushing that envelope, to the point where it's too late to stop them."

The remedy he names is historical: "you need a Church Committee or a Pike Committee to finally rein them back in again."

See also

- William Webster
- Wesley Clark
- Sleeper Agent
- Sharon Scranage
- Scholar-in-Residence program
- Mike Baker
- Mad minute
- Kiki Camarena case
- Imran Khan
- Havana Syndrome
- Gust Avrakotos
- Gina Haspel
- Francis Gary Powers
- Double-Agent Capture
- Curveball
- The CIA Insider's Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection
- CIA cable priority levels
- The Farm
- John Kiriakou
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Waterboarding
- Guantanamo Bay
- John Brennan
- Five Eyes
