The Farragut West encounter
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The Farragut West encounter was a brief exchange, or rather a single sentence, unanswered, between John Kiriakou and two National Guardsmen stationed in a Washington Metro station, which he recounted on 5 November 2025.

The setting

He was not looking for a confrontation. "I went downtown yesterday afternoon to have coffee with a friend, and there were two National Guardsmen in the Farragut West Metro station."

The location is the load-bearing detail of the story. Farragut West sits in the federal office district a short walk from the White House, and Kiriakou's assessment of it is dismissive of any security rationale for troops being there at all: "Farragut West, probably the single safest Metro station in the entire Metro network."

Talking himself out of it, and failing

What he describes next is an internal argument he lost. "As soon as I saw them at a distance, I was like: don't say anything. Don't say anything. Don't say anything."

He then walked up to them. "And I said, 'You guys should be ashamed of yourselves.' And I walked away." Asked what they did, he was clear that nothing followed on either side: "They didn't say anything." Pressed, he added the limit of it, "That's all I said."

Where it sits in his politics

The encounter is a personal coda to a position Kiriakou had already argued at length: that the federal deployment of soldiers into American cities is a political display rather than a response to crime, and that its authors count on the deployment becoming ordinary. He raises it in a passage about public revulsion at the ICE raids and the troops on the streets, "even people who are anti-illegal immigration, they don't like the way this is being handled: the goons on the streets of the city, the National Guard", and offers his own conduct as an instance of the reaction rather than as advice.

He makes no claim to have changed anything. The two men said nothing, he walked on, and the story ends there. Its interest lies in the shape of it: a former government officer, rehearsing silence, unable to keep to it.

See also

- The National Guard in Washington
- John Kiriakou
- The Lafayette Square tents
