Kiriakou's Russian media work
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Kiriakou's Russian media work is his daily radio show on Sputnik, a Russian state-owned media company, which he has hosted for seven and a half years (elsewhere he says seven years, and elsewhere dates the run 2017 to 2024). John Kiriakou says he initially declined, then agreed on the condition, written into his contract, that he could "say anything I want and criticize anyone I want, including Vladimir Putin." He says only the Russians offered him work at all after his release from prison, contrasting this with being shunned by the CIA and the broader U.S. media landscape; he has said he took the job purely for financial reasons after being turned down for work as a convicted felon by Uber, Lyft, Safeway, Target, and even as a baggage handler at Reagan National Airport. In other retellings he adds being turned down by DoorDash and local grocery stores, and says he was fired at the end of his first day as the Reagan National baggage handler once the employer realized he was a convicted felon. He notes The New Republic published a 2018 article calling him "the CIA spy who became a Russian propagandist." He has never been asked to say or not say anything: on the morning of the invasion he opened by condemning it and refused to use the state term "special military operation," calling it the "Russian invasion of Ukraine" and demanding Russian forces withdraw immediately. On the Salisbury Novichok poisoning of a Russian dissident and his daughter, he says he stated on air that it was the work of the KGB or its successor agency, "this is what the Russians do, they poison people", rejecting his co-host's alternative theories of a Ukrainian false flag or Russian mafia involvement. His weekly Thursday segment on the show, "Criminal Injustice," featured journalist Kevin Gosztola and Paul Wright, founder of the Human Rights Defense Center and publisher of Prison Legal News; in one telling he places it on a Sputnik program called Loud and Clear, co-hosted with Brian Becker. He notes the Washington Post accused him of "weakening our democracy" over the segment, for airing stories like a Pennsylvania judge jailing children for a private-prison bribe, and that Georgetown University separately published an academic paper claiming the same segment was "perpetuating Russian stereotypes" of the American judicial system. Kiriakou describes the show as government-funded, structurally comparable to Voice of America, no advertising, aimed at an American audience as an instrument of Russian soft power, and argues that what interests Russian media is his CIA background rather than the show itself, since it gives him a platform to expose crimes he says he witnessed there. He also writes for Consortium News (since 2015), Covert Action Magazine, and the Scheer Post.

Kiriakou's Russian-media ties nearly extended to Moscow itself. He says he received an engraved invitation, all expenses paid, to a Moscow dinner marking RT's 15th anniversary, a VIP table that included Michael Flynn, Jesse Ventura, Jill Stein, and Mike Maloof, with Vladimir Putin appearing briefly to shake hands. Having just been released from prison, Kiriakou asked the judge overseeing his release for permission to travel; she refused. He says he was relieved in hindsight, given that several attendees were later investigated, Flynn was arrested, and Stein was called a traitor. Despite hosting the show, Kiriakou describes Putin as a hater of free speech, a war criminal, and a tyrant he considers a dictator.

Platform bans and the end of the Sputnik show

Kiriakou says the Justice Department, Treasury Department, and FBI targeted Sputnik and RT for closure, and that RT was successfully shut down across the United States and the entire European Union. Sputnik was dropped by YouTube, Spreaker, Spotify, iTunes, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn, and its listenership fell from between 35,000 and 38,000 a day to about 250. Banned from other platforms, Sputnik and RT were forced onto Rumble; Kiriakou says he initially expected a Trump/Bannon "echo chamber" but found it the only place they could speak without censorship, calling it strange that press freedom now depends on figures like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. He says he is still regularly taken down and demonetized on YouTube for saying words like "Vladimir Putin," "Russia," or "abolishing the CIA," and that RFK Jr. and Kim Iversen have faced similar treatment.

The Sputnik show itself ended when the Biden administration sanctioned the Russian banks used for its payroll, making receipt of his paycheck legally treated as money laundering; Kiriakou hosted the show from August 2017 until around October 2024.

Post-Sputnik work

Kiriakou's radio show led, in his account, to his own TV show, a podcast, and speaking engagements, and to a wave of subsequent podcast appearances, Julian Dorey, Tucker Carlson, Patrick Bet-David, Sean Ryan, Joe Rogan, and Diary of a CEO, the last of which he says most broke him out. His weekend RT show was renamed Deep State, and the resulting viral attention led the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to sign him for representation in books, Hollywood, consulting, and licensing. Since leaving Sputnik and RT, he has hosted two YouTube shows, Deep Program, a daily show with former LA Times editorial cartoonist and two-time Pulitzer finalist Ted Rall, and Deep Focus with John Kiriakou, a weekly, more in-depth interview show, plus an Apple Podcasts show called Deadrop about what makes a spy tick. He also hosts CIA Declassified on Unifyd TV, which uses declassified CIA documents to examine historical episodes; he has confirmed on the show that the CIA killed Chilean president Salvador Allende and overthrew the South Vietnamese government.

The labelling wave

The mechanism by which former RT contributors were marked was, in Kiriakou's description, indiscriminate enough to be self-discrediting. He went to his own Twitter profile daily in 2022 expecting to find himself designated an official mouthpiece of the Russian government, and pointed to the two cases that showed the label was not being applied by anyone actually checking: George Galloway, who was no longer connected to RT, and Ed Schultz, who had been dead for four years.

"They never asked"

Put to him directly in 2026 whether his Russian employers had required either CIA secrets or Russian positions from him, Kiriakou's answer to both was no. On whether he had to hand over anything from his CIA service: "Nope, they never asked." The whole of the brief, as he gives it, was "Here's a microphone. We give you a radio show. Knock yourself out", with the subject matter left to whatever happened to be in the news that day, and no obligation to adopt the Russian line on any of it.

He again dated his own test of that freedom to the first morning of the war, giving the on-air words as "I unreservedly condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I call on Russian troops to withdraw immediately." Asked whether he was fired for it: "Nope." The protection was contractual, he could say anything he wanted and criticise anybody he wanted, and he extends the same latitude to the present, on the stated grounds that he has nothing left to lose.

On the money, he is dismissive in a way that cuts against the propagandist framing: asked what Russian state media paid him, his answer was "they don't pay very much."

The Brussels panel

The clearest cost Kiriakou attaches to the Sputnik association came at the European Parliament. He was invited by Stelios Kouloglou, a Greek MEP from the governing Syriza party, to sit on a panel on national security whistleblowing, an invitation he was glad to accept in person, having once been invited to address the Parliament while he was still in prison, when he wrote a speech and his attorney delivered it for him. He flew into Brussels for a single day and went straight from the airport to the Parliament.

In the pre-panel meeting, another of the American speakers, a representative of the group he identifies as People for Bernie, later Americans for Bernie, announced that she would not appear on the panel if he was on it. Kiriakou laughed, taking it for a joke. Her stated ground was the Sputnik show: "you appear on the Sputnik radio network and it's owned by the Russians," and so "I just refused to be on a panel with you." He describes himself as "shocked to the point of being speechless," and the MEP as embarrassed.

He was removed from that first panel. He spent the hour giving an interview to Greek national television instead, and appeared on the afternoon panel as scheduled, alongside Medea Benjamin and several European whistleblowers. His own reading of the episode is geographic: it was a reminder that "the long judgmental arm of American political society reached all the way across the ocean to the European Parliament in Brussels and gave me a good smack across the face."

The disappearance of RT America

Speaking days after the network''s closure in 2022, Kiriakou described it as an erasure rather than a cancellation. "They just basically wiped RT America off the face of the earth. I mean, like, just like that." He knew people who had worked there, "I have several friends", and named the programmes he had followed: "Redacted Tonight, On Contact, Boom Bust, Max Keiser, all these shows that I watched, that brought news and information to people in a way that the American media isn''t. It''s just awful. It''s terrible."

The Potemkin station

Put to him in May 2022 that his Sputnik work was "kind of a Potemkin radio program, meaning it doesn't really exist, since hardly anyone in this country can hear it," Kiriakou accepted the description and supplied the figures. Before the war the show went out daily on YouTube, Spreaker, Spotify, iTunes, iHeartRadio and TuneIn, "and we had 35 to 38,000 downloads a day. So that's a pretty healthy daily audience."

"We've been stricken from every one of those platforms. And now the only way you can listen to our show is on the Sputnik news website, or on a 1000 watt terrestrial radio station in Washington D.C. that you can barely pick up if you just cross the street. And so we're down to about 500 listeners a day. So you're right. It's a Potemkin village kind of radio station in that almost nobody listens to it."

The floor he gives here, about 500, differs from the roughly 250 he gives for the same collapse six weeks earlier; both figures are recorded as spoken.

Condemning the invasion, and being called an apologist anyway

He states his position on the war without qualification and dates it: "I said on the very first day of the invasion that I unreservedly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because I believe that all wars are wrong, they're violations of international law." He distinguishes that from refusing to describe Moscow's reasoning, the 2014 events in Ukraine, the treatment of ethnic Russians, and notes that the distinction bought him nothing: "I'm still viewed as a Russian apologist, even though I've made clear my personal position."

On the demand that he resign rather than take Russian money, his answer is domestic: "somebody said to me the other day, well, if you were really against the war, you would resign. And I said, yeah, that's easy for you to say, but are you going to pay my bills? Are you going to put my kids through college?"

See also

- Andrew Bustamante
- Russiagate
