New Castle, Pennsylvania
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New Castle, Pennsylvania is John Kiriakou's home town, and the fixed starting point of almost every account he gives of himself: he grew up in western Pennsylvania, wanted to go into public service and see the world, and left at eighteen for George Washington University. He was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania and lived in New Castle from the age of two, graduating from New Castle High School, the biography an FBI legal attaché once recited back to him from a file, and which he has also watched an AI chatbot get right on air.

He places the town about an hour north of Pittsburgh, on the edge of Amish country, and calls it a wonderful place to grow up. He now lives in Arlington, Virginia, and says plainly that he misses it.

What happened to it

His account of the town today is blunt and demographic, though the numbers move between tellings. In one it had about 50,000 people when he was growing up and has about 18,000 now, and "it's not such a nice place anymore." In another it had "a good 40,000" and is "down to about 20, or less than 20." The explanation he gives is one word long: "western Pennsylvania rust belt. Nobody wants to live there, but it was a great place to grow up." His measure of the decline is not a statistic but an institution: "when DEA and ATF open a field office in your hometown of 18,000 people, you got a problem."

The town also anchors his politics on incarceration and industry. Discussing private prisons he places himself geographically, Youngstown within reach, New Castle, Pennsylvania, as somebody speaking about his own region rather than an abstraction. It appears again in his account of the collapse of local reporting: whole sections of the country now have no local coverage, which he calls "a golden age for political corruption", and the small New Castle paper is among the casualties of a business where national titles survive on subscriptions and small ones do not.

The family business

When Kiriakou was seventeen his parents bought a restaurant in Sharon, Pennsylvania, fifteen or twenty miles away, and he and his father worked the eleven-to-seven shift there on Friday nights, the drive through the unlit Amish country between the two towns being the setting of his UFO sighting. Restaurants ran in the family: an uncle owned one in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia.

A trip into the city was an event. Going to a Pirates game or a Steelers game was, he says, always a big deal, because Pittsburgh really was a big city, it had a zoo.

The high school and the tube socks

The town produced one story he tells as the hinge between wanting to serve and choosing how. Fixed on the Iran hostage crisis and staying up for Nightline, a programme he says ABC News created specifically to report each day's developments, the teenage Kiriakou mentioned to his father that an army recruiter had come to New Castle High School and was offering a free pair of tube socks to anyone who came down on Saturday just for a conversation. His father, "a very gentle, very sweet man" who never spoke to him that way, answered: "If you go down there on Saturday, you and I are going to have a serious problem, boy." He skipped it, and started looking instead for universities with a major in Middle Eastern studies, of which, in 1981, there were almost none.

The church announcement

New Castle followed him into the field. Kiriakou's parents had a picture of the agency drawn from James Bond films and were, he says, beside themselves with worry; while he was stationed in Athens his father stood up in church one Sunday and announced that his son was an undercover CIA officer at the American embassy, and that anyone needing help there could call him. Parishioners from New Castle duly began telephoning his desk at the station asking for help getting relatives visas.

His mother's response was that she had told him not to say anything. Kiriakou's own was less measured: "Dad, I said, you're going to get me killed. I'm undercover here. It's a critical threat for terrorism post." He dealt with each caller by claiming his father had "a touch of dementia" and denying any connection to the CIA, and the matter "died a quiet death." The motive, he says, was pride.

Oak Park Cemetery

The most consequential thing New Castle gave him was found by accident at eight or nine years old, in Oak Park Cemetery, while he was turning over rocks looking for salamanders. He found one, and also the grave of a man named Joseph B. Chambers, on a simple marker recording that he had died in the town and had won the Congressional Medal of Honor. The inscription read "Capture of Colors of First Virginia Infantry, Confederate States of America."

He took the question home in a shoebox with the salamander. His mother's answer, "oh, he's a hero. We should go to the library and see if we can find his story", and her aside that "everybody has a story" are the part he repeats. What the library gave up was that Chambers had been a lowly private in Company F of the 199th Pennsylvania Infantry, called the Round Heads; that on 25 March 1865, weeks before the end of the war, he captured a Confederate battle flag at the Battle of Petersburg; that he was awarded the Medal of Honor on 27 July 1871 at the age of thirty-eight; and that he went back to the village of Eastbrook just outside New Castle and farmed there until he died quietly in 1908. An earlier telling of the same discovery gives the regiment as the Fourth Pennsylvania Infantry and the death as in the 1890s; the later account is the more precise one.

What hooked him was the arithmetic his mother left him with: Chambers was one person in a cemetery of about 30,000. He became a regular there, learning the town's own hierarchy off its stones, the Jameson family under the obelisk, who funded Jameson Memorial Hospital; the men who owned the coal mines, the tin mill and the steel mills in their 19th-century mausoleums, and noticing that the grave that interested him was the common farmer's, not theirs.

The habit outlasted the town. Once he joined the CIA he visited a cemetery or two wherever in the world he was sent, turning up the graves of Eva Perón, Nicolae Ceaușescu and Oskar Schindler along the way, and using Find a Grave as a first hint that somebody was worth researching. It became a book: Remains of the Day, a guide to the historic cemeteries of Washington DC published in March 2026 and the first in a planned series.

See also

- Kiriakou's UFO sighting
- George Washington University
- Find a Grave
- Arlington Cemetery spies
- The Greek Orthodox Church
- Private prison system
