Karl Rove
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Karl Rove is a U.S. political strategist, best known as the senior strategist on the George W. Bush presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004. He appears in the source corpus through a 2008 contract from John Rendon's firm to rehabilitate the U.S. press reputation of an Indonesian general, named in the transcripts as Joko Widodo, who was banned from the United States on human-rights grounds. John Kiriakou was hired as good cop; Rove as bad cop.

The Indonesia contract

Kiriakou prefaces the story with a disclaimer, "I'm not proud of this", and dates it to 2008, when Rendon hired him to work with "Karl Rove, of all people" on a presidential campaign in Indonesia. The two flew into Singapore and helicoptered across to Jakarta. The candidate, in Kiriakou's description, owned a chain of Holiday Inns and was a former chairman of Indonesia's joint chiefs of staff.

The split between the two consultants showed immediately. Rove, by Kiriakou's account, opened with television and radio commercials; Kiriakou stopped the meeting. There was video on YouTube, he told the general, of him stabbing six peaceful protesters in the heart, six college students, lined up and stabbed one by one, for taking part in a pro-democracy demonstration, and a resulting American travel ban. "We can't just pretend it didn't happen."

The job itself was four op-eds arguing that the general was misunderstood, for which Kiriakou says he was paid handsomely, 25,000 dollars. They were sent to the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, and none would touch them. Nothing came of the campaign: the general dropped out of the presidential race and had himself elected vice president instead, and the American travel ban was never lifted.

Kiriakou explains taking the work in plain terms: he had just blown the whistle on the torture program, had lost his job, had four children at the time, and needed an income, "'Hey, would you take 25 grand to write four op-eds?' And I said, 'Yes, definitely.'"

The general's name as it appears in the auto-captioned transcripts is retained here; the biographical details Kiriakou gives do not match the Indonesian politician of that name, and the transcription is likely an artifact.

Siegelman

Rove also surfaces in Kiriakou's prison reporting. Narrating the case of Gary White, a federal prisoner at Forest City, Arkansas, Kiriakou describes him as having been caught up in "the Carl Rove instigated political case involving former Alabama governor Don Siegelman."

See also

- Joko Widodo
- John Rendon
