Dumping cash in a Moscow bathroom
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Dumping cash in a Moscow bathroom is one of three examples John Kiriakou offered on 19 November 2025 to show the range of what a covert action programme can consist of, after a viewer asked what such a programme against Venezuela might look like in practice.

The range

He began at the destructive end. "Covert action can take many, many forms. I mean, I think of some really notorious examples during the Soviet Union, when American commandos blew up the Trans-Siberian oil pipeline in Siberia, causing ecological damage."

The second example is proxy warfare across a Soviet border. "When the US hired Afghan guerrillas, terrorists, to cross the Amu Darya River and then attack an oil refinery in what was then the southern USSR."

The third is neither. "But it can also be like dumping cash in a bathroom in Moscow, so, to try to undermine the state currency, the rouble." His summary of the category: "there's all sorts of things you can do."

Why the third example is the interesting one

The first two are recognisably military. The third is an attack on confidence: counterfeit or genuine notes left where they will be found and spent, degrading trust in the money itself. It requires no shooters and produces no attributable event, which is precisely what makes it belong to the category rather than to war.

That breadth is the point Kiriakou is making. He gives these examples immediately before setting out the bureaucratic approval chain a programme must climb, and immediately after describing being forbidden even to say the words in a federal deposition. A category that can encompass a pipeline demolition and a bag of banknotes is a category that tells the public nothing when it is announced, which is his standing objection to announcing one.

What he expected in the Venezuelan case

Applying the range to the case at hand, Kiriakou put the likely starting point at the cheapest end. "Probably lots and lots of propaganda. That's the easiest sort of entry-level covert action. Lots of propaganda." He then named the escalation he would not be surprised by: "I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually begin arming opponents of President Maduro. That would really ratchet things up, and then you're going to have fighting in the streets."

See also

- Covert action programs
- The Scooter Libby deposition
- Maduro Capture
- Italian election covert action
