Six different passports
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Asked in Athens in May 2025 what separates intelligence officers entering the profession now from those of his own era, John Kiriakou named two things.

The passports

"Number one, it is much harder to be an intelligence officer today than it was when I was in the CIA. And it's because of the development of technology, especially AI and facial recognition software. I don't know how people cross borders now. I had six different passports. How do they cross borders when everything is scanned and saved?"

The problem he identifies is not detection at a single border but persistence across all of them. An alias that survives one crossing does not survive being stored, indexed and matched against a face at the next.

The advice

"Number two, the advice that I would give is: don't let technology take over your job."

It is the same argument he makes about the run-up to September 11th, that a service can spend billions on electronics and still miss the thing a recruited human being would have told it. The technology has changed which side of the ledger it sits on: it used to be the thing an officer used, and is now also the thing that exposes him.

What he judged the best service

Asked in the same interview which service he now considers the most effective in the world, Kiriakou declined the obvious answer and named Israel. His reasoning was operational and unsentimental. Of the 2024 pager operation he said it was probably a war crime, "but from an intelligence point of view, it was brilliant", because of what it required: controlling the manufacturing of the devices, controlling the supply chain, and then getting them into the hands of the specific people the operation was meant to kill. "And they did it. They succeeded. I think they're the best in the world."

On the Greek service

Asked how capable Greece's own service is, his answer was that it still needs work, and that the work is resources rather than talent: "Greece needs more personnel. They need more training and they need more specialization."

The specific failure mode he warns against is monomania: "you can have a lot of people working on Turkey. You can't have everybody working on Turkey." A service needs enough money to have collectors collect, analysts analyse, and writers put it in front of the minister or prime minister so that he can make the best-informed decisions, the same thing, he says, that the United States went through between the 1940s and the 1970s.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Greek Intelligence Service
- Denied areas
- Kiriakou on artificial intelligence
- MOSSAD
