Executive Order 12333
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Executive Order 12333, referred to by John Kiriakou as "1233", is the U.S. presidential directive that, in its post-September 11 amended form, grants the Central Intelligence Agency the legal authority to kill any individual anywhere in the world whom the agency deems to pose a "clear and present danger" to the United States. It is the foundation of the agency's targeted-killing operations and, through the 2025 Ninth Circuit ruling, of the contractor extensions of that authority.

Self-designation of threats

The most consequential feature of the amended order, in Kiriakou's reading, is that the CIA itself determines who qualifies as a clear and present danger, there is no external review of those designations, and the underlying intelligence is generally not shared with anyone outside the agency:

> The CIA is going to decide who's the clear and present danger. And they're not going to tell you because you're not cleared. ... I'm not cleared. We're just going to have to take their word for it. But they have the legal authority to kill people through 1233.

Extension to contractors

The 2025 Ninth Circuit ruling, issued in a case in which Abu Zubaydah was the plaintiff, held that 12333 authority extends to private contractors when they act under written CIA contract. The practical effect is that contractors operating CIA paramilitary programs, including Blackwater's Global Response Staff and assassination program, are legally protected as agents of the agency.

Operational application

In Kiriakou's account, the order is the legal substrate beneath the Tuesday morning kill list, the regular Brennan-era meeting at which CIA personnel produced and assigned that week's targets for killing.

The assassination ban Bush crossed out

John Kiriakou says Executive Order 12333, which grew out of the Church and Pike investigations and was signed by President Gerald Ford, set the terms of what the CIA could do overseas, and its signed version forbade assassinations. That prohibition held, he says, until September 12, 2001, when President Bush effectively "crossed that part out" and told the agency to "kill anybody you want." In another telling, Kiriakou says the order was amended several times but held until 9/11, when an amendment allowed the assassination of any person the president deemed a clear and present danger to the United States, its citizens, or its installations. In a separate telling, Kiriakou dates the original order to the 1970s and says the CIA had told the Justice Department and White House as early as 1991 that Osama bin Laden was a serious threat, only to be told officials had to wait until he committed a crime against an American before acting; days after the September 11 attacks, Bush signed the executive order amending 12333 to permit the CIA to assassinate people, which it had previously been barred from doing.

Amended overnight after 9/11 (HOPE 2025)

John Kiriakou says that on September 12, 2001 the CIA became a paramilitary organization answering to no oversight committee, and that Executive Order 12333, which had banned CIA assassinations, was amended not merely to allow killings but to "set up the mechanism" by which the agency could kill anyone it wanted worldwide.

Church-era assassination ban and the 12 September 2001 revision

John Kiriakou said on Covert Strategies Revealed in July 2026 that the original 1975 signed version of Executive Order 12333, imposed at the insistence of Senator Frank Church and Congressman Otis Pike after the Church Committee, expressly "forbade assassinations" by the CIA. That prohibition survived, in his telling, "until September 12th, 2001," the day after the attacks, when President George W. Bush "kind of crossed that part out" and effectively authorised the agency to "kill anybody you want. And that's what they've been doing ever since."

Three states of the same order

In a June 2026 summary Kiriakou lays the order's history out as a staircase. In its original form 12333 "had banned the CIA assassinations." In the aftermath of 9/11 the amended order "allowed CIA assassinations." And "then finally under the Obama administration" it allowed CIA assassinations of American citizens, the authority under which Anwar al-Awlaki was killed.

He presents the drift as a governance failure rather than a legal one. Discussing what the CIA does domestically, collection on American citizens is "patently illegal" and belongs exclusively to the FBI, though he believes the agency does it and knows from Snowden that the NSA does, he names the cause as "really a lack of congressional oversight."

As the thing Israel does without

Kiriakou's shorthand for the difference between American and Israeli practice is the order itself. Israel, he says, has "no gang of four, gang of eight that you have to inform. There's no Executive Order 12333. You just do it."

The order's other face, the one that constrains nobody, came up in the same exchange, when Napolitano put it to him that the intelligence community has read 12333 as licence to "forget about the Fourth Amendment, just spy on everybody, take down whatever they say from whatever source," and that even a president who had himself been a victim of that reading had failed to change it. Kiriakou did not dissent.

See also

- Tuesday morning kill list
- Ninth Circuit contractor ruling (2025)
- Blackwater
- Special Activities Division
- Title 10 vs Title 50
