Moral Injury
============

John Kiriakou described his friend, a member of the same church and men's fraternity, a CIA veteran, a brigadier general in the Army, and a psychiatrist, observing something Kiriakou had not understood about himself: "I find it fascinating that you came back from Pakistan with no PTSD, but you have crippling PTSD from your divorce."

The diagnosis was moral injury. Kiriakou had not heard the term and had to look it up. As he described it: "If you're raised in a certain way to believe that these things are right and these things are wrong and the wrong things you just don't do, and then somebody does it to you, your brain cannot wrap itself around the fact that this has been done to you, and it leads to PTSD."

Kiriakou identified the mechanism as trust, specifically, having allowed himself, despite his training, to trust one person, and that person having been the one who betrayed him. The violation was not physical danger but the shattering of a moral certainty: that the person closest to him would not do this.

He has since given the same episode as the one life lesson he would pass to someone much younger, and stated it as a rule rather than a wound: that you can't trust anybody. In that telling he attaches the CIA instruction it violated, in the agency's own words, "Don't trust anybody. Don't even trust me", and his verdict on himself is four words: "I should have listened."

He described his divorce as the hardest thing he ever went through, worse than FCI Loretto, worse than arrest, worse than counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, or Iran.

"I allowed myself to trust one person" (Bopst v2)

In this telling, Kiriakou connected the moral-injury diagnosis directly to the CIA training framework. The agency trains officers to trust no one. He spent a career operating on that basis. His divorce represented the one exception: "I allowed myself, despite my training, to trust one person, and that was the person who betrayed me."

Kiriakou stated plainly that his divorce was the worst thing he ever went through in his life, worse than prison, worse than his arrest and prosecution, worse than running counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the Iranians.

'What kind of lunatics do this'

In another telling, Kiriakou said he did not realize until 2015 that he had been suffering from long-term PTSD dating back to his years at the agency, describing walking into a church, 15 minutes after it had been the site of a terrorist attack, and accidentally kicking a severed human head, then volunteering a few days later to help clean brain matter off the ceiling. He said he survived two separate assassination attempts during his career, once in Greece and once in the Middle East, and would go home afterward and not tell his wife, since she lacked the clearance to be told. He described routinely dressing for work overseas in a bulletproof vest, a 9mm pistol in a shoulder holster, a .38 on his ankle, a serrated pocket knife, and two extended magazines, 44 rounds of ammunition in all, and recalled thinking, "what kind of lunatics do this to go to work every day." He also recalled his six-year-old son once catching him hiding his guns on top of a breakfront and asking if he was a detective; Kiriakou told him yes and swore him to secrecy, later reflecting that he had drawn his own children into the secrecy of his work.

'Once it's lost, you can't reclaim it'

John Kiriakou says many officers, "mostly guys", lose their sense of who they are once they cross their own moral lines in the field, and that once that self is lost, "you can't reclaim it." He frames this permanent moral injury as the reason an officer must enter the work with fixed ethical principles.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- FCI Loretto
