The Los Angeles Times Iran op-ed
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The Los Angeles Times Iran op-ed is an episode John Kiriakou could not account for until 2022, and which he now reads as the first evidence of something he did not know was happening.

About six months after he blew the whistle on the torture programme, the Los Angeles Times asked him to write an op-ed on Iranian foreign policy in Latin America. He had sat down at his computer to start it when the telephone rang. It was the CIA's general counsel's office, and the message was: "You better not be writing about Iran today."

His answer was that he no longer worked for them, that they did not get to say what he wrote, and that he cleared everything anyway, and he hung up.

The question he could not answer

What he could not work out was how they knew. He put it to his wife, "can you believe these guys had the nerve to call me and threaten me and tell me not to write about Iran? But how could they know I was writing about Iran?", and she supplied the answer he then carried for fourteen years: "they must have somebody at the LA Times." He agreed, appalled: "oh my God, that would be so illegal, but they must, they must have somebody at the LA Times."

What replaced that explanation

Coming out of a custody hearing in August 2022, in which his wife testified that the CIA's Office of Security had instructed her to report on his activities, he revised it: "they didn't have anybody at the LA Times. She was reporting back to them on my activities. She told them that I was writing about Iran that day."

He is careful about how far that goes. Pressed that this is inference rather than proof, he agreed, and added the practical objection to his own earlier theory: "you'd have to ask, too, if the CIA would want to take the legal risk of placing somebody inside the Los Angeles Times or any other outlet. Of course they could, they might, I don't know. But her admission that she was reporting back to the CIA on my activities made it clearer for me."

See also

- The Office of Security arrangement
- The custody standoff
