The Capitol Hill cocaine ring
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The Capitol Hill cocaine ring was a 1983 federal investigation into drug use among members of the United States Congress, which John Kiriakou encountered at eighteen while working as a paid intern in his congressman's district office in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.

The phone call

Kiriakou's father called the office one day and asked whether he was in some kind of trouble. He said no, and asked why. "And he said, because an FBI agent was here and he wanted to talk to you. And I freaked out. I was a kid. I was 18."

The agent had left a card. Kiriakou called the number and said his father had told him the agent wanted to talk.

The questions

The interview, as Kiriakou recounts it, escalated in three steps. "Have you ever seen the congressman snort cocaine? And I was like, what? No. Have you ever seen anybody in the office snort cocaine? I said, no. Have you ever seen the congressman trade stamps for cocaine? And I was like, no."

His composure did not survive it: "I was so freaked out. I blurted out, they all smoke pot on Friday afternoons."

What the questions were about

The premise of the third question turned out to be correct. "Well, it turned out that the congressman was trading stamps for cocaine and ended up going to prison for seven and a half years."

And he was not alone. In Kiriakou's account, four or five members of Congress "ended up either losing their primaries or being prosecuted and going to prison because there was this coke ring on Capitol Hill that was in 1983."

The lesson he draws

The conclusion Kiriakou takes from it is not scandal but ordinariness, the same frame he later applied to the cocaine in the West Wing: "I came to learn after, you know, 41 years here, that's just how Washington runs. It's just a fact of life."

See also

- The cocaine in the West Wing
- Jim Moran
