Ray McGovern
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Ray McGovern is a former senior CIA analyst turned antiwar dissident and one of John Kiriakou's closest friends and constant public allies.

"Like a brother to me"

Kiriakou describes McGovern as "a really great friend, a former very senior CIA officer... like a brother to me." Their agency careers never overlapped: Kiriakou began working for the CIA on the Monday after the Friday that McGovern retired, in January 1990. The friendship was forged instead in the dissident world, Assange vigils, panels, and the Sam Adams Associates circle of intelligence veterans.

Kiriakou lists McGovern among the ex-intelligence people who could genuinely reform the agency, "can you imagine Ray McGovern back at the CIA?", though he concedes Ray is a little long in the tooth and would probably decline. He also cites McGovern when rebutting the accusation that prominent ex-CIA dissidents are still secretly agency: people say it of Snowden, of Philip Agee, whom the CIA hunted for decades, and of McGovern.

MICIMATT

The phrase Kiriakou often reaches for about Washington's permanent economy, that the business of Washington is government, and behind it a military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank complex, is, he notes, McGovern's coinage: the "MICIMATT."

The Kremlin meeting

Kiriakou recounts, with delight, that McGovern traveled to Russia with Oliver Stone, without ever mentioning the trip to him, and that at the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin said, "Oh yeah, let me meet with Oliver and Ray," receiving the two in his office for 40 minutes. "I don't know what was said, but I'm going to call Ray tonight and ask for a readout."

Where they disagree

Kiriakou is open about the gap between them on September 11: McGovern, he says, is convinced it was a conspiracy, that if bin Laden was involved, he was used as a stooge, a position Kiriakou does not share, though he treats it with respect rather than ridicule.

In Kiriakou's trusted-feed cohort (2025)

John Kiriakou named Ray McGovern at the Consortium News 30th-anniversary panel in November 2025 as one of the small handful of writers whose feeds he checks daily on X and Blue Sky for news, the same short list on which he placed Patrick Lawrence, Mary Kostakidis and Joe Lauria, as the mechanism by which he now escapes what he calls the intolerable ecosystem of "any slob" rolling out of bed to make a YouTube show.

As Kiriakou introduces him

Kiriakou's standing on-air introduction is a four-item biography: a former senior CIA officer who served 27 years; President George H. W. Bush's morning intelligence briefer; recipient of the CIA's Intelligence Commendation Medal, "which he returned in protest"; and now a noted activist and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Sitting with Kiriakou, May 2022

Interviewed alongside Kiriakou on the Ukraine war, McGovern gives his own account of what he calls scoundrel time. He dates the change to the Reagan appointments: on entering the agency "there were scoundrels around, but most of them existed in the operations part... we were kept hermetically sealed away from those guys," until William Casey and Robert Gates "recruited people in managerial positions who were scoundrels, who wanted to get promoted." His own break came over Iraq rather than Afghanistan or Ukraine, "I saw my former colleagues deliberately falsifying, making up, manufacturing evidence to justify a war."

He offers as his proudest professional moment the analysis, produced as chief of the Soviet foreign policy branch in the 1970s, that Moscow and Beijing "were likely to come to blows, which they did in 1969", and that the hostility could be exploited. "One of my nice memorabilia is a nice note I got back from Kissinger saying, you got it right, we're going to do this." The chain he draws from it runs to the anti-ballistic missile treaty signed in Moscow in May 1972, which "formed the foundation of strategic stability for the next 30 years, count them, three decades, until the junior Bush" withdrew from it.

His reading of the present is that a comparable shift has gone unnoticed: "China and Russia are together now. I don't think Putin would have done, would have risked doing what he did in Ukraine, were he not to have full backing from Xi Jinping." He describes the resulting world as bipolar rather than unipolar, and "bipolar in the psychiatric sense as well as in the political sense." On the danger he is blunt, the intelligence leadership having testified that defeat could push Moscow toward nuclear use, "the policy is, therefore, let's put Putin on his back. Let's defeat him in Ukraine. My God, you do the syllogism."

On what analysts actually work from, he cites Casey's complaint at his first cabinet meeting that "my analysts of the Soviet Union are using 80% public sources, newspapers, books... They should be using spies." McGovern's answer: "give me a break. That's the way it always was", and with the availability of information since, "it's 90%."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Vladimir Putin
- Edward Snowden
- Julian Assange
