Senate Foreign Relations Committee
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John Kiriakou served as a senior investigator for the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee under chairman John Kerry, a role he also describes as adviser to the committee. He was still holding the post, "the most prestigious committee on Capitol Hill", when the weight of a federal investigation into him came to a head with his arrest in January 2012.

AIPAC's welcome and the Holy Land offer

John Kiriakou served as senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2009 to mid-2011 under chairman John Kerry. He says two AIPAC representatives walked unannounced into his office on his first day and offered an all-expenses-paid trip to the Holy Land, name-dropping seven colleagues already going; he refused repeatedly and finally told them to get out of his office. More broadly, he says the committee's staff were "never permitted to do anything that might anger the Israelis", that they always had to think about Israel first and the United States second, something he says he long resented. As chief investigator for the committee, he also ran a study of the hawala system, the informal money-transfer network he identified as one of the principal channels through which al-Qaeda moved operational money in the post-9/11 period.

The authorization bill nobody had passed

The single episode Kiriakou uses to illustrate how little of the committee's formal work actually gets done involves John Kerry walking into the staff office one day and saying that he had been thinking, and that they should probably do an authorization bill. Kiriakou chuckled, assuming it was a joke. Kerry looked at him and said "what?", and Kiriakou, recovering, agreed that of course they should do one.

The mechanism is the point. An authorization bill is the step in which the Appropriations Committee votes an appropriation and the oversight committee then authorises the State Department to spend the money. Kerry's own answer to why he had raised it was that the committee had not passed one in five years. Kiriakou's reaction was the obvious question, "how does the State Department run? How do they know?", and his conclusion is the flat one he applies to much of Congress: "it's all theater."

On Congress: "narcissism and cashing in"

Kiriakou has been blunt about his view of the lawmakers he worked alongside as chief investigator: "most of these guys and women seek only to promote their own narcissism and to cash in. It's not about the country. It's about power and about enriching themselves."

The Arab Spring and a policy vacuum

Kiriakou says that while he was on the committee during the Arab Spring, Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry "just got caught up in the euphoria of change and people power" without giving any thought to what would happen afterward, a policy vacuum he blames for the chaos that followed in Libya, Syria and Egypt.

The seventeen-year-old in the delegation

Kiriakou's only meeting with Charlie Kirk happened while he was working on the committee. A group of Tea Party people came through to lobby office to office for tax cuts, and Kiriakou, watching them for a moment, concluded that "it's that kid who's the leader. It's not any of the adults." When the delegation left there was a press conference, and the seventeen-year-old gave it. Kiriakou told a colleague "boy, that kid's going places, whoever he is," and had to ask who he was.

Where classified reading actually happens

From his two-plus years as senior investigator on the committee, Kiriakou describes a procedure that leaves no room for material to migrate into a member's papers. Outside the intelligence committee, "you can't just have classified documents in your office, because your office is not a vaulted area. It's not a secure area."

To read a briefing or international cable traffic, "you go down to the office of the Senate security officer, which is underneath the Capitol Rotunda. You make an appointment, you go down there, they take you into the classified vault, the conference room, and you can read those documents there."

The conclusion he draws from his own experience of the system is the basis for his scepticism about Joe Biden's Senate-era documents: "you can't walk out with classified documents. You have to make an effort to walk out with classified documents."

The investigations that were closed

John Kerry offered Kiriakou the senior investigator's post in early 2009. "So I was under the impression that he actually wanted me to investigate things, and I ran into even more trouble with the CIA in that job."

Two of those investigations are documented. The first, into the Dasht-i-Leili massacre and whether CIA officers had been present at the loading of the containers, was killed within days of his writing to the agency, by the committee's own deputy staff director, who told him it was dead and to drop it. The second, into the placing of CIA torturers under State Department cover, ended when the reply arrived classified above his clearance.

Neither was the last. "There were other investigations too, at which I was poking them," and another three years passed between them and the charges.

The rank, and the only time he used it

Retelling the Afghanistan study in April 2026, Kiriakou dated his tenure as the committee's senior investigator to "2009 to 2011, end of 2011", and described the study as something he proposed to the chairman himself: he told John Kerry he wanted to go to Afghanistan "to do a formal Senate study on the heroin poppy crop."

The rank attached to the job is what made the trip possible. "As a senior congressional staff member, I had the rank of Brigadier General", and when the military at Bagram declined to fly him south, he used it, in what he calls "the only time in my life I ever pulled rank on somebody": "I'm not asking you. I'm telling you."

The AIPAC approach

John Kiriakou dates his service as the committee's chief investigator to 2009 through 2011, and says the lobbying began almost immediately: a couple of days after he started, two AIPAC representatives came in to welcome him to Capitol Hill and offer him an all-expenses-paid trip abroad. The episode is recorded at the AIPAC "Holy Land" trip offer.
