Hayden at the National Press Club
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Hayden at the National Press Club is John Kiriakou's account of an encounter, some years after their one aborted joint television booking, with a visibly incapacitated Mike Hayden. He described it on the DeProgram programme in August 2025.

The event

The setting carried its own irony, which Kiriakou notes without comment. "I went to an event recently at the National Press Club that was sponsored by the Michael Hayden Center for the Study of Intelligence at George Mason University."

What he saw

Kiriakou prefaces the description with a disclaimer: Hayden "has had a number of strokes, and I don't wish this on anybody."

The account that follows is unsparing anyway. "He got up to thank everybody. He has two canes and there's this young woman who physically lifts him up out of the chair because he couldn't get up himself, and he's bent over balancing on the two canes like this, and he opens his mouth and this drool comes out of his mouth and goes all the way to the floor, and he just says, 'Thank you. Thank you.' And then he sat down."

His reaction

Kiriakou reports his own response as a check on satisfaction rather than an expression of it: "and I was like, 'Okay, well, there but for the grace of God.'"

The host offered the harsher reading, that Hayden "got what he had coming" and that "karma caught up", and Kiriakou did not adopt it.

The record he holds against him

Earlier in the same programme, asked directly whether Hayden had been a good CIA director, Kiriakou's answer was categorical: "one of the worst CIA directors in American history."

He lists the grounds in sequence. Hayden "not only gave us warrantless wiretapping when he was director of the NSA"; on moving to the CIA "he ran the torture programme and the rendition programme and the secret prisons programme"; and "when he was called out on it, actually doubled down and co-authored a book on why torture was good."

See also

- Mike Hayden
- The green room with Hayden
- National Security Agency
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- John Kiriakou
