Threats against John Kiriakou
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Threats against John Kiriakou began, on his own dating, in 2007, when he went public about the CIA's torture programme, and have grown as his public profile has.

The C-SPAN stalker

Shortly after going public he gave a speech at Georgetown University Law School that was carried on C-SPAN. A woman in Lincoln, Nebraska watched it and became convinced he had proposed to her in code during the speech. She began emailing him, sometimes twenty-five or thirty times a day, telling him how much she loved him and that she accepted. This went on for months; he never answered a single message.

Then, while he was senior investigator at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, an intern told him his ten o'clock had arrived. He had no ten o'clock. Recognising the name, he told the intern to hold her there and called the Capitol Police; she bolted. A later email arrived in the same flaky, friendly register: "Silly, why did you call the cops on me? You know how much I love you. I just wanted to tell you I brought a gun with me so I can kill your wife so we can be together forever." He called the police again with her hotel and room number, and she was arrested.

The Pahlavi calls

After Kiriakou said in an interview that Reza Pahlavi was a clown who would not survive the walk from the plane to the terminal if he returned to Iran, one man called him seventy-two times in three hours, using six different Google Voice numbers as each was blocked, leaving what Kiriakou calls the filthiest, most vile voicemails.

He reported it to the FBI and was told this happens to people all the time, even after he mentioned a threat to see his brains on the sidewalk, delivered with his own home address. What changed the answer was the next line: the caller named his son and the street address in Cincinnati where he lives. At that, the agent said, "Oh, that's a crime." The Bureau found the man in four days, someone in New York who had seen the interview and decided to try to silence him.

The NGO executive

A week before the July 2026 interview, Kiriakou received a death threat from a man who used his real name, email address and telephone number, the chief executive of a medical NGO who objected to something Kiriakou had said on Piers Morgan's show and threatened to come to Washington and blow his brains out. Kiriakou forwarded it to the FBI, who said they would drive over and tell him to stop, and asked whether he would press charges if it recurred. He said he would.

Why he takes all of it seriously

Kiriakou's working rule is that everything must be taken seriously, because you cannot tell in advance who is a nut, who is venting and who means business. He notes the practical difficulty: local police often say there is nothing they can do because the calls cross state lines and are routed from everywhere, and half the time the caller uses Google Voice, which is untraceable.

He illustrates the point with a chance encounter at the home of an A-list Hollywood friend, where he recognised a member of the security detail as someone he had last seen in an Islamabad safe house in 2002, now, after Blackwater, running security for the star, who was receiving threats over a public position on Iran that "would make your hair stand up."

On his own exposure, Kiriakou notes that he spent a career at the CIA and knows how easy it is to find someone with a name and a little patience, and that today nobody needs to be a spy to do it, because home addresses, phone numbers and family details are compiled by data brokers and sold to anyone with a credit card. Since going public he uses a subscription service to have that information removed.

Reporting them, and what comes of it

Kiriakou describes the threats as a routine feature of a public life: "I''m out there, like you are, on the internet. I''m former CIA. Some people love me, some people hate me, so I get death threats." He reports each one through the FBI''s own web form. "The FBI has never, ever reached out to me. Ever. Not a single time." He does not treat this as personal, "they don''t have the manpower to care when they have major crimes that they''re investigating", but he draws a practical conclusion from it: "the FBI is not going to do it for you. The FBI is not going to protect you."

The 3:25 a.m. voicemail

He offers one recent case as an illustration of what he does instead. A caller left a voicemail threatening to kill him at 3.25 in the morning, using his own mobile phone. "I have BeenVerified, so I went to beenverified.com, I put in the phone number, it gives me his name, his address, his phone number, and it confirmed the phone number and his social media."

"So rather than report it to the FBI, because they do nothing, I texted him, and I told him that if he ever did something like that again I was going to tear off his head and shove his head up his ass, and I said, ''and I''m going to do that at 321 Main Street.'' I put his home address." The reply came back at once: "''I''m so sorry. I was drunk. I don''t like you, and I watch your videos and they made me angry, and I found your number online.'' And I said, ''yeah, don''t do it again, because next time I''m not going to be so nice about it.'' And I haven''t heard back."

See also

- Reza Pahlavi
- Situational awareness
- Piers Morgan
