The 2007 death threats
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The 2007 death threats were the first personal consequence of John Kiriakou's December 2007 decision to speak publicly about the CIA's torture programme, five years before his prosecution.

The mail

"When I went public on torture in December of 2007 I got hundreds, literally hundreds, of pieces of hate mail and hate email."

The three the FBI took seriously

The FBI telephoned him one day to say they had what they described as three credible threats on his life. "One of them actually mentioned my children and my address," and the Bureau urged him to leave town. He took his family to Cancún for a week. The FBI then called to say they had taken care of everything: the senders had been interviewed, they were "just local lunatics," and there was no real threat. The family came home.

As a measure of the climate

Kiriakou raised the episode in 2019 as a baseline, not as a grievance. Asked what would happen if the Ukraine call whistleblower were named, he answered by comparison: "we're in a far, far more politically charged environment now than we were in 2007," with rally-goers assaulting journalists and protesters and the president encouraging it. The implication he leaves is that a 2019 outing would draw worse than three letters the Bureau could dismiss in a week.

See also

- CIA Torture Program Whistleblowing
- The Ukraine call whistleblower
- John Kiriakou
- The chilling effect of whistleblower prosecutions
