The Yugo factory argument
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The Yugo factory argument is John Kiriakou's account of being confronted by a relative in Greece over the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, told on the DeProgram programme in July 2025 in answer to a viewer's question about that campaign.

An Orthodox diplomat in an Orthodox country

Kiriakou was posted in Athens at the time, and describes the position as doubly untenable. It was "absolutely miserable not just to be an American diplomat in Greece, but to be an Orthodox Christian American diplomat while the United States government was bombing an Orthodox Christian country that the Greeks considered to be brothers."

The dinner

The pressure reached his own family. "Even one of my uncles attacked me verbally at a dinner and I could barely respond to him," he says. The uncle's question was put twice and without softening: "Why the fuck did you blow up the Yugo factory? What the fuck were you thinking, you blew up the Yugo factory?"

Kiriakou's answer was narrow and, he concedes, evasive. He addressed the man as theo, uncle, and said only that "they converted it to manufacture tanks, which was true." He adds immediately that he "almost didn't want to answer him," because the technical justification was not what he believed: "the bombing of Yugoslavia was wrong, wrong, wrong in the first place."

The wider objection

His criticism goes past the target list to the war's outcome. He says the United States "created this fake rump country called Kosovo that has never otherwise existed through the course of human history," on ground that "just so happens to be holy ground for the Serbian Orthodox Church" and holds most of its monasteries.

He renders the American position as a taunt: "Yeah, tough luck. We're going to take this land away from you. We're going to give it to these Muslims that you've been feuding with for the last 1500 years. And there's nothing you can do about it. Oh, and by the way, we're going to bomb you, too, just for the hell of it."

Put to him that the intervention was meant to stop a genocide, Kiriakou allowed that this was indeed its stated purpose, but said the campaign had been sold as creating a safety zone and that "nobody ever said anything about it being an independent country five minutes later." He also says that despite having access to the intelligence at the time, "there was no information" explaining why Washington had not simply worked the problem through with Boris Yeltsin rather than picking a fight with Moscow over it.

See also

- The Hundred Drachma Coins
- The Greek Orthodox Church
- John Kiriakou
- Kiriakou's Athens house
