Bill Clinton
============

Bill Clinton was the 42nd President of the United States, whom John Kiriakou describes as "disinterested" in intelligence. The CIA, he says, briefed Clinton only twice in his eight years; Vice President Al Gore, by contrast, was briefed six days a week and relayed anything Clinton needed to know. Clinton's first CIA director, James Woolsey, reportedly said he had never briefed Clinton and "wasn't sure Clinton would recognize him in a meeting."

Kiriakou was the 35-year-old CIA note-taker for Clinton's 1999 meeting with the Greek Prime Minister, Clinton being, by Kiriakou's count, only the third U.S. president ever to visit Greece, after Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush. The trip's purpose was specific: Clinton came to apologize for the U.S. role in overthrowing the Greek government in the 1967 coup. In the two weeks before the visit, Greek television derisively nicknamed him "planetarhis", "planet ruler", mocking his self-importance, repeatedly juxtaposing the name with clips of his "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" denial to show contempt; the coverage reversed to praise once he delivered the apology.

Kiriakou gives a fuller account of the same meeting elsewhere: Clinton entered with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, and Ambassador Nicholas Burns, greeting the Greek prime minister, foreign minister, and defense minister with hearty handshakes, while, behind them, an entire spread of food ordered for the meeting went untouched because none of the Greek officials wanted anything to eat. Clinton, not registering that Kiriakou was standing discreetly as notetaker, mistook him for the Greek note-taker and offered him food; when Kiriakou explained he was American, Clinton replied, "I'm sorry, I thought you were Greek."

The Athens meeting and 'Clinton magic' (Secret Intelligence Report)

John Kiriakou recalls Clinton "hates silence", joking and storytelling constantly. As the meeting broke up, Hillary stepped off an elevator scowling, in Kiriakou's separate telling of the same scene, Hillary and daughter Chelsea arrived by elevator roughly a year after the Lewinsky story broke; Clinton twice tried, "We sure had a good time at the Parthenon this morning, didn't we, Hill?" and she snapped, "Jesus Christ, Bill, it's raining all day, I'll be in the room." Kiriakou looked at him thinking "you poor man," and Clinton turned to him and said, "Let's get the hell out of here", the two of them walking to the elevator together with the Secret Service falling in behind, before delivering "vintage Clinton magic" to 500 cheering Greek-American businesswomen in a hotel basement, a speech Kiriakou says "almost made me start to cry" and that he compares to the personal aura of Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy. Kiriakou also recounts, secondhand from a friend, that Clinton fundraisers once planned to confront him over the Lewinsky scandal and demand his resignation, but Clinton preempted them with such a moving apology that the meeting ended with attendees chanting his name instead.

Kiriakou adds that Clinton's Greece visit made him, in Kiriakou's own account, the first person ever to apologize on behalf of the United States for its support of the Greek military junta and to ask forgiveness of the Greek people for the subversion of their democracy, a gesture that flipped Greek public opinion overnight, with commentators hailing him afterward as "the greatest president of the 20th century." Kiriakou later became friendly, through this same Athens posting, with Clay Constantino, the U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg.

The embassy bill Clinton signed

John Kiriakou blames Clinton for signing the congressional bill mandating that the U.S. embassy in Israel move to Jerusalem, contingent on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a bill Kiriakou believes Clinton should have vetoed. The move itself did not happen until Donald Trump's presidency, funded personally by Sheldon Adelson.

Camp David final talks

Elsewhere, Kiriakou relays an NSC officer's account of the Camp David final talks at the end of Clinton's presidency, including Clinton's own retrospective view, from his memoir, that he should have redeployed Secretary of State Madeleine Albright from stalled North Korea negotiations to help close the Israeli-Palestinian deal.

1993 and the Democratic Party's rightward turn

Kiriakou traces the political realignment that culminated in Russiagate back to Clinton's 1993 inauguration, which he says began, very slowly, an effort to move the Democratic Party toward Wall Street and a more militarist foreign policy, including the attack on and breakup of Yugoslavia, a country he says the U.S. "had no beef with." Then serving in Greece, an Orthodox Christian country, like Serbia, Kiriakou recalls Greeks discussing withdrawing from NATO over the U.S. attack.

Epstein files depositions

Kiriakou has noted that in recent videotaped depositions related to the Jeffrey Epstein files, both Les Wexner and Clinton volunteered information about the Rothschild family without being asked about them.

The Constitution Avenue bookshop encounter

On a Sunday morning some years after the Athens meeting, John Kiriakou and his visiting brother spotted two limousines parked outside the small Barnes & Noble in the National Press Club at roughly 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Out walked Bill Clinton with his daughter Chelsea, both carrying books. Kiriakou, unsure what else to say, shouted "keep abortion safe and legal, Bill," to which Clinton replied "I'm trying," walked over and shook Kiriakou's hand, a second, unrelated encounter Kiriakou cites as evidence that Clinton was, in person, "the smoothest" of the modern presidents he met.

The depositions, and Boebert's photograph

On the congressional depositions arising from the Epstein files, Kiriakou's assessment is that the Clintons got the better of their questioners: "I think that they played the Republicans in these testimonies."

His illustration of the questioners' seriousness is Lauren Boebert, who, after being told twice that there was to be no photography, photographed Hillary Clinton testifying and posted the picture to Instagram. "Like she just can't be a serious person."

The human-rights edict

Kiriakou describes a brief "golden age" under Clinton, produced by a single instruction: that the CIA was not to do anything with anybody who had what Clinton called a human rights problem.

The application was literal. A recruited asset who happened to run a Honduran death squad was fired, Kiriakou notes the agency's own word was "terminated", which people took the wrong way. No more paycheck, no more cooperation.

He remembers people laughing when the edict first came down, and then the reaction changing as it was enforced: "Oh, he's serious. This is actually working out. Okay. Well, good for us."

Kiriakou is specific about who the purge reached, and about where those assets had come from. The order, which he calls a "cull," required the agency to go through its files and fire every recruited asset with a human-rights problem in their background, people recruited during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations who had murdered nuns in Central America, served on death squads, or tortured indigenous people. His own arc mirrored the agency's: unsure at first whether to take it seriously, then watching it unfold and concluding "wow, they're really serious about this." The policy held, he says, until 9/11.

The Latin America declassification

Kiriakou credits Clinton with a second act he is otherwise reluctant to praise him for: an executive order declassifying large volumes of records on U.S. activity in Central and South America, including Chile and Argentina, "some of the worst U.S. policies in Latin America." Inside the agency it landed as nothing at all. Declassification of that kind, he says, is "sort of an administrative thing that happens every once in a while," so most people paid no attention and those who did simply did as they were told. The released material went to the National Security Archive at George Washington University and to the Clinton Presidential Library, where it remains available to scholars.

What ended it was 9/11. Kiriakou's formulation is that the pendulum tends to swing both ways, but that after 9/11 "it went so far that it's not yet swung back."

Two briefings in eight years

Kiriakou uses Clinton as the low end of presidential engagement with intelligence. He "didn't give two shits about the CIA or what it was," and on Kiriakou's count took an intelligence briefing twice across two terms. The work was delegated: Clinton "would give these overarching orders and then trust Al Gore to implement them", so Gore "was briefed all the time."

The anecdote he attaches is James Woolsey's: Clinton's first CIA director "once famously said that Clinton wouldn't know who he was if they bumped into each other in a room."

The no-fly-zone argument

Kiriakou uses one exchange with Clinton as his benchmark for a president who wanted analysis rather than agreement. "I remember as a young man, I was still in my twenties, 28 years old, getting into a written argument with Bill Clinton over the Iraqi no-fly zones. And then finally his briefer said: you know what, the president just gave up. He admits you're the expert, he's not. He's going to go with your analysis."

He raises it in 2026 as a contrast rather than a reminiscence: "that's what happened in a normal situation. Not that everybody's fired, and then you just do what you want to do anyway."

See also

- George Tenet
- Donald Trump
- John Kiriakou
