KiriPedia Kiripedia The Free Encyclopedia of John Kiriakou's World

On this day

Every dated event in KiriPedia's source corpus, organized by calendar day

This page aggregates every event with a known date that has been mentioned anywhere in KiriPedia's source corpus. Entries are grouped by calendar day; click any article title to read the surrounding context.

New events appear here automatically as articles are added or updated — each event lives in its source article's frontmatter under an events: array. The callout above and the order of entries within each day reshuffle on every page load.

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January

January 1
January 2
January 3
  • 2020 — Trump killed Qassem Soleimani; roughly 700,000 attended his funeral procession, but Iran did not retaliate militarily — later termed "strategic patience" by Kiriakou's telling. [Iran strike factions (2026)]
  • 2020 — Hours after the strike, John Kiriakou assessed the killing of Qasem Soleimani as the death of "arguably the second most important person in Iran, a potential successor to the supreme leader", and dismissed the talk around it: "De-escalation is a pipe dream." [Qasem Soleimani]
January 4
January 5
January 6
January 7
  • 2023 — John Kiriakou argued the country needs viable third parties and traced their disappearance to one change — the parties displacing the League of Women Voters with a Commission on Presidential Debates of three Democrats and three Republicans, which decided no independent would ever be invited, so that "the Democrats and the Republicans just trade the presidency." [Ralph Nader]
January 10
January 11
  • 1968 — Washington Post publishes front-page photograph of a U.S. soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner, per John Kiriakou; Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara orders an investigation, the soldier is convicted of torture, and is sentenced to twenty years of hard labor at Leavenworth. [Waterboarding]
January 12
January 13
January 15
  • 1991 — President Bush's ultimatum deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait expires; per John Kiriakou, "the 15th of January, that's what it was." Bombing campaign Desert Sword begins immediately after. [Saddam Hussein]
January 16
January 19
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou described the Russian sleeper-agent programme on The Diary of a CEO — a child raised in a simulated American town in the Russian hinterland, given the identity of an infant who died within days of birth, admitted to the United States on a genuine passport and left in an ordinary job for twenty years awaiting a radio message. [Sleeper Agent]
January 20
January 21
January 22
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou walked through the mad minute — whether the source was followed there, whether he was followed home last time, any problems since, and the next appointment fixed — "you do that all in the first 60 seconds in case you're disrupted." [Mad minute]
January 23
  • 2013 — Interviewed on Citizen Radio days before his sentencing, John Kiriakou corrected his host's count of Obama-era Espionage Act prosecutions — there had been a seventh, "a man who was a translator at the American naval base in Bahrain" — and set the total against the three charged in the entire prior history of the United States. [The seventh Espionage Act defendant]
January 24
  • 2021 — John Kiriakou, who had known Bill Burns for thirty years, called his appointment the rare one he was straightforwardly happy about — "He's the real deal, and he is apolitical to a fault" — and set it against the appointment made the same week: "Joe Biden could pick somebody as able as Bill Burns and somebody as disastrous as Avril Haines in the same week." [Bill Burns]
January 25
January 26
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou placed the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier battle group in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Oman and attached an admission to the disposition: "I genuinely fear what's going to happen in the coming weeks." He read the timing as a convenient distraction from Minneapolis and from the Epstein files — "and that was the plan." [The Abraham Lincoln off Oman]
January 27
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou called the Monroe Doctrine obsolete on its own terms — "we don't really need a Monroe Doctrine, and it's not up to us whether the Argentines want to have good relations with China" — and drew the trade nobody negotiated: assert a hemisphere and China has Taiwan, Russia has Ukraine. [Monroe Doctrine]
January 28
January 29
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou made the capability argument about Iran's nuclear programme — "if the Iranians wanted to be a nuclear power, they would have been a nuclear power years ago. It's not that hard" — and stressed the point he says American media never carries: that Iran's non-proliferation obligations after the revolution were voluntary. [Iran Nuclear Assessment]
January 30

February

February 1
  • 2021 — John Kiriakou announced that after thirteen years of being "reactive and responsive" to his detractors he had retained Harvard and Georgetown law professors and was "going to start going after people" — naming no defendant, court or cause of action, and closing the subject himself. [Kiriakou's legal counteroffensive]
February 2
February 3
February 4
February 5
February 6
  • 2002 — Per John Kiriakou, he was summoned to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad very early in the morning, met by every senior intelligence officer in the country and the FBI's legal attaché, and told that Abu Zubaydah was somewhere in Pakistan and had to be caught — a name he privately admitted meant almost nothing to him at the time. [Abu Zubaydah]
February 7
February 8
  • 2026 — Asked whether Jeffrey Epstein's operation was a honeypot, John Kiriakou answered chronologically rather than categorically — "I think it probably became a honeypot operation" — doubting that any service could have planned it decades ahead, and closed on what he said still bothers him: "nobody should be given the benefit of the doubt in crimes where children are the victims." [Jeffrey Epstein]
February 9
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou set out the MEK's history for Judge Napolitano — a cult founded by the Rajavis, the husband vanished in the 1970s, the group having tried to assassinate the U.S. ambassador in Iran — and dated the turn to its removal from the terrorism list under Hillary Clinton. [Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK)]
February 10
February 11
February 12
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou corrected the common impression of James Angleton — almost his entire career was counterintelligence, not European affairs — and retold the mentor's account of the wall of illegal files on Americans that an intern was quietly invited to read. [James Angleton]
February 13
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou devoted an episode to Aldrich Ames, the counterintelligence officer who walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington and betrayed at least twelve American assets to their deaths — a case he treats as the definitive test of whether the CIA can police itself, failed for nine years. [Aldrich Ames]
February 14
February 15
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou called Dick Cheney "a liar, a manipulator" who, when the CIA would not give him the intelligence he wanted, had the Defense Department make its own through Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress — "one of the most despicable figures I've ever encountered in government." [Dick Cheney]
February 16
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou described arriving in Pakistan and refusing, on his driver's advice, to be housed at the Islamabad Marriott he was certain was al-Qaeda's most obvious target — it was truck-bombed six weeks later — and the branch he actually had: himself and seven CIA retirees back as contractors, one of whom had run the Bay of Pigs. [Pakistan Station (2002)]
February 17
February 18
February 19
February 21
February 23
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou reported the decision to attack Iran before it was public, relaying that a former CIA officer who had been at the White House that morning was told "that a decision has been made to attack Iran on Monday or Tuesday" — and predicting the ten-day ultimatum would not be honoured. [2026 Iran war]
February 24
February 25
  • 2026 — With the American attack on Iran still forty-eight hours away, John Kiriakou doubted the immediate timetable while holding to the judgement behind it, reading the delay as institutional rather than diplomatic: "the longer they wait, the better, cuz they'll have more assets in place and it's easier." [The White House tip]
February 26
  • 1993 — Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and others detonated a 1,336-pound urea-nitrate device in the parking garage beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center; per John Kiriakou, the goal was the same as in 2001 and the attack is largely forgotten. [World Trade Center]
February 27
  • 1991 — John Kiriakou enters Kuwait City with U.S. Marines on Liberation Day, describing his CIA analytical work during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as where he "made his bones." [John Kiriakou]
February 28

March

March 1
March 2
  • 2026 — Three days into the war on Iran, John Kiriakou reported European coverage that Washington had asked the Italian foreign ministry to carry a ceasefire offer to Tehran — evidence, he said, that the administration had expected the Iranian government to collapse at once and was "starting to worry about a plan B." [2026 Iran war]
March 3
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou broke off mid-question to report that the United States had just announced it was closing its embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — "This is dramatic" — measuring the decision against a war in which no embassy was closed at all: "All through the the first Gulf War, we never closed any embassies." [Closing the Gulf embassies]
March 4
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou answered a viewer's question about why revolution in Bahrain never quite arrives by explaining it demographically — a population historically "between 2/3 and 3/4 Shia Muslim" under a Sunni royal family — and recalled living there through what is now called the first Intifada: "it was freaking hideous, let me tell you." [Bahrain's naturalisation policy]
March 5
  • 2023 — John Kiriakou gave the figures from the Drone Papers in his own voice — that over five months in 2012 "nearly 90 per cent of those people killed in drone strikes were not the intended targets but civilian bystanders," and that the dead were classified as enemies killed in action unless proven otherwise — and called Daniel Hale's sentencing statement "one of the most inspirational speeches that I've ever heard in my life." [Daniel Hale]
March 6
March 7
March 9
March 10
March 11
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou said the Israelis "have been carrying out false flag operations since the founding of the state of Israel, and they're usually very good at it," recalled being taught legendary Mossad examples at the CIA, and named the one that scared him most — an attack on Al-Aqsa blamed on Arabs or Iranians — calling such operations "so prevalent, so dangerous that we all need to be on the lookout for them." [Israeli False Flags]
March 12
March 13
  • 2021 — John Kiriakou characterised the Taliban by what it is not — "loyal to nobody — and if you look historically, they never have been" — and said its leadership was shocked when the United States attacked in 2001, having made clear that Osama bin Laden aside they had no quarrel with America, and that sheltering al-Qaeda was a matter of custom rather than alignment. [The Taliban]
March 14
  • 2019 — John Kiriakou recounted never correcting the rumour among Aryan Brotherhood inmates at FCI Loretto that he had been a CIA hitman who killed Muslims — and, when one confronted him directly, answering deliberately ambiguously: "It was wartime and we all did things we weren't proud of." [Prison racial segregation]
March 15
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou set out the Gulf security bargain — the Arab monarchies hosting American bases and selling their oil in dollars in exchange for American protection — and traced it back to a deal between FDR and the Saudi king, laid on top of the earlier British framework that ran the sheikhdoms' defence and foreign policy. [Gulf security bargain]
March 16
  • 1984 — Hezbollah kidnapped CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley as he headed into work; per John Kiriakou, his torture was filmed and sent to U.S. embassies on three VHS tapes, the last showing his execution. [Bill Buckley]
March 17
March 19
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou rebutted the claim that Tucker Carlson had committed treason, explaining that the CIA does not file such referrals — a deputy director simply orders a crimes report — and that the offence Laura Loomer actually described was a FARA paperwork violation carrying zero to six months: "Zero to six months is not exactly the death penalty, is it?" [Tucker Carlson 2026 FARA referral]
March 20
March 21
  • 2018 — John Kiriakou recalled that the only time Dianne Feinstein genuinely got angry was when John Brennan confessed to ordering his officers to break into the Senate intelligence committee's computers — and that she had blocked Gina Haspel from the deputy director's job in 2013 over the secret site, only to soften five years later when Haspel was named director. [Dianne Feinstein]
March 22
  • 2002 — Thirteen simultaneous raids at two in the morning across Pakistan captured Abu Zubaydah, the commanders of both al-Qaeda training camps and dozens of low-level fighters. [Pakistan Station (2002)]
  • 1990 — Mossad assassinates British inventor Gerald Bull outside his Brussels apartment — only after Iraqi engineers solve his giant gun's cracking problem with an internal sleeve they called "the condom". [Gerald Bull]
March 23
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou recounted first meeting George Tenet in a dessert line at a Greek festival in Bethesda over a shared love of loukoumades, and the island-versus-mainland grudge Tenet kept up for more than a decade — along with a Sunday briefing at which the CIA director, in a lumberjack shirt and torn jeans, took off his boots and socks and picked his toenails. [George Tenet]
March 24
March 25
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou set out the two National Intelligence Estimates on Iran's nuclear programme, each carrying the unanimous verdict of all eighteen U.S. intelligence services that no weapons programme existed — against decades of Israeli prime ministers asking every president to bomb it anyway. [Iran Nuclear Assessment]
March 26
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou described a near-total absence of fear across his career — "I'm not afraid of anybody. And I don't really know why that is" — and noted that CIA psychiatrists would read it as evidence of sociopathic tendencies, the same trait that made him an effective case officer. [John Kiriakou]
March 27
March 28
  • 2002 — Per John Kiriakou, fourteen simultaneous raids launched at 2 a.m. across Pakistan ended at the fourteenth site with the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who was shot three times while trying to escape. [Abu Zubaydah]
March 29
March 30
March 31

April

April 1
  • 2002 — A 17 November bomb intended for a Piraeus shipowner's car detonates prematurely, severing the bomber's hands and destroying an eye; his confession leads to the group's total rollup. [Revolutionary Organization 17 November]
  • 1976 — 17 November assassinates former Greek National Police chief Mallios, a torturer under the military dictatorship, using the same pistol later known as the Welch .45. [Revolutionary Organization 17 November]
April 2
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou described how LSD entered MK-ULTRA — the agency asking whether microdosing could make a mind controllable, and beginning with sex workers instructed to bring dates back to a safe house to be dosed without their knowledge. [LSD Mind Manipulation]
April 3
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou called Benjamin Netanyahu's disappearance during the war "a kind of a mystery" — Germany in one report, Cyprus in another — and gave the same verdict either way: "Wherever he happens to be, he's hiding. What kind of wartime leader is that?" [Netanyahu in hiding]
April 6
April 7
  • 2019 — Four days before Julian Assange was taken out of the Ecuadorian embassy, John Kiriakou told a vigil livestream he had grown more optimistic overnight — "Julian is not the kind of person that the Espionage Act was written for. He's not a spy, he's a working journalist doing his job." [Julian Assange]
April 8
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou endorsed the reporting that John Ratcliffe had called the Israeli plan "farcical" and "nonsense" in the meeting before the strikes, warning that Israel oversells because it cannot act without the United States, and that Trump went ahead anyway: "I 100% believe it." [John Ratcliffe]
April 9
April 11
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou called Greenland "for lack of a better word, a colony, a protectorate of Denmark" — a NATO country, which is what makes American designs on it dangerous — and put the real interest down to rare earths, noting the bottleneck is not supply but refining, all of which happens in China at a deliberate loss to hold the monopoly. [Greenland]
April 12
April 13
  • 2023 — Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard reservist, was arrested by the FBI in connection with the leak of classified Pentagon documents to a Discord server; John Kiriakou, discussing the case the next day, predicted an Espionage Act charge and an eventual plea bargain. [Jack Teixeira]
April 14
  • 2010 — NSA whistleblower Tom Drake is indicted on ten felony counts; John Kiriakou cites his case as proof that internal channels for national-security whistleblowers do not work. [Thomas Drake]
  • 1865 — Abraham Lincoln assassinated at Ford's Theatre; an artifact allegedly excreted by him in the theatre men's room that evening was preserved by a Pennsylvania circus-freak-show museum [Lincoln's last turd]
April 16
  • 1985 — Aldrich Ames walks into the Soviet embassy in Washington and offers the identities of two CIA-recruited double agents for $50,000, beginning nine years of espionage. [Aldrich Ames]
April 17
April 18
April 19
  • 2025 — Put the story that Iraq had printed American currency on the Shah's offset presses, John Kiriakou said the parallel stories were true and described the American answer — billions of Iraqi dinars printed and dropped out of aeroplanes to crash the economy — and explained why the forgeries never matched the North Korean product: it is all about the Swiss paper. [The counterfeit dollar trade]
April 20
  • 1967 — Per John Kiriakou, Gust Avrakotos — then stationed in Athens — heard a rumour that the Greek military would launch a coup that night, a story Avrakotos later told him and which he believed. [Gust Avrakotos]
April 21
April 22
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou discovered that the prediction market Kalshi had opened a contract on whether Donald Trump would pardon him; his implied odds ran at about twenty per cent on $152,000 of trading volume, and the platform blocked his own twenty-dollar bet on himself for "conflict of income." [Kiriakou pardon request]
April 23
April 24
  • 2015 — John Kiriakou explained Dick Clarke's demotion in personal rather than professional terms — the incoming Bush people "saw this guy that's been in the same position for ten years, he's gay, he's a liberal Democrat — it's time to give him the heave-ho" — and, asked whether the failure that followed belonged to Condoleezza Rice, answered: "Well, that's on Condi Rice, isn't it?" [Dick Clarke]
April 25
April 26
  • 2016 — John Kiriakou described Bernie Sanders as the fixture of the Senate cafeteria — "inviting any Joe who walked in off the street to sit and have breakfast with him," insisting only on being called Bernie — against another senator in the same room who shoved a pregnant woman out of the cashier's line, and named Sanders as the one candidate who might take the torture question seriously. [Bernie Sanders]
April 27
April 28
  • 2026 — Pressed on whether anyone in the rooms where Afghan heroin policy was made ever objected, John Kiriakou said the question was never raised in his presence — "The meetings were all about how do we win?" — and located the difficulty in himself: "We're supposed to be the good guys. So why are we doing so much of this? I just never understood it." [Afghan heroin policy]
April 29
April 30
  • 2017 — John Kiriakou drew a direct line from being misassigned to FCI Loretto rather than the camp to everything he later published: "if they had sent me to the camp I would have… kept my mouth shut… because they screwed me and stuck me in the prison, I was determined to tell my story." [FCI Loretto]

May

May 1
May 4
May 5
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou used Eli Cohen's infiltration of Syria as the template he says Mossad later ran on Jeffrey Epstein: "It's the same playbook. We're going to put you in another country. We're going to make you an extremely wealthy businessman. Go throw lavish parties." [Eli Cohen]
May 6
  • 2002 — On his first day in a new assignment, John Kiriakou was told by a security officer that the United States would invade Iraq the following year and open the world's largest air force base in the south — nearly a year before the war was publicly announced, and while Osama bin Laden was still at large. [Iraq WMD intelligence]
  • 2002 — John Kiriakou signed six secrecy agreements on becoming executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations, and was told the United States would invade Iraq the following year — the corroboration he offers for Wesley Clark's account. [Wesley Clark]
May 7
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou read Iran's drone and missile exchanges with Israel as intelligence-gathering rather than escalation — the Iranians warning the Israelis through the Jordanians that a response was coming, and a couple of missiles getting past the reinforced defences, proving "that the Iron Dome is not all that it's cracked up to be." [The Iron Dome]
May 8
  • 2026 — Speaking at the Cyprus Diaspora Forum in Limassol, John Kiriakou described crossing the Green Line into the occupied sector of Nicosia — a crossing he had refused on principle for years, made only at the mayor's urging, lasting forty-five minutes and leaving him saying "I feel like I have to take a shower." [The Green Line in Nicosia]
May 9
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou, who sat next to her at headquarters, stated the case flatly — "the CIA killed Jennifer" — describing an analyst handed chief of base at Khost to tick the operational box she needed for promotion, with no time for operational or security training. [Jennifer Matthews]
May 10
May 11
May 12
  • 2021 — John Kiriakou described the National Security Agency as an institution with an unusual birth and an inverted rule — not created by Congress but arbitrarily created by the Pentagon and "foisted upon us," its existence denied until 1978 — under a charter that forbids it from collecting on U.S. persons. [National Security Agency]
May 13
  • 2021 — John Kiriakou described the night before the Justice Department wanted an answer — his jury consultant having told him an Eastern District of Virginia jury drawn from the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and their families gave him no prayer — spent going through Harvard law reviews with his wife because there was no case law to read. [Make it the blip]
May 14
  • 2026 — In a Fox News segment, John Kiriakou attacked the pardon given to Anthony Fauci, grounding the objection in his cousin George — "the second person in the state of Ohio to die of COVID" — before the verdict that titled the segment: "you liar, look what you've done to our country." [Anthony Fauci]
May 15
  • 2020 — John Kiriakou traced the need for the Church Committee to the fact that the CIA operated with no congressional oversight whatever from its founding in 1947 until 1975 — nearly three decades in which, on his account, it killed foreign leaders, overthrew governments, ran illegal secret wars in Southeast Asia and spied on Americans. [Church Committee]
May 17
May 18
May 19
  • 2017 — John Kiriakou described to Peter B. Collins the European speaking tour he had just finished — Iceland, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and Ireland — his first travel abroad since Trump's election, and stressed that his fellow panellists were the Luxembourg justice minister and the German foreign minister rather than fringe people. [The 2017 European tour]
May 20
May 21
  • 2021 — John Kiriakou described watching from inside the Kuwaiti royal court in exile at Taif what Yasser Arafat's alignment with Saddam cost ordinary Palestinians — the Kuwaitis "wanted to kill every Palestinian that they could get their hands on" — and judged the punishment misdirected: "it wasn't the Palestinian people who had done anything wrong, it was their idiot leadership." [Yasser Arafat]
May 22
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou said the CIA bought much of its tradecraft equipment off the shelf at commercial spy shops — about half a dozen of them, open to anyone — and that where they could not supply, the answer was not a laboratory: "Much of it was just from Radio Shack. We would just go buy the parts at Radio Shack and put stuff together." [The spy shop]
May 23
  • 2022 — John Kiriakou described the bedside watch George Tenet ordered after Abu Zubaydah was shot — twenty-four-seven CIA eyes, a pump forcing blood into the arm as fast as it drained, blood pooling under the bed "like a scene from a horror movie" — and the fifty-six hours he sat there, tearing up a sheet to tie the prisoner down and fighting to stay awake. [Abu Zubaydah]
May 24
May 25
  • 2022 — John Kiriakou's trilogy of CIA Insider's Guide books — on disappearing and living off the grid, on lying and lie detection, and on surveillance and surveillance detection — was published, after repeated delays he attributed in part to a paper shortage. [John Kiriakou]
May 26
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou described the slowest recruitment approach of his career: a long bushy beard, shalwar kameez, and weeks of arriving at an Arab coffee shop at half past nine with an Arabic newspaper until one of the mid-level al-Qaeda men who came in at ten finally nodded, then said "Salam" — an Egyptian who had survived a cruise missile fired into a cave at Tora Bora and simply wanted to go home. [John Kiriakou]
May 27
May 28
May 29
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou described how his acting career began — a night-time call from Tyrel Ventura, who had written a part for him and pre-empted his refusal with "you acted every day of your career when you were with the CIA" — and his verdict on the finished film: "I would go to the theatre to watch it." [Kiriakou's acting career]
May 30
  • 2023 — John Kiriakou called Edward Snowden's disclosures "absolutely critical" and the man "a bona fide hero," described him as intensely private and convinced he did nothing unusual — "he's wrong about that, of course" — and recalled the three instructions he had sent him: take support where you find it, trust nobody, hire the best lawyers money can buy. [Edward Snowden]
May 31
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou told the story of a CIA colleague nicknamed "Bill" who won a roughly 350-euro pot from Greek intelligence officers on a drunken night out by shooting a piece of bubble gum off the centre of a paper target — over his own shoulder, gun upside down — then revealed he had been on the 1984 U.S. Olympic shooting team. [John Kiriakou]

June

June 1
June 2
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou traced islamofascism to a public-relations firm working for the Republican National Committee that pushed it hard around 2004 — "And it just didn't catch, and then they just stopped using it" — and filed "narco terrorist" under the same heading: "But it's all domestic propaganda. All of it." [Islamofascism]
June 3
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou called Ukraine's drone strike deep inside Russia "a brilliant operation" and counted the logistics rather than the strike — eighteen months of smuggling drones across the border and "across all 11 time zones" to be prepositioned, "multiple operational acts" commanded from Kyiv. [Operation Spiderweb]
June 4
June 5
June 6
June 7
June 8
June 10
June 11
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou recounted how his Senate study of Afghan heroin began — two DEA officers approaching him at the committee as unofficial whistleblowers — and how little help there was: the military "did not like the idea, not even a little bit." Afghanistan, he noted, had been a net food exporter as recently as the 1970s. [Afghan heroin policy]
June 13
June 14
  • 2018 — John Kiriakou recounted the night Abu Zubaydah was taken in Pakistan — all fourteen sites hit simultaneously at two in the morning in late March 2002, and Abu Zubaydah on the roof of the final one, shot three times by a Pakistani policeman with an AK-47 as he tried to jump to the next building, the Syrian bomber beside him dead before he hit the ground. [Abu Zubaydah]
June 15
  • 2026 — Per John Kiriakou, the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons calls him to invite him onto an informal advisory council on prison reform; Kiriakou tells the director the agency is corrupt "from the very top to the very bottom" and that reform must start with breaking the guards' union. [FCI Loretto]
June 16
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou restated his charge against Zero Dark Thirty — that it "perpetuated the lie that the torture program led to Bin Laden's location" when "great analysis led to the location" — and said he could not sit through more than about ten minutes of it. [Zero Dark Thirty]
June 17
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou reached back to Reagan's mid-1980s reflagging and escort operation as the precedent for closing the Strait of Hormuz, and named the difference that worries him: "in 1985 and 1986 you didn't have Iranian naval vessels firing rockets at American ships" — escorting "could set us up for being targeted, so it's a trigger for escalation." [Strait of Hormuz transit fees]
June 18
  • 2002 — Per John Kiriakou, the CIA began isolating Abu Zubaydah at Detention Site Green, with the FBI team departing and not returning, ahead of the coming interrogation escalation. [Abu Zubaydah]
June 19
June 20
  • 2018 — John Kiriakou revealed that three separate FBI surveillance teams were assigned to him simultaneously from the December 2007 ABC interview to his arrest, with his calls and emails intercepted and no knowledge of it for three years — and described the eleven-attorney defence led by Plato Cacheris that cost him about $1.2 million. [John Kiriakou]
June 22
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou described how he dealt with a tablemate at FCI Loretto he could not accuse directly, because the man sat at the same Aryan table: he went to the prison law library, searched the name, found about 150 men who shared it, and among them a 1970s Ohio case in which a man of that name had beaten and raped a male prison guard. [The Bob Jones frame-up]
June 25
  • 1996 — A truck bomb destroyed the Khobar Towers U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. Air Force personnel; John Kiriakou, living across the water in Bahrain, felt the blast shatter his own windows. [Khobar Towers bombing]
  • 1996 — The Khobar Towers bombing destroyed a U.S. Air Force housing block in Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen airmen. John Kiriakou, then posted to Bahrain some eighteen miles away, dates it by his own wedding anniversary — he was on the telephone to his wife, who had just given birth to their second son, when the blast blew in every window at the front of his house. [Khobar Towers bombing]
June 26
June 27
June 28
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou said the CIA held no undisclosed information about 17 November's rumoured ties to PASOK or the Greek prime minister's office beyond what became public, and was surprised that highly classified material on the group leaked at all — probably, he judged, from the Greek side. [Revolutionary Organization 17 November]
June 29
  • 2017 — John Kiriakou recounted personally briefing presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and being asked to brief Jimmy Carter as well — spending a full day with Clinton, whom he rates the smartest and most combative of them. [Iraqi invasion of Kuwait]
June 30

July

July 1
July 2
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou retold the lunch at which Alec Baldwin — there to consider playing him in an off-Broadway play — listened for thirty minutes and then said "I think you're full of shit," drawing the reply he repeats in every telling: "I've been called a lot of things in my life, but liar is not one of them." [Alec Baldwin]
July 3
July 4
  • 2023 — Per John Kiriakou, a friend he had talked out of suicide every day for months called to report that his sister had blown off two fingers with a firecracker, and sounded well — "I feel really good about things." Two days later the sister called to say the friend had hanged himself, leaving a note that read: "Call John and tell him I said I was sorry." [John Kiriakou]
July 5
July 6
  • 2001 — Cofer Black told a visiting delegation of Middle Eastern intelligence officers at CIA headquarters that an attack on a massive scale was coming, and begged them for any source inside al-Qaeda — the warning John Kiriakou has described as the most explicit he heard before September 11. [Cofer Black's warning to the liaison class]
  • 2001 — Cofer Black interrupts a routine John Kiriakou briefing to a friendly Arab delegation to warn — nine weeks before 9/11 — that "something terrible is going to happen … on an unprecedented scale," handing them code words to watch for ("honey salesman, wedding, football match"): "I beg you, if you have any sources inside al-Qaeda, please help us." [Cofer Black]
  • 2001 — Among the Middle Eastern intelligence officers John Kiriakou was hosting when Cofer Black broke in to plead for sources inside al-Qaeda were services Kiriakou later argued had already penetrated it — the starting point of his Israeli foreknowledge argument. [Israeli foreknowledge of 9/11]
  • 2001 — Per John Kiriakou, the intelligence Cofer Black laid out at CIA headquarters was a pattern of intercepted code words — a honey salesman arriving with vast quantities of honey, a great football match, a huge wedding — together with camp commanders overheard telling their students, in tears, "I'll see you in paradise." [The honey salesman warning]
July 7
July 8
July 9
July 10
  • 2001 — At a meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, CIA counterterrorism officer Rich B predicted not merely a spectacular attack on U.S. interests but multiple simultaneous attacks; per John Kiriakou, Rich B and Cofer Black congratulated each other afterwards for finally getting the administration's attention. [Cofer Black]
July 11
  • 2016 — John Kiriakou set out how thin the espionage counts against him were: two rested on emailing a reporter the business card of a colleague who had never been undercover, and a third on telling a New York Times reporter that the CIA had a post-9/11 kill-or-capture programme — material the Justice Department called top secret although Vanity Fair had printed it three years earlier, and the charge was dropped. [CIA Torture Program Whistleblowing]
July 13
July 14
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou laid out the access agent concept — you cannot recruit a sitting president or a member of a royal family, so you recruit whoever already has them in a controlled setting, which takes money enough for an island, a mansion or a jet, and a manner that makes powerful people feel valued. [Access Agent]
July 15
  • 2002 — Mid-way through the 47 days Abu Zubaydah spent in isolation, the CIA cabled headquarters that, in light of the planned psychological pressure techniques, it needed assurances he would remain isolated and incommunicado for the remainder of his life — a cable John Kiriakou reads as proof the agency knew exactly what it was about to do. [Abu Zubaydah]
July 16
July 17
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou named the four members of Congress a whistleblower can turn to — Chuck Grassley above all, then Jim Jordan, Rand Paul and Ron Wyden — and treated the count as the measure of the problem: "We're talking about 535 people, and we can name four who support whistleblowers." [Jim Jordan]
July 18
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou described Angry Birds as "really my only vice, besides buying art" — 2,887 consecutive days played across nine years, level 1,708, and the first thing he reaches for on waking, a habit his ex-wife cited among her reasons for wanting a divorce. [Angry Birds]
July 19
July 20
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou set out the informal food economy at FCI Loretto, where the currency was books of postage stamps and packets of mackerel, cooking was done in a bucket heated by a stinger wired out of a lamp, and the supply chain ran through the staff — kitchen officers stealing the best of the food and selling it on. [The prison food economy]
July 21
  • 2024 — Following Joe Biden's withdrawal from the 2024 race, Kamala Harris is installed as the Democratic presidential nominee without a competitive primary — per John Kiriakou, despite party insiders having planned four regional primaries. [Kamala Harris]
July 22
  • 2019 — John Kiriakou, prefacing it by saying he is no natural supporter of Donald Trump, related what he had learned the day before from a friend in the White House — that Jared Kushner had personally called Walmart's chief executive to get a commuted lifer a job, and had called every six months since to check she was all right. [The Walmart phone call]
July 23
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou took apart JD Vance's break with the White House on Epstein, objecting less to the admission than to the tense — Vance spoke "as if the Epstein scandal is over" while three million-odd pages sit unreleased and the witnesses have never been called. [JD Vance]
July 24
  • 2022 — Asked whether Zbigniew Brzezinski really had bragged about luring the Russians into Afghanistan to give them their own Vietnam, John Kiriakou answered "absolutely" and carried it forward to Ukraine — the United States wanting the Russians bogged down indefinitely, at the cost of every last Ukrainian life, with no interest in peace. [Zbigniew Brzezinski]
July 25
July 26
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou exonerated Christopher Steele personally over the dossier by dividing the labour: "Chris Steele was a collector… his job is to just cast a wide net… And then it's the analyst's job to vet the answers" — the consumer, in this case, being the Clinton campaign. [Christopher Steele dossier]
July 27
  • 2026 — A colleague close to the White House Chief of Staff called John Kiriakou to relay that he was never getting a pardon — the obstacle being not a person but the CIA, which did not care about him personally but did not want the precedent of a pardoned officer. [Kiriakou pardon request]
July 28
July 29
  • 2021 — John Kiriakou sat in a courtroom packed with whistleblowers, journalists and family as Judge Liam O'Grady sentenced Daniel Hale to forty-five months against a government request Kiriakou puts at fourteen years, then dismissed the remaining charges with prejudice. [Daniel Hale]
July 30
July 31

August

August 1
  • 2015 — Per Kiriakou, he learns his Second Chance Act resentencing petition for fellow inmate Mark Lanzalotti succeeded, freeing Lanzalotti 17 years into a 30-year sentence. [FCI Loretto]
  • 2002 — John Kiriakou begins work at CIA headquarters as executive assistant to Bob Grenier, the newly appointed associate deputy director of operations for policy support — the same day the CIA's most intense torture of Abu Zubaydah began. [Bob Grenier]
  • 2002 — The Justice Department issues the legal opinions authorizing the CIA's enhanced interrogation program; John Kiriakou says the Federal Torture Act was suspended 'like magic.' [Enhanced interrogation techniques]
  • 2002 — John Kiriakou's first day as Executive Assistant to the CIA Deputy Director for Operations; he is read into six compartments and told the U.S. will invade Iraq in spring 2003 to overthrow Saddam and build the world's largest air base in the south. [John Kiriakou]
  • 1994 — John Kiriakou, his wife Joanne, and their 16-month-old son Chris arrive in Bahrain, where Kiriakou serves under State Department cover as second secretary for economic affairs. [Bahrain Posting (1994–1996)]
  • 1990 — Kiriakou's boss at the CIA: "Get a good night's sleep, because tomorrow's going to be a very long day." The Iraqi military, per John Kiriakou, is fully massed on the Kuwait border the night before the invasion — "you could not squeeze one more Iraqi soldier onto the border." [Saddam Hussein]
August 2
August 3
August 4
  • 2002 — Per John Kiriakou, Abu Zubaydah was first waterboarded, at roughly 6:20 p.m., beginning a month in which he was waterboarded at least 83 times. [Abu Zubaydah]
August 6
August 7
August 8
  • 2019 — John Kiriakou described his own role in the Pakistan interviews — "I was always the good cop at the CIA" — sitting down first with captured prisoners because his Arabic was excellent, in bare rooms with an eyebolt set into the table, and drawing a line between those rooms and what came later: "no, that came later." [The first prisoner who cooperated]
August 9
  • 1964 — John Kiriakou was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania — a rural town of some 50,000 an hour north of Pittsburgh, which he has described leaving for Washington on the strength of a shortwave radio bought with paper-route money. [John Kiriakou]
August 10
August 11
  • 2026 — John Kiriakou devoted a broadcast to the Mecca Agreement, the Pakistan–Turkey–Saudi security pact signed in Mecca: "While Washington has been focused on this Iran war, three of the most powerful countries in the Muslim world have just quietly created a completely new security alliance" — with a mutual-defence clause he read as NATO's article 5. [Mecca Agreement]
August 12
August 13
August 14
August 15
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou described the Kryptos sculpture he looked at nearly every day for fifteen years in the courtyard at Langley, and added a detail from the inside: in the 1990s the agency tried to load the cipher into a Cray and have the machine break it, and it could not. [Langley]
August 16
August 17
  • 2021 — Two days after the fall of Kabul, John Kiriakou argued that the country with real leverage in Afghanistan was China, which he said holds an exclusive contract to mine Afghan rare earth minerals valued in a Defense Department report at one trillion dollars — and therefore has a stake in a stable Afghan government, Taliban or not. [Afghan rare earth minerals]
August 18
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou told the story of the Alaskan glacier that has retreated a quarter of a mile from the visitor centre built to touch it, and refused the laugh it got: "Well, no, that's not that's not funny. That's not funny at all. This is exactly what we should be talking about." [The Alaska glacier]
August 20
  • 2017 — John Kiriakou gave his standing illustration of the FISA court's passivity: in the last weeks of the Obama administration the NSA admitted it had been collecting on Americans it had no right to collect on, material swept up automatically and stored in the Utah data centre — and its remedy was to tell the court it had deleted what it should never have had. [FISA court]
August 21
August 24
August 26
  • 2017 — John Kiriakou explained how he turned down the Justice Department's ten-year "best and final" offer — "I haven't done anything wrong… I'm not doing ten minutes, let alone ten years" — and the second reason, the operative one: testifying in his own defence, he might accidentally say something about the war crimes he had watched colleagues commit. [The threat to testify]
August 27
  • 2022 — With the Mar-a-Lago search affidavit newly unsealed, John Kiriakou declined to read it on air because it was too redacted to read at all, separated his objection to the Espionage Act from any defence of Trump, and rejected the claim that the documents had been declassified: a president who declassifies must have the material posted to the National Archives, and "that was never done with a single page." [National Archives declassification]
August 28
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou reported what his operational instructors had told him about sexual blackmail — that the CIA copied it from the Russians and abandoned it because "compromat doesn't work" — and passed on the illustration they used, a prostitute hired to lure an Iranian ayatollah, with the instructor's own qualification that he was not a senior one. [The ayatollah and the photographs]
August 29
  • 2017 — John Kiriakou gave the two FOIA results that loom largest for him — a CIA detainee sedated without being told and waking with his eyeball gone, "We didn't ask him... we just did it. That's a crime against humanity" — and noted that Jeffrey Sterling's plea carried the same FOIA self-ban as his own, designed to keep defendants from discovering FBI wrongdoing. [Freedom of Information Act]
August 30
August 31
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou set out how Ground Branch is actually staffed: almost none of its people are career CIA officers, but SEALs, Rangers and Delta Force men seconded after September 11 for quick-strike work and later made official — an arrangement he called a far more efficient way of bringing them on board. [Ground Branch]

September

September 1
  • 2019 — John Kiriakou explained why the 9/11 trials never happened, and stressed the verdict came from the government's own judges: trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Ammar al-Baluchi were twice announced and twice abandoned "because even the military judges recognized that because the CIA had tortured every one of these men, literally nothing that they said to implicate themselves could be used against them." [Ramzi bin al-Shibh]
September 2
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou retold the collapse of Petra Bank — Ahmed Chalabi wiring tens of millions out to Switzerland and London, then living the high life on it in a Mayfair townhouse by Harrods and a house in Geneva — and stated the consequence without qualification: Chalabi "literally bankrupted every Iraqi in Jordan." [Petra Bank]
September 3
September 4
  • 2025 — A U.S. military strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea kills 11 people the White House calls drug traffickers; John Kiriakou calls the strike "piracy on the high seas followed by a mass murder." [Venezuela Boat Strikes]
September 5
  • 2017 — John Kiriakou described the sentencing reform bill that had been before Congress since 2015 and cleared committees under both parties, aimed at doing away with most mandatory minimums — "you can be a first-time non-violent drug offender… and get 10 years, 20 years, 30 years in prison. First time. There's no second chance" — while bounding the argument without hedging: with violence or a gun in the case, prison. [The sentencing reform bills that died]
September 6
September 8
September 9
  • 2001 — John Kiriakou returned to CIA headquarters from a months-long joint operation in the Middle East with Billy Waugh — two days before 9/11, after which Waugh vanished and Kiriakou did not see him again for weeks. [Billy Waugh]
September 10
September 11
September 12
September 13
  • 2022 — John Kiriakou described what his own FOIA request on himself produced: prison records showing that after he was sent to the wrong facility, the staff there had been trying to set him up. [Freedom of Information Act]
September 15
  • 2021 — John Kiriakou went through the FBI file on Omar al-Bayoumi declassified that year, noting that his account of meeting two of the hijackers by chance did not survive the witnesses — who described him standing at a window watching for the men and greeting them in Arabic — and that the Saudi embassy's response was worded to deny only that senior royals were involved. [Saudi princes and 9/11]
September 16
September 17
September 18
September 19
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou called Ali Mohamed one of the most mysterious figures in the run-up to September 11 — an Egyptian-American army sergeant who trained at Fort Bragg while running through Egyptian intelligence and into al-Qaeda's network, where he trained future hijackers. [Ali Mohamed]
September 20
  • 2022 — On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the CIA's creation, John Kiriakou told the Roundtable that the Church Committee reforms had "just Fallen by the wayside" — the agency running an active assassination programme, a secret prison system and kidnappings "they euphemistically call renditions" — and called for a new Church Committee. [Central Intelligence Agency]
September 22
September 23
  • 2015 — Asked whether any Middle Eastern country had managed a transition toward democracy, John Kiriakou named only Kuwait — "it's not a perfect model" — and dated the change to a decade of street protest that simply did not stop. [Kuwait as a sectarian model]
September 24
  • 2021 — John Kiriakou set the Steele dossier beside the Alfa Bank allegation as two products of one operation, and pointed to the orphaned passage naming a Putin associate said to handle the cash — "Putin's bag man" — connected to nothing else in the document: "You look at that and you're saying, well, what the hell is that doing in the Steele dossier?" [Christopher Steele dossier]
September 25
  • 2021 — John Kiriakou described swearing the oath in the CIA's auditorium alongside three hundred other new hires, right hand raised to protect the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic — with the retrospective judgement he says he hates to make, that he may have been the only person in the room who meant it. [The oath in the auditorium]
September 27
September 29
September 30

October

October 1
October 2
October 3
  • 2019 — John Kiriakou dismissed the reported twenty participants on the Trump–Zelensky call — "Usually there are four; on rare occasions there are five people on that phone call" — and explained the memcon, the write-up of what each leader said, and who normally sees it. [Presidential call memcons]
October 4
October 5
  • 2025 — Per John Kiriakou, the Washington Post released the poll in which "for the very first time a majority — a majority — of American Jews believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza" — the figure he used two days later to press a researcher on the purpose of Israel's new influence contracts. [The October 2025 poll of American Jews]
October 6
October 7
October 8
  • 2023 — Per John Kiriakou, Israel asked the United States to join a war against Iran the day after the October 7 attack and was refused, U.S. intelligence having reached no conclusion that the Iranians were involved. [October 7 attack]
October 9
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou taped his first appearance with Joe Rogan in Austin, having signed a non-disclosure agreement beforehand and been barred from bringing anyone with him; Rogan walked in ten minutes late and opened with "Hey, do you know my friend Mike Baker?" [Joe Rogan]
  • 2019 — Per John Kiriakou, he spoke to his second wife for the last time — "I don't ever want to speak to you again as long as I live" — after which, though the two live three-quarters of a mile apart, every exchange between them has run through lawyers. [John Kiriakou]
October 10
  • 2025 — Episode #2392 of The Joe Rogan Experience, two and a half hours with John Kiriakou, was released; he came away calling Rogan "a nice guy, very down to earth, very normal" and unfairly characterised as a right-winger. [Joe Rogan]
October 11
October 12
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou described the Middle East Forum piece a Google alert had surfaced days earlier — written by the political adviser to the Israeli foreign minister, charging him with repeatedly criticising Mossad and calling Gaza a genocide, and concluding he was antisemitic — and the line he kept: that his position "shows the rot that is taking hold in the intellectual class of the American left." [Middle East Forum]
October 13
October 15
October 16
October 17
October 19
  • 2021 — Speaking at a CODEPINK event twenty years after the September 11th attacks, John Kiriakou said the worst thing to come out of that day was "the number of precedents that we set that made it okay to kill innocent people" — including the answer given when whole families were killed at weddings and funerals: "Take our word for it. If you could see the intelligence that we have, you would know that we did the right thing." ["Take our word for it"]
October 20
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou described his day of CIA entrance testing at the George Washington University medical school auditorium alongside 250 to 300 other applicants — a current-events test, a blank world map to label, and a personality inventory of thousands of questions that repeated "I like boxing" at intervals to catch anyone gaming it — all three of which he finished first, in forty-five minutes. [John Kiriakou]
October 21
October 22
October 23
  • 2024 — John Kiriakou noted that the earlier Iranian drone salvo had been almost entirely shot down with essentially no damage — a show of force from which nothing came — the exchange that first put the Iron Dome's reputation under his scrutiny. [The Iron Dome]
October 24
October 25
  • 1978 — FISA is enacted; John Kiriakou cites its abuse — four applications against Carter Page on the Steele dossier — as proof of how easily it can ruin a life. [FISA]
October 26
October 27
October 29
  • 2021 — John Kiriakou laid out what Daniel Hale had disclosed — that at least 40 per cent of those killed by drone were innocent civilians, against an official line that the dead civilians could be counted on one hand: "the government was lying to us when they said that the drone program was this laser-focused advanced program that just killed bad guys." His verdict on Hale was that "we owe him a debt of gratitude." [Daniel Hale]
October 30
  • 2024 — John Kiriakou traced MK-Ultra to Chinese disinformation planted around 1951 — that the Soviets were developing an LSD mind-control drug — when "the KGB wasn't doing anything. They had never heard of this stuff"; it was the Chinese who had the programme, and the CIA built its own to catch up with a rival that did not exist. [MK-Ultra]
October 31

November

November 1
November 3
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou traced the invasion of Kuwait to the Rumaila oil field and Kuwaiti slant drilling, and recounted his own suggestion — with satellites six months from being repositioned — that someone simply ask the Defence Attaché in Baghdad to drive to the border, who called back: "Literally the entire Iraqi military is heading south." [Iraqi invasion of Kuwait]
November 4
November 5
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou recounted losing an argument with himself at the Farragut West Metro station — "probably the single safest Metro station in the entire Metro network" — walking up to the two National Guardsmen posted there and saying "You guys should be ashamed of yourselves." See the Farragut West encounter. [The Farragut West encounter]
November 6
November 7
November 10
November 11
  • 2025 — Asked whether Sergey Lavrov had been sent to a gulag, John Kiriakou dismissed it — something had pushed him out of the innermost circle, perhaps temporarily, but "I don't think Lavrov's in any kind of danger. I think the worst thing that could happen to him is that he's told that it's time to retire." [Sergey Lavrov]
November 12
  • 2023 — John Kiriakou told the story of impersonating a station chief for a double agent under the alias "Nick" — flying out monthly, issuing a triband phone that always rang with a local number so the agent believed he was in-country, and greeting him with a bear hug that doubled as a pat-down for weapons. [Marriott double-agent trap]
November 13
November 14
  • 2015 — John Kiriakou described what sleep deprivation actually meant in practice — prisoners stripped naked and chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling so they could not get comfortable, kept awake not for two or three days but for twelve or fourteen — and named Donald Rumsfeld among those who should be charged with crimes against humanity. [Donald Rumsfeld]
November 15
  • 2025 — Consortium News marked its thirtieth birthday with a live panel on which John Kiriakou sat alongside Ray McGovern, Joe Lauria, Patrick Lawrence and Mary Kostakidis, arguing that the outlet's remaining role was to carry a small stable of writers whose judgement could substitute for the video news he refuses to watch. [Consortium News]
November 16
November 17
November 18
November 19
November 20
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou explained why blackmail was not taught as a recruitment tool — "we cannot get long-term working relationships going on the right track if we start with blackmail" — on operational rather than ethical grounds, while conceding the history at once: "certainly they did it in the past, pre-Church Committee." [Blackmail in agent recruitment]
November 21
November 22
November 23
  • 2020 — John Kiriakou described federal prison medicine as neglectful bordering on lethal — the 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. insulin queues, the separate 7 p.m. "zombie pill line," and a man in solitary who smashed his cell window, ate the glass and bled to death after guards told him "tough luck" — the world he wrote up in Doing Time Like a Spy. [Doing Time Like a Spy]
November 24
November 25
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou said every American president since Reagan has been asked by a visiting Israeli prime minister to bomb Iran and every one refused — until this one — and relayed what friends inside the White House and the CIA told him changed it: Netanyahu's claim that Israel was prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran itself. [The bunker busters as preemption]
November 26
  • 2008 — The Mumbai attacks begin; John Kiriakou was the only commentator to attribute them to Kashmiri separatist groups backed by Pakistan's ISI, which proved correct. [ISI]
November 27
  • 2021 — John Kiriakou credited Daniel Ellsberg with teaching him that whistleblowing serves a greater good, cited research finding whistleblowers have a far more sharply defined sense of right and wrong than the general population, and made an unqualified claim about the aftermath: "i would defy you to to name one whistleblower who hasn't considered suicide." [Whistleblower psychology]
November 30

December

December 1
December 2
December 3
December 4
December 6
  • 2024 — John Kiriakou recalled the op-ed he wrote when Bill Burns was named CIA director — "Finally, an adult in the room" — and drew him against Tony Blinken, whose every adult job had been with Joe Biden, so that "he's never really lived in the real world." [Bill Burns]
December 7
  • 2023 — John Kiriakou said there is no such thing as a Syrian moderate rebel, the Kurds aside, and that the American strategic error was pretending the Nusra Front — formerly al-Qaeda in Syria — was moderate, while Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into forces fighting Bashar al-Assad, most of it ending up with jihadists. [Bashar al-Assad]
December 8
December 9
December 10
  • 2007 — John Kiriakou's nationally broadcast ABC News interview with Brian Ross aired — the first on-the-record confirmation by a U.S. official that the CIA had waterboarded detainees; by his account the agency filed a crimes report against him with the FBI the very next day. [John Kiriakou]
December 11
  • 2023 — John Kiriakou set out how NewsGuard rates independent outlets, saying it docks any site below sixty per cent for departing from its preferred line on Ukraine or Syria, that its subscribers are mostly governmental and mostly the Pentagon, and that all four Consortium News articles it challenged were by Chris Hedges. [NewsGuard]
December 12
December 14
  • 2015 — John Kiriakou put his use of encryption in constitutional rather than defensive terms — the government has no right to intercept his communications without a warrant — and rejected the argument he attributes to James Comey that encrypted applications are what terrorists use: "First of all, that is just simply not true." [Encryption before the key]
December 15
December 16
  • 2015 — John Kiriakou endorsed Peter Moskos's description of the Bureau of Prisons as "little more than an employment agency for unemployable semi-literate rural white men," and walked through the grievance ladder — BP-9 to the warden, BP-10 to the region, BP-11 to Washington — by way of a prisoner whose bleeding haemorrhoid earned him Tylenol and a brush-off. [Bureau of Prisons]
December 17
December 19
  • 2024 — John Kiriakou traced Tony Blinken's career ladder — every rung with the same employer, from junior aide to Joe Biden to secretary of state — and separated the man from the appointment: "Tony is a lovely guy, he's very smart, and he is in completely over his head… he belongs at a think tank." [Tony Blinken]
December 20
December 21
  • 2024 — John Kiriakou dated the Gulf security bargain to a Saudi guard who ignored his Arabic greeting for three days outside the Riyadh embassy before snapping "You Americans are hired help. We brought you here to protect us and we pay you for it. We're not friends" — the exchange he says set the tone for the whole relationship. [Gulf security bargain]
December 22
  • 2025 — Weeks before the operation, John Kiriakou expected Nicolás Maduro to run rather than be taken — he "probably has laid plans to leave if he needs to leave quickly," most likely to Havana, possibly Moscow — and judged killing him prohibitive under the approval machinery, the freelance attempts merely absurd. [Maduro Capture]
December 23
December 24
December 26
December 27
  • 2025 — Asked to explain the failures around Jeffrey Epstein's death in custody, John Kiriakou declined to find them remarkable — most guards "have their heads up their asses" — and gave the procedural consequence: rounds meant to be walked every eight or fifteen minutes are walked once an hour or two, "because they're sound asleep in that guard booth." [The guard booth rounds]
December 29
  • 2025 — John Kiriakou walked through the bomb course that followed the Farm — the week that began with a Molotov cocktail and moved to detonators, one of which he was told would "blow off both your hands and probably at least one of your eyes. Just the detonator." [The bomb course]
December 30