Andrew Bustamante is a former CIA officer who runs a business selling CIA-style training online. By his own account, Bustamante entered US government service at 18 through the Air Force Academy, graduating in 2003 and serving as a nuclear missile officer before the CIA recruited him in 2007; he spent seven years as a National Clandestine Service staff operations officer through the agency’s PCS/FTC program before leaving in 2014.[1] John Kiriakou identifies him as the only person to have criticized him for hosting a radio show on a Russian network.[2][3] Kiriakou notes that Bustamante takes the training he underwent at the CIA and teaches it to, by Kiriakou’s understanding, “anybody who pays” — including Russians and Chinese — and asks “what’s the difference,” calling that the more problematic arrangement.[4] Kiriakou makes the same point elsewhere, disputing Bustamante’s characterization of Kiriakou’s own radio work as Russian propaganda given that Bustamante sells CIA-training courses for $3,000 to $4,000 depending on the course.[5]
Kiriakou says Bustamante privately told him, when they first met, that he had not been a case officer — despite publicly presenting himself as one — but rather a “SO,” or special operations officer, an assistant-type role handling paperwork and setting up surveillance teams for case officers.[6] He makes the same claim elsewhere in blunter terms, saying special operations officers “do surveillance, they do the paperwork, they go pick up my dry cleaning” and that Bustamante never recruited anybody in his career; Kiriakou also notes Bustamante has never explained why he left the CIA after only seven years.[7]
Kiriakou disputes a claim Bustamante made in a book co-written with his wife that he had caught a CIA mole, noting the agency’s Counter Intelligence Center employs roughly 300 skilled mole hunters and that no such case was ever reported by major newspapers.[8] Despite their public disagreements, Kiriakou says that when he debated Bustamante on the Danny Jones podcast, the two — despite approaching the subject from opposite sides — ended up agreeing on about 80% of the underlying issues; he separately says he “won” that same debate once Bustamante attacked him personally.[9][5] Kiriakou also recalls once telling Bustamante directly that “the president has the CIA in his back pocket.”[10]
Kiriakou on the Bustamante résumé (2026)
On The Pocket in July 2026, John Kiriakou disputed the public presentation of Andrew Bustamante’s CIA career. On his account, Bustamante was never an operations officer: “he was a special operations officer or staff operations officer — that’s an assistant to the operations officers. So this notion that he was running out there running around the world grabbing bad guys, kicking asses, and taking names is just simply not true.” Kiriakou also rejects Bustamante’s public claim that money is “the only objective measure of success” and that people with less than a million dollars are ignored — “see, but this is coming from a guy who never recruited a source in his entire career” — and dismisses Bustamante’s stated plan to move his children to a developing country to “appreciate America” as “who wouldn’t want to get malaria when you’re six years old?”[11][12][13][14][15][16]
Named as an agency apologist
Answering a 2026 viewer question that suggested he had been released from prison early in exchange for running a podcast favourable to the CIA, Kiriakou rejected the premise and offered the questioner a redirection: “You want to see a CIA apologist? Go look at Andrew Bustamante’s podcast or Shawn Ryan. Not the foremost CIA critic in America.”[17]
On the Iran forecast
Bustamante had posted a video arguing that Kiriakou was wrong about the timing of the attack on Iran. A viewer raised it on the morning the attack began, and Kiriakou’s reply was three words: “Bustamante’s a clown.”[18]
He added only that all he could do was laugh and shake his head, and a jibe that Bustamante had “probably already volunteered to go back and fight Iran.”[18]
The underlying claim was a tip from a friend at the White House that a decision to attack had been taken and would be executed the following Monday or Tuesday; the strikes came that Friday night. Kiriakou has been open that the day was wrong and insistent that the decision was not.
The debate, days after
Speaking weeks after the Danny Jones debate, Kiriakou described how he had approached it. He had known the hosts long enough, he said, that they would not be surprised: “I don’t prepare for these things, because I figure if I don’t know it by now, I’m not going to learn it between now and when the podcast starts.” He reconsidered a couple of days out — “this is a debate, and usually it’s just John bloviating” — and then decided against preparing after all.[19][20] His verdict on the result was that he “was really pleased” with it, that he had “tried hard not to be defensive,” and that Bustamante “attacked me at one point, which kind of took me by surprise.”[20]
He again separated Bustamante’s role from his own, and this time repeated himself for emphasis: Bustamante “spent seven years at the agency as a SO, a special operations officer. He was not a case officer” — “I’m going to say it a second time” — “he was an operations support officer.”[20][21] The work, on Kiriakou’s description, is support to case officers: “if I need somebody to do surveillance or counter-surveillance for me, if I need somebody to fill out my paperwork because I’m too busy doing other stuff, that’s what those guys do.”[21] Asked whether Bustamante had held cover, Kiriakou was unsure it amounted to much, and used the question to lay out the lighter grades of it: “notional cover, which is just as needed, or nominal cover, which is light cover — where do you work? I work at the Pentagon. Oh, okay. That’s light cover.”[22]