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.[1][2] 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’s encounters with him
The 1999 Athens visit
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.[3] The trip’s purpose was specific: Clinton came to apologize for the U.S. role in overthrowing the Greek government in the 1967 coup.[3] 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.[4][5] By Kiriakou’s own account the apology made Clinton 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.”[6]
How he came by the seat was a lottery. When a president visits a country, everyone at post pitches in regardless of which agency they work for, and Ambassador Nicholas Burns put every job into a hat and had the staff draw for them; Kiriakou drew note-taker for the meeting with the Greek prime minister, defence minister and foreign minister, and calls it hitting the lottery.[7][8]
The departure and the bomb threat
The visit ended in the basement of the Intercontinental Hotel, where Clinton gave a raucous and wildly popular speech to the Greek American Business Women’s Association before driving to Ellinikon, the old Athens airport, and flying home.[9][10] At the embassy’s hot wash afterwards the ambassador opened with a question — “Do you want to hear something crazy?” — and disclosed that as the aircraft was taking off, the telephone aboard Air Force One had rung with a bomb threat, placed by someone in Greece who had obtained the classified number. A low-level aide took the call; see the Air Force One bomb threat.[10][11]
The meeting itself
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.[12][13] 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.”[14][15]
’Vintage Clinton magic’
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.”[16][17] 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.[18][19][20][17][21] The same capacity to turn a room appears in a story Kiriakou recounts secondhand from a friend: 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.[22] Kiriakou later became friendly, through this same Athens posting, with Clay Constantino, the U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg.[23]
The Constitution Avenue bookshop
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. It was Kiriakou’s interviewer, not Kiriakou, who responded to the story by calling Clinton “the smoothest out of all of them”; Kiriakou’s own answer was only that he had more Clinton stories.[24][24]
Clinton and the intelligence he did not read
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.”[25][26] 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.”[26]
The no-fly-zone argument
Against that, 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.”[27][28]
He raises it in 2026 as a contrast rather than a reminiscence, and as evidence of how the job used to work: “that’s what happened in a normal situation. Not that everybody’s fired, and then you just do what you want to do anyway.”[28]
The human-rights edict
The cull
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.[29] 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.[29]
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.[30] 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.”[31] 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.[32]
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.[33][34]
What ended it
What ended the golden age 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.”[31]
Foreign policy
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.”[35] Then serving in Greece — an Orthodox Christian country, like Serbia — Kiriakou recalls Greeks discussing withdrawing from NATO over the U.S. attack.[36]
The embassy bill he 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.[37]
Camp David
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.[38]
The Epstein depositions
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.”[39] 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.”[40]
Kiriakou has separately noted that in the videotaped depositions, both Les Wexner and Clinton volunteered information about the Rothschild family without being asked about them.[41]
The scale of it, and the logic behind it
Kiriakou has given the cull a figure and a date. The instruction came “within the first day or two of the Clinton administration” — that the agency “were going to respect human rights, and that every recruited asset who had a problem with human rights was to be fired.” What followed, on his account, was that “they went through and fired fully one third of all of the recruited assets in the CIA.”[42] He is careful to head off the obvious misreading of that number when an interviewer takes it as a purge of staff: “it wasn’t one third of the CIA. It was one third of the assets recruited by the CIA to be informants.”[43]
His explanation of why so many assets failed the test is a defence of the recruiting logic rather than of the recruits. “If you want to know what the communists are doing in the jungles of Colombia, you’re going to recruit members of the right-wing death squads that are going after the rebels in Colombia. And so sometimes members of those death squads kill Catholic nuns or massacre villages.”[43][44] He reaches for John McCain to characterise the bind: “never get into a fight with a pig, because you both get dirty, but the pig likes it. And that was the situation that we were in.”[44]
The new rule ended those relationships wherever they were — “whether it was in Colombia or El Salvador or Guatemala or whatever” — and he offers Manuel Noriega as the type of the asset it caught: someone “that was going around killing communists. That was the end of the relationship.”[44][45]
His own reaction at the time was to revise his estimate of the president: “Wow, Clinton is serious about this. This really is a different CIA.” And, again, “all of that changed on September 11th, and it went back to what it was during the bad old days.”[46]