Brad Birkenfeld is the UBS banking whistleblower. In John Kiriakou’s account he serves two purposes: as the clearest single measure of how differently the United States treats financial and national-security whistleblowers, and as one of the visitors caught up in the surveillance of the Ecuadorian embassy.
The settlement, and the asymmetry
Birkenfeld disclosed money laundering and tax evasion at UBS. Kiriakou records that he was prosecuted for it too — wrongly, in Kiriakou’s view — and served three and a half years in prison, and that on his release he received a settlement of $104 million from the Treasury Department for the whistleblowing.[1][2]
That outcome is the benchmark against which Kiriakou measures his own. Blow the whistle on money laundering, tax evasion or bank fraud and there is a statutory reward at the end of it; do it in national security and “forget it, you’re going to prison — and a real prison, not some minimum security work camp.” There is no settlement, and Kiriakou’s position when he said it was that he was still digging his way out of bankruptcy.[1][3] He makes the same point about the law itself: the federal whistleblower statute and the newer intelligence-community protections are, in his assessment, a joke.[1]
What he did with the money
Kiriakou raises Birkenfeld again when asked what a crowd-sourced independent voice supporting whistleblowers might look like. Listing the Washington institutions that already exist — the Government Accountability Project, the Project on Government Oversight, the National Whistleblower Defense Center — he adds that Birkenfeld had decided to use his own money to set up something of the kind: an organisation to protect whistleblowers and, “most importantly, to help the legal defense costs of whistleblowers.” Kiriakou calls that “critically important and very generous, and something probably we should be focusing on.”[2][4]
The Ecuadorian embassy
Kiriakou also names Birkenfeld in connection with the surveillance of visitors to the Ecuadorian embassy, and says the two had been discussing it at length in February 2024.
“Brad visited Julian on two occasions in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. And Brad, of course, is an American citizen, born and raised in the United States. He turned his cell phone in — just like every visitor to the Ecuadorian embassy did — and now is confident that his information was illegally, improperly downloaded by this Spanish contractor and turned over to the CIA.”[5]
The citizenship is the point Kiriakou dwells on, because it converts the matter from a question of foreign intelligence collection into one of constitutional rights — and, on his account, rights without a remedy: “there’s no recourse. This is clearly, obviously a legal, constitutional violation, and there’s nothing that anybody can do about it.”[6]
Why he was prosecuted
Kiriakou uses Birkenfeld’s case as his standing demonstration of what publication is for, because the motive for the prosecution only became visible through a leak. The disclosure itself covered “money laundering and income tax evasion by very, very wealthy Americans, 19,000 of the wealthiest people in America,” and let the government recover ten billion dollars in unpaid tax; the reward was three and a half years in prison.[7][8]
“Brad never had any idea why this happened until Julian Assange and WikiLeaks issued that tranche of documents from Chelsea Manning.” What the cables showed was a trade: Switzerland would accept two Uyghur prisoners out of Guantanamo if the United States arrested Birkenfeld, and the State Department agreed.[8][9]