# The CIA divorce rate

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
>
> Cite as: "The CIA divorce rate," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-divorce-rate/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*John Kiriakou's account of why marriages fail at the CIA at a rate he says exceeds that of any other part of the U.S. government — the impossibility of explaining a midnight departure to a spouse without a clearance, and the difficulty officers have switching off a professional habit of deception. He gives the figure variously as over 75 percent and upwards of 80 percent, says he was determined not to become a statistic and became one anyway, and dates the end of his first marriage to a sentence spoken in an armoured car on the way to Athens airport. Both his divorces have been costly; of the second he says the agency played an active role he is barred by court order from explaining.*

- **Kiriakou's claim:** Higher than any other governmental entity
- **Figures he has given:** *"over 75 percent"*; *"upwards of 80%"*
- **Cause he gives:** Living two lives, and not knowing when to turn the lying off
- **His own case:** Married and divorced twice
- **Where the first ended:** In an armoured car during the evacuation from Athens
- **What he says of the second:** The CIA "had an active role" — details barred by court order
- **Aftermath:** PTSD from the divorce, not from Islamabad
- **Related failure mode:** Officers prosecuted after service for fraud

**The CIA divorce rate** is, on [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou)'s account, the highest of any part of the U.S. government. He has put the number at *"over 75 percent"* and, elsewhere, *"upwards of 80%"*, and attributes it to the same cause each time: officers lie and cheat professionally all day and cannot switch it off at the front door. *"They end up lying to their wives and cheating on their wives until marriages fail."*[1][2][3]

He frames it more precisely elsewhere as the cost of *"having to live two lives, and in some cases more than two lives"* — the job being *"the greatest job I ever had in my life"* and, in the same sentence, the thing that *"cost me my first marriage."*[4] He also says he saw it coming and tried to avoid it: *"the job is very, very hard on marriages. I was determined to not become a CIA divorce statistic — and unfortunately that's exactly what happened to me."*[5]

## His own case

The mechanism in his first marriage was not infidelity but the clearance. He could tell his wife nothing beyond the fact that he had to work, and *"she never believed me when I said that I was going out in the middle of the night because I had to work… and so she left me and my first marriage fell apart."* His second wife was herself a CIA officer: *"so when I told her I was going to work, she understood. She knew I was telling the truth."*[2][6] In a later telling he adds the ordinary reasons alongside the professional ones — *"we got married too young… grew in different directions. All the clichés are true."*[7]

He gives the moment it ended precisely. It came during the emergency evacuation from Athens, after [17 November](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/revolutionary-organization-17-november) published its claim of responsibility for killing the British defence attaché [Stephen Saunders](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/stephen-saunders) and Kiriakou was told to go home immediately. One driver put him in an armoured car for the airport; another collected his wife, another his children. *"My wife says, 'I want a divorce. I'm not doing this anymore.' And she divorced me."* He was on the noon Delta flight to New York.[8][9]

The dissolution itself was slower than the decision, and he describes chasing it: *"I kept telling Joanne, are we getting divorced or not? You're the one who said you wanted a divorce — why don't you file for divorce?"* On his next-to-last day in Athens he sat down with a calculator, divided his salary by twenty-six pay periods, worked out what she would need to live on, wrote her a cheque that day and kept sending the same amount monthly. Her lawyer, he says, had seen thousands of divorces and had never before seen someone calculate child support, pay it, and land that close to what a court would later order. His own research told him an Ohio divorce took a year; he waited the year, called the lawyer, and was told he could not file because he did not live in Ohio.[10][11]

## What the divorces cost

Kiriakou has been married and divorced twice, and says the second was the worse of the two: *"I wouldn't wish my divorce on anybody."*[12][7] He describes the second wife — the CIA officer — as *"the love of my life,"* puts the financial cost of that divorce at another million dollars, and says his two elder children, then in their thirties, cut him off almost eleven years ago.[7][13]

Asked directly whether the agency had played a role in either divorce, he answered that it had, and then declined to say more: *"the CIA played a role in my divorce. I apologise that by court order I'm not at liberty to explain that, but the CIA had an active role in my divorce."*[12][14]

The aftermath, in his account, did what the operational career had not. Suffering from insomnia at three in the morning, and *"against the advice of every intelligence officer I've ever known"* keeping a voice assistant in his bedroom, he asked it what percentage of marriages that begin as affairs end in divorce. The answer — 93 per cent — he took as a promise of vindication, and says the vindication arrived after fourteen months. *"But I still… it still didn't make me feel better. I still couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I was depressed all the time."*[15][16][17]

He puts the comparison with the job itself starkly. A doctor he knew from the agency told him it was *"amazing to me that you came back from Islamabad and you had no signs of PTSD."* Kiriakou's answer was that he had loved Islamabad — *"I loved the job, I loved the work, the operations, the people. It was like a vacation for me."* The post-traumatic stress he did develop came from the divorce.[18][19]

## The parallel failure

Kiriakou links the divorce figure to a second pattern — officers who get into legal trouble after leaving, and *"not for things like whistleblowing, but for things like fraud."* His evidence is first-hand: *"I actually served in prison with a former CIA officer who was in prison on multiple counts of fraud."* The explanation he offers is the same one: *"you lie and trick and cheat and steal for a living for 25 years, 30 years… a lot of guys are not able to turn that off."*[1]

## See also

- [The CIA entrance examinations](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-entrance-exams)
- [The polygraph](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/polygraph)
- [Stephen Saunders](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/stephen-saunders)
- [CIA culture of lying](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-culture-of-lying)

## Sources

1. The Sharin Hour 1/11/16: JOHN KIRIAKOU, ex-C.I.A. (2016-01-12), at 08:57. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rss4dc75908&t=537s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2016-01-12-the-sharin-hour-the-sharin-hour-1-11-16-john-kiriakou-ex-c-i/
2. The Sharin Hour 1/11/16: JOHN KIRIAKOU, ex-C.I.A. (2016-01-12), at 09:33. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rss4dc75908&t=573s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2016-01-12-the-sharin-hour-the-sharin-hour-1-11-16-john-kiriakou-ex-c-i/
3. "All My Stories Have a Bad Ending for the Good Guy" - John (2025-09-25), at 1:38:39. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s41zksLari8&t=5919s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-09-25-joe-mkhitaryan/
4. John Kiriakou on Venezuela Strikes, Regime Change Talk, (2025-09-06), at 54:30. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RqBVs-P6WY&t=3270s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-09-06-connecting-the-dots-podcas/
5. Radio Liberty interview, 4-15-10, John Kiriakou (former (2019-06-19), at 30:38. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPfqguIwcqU&t=1838s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2019-06-19-soundwaves-2000/
6. The Sharin Hour 1/11/16: JOHN KIRIAKOU, ex-C.I.A. (2016-01-12), at 10:06. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rss4dc75908&t=606s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2016-01-12-the-sharin-hour-the-sharin-hour-1-11-16-john-kiriakou-ex-c-i/
7. Truth, Betrayal & The Cost Of Speaking Out Ft. John Kiriakou | EP 6 (2026-07-28), at 34:16. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJVUqlEZ2zQ&t=2056s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-07-28-to-my-sons-truth-betrayal-the-cost-of-speaking-out/
8. "NOT SILENCED" - Part-1: The CIA and John Kiriakou - Stories Untold (2025-06-01), at 1:09:00. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8paaOJyEaU&t=4140s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-06-01-not-silenced-part-1/
9. "NOT SILENCED" - Part-1: The CIA and John Kiriakou - Stories Untold (2025-06-01), at 1:09:30. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8paaOJyEaU&t=4170s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-06-01-not-silenced-part-1/
10. S1E12 The Grind (2026-01-26), at 13:21. Recording: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68e695c6d798804c9e4bbd13/e/6966def5023744df1124cd30/media.mp3 · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-01-26-dead-drop-s1e12-the-grind/
11. S1E12 The Grind (2026-01-26), at 13:58. Recording: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68e695c6d798804c9e4bbd13/e/6966def5023744df1124cd30/media.mp3 · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-01-26-dead-drop-s1e12-the-grind/
12. John Kiriakou: "He Sold Us Secrets!" How Jeffrey Epstein Ran Mossad, MI6, and the CIA (2026-06-07), at 1:29:13. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjL0abFfcsA&t=5353s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-06-07-jack-neel-epstein-mossad-mi6-cia/
13. Truth, Betrayal & The Cost Of Speaking Out Ft. John Kiriakou | EP 6 (2026-07-28), at 00:31. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJVUqlEZ2zQ&t=31s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-07-28-to-my-sons-truth-betrayal-the-cost-of-speaking-out/
14. John Kiriakou: "Be Scared" — Why Palantir Should Terrify You (2026-06-30), at 38:25. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKU0XvJl21g&t=2305s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-06-30-jack-neel-palantir-should-terrify-you/
15. Covert Strategies Revealed (2026-07-08), at 10:46. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUxyyvi_ORE&t=646s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-07-08-covert-strategies-revealed-covert-strategies-revealed/
16. 3 Hours with John Kiriakou: CIA Whistleblower on JFK, Conspiracies & Power (2026-06-15), at 1:31:50. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dfXffvHAnU&t=5510s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-06-15-jason-jones-3-hours-kiriakou/
17. Truth, Betrayal & The Cost Of Speaking Out Ft. John Kiriakou | EP 6 (2026-07-28), at 35:49. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJVUqlEZ2zQ&t=2149s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-07-28-to-my-sons-truth-betrayal-the-cost-of-speaking-out/
18. Spy Diaries — Jailed for Exposing the CIA (2025-07-03), at 15:06. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEKxuNFf308&t=906s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-07-03-spy-diaries-jailed-for-exposing-the-cia/
19. TCM TV (2025-12-23), at 15:06. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCUpSKD4T4o&t=906s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-12-23-tcm-tv-tcm-tv/

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From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-divorce-rate/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt