Code Pink is the women-led peace group co-founded by Medea Benjamin — first an oddity in John Kiriakou’s establishment career, then one of the pillars of his defense committee, and finally an employer of sorts. He now calls its members “my closest friends” and “my angels.”[1][2]
First contact
Working for Senator Kerry, Kiriakou produced a hearing — he had invited the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to testify — and noticed the audience filling with women in pink t-shirts. “Who are all these women?” he asked; a neighbor explained it was Code Pink, a peace group. Kiriakou, sequestered at the CIA for years, had never heard of them.[3][4] When the chanting started — and the dollar bills began flying at the chairman, which Kiriakou compares to money thrown in a club as a mark of disrespect — he realized he was smiling, and that nobody else was. Kerry turned around: “You think this is funny?” His answer varies between tellings, from “she’s very courageous” to “I think it’s gutsy”; Kerry’s did not — “you keep your opinions to yourself.” That was the first time he ever heard of Medea Benjamin.[5][6][7]
The story has a coda he tells only in the longer version, and it is the part that implicates him. He was the staffer who removed them. Clearing up the papers after the hearing, he was approached by Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire: “John, did you throw those women out?” “I did.” “Why?” “The chairman told me to.” Her reply was “well, I’m from New Hampshire, and in New Hampshire we say Live Free or Die. Learn some respect.”[8]
The defense committee years
When Kiriakou was arrested, “Code Pink was right there next to me.”[6] When the Bureau of Prisons moved to silence his letters, Code Pink asked all its members to call the director’s office — part of the campaign, alongside Oliver Stone’s and John Cusack’s “hands off John Kiriakou” tweets, that logged 1,600 calls and backed the Bureau off.[9][10]
The going-away party
Four nights before he left for prison, Code Pink held a party for him on the roof of the Hay-Adams Hotel, the finest hotel in Washington and directly across the street from the White House — “a giant conglomeration of just the hard left from around Washington,” Code Pink and the Institute for Policy Studies among them.[11][2] It is where Lee Camp says he first met him.[12]
He spoke — ending on the promise that thirty months was not a long time and that he would go on speaking against torture — and the room cheered. Then came the part he cannot recount evenly. Knowing what Pete Seeger and folk music meant to him, and that the two men had become friendly, Code Pink found a Grammy-winning folk group to perform, and had them rework the 1960s Peter, Paul and Mary song Have You Been to Jail for Justice into “do you know John Kiriakou, well he’s a friend of mine, he stood up to the CIA, now he’s doing time.” Everybody in the room knew the words. “It brought tears to my eyes. I couldn’t have made it without them.”[13][14]
They had also worked out what nobody had said aloud: with Kiriakou incarcerated and not earning, and a first and second mortgage on the house, his wife was probably going to lose it. Code Pink approached Roger Waters, who “very generously paid off my second mortgage — he just wrote a check and paid it off,” and the house was kept. Kiriakou’s summary is the closest thing the corpus has to a thesis about the group: “to go through life with one friend like that is a blessing; to go through life with a hundred friends like that is a miracle.”[15]
Code Pink Congress
By late 2020 the relationship had formalized: Kiriakou volunteered as coordinator of Code Pink Congress, tracking five to fifteen pieces of legislation, organizing Capitol Hill call campaigns, and joining the group’s fights against hawkish appointments.[16][17] He describes the format as discussion followed immediately by action — the group talks through an issue and then breaks to make the calls and send the emails on the spot.[18] He stood with them at the 2019 Venezuelan embassy defense[19], credits Benjamin and Code Pink with forcing the drone war into public attention[20], notes that they and the ANSWER Coalition were about the only people marching for Daniel Hale[21], and points to their trips to Iran as first-hand contradiction of the official picture of the country.[22]
Losing as a method
Code Pink is also where Kiriakou gets his theory of activism, and he attributes it to Benjamin personally. She “is always running at a level of 10 — from 1 to 10, she’s always at a 10. And she loses time after time after time, but she never sees it as a setback.” She is arrested and is back on C-SPAN being arrested again the next day; she is, he notes, about five feet tall and under ninety pounds.[23][24][25]
The lesson he draws is that the metric is wrong: “it’s not an issue of winning or losing” but of influencing young minds and changing the narrative — a hundred people at a demonstration who each tell somebody produce a thousand at the next one.[24][25] He made the same point about the group’s decision to keep fighting the Kavanaugh nomination after the vote was clearly lost — “and it made the news… you reach more people.”[26] His own version of the obligation is unsentimental: there will certainly be no change if you sit at home wishing for it, so “in my case fighting means writing or broadcasting or marching” — and going to all their marches, events and fundraisers.[1][27]
The last institution he trusts
Asked who can be relied on, Kiriakou answers by elimination. The National Endowment for Democracy, the DNC and RNC, international organisations, “even my old beloved AFL-CIO” — all of them, he says, are tied to the deep state. “And so, who do you trust? I trust Code Pink.” The reason he gives is not strategic but personal: “they’ve been very, very good to me over the years, and I know everybody in Code Pink. They are beautiful people who have dedicated their lives to stopping war.”[28][29]