Consulting for royal families refers to work John Kiriakou has said he was engaged to do after his podcast appearances began circulating widely in 2026. It rests on a set of Gulf relationships he has described as decades old.
The engagement
Kiriakou has said that he has been hired by members of two different royal families to consult for them because of what he did — specifically, on ethics in their own intelligence operations. He offers the fact as an illustration of how far his position had changed, saying that things had seriously turned around. [1]
The relationships behind it
The contacts long predate the engagement. Kiriakou has said he has friends who are members of five of the six Gulf royal families — he has no Saudi royal contacts, but close contacts in all the others.[2] He reports those contacts asking, unanimously, why American bases are still on their territory, given that the United States could not stop Iran attacking them: army bases in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Oman, the Fifth Fleet headquartered in Bahrain, the largest US Air Force base anywhere in Qatar, and ground, air and naval forces in the United Arab Emirates. Were he a leader of any of those states, he said, he would be seriously reassessing the relationship with the United States.[2][3][4]
He traces the closeness to a single operation, carried out about 25 years earlier, whose target he has said remains in prison and will die there. Word of what he had done spread among people in the know in that country’s government, and he was invited to the wedding of the crown prince as a guest of honour, despite never having met him.[5] A quarter of a century on, the contact has not lapsed: he described taking a call from a member of the royal family the previous day, one of many members he remains in touch with “because they will never forget what I did and they’re still appreciative after 25 years.” He says he is touched by it, and attributes the durability to a mutual regard — he loves the region’s history, culture, literature, poetry, language and food, “they appreciate that and I appreciate that they appreciate it.”[6]
The context
He frames the 2026 engagement within an account of an audience that turned out to be global rather than American. He has described being recognised constantly, and gives two instances in the same conversation: a Lebanese refugee who found him lost and disoriented in the railway station at Hanover and helped him find his platform, and a man in Kuwait who stopped him outside a podcast studio, introduced himself as Ali Reza from North Macedonia, and said he had listened to him daily, including earlier in Albania. [7] [8]
Kiriakou has said he embraces the recognition, and identifies one theme running through it — not the remixed clips or the visual jokes made at his expense, but that people respect him for telling the truth. That, he says, is what he has clung to. [9]
He dates his realisation of the scale to about three weeks before the conversation. [8]