The Defense Intelligence Agency is the Pentagon’s intelligence organisation. Kiriakou’s view of it is unflattering and he has been asked about it more than once; put to him that he had “had dim things to say about the DIA in the past”, and asked whether it was routine for the agency to be this bad, he flagged the criticism before making it: “listen, I know people are going to complain but I’m going to say it anyway.”[1][2][3]
The criticism is about who ends up there rather than about method: “DIA is largely made up of people who just couldn’t make it through the CIA process. Like they really, really, really want to work in Intel. They’re not very bright but by God, they want to work in Intel and they end up at DIA. Yeah, it happens all the time.”[4]
The occasion was the Iranian elementary school strike, whose map information appeared to have come from the agency, and whose underlying error — data listing a school as a Revolutionary Guards facility a decade after the conversion — Kiriakou treats as a failure of the checking discipline rather than of the imagery itself.[2][4] Asked whether it is routine for targeting data to be that old, his answer is unhedged: “Yep. It is. It’s very, very old.”[5]
The 2026 all-hands email on Israeli espionage
In August 2026, per John Kiriakou’s reporting on the Young Turks, “the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency released an all-hands email to all Defense Intelligence Agency employees, telling them to be especially careful right now because the Israelis have ramped up their espionage activities against DoD and specifically DIA.” Kiriakou places the notice against the earlier operational rule he lived under — “when I was at the CIA, we had to keep the Israelis at arms length, rather long arms length, because they were spying on us” — and treats the fresh warning as evidence that the underlying espionage has not changed while U.S. political leverage over it has.[6][7]