Executive Order 12333 — referred to by John Kiriakou as “1233” — is the U.S. presidential directive that, in its post-September 11 amended form, grants the Central Intelligence Agency the legal authority to kill any individual anywhere in the world whom the agency deems to pose a “clear and present danger” to the United States. It is the foundation of the agency’s targeted-killing operations and, through the 2025 Ninth Circuit ruling, of the contractor extensions of that authority.[1]
Kiriakou traces the order through three states. In its original form it “had banned the CIA assassinations.” In the aftermath of 9/11 the amended order “allowed CIA assassinations.” And “then finally under the Obama administration” it allowed CIA assassinations of American citizens.[2]
The Church-era ban
The order grew out of the Church and Pike investigations and was signed by President Gerald Ford; it set the terms of what the CIA could do overseas, and its signed version forbade assassinations.[3][4] The prohibition was imposed at the insistence of Senator Frank Church and Congressman Otis Pike after the Church Committee, and expressly “forbade assassinations” by the CIA.[5] Kiriakou dates the signed version to 1975 in some tellings and more loosely to the 1970s in others, and notes the order was amended several times in the intervening years without the ban being disturbed.[5][6][4]
The constraint had operational consequences before it was lifted. The CIA had told the Justice Department and White House as early as 1991 that Osama bin Laden was a serious threat, only to be told that officials had to wait until he committed a crime against an American before acting.[6]
The 12 September 2001 amendment
The prohibition held until 12 September 2001, when President Bush effectively “crossed that part out” and told the agency to “kill anybody you want.”[7][8][9] Retelling it in July 2026 he fixed the date to the day after the attacks and carried the consequence to the present: the ban survived “until September 12th, 2001,” when Bush “kind of crossed that part out” and authorised the agency to “kill anybody you want. And that’s what they’ve been doing ever since.”[10][11] The amendment permitted the assassination of any person deemed a clear and present danger to the United States, its citizens, or its installations.[4]
Kiriakou frames the change as constructive rather than merely permissive: the order was amended not simply to allow killings but to “set up the mechanism” by which the agency could kill anyone it wanted worldwide — the same day, in his account, that the CIA became a paramilitary organization answering to no oversight committee.[12]
Extension to American citizens
The third step came under Obama, when the authority was read to reach American citizens — the basis on which Anwar al-Awlaki was killed.[2]
Kiriakou presents the drift as a governance failure rather than a legal one. Discussing what the CIA does domestically — collection on American citizens is “patently illegal” and belongs exclusively to the FBI, though he believes the agency does it and knows from Snowden that the NSA does — he names the cause as “really a lack of congressional oversight.”[13]
Who decides
The most consequential feature of the amended order, in Kiriakou’s reading, is that the CIA itself determines who qualifies as a clear and present danger — there is no external review of those designations, and the underlying intelligence is generally not shared with anyone outside the agency:
The CIA is going to decide who’s the clear and present danger. And they’re not going to tell you because you’re not cleared. … I’m not cleared. We’re just going to have to take their word for it. But they have the legal authority to kill people through 1233.[1]
Operational application
The Tuesday morning kill list
The order is the legal substrate beneath the Tuesday morning kill list — the regular Brennan-era meeting at which CIA personnel produced and assigned that week’s targets for killing.[14]
Extension to contractors
The 2025 Ninth Circuit ruling — issued in a case in which Abu Zubaydah was the plaintiff — held that 12333 authority extends to private contractors when they act under written CIA contract. The practical effect is that contractors operating CIA paramilitary programs, including Blackwater’s Global Response Staff and assassination program, are legally protected as agents of the agency.[15][16]
The thing Israel does without
Kiriakou’s shorthand for the difference between American and Israeli practice is the order itself. Israel, he says, has “no gang of four, gang of eight that you have to inform. There’s no Executive Order 12333. You just do it.”[17]
The order’s other face — the one that constrains nobody — came up in the same exchange, when Napolitano put it to him that the intelligence community has read 12333 as licence to “forget about the Fourth Amendment, just spy on everybody, take down whatever they say from whatever source,” and that even a president who had himself been a victim of that reading had failed to change it. Kiriakou did not dissent.[17][18]