False flags are too hard is John Kiriakou’s answer to whether he was ever involved in promoting false stories while at the CIA, and to the broader question of how common staged operations really are.
They exist, and they were routine — at one scale
Kiriakou does not deny that the category exists: there is such a thing as a false flag operation.[1][2]
Asked in 2017 how he felt about the term, his answer went considerably further than a bare admission that the category exists: “False flags were actually very popular at the CIA when I was there. Not on grand scales, because the bigger the false flag, the tougher it is to pull it off. But operationally, false flags were very popular. They used them all the time.”[3]
Scale, then, rather than existence, is what his objection turns on — and he notes that the words themselves have become unusable in ordinary conversation: they are taboo “because they’re loaded.”[4]
The mechanical objection
His objection to the grand version is practical. Such operations are very difficult, have a lot of moving parts, and require a lot of people to buy into the conspiracy.[1][5][6] For that reason, he says, the agency really did not use them very often at that scale — they were simply too complicated.[5][6]
The second half of the objection is about people rather than logistics, and it is the part he delivers with most relish. If you knew “the morons, some of the morons I worked with at the CIA, you would never use the words false flags again, because these guys can’t find their way to the men’s room, let alone manipulate governments and countries.”[7] Put more soberly: “I think we have a tendency to underestimate incompetence in government. I really do.”[8]
The premise he attacks
Pressed in 2025 on whether the September 11 attacks were allowed to happen or staged, Kiriakou rejected the underlying assumption rather than the specific claim. The misconception, he says, is “that the United States needs a provocation to go out and start killing people” — as though Washington would have to attack itself to acquire an excuse. “No. If we want to kill Muslims, we just go out and kill Muslims. You don’t need a provocation.”[9][8]
Asked directly whether it was a false flag, he answered no, drew the contrast he draws elsewhere — “the Israelis do lots of false flags” — and returned to the mechanics: how complicated they are, how many moving parts they have, and how many people in government are not competent enough to run one.[8]
His alternative explanation for the intelligence failure is institutional rather than conspiratorial: a White House obsessed with China, with George Tenet and Richard Clarke screaming at Condoleezza Rice that al-Qaeda was going to attack, and Rice answering that the threat was from China, not from “these guys wearing sheets” — declining to increase the budget or approve covert action programmes.[10][11]
A case he rules out by name
Kiriakou is willing to be specific about which claims he rejects. “I don’t believe that the Newtown massacre was a false flag. I think it was a massacre.”[4]
The correspondence
He describes the volume of enquiry he now receives on the subject. It was only recently, he says, that people began emailing him, messaging him on Facebook or contacting him on Twitter about false flag operations, and he notes one friend who thinks every event in life is a false flag operation.[5] The problem is longstanding: as far back as 2017 he was remarking that he had “so many friends who believe that everything is a false flag.”[4] The idea strikes him as preposterous precisely because these operations are so labour-intensive and so difficult to carry out.[5][12]
Why the belief persists
Kiriakou does not leave the answer there, and the concession he adds is as firm as the denial. His interviewer said that people who write in mean well, and Kiriakou agreed that one cannot blame them for being paranoid.[12]
The reason, he says, is the government’s own conduct: when a government is not transparent, when it pretends to tell the American people the whole story about terrorist operations and then the story changes, one cannot blame people for being suspicious of the official line.[12][2]
He applies the same reasoning to torture, noting that everything the government has said about it since 2002 has been a lie, and asking why anyone would believe it now.[12]