FBI manufactured terrorism cases are prosecutions in which, by John Kiriakou’s account, the Bureau originates the plot it later charges — selecting a vulnerable target, proposing the crime, supplying the means, and arresting the person it recruited. He describes the pattern from the inside of a courtroom, having testified as a defence expert in one.
The Miami case
Two days before leaving for a conference in Greece, Kiriakou took a call from the federal public defender for the Southern District of Florida, asking him to serve as an expert witness in a terrorism case.[1]
The charges were six: two counts of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, two of conspiracy to commit terrorism, and two of conspiracy to murder a federal agent. “Each one of those six charges by itself carries a penalty of life without parole. So six times life without parole.” Kiriakou asked to read the file first.[2]
The defendant
What the file described was “a mentally ill, homeless man who happens to be Muslim,” living in an alley behind a restaurant in Miami, with a small storage unit holding his few possessions.[3]
The case began when an employee of the storage company entered the unit — “probably to rob him” — and found two things: a baseball bat with writing on it, and some drawings. Kiriakou’s description of the drawings is the measure of the case: “Remember when you were in fifth or sixth grade and you would draw battlefield pictures of people launching rockets at each other?” The FBI later called them schematics for a bomb. “No, it’s a 10-year-old’s drawing of rockets.”[3][4]
The recruitment
The employee told the police, the police called the FBI, the FBI photographed everything and then approached the man through Facebook. The opening was an appeal to identity — “Hey, brother. We heard that you’re Muslim” — followed by an offer of pizza and a beer, and a pack of cigarettes.[4][5]
Then the pitch: they had a militia — “It’s called the Pineapple Militia because we live in Florida” — and wanted to overthrow the government. Would he join?[5]
“He said no. Four times.” On the fifth approach, “just to get them off his back,” he agreed.[5]
The target came from the agents, not from him. Their first proposal was a nearby synagogue; his response was “Why would we do that?” They escalated to the New York Stock Exchange, and asked him to build a bomb. He said he did not know how. They told him to learn from YouTube.[6]
“The FBI ends up building the bomb. And then they pick him up, they hand him the bomb, he looks in the bag, and they arrest him.”[6]
The testimony
Kiriakou testified by video from Athens. His expert contribution was to name the process for what it was — the asset acquisition cycle: “spot, assess, develop, recruit.” They spotted a man who was homeless and mentally ill; assessed that he could use money, “even if it’s just for food, maybe a roof over his head for a night or two a week”; and then developed him.[7]
The development stage is the part he calls the most important in the case, because it is exactly what he was trained to do: “we’re all trained to ingratiate ourselves with our target. You call him brother, you call him buddy, you call him cousin, you spend money on him, starting in restaurants.” Applied to a man who “can’t even feed himself,” and then — “when you make him believe that you are such close friends, you go in for the ask.”[8]
The cross-examination
The prosecutor opened by attacking Kiriakou rather than his evidence: “Mr. Kiriakou, you’re just a common criminal, aren’t you?” Kiriakou’s answers conceded the facts and refused the framing — yes, a convicted felon; yes, convicted of a national security crime; “and I would do it again tomorrow if I had the opportunity.”[9][10]
Asked why he remained close to members of New York organized crime families, he confirmed it — he had spoken to one two days earlier — and turned it into an indictment of the questioner: he finds many of them honourable, and “they are victims of something that you do, counselor.” That something is charge stacking: “you’ll take somebody who may or may not have committed a crime. You charge him with five, 10, 20 felonies. You wait until he’s bankrupt, and then you offer to drop all the charges but one if he takes a guilty plea.”[10][11]
To his own surprise, the prosecutor then raised something the defence had wanted to introduce anyway — Kiriakou’s published claim that the FBI is an organized crime outfit — and read his own words back to him: “FBI agents don’t get promoted by not arresting you. Federal prosecutors don’t get promoted by not prosecuting you.”[11][12]
Kiriakou’s reply: “And that’s exactly why we’re here today… Counselor, you’re making my case for me.” He added the career logic he sees behind it — that every prosecutor he has met “sees himself one day as the US attorney, as a member of Congress, as a candidate for governor, or occupying the corner office in the A-list firm making $2 million a year.” The prosecutor called him a criminal once more, was told by the judge to move on, and had no further questions.[12][13]
The redirect
The public defender’s closing sequence is the passage Kiriakou recounts with most admiration — “I wish that I could think this linearly.” Certified as an expert, he was asked a series of single questions:[14]
Who built the bomb? “The FBI built the bomb.” Who provided the explosives? “The FBI did.” Who provided the det cord? The FBI. Where did the timer come from? The FBI. Who bought the getaway car? “It was an FBI car.”[14][15]
Then: “Mr. Kiriakou, in your expert opinion, who’s the criminal in this case?”
“The FBI is clearly the criminal in this case.”[15]
The verdict
The defendant, Harun Yenner, was found not guilty on all counts.[15][16]
Testifying remotely, Kiriakou could see only the judge and whichever attorney was speaking. The public defender told him afterwards that the jury had been openly laughing at the prosecutor, “the case was just so weak.” And that when the testimony ended, the judge cut the video feed because Yenner had burst into tears — telling his lawyer that Kiriakou’s testimony “was the first time that somebody spoke out in support of him.” The judge called a recess.[17][16]
Kiriakou’s own conclusion, after roughly 1,200 pages of case papers: “it was clear to me that this man was innocent and he was set up, and this is not justice, and this does not make us safer on any level at all.”[16][18]
The numbers
Kiriakou says his own attorney researched the pattern afterwards, for a piece they were writing together: of all the terrorism cases the FBI has investigated, “only 1% are actual terrorism cases. The rest are just created out of thin air” — and the Justice Department wins 98.2% of the cases it prosecutes.[15][19]
The template, in his description, recurs: a defendant who is mentally impaired or homeless, a scenario constructed entirely by the Bureau, and every physical resource supplied by it. The targets are chosen by the agents — “they usually pick a synagogue… or they’ll pick a landmark, a bridge, something.”[20]
The Route 82 bridge
The precedent Kiriakou raised with the defence lawyer before agreeing to testify was a Cleveland case he calls the Route 82 bridge conspiracy. Three men were drinking in a bar when a fourth joined them — an FBI informant — and proposed blowing up the bridge carrying Route 82 into the city. “How cool would that be?”[18][21]
The informant supplied inert explosives obtained from the Bureau. “When they went to push the plunger down, nothing happened. The FBI came out of the bushes and grabbed all three of them.” They received 20, 25 and 30 years in a federal penitentiary. “And it was the FBI’s idea to blow up the 82.”[21][22]
The legal doctrine that defeats the entrapment defence is the one Kiriakou identifies as the hinge of every such case: the moment the defendant says yes — even under duress — the idea is treated in law as his own.[23][22]
The older pattern
Kiriakou places all of this in a documented lineage, known through the Freedom of Information Act: small anti-Vietnam War groups of six or eight members in which every member was an FBI agent — “and in a lot of cases did not know” about the others, so they reported on each other.[23][24]
He extends it to the Black Panther Party, noting he is not a particular supporter but that the original party “was not a violent party at all” — it was about protecting Black communities, education and medical care — and that the FBI and CIA planted informants inside it “to intentionally corrupt them.” This, he stresses, is declassified and on the record.[24][25]
His assessment of what one acquittal accomplishes is modest: “You’re not going to stop the entire train, but you pulled one guy off. I’m glad that I was able to do my part.”[17]