The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the US domestic law-enforcement and counterintelligence agency that John Kiriakou contrasts with the CIA’s overseas conduct. Kiriakou says that in his experience working with the FBI for years, its agents were sticklers for the law in a way the CIA was not, since the CIA is barred by law from operating domestically while the FBI is not. [1]
Kiriakou says the FBI has been working to keep Hollywood’s depiction of the CIA favorable since the 1940s, part of the same public-liaison strategy the CIA itself only formalized within the Office of Public Affairs in the last decade. [2]
Kiriakou says the FBI has identified 187 undeclared Israeli intelligence officers spread across the United States, mostly working out of defense contractors and trying to steal US secrets. [3]
Kiriakou says the FBI “leaks like a sieve,” nearly as much as the Defense Department, and recounts a reporter with an FBI source who told him during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee-era lunch that he was under surveillance in connection with the “Sam Adams project,” an ACLU effort defending Guantanamo detainees — a claim he dismissed at the time.[4] The FBI investigated him for a year after his 2007 CIA-torture interview and closed the case in December 2008 without charges, before it was secretly reopened three weeks later at the CIA’s request once Barack Obama took office.[5]
Kiriakou says an FBI agent, hearing out his and his attorney’s report of a massive fraud, cut him off within minutes: “If this doesn’t have the word terrorism associated with it, we’re not interested.”[6] Years later, an FBI duty officer told him her standing instructions were to turn away walk-ins and call-ins unless their information directly related to terrorism, Russia, China, or January 6.[7] Kiriakou says the FBI has never had a budget cut in its hundred-year history, crediting J. Edgar Hoover’s 48-year tenure of warning Congress about a rotating cast of existential enemies — anarchists, communists, fascists, gangsters, beatniks, anti-war protesters — to keep funding flowing.[8]
In Kiriakou’s account of his imprisonment
Kiriakou places the FBI at the receiving end of what he describes as an attempted frame-up inside FCI Loretto. A prisoner presenting himself as the Taliban’s American spokesman approached him on the exercise track with a hand outstretched while a guard photographed the encounter from the woods outside the fence with a telephoto lens. In Kiriakou’s reading, the intent was that the photographs be sent to the FBI so that he could be accused of colluding with the Taliban or of planning an attack.[9] See the Taliban spokesman setup.
His general characterisation of the Bureau is structural rather than personal. He argues that the FBI does not get promoted by not arresting people, in the same way that Justice Department prosecutors do not get promoted by not prosecuting them — and that their eventual ambitions, whether a U.S. attorney’s office, a seat in Congress, a governorship or a partnership in an A-list law firm, are not reached by declining to bring cases.[10][11]