Asked in 2025 why he had blown the whistle when so many colleagues had not, John Kiriakou gave the chronology and then the regret.
The dates
“My only regret was that I left five and a half years on the table. I learned about the torture in May of 2002. It started on August the 2nd, 2002, and I didn’t say anything until December the 11th, 2007. And I wish I had said something sooner.”[1]
Why he waited
The interval is not, in his account, hesitation. It is a series of assumptions that somebody else would act. After declining the enhanced interrogation training he was promoted to executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations, a post from which he could see, for a year, everything the agency was doing around the world.[2]
What he saw was that plenty of people objected. Officers wrote cables back from the secret site saying “this is not what I signed up for. I’m not going to do this. I want to come home” — curtailments, which he notes are career-ending. Others resigned from the site. Nurses fainted watching the sessions. Doctors from the Office of Medical Services wrote back refusing to revive a prisoner so he could be tortured further, on the grounds that they had taken an oath to do no harm.[3]
“So I thought, well, certainly somebody is going to say something.”[4]
He finished his tour on the executive floor, went to the United Nations for a final posting, resigned from the CIA and went into the private sector — “still thinking somebody’s going to say something.” Then in 2007 he said it himself, to ABC News.[4]
Why he was sure
Asked what made him so certain the programme was illegal, Kiriakou describes doing his own research and finding two precedents he found convincing: that in 1945 and 1946 the United States executed Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American prisoners of war, and that when the Washington Post published a photograph on 11 January 1968 of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner, Robert McNamara ordered an investigation and the soldier was arrested, convicted of torture and sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour at Leavenworth.[5][6]
The United States is not merely a signatory to the Convention Against Torture, he adds, but its author. “So if waterboarding somebody was a death penalty offense or worthy of 20 years at hard labor … how could it just magically be legal in 2002? Just poof, by magic. Congress never passed any amendment to the law. We changed.”[7][8]