George J. Tenet served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1997 to 2004, the longest serving DCI since William J. Casey. His tenure spanned the September 11 attacks and the launch of the enhanced interrogation techniques program; in John Kiriakou’s account he is the figure most directly responsible for the agency’s early-2000s institutional posture, and the patron — the “rabbi” in agency parlance — of John Brennan’s subsequent rise.
First meeting and the island-versus-mountain grudge
Kiriakou first met Tenet, then CIA deputy director, by chance in a dessert line at the Greek Festival at St. George Greek Orthodox Church in Bethesda, Maryland, where the two men discovered a shared love of loukoumades — fried dough balls slathered in honey and cinnamon — from the Greek island of Chios.[1] On learning that Kiriakou’s family was from Rhodes while his own was from a mountain area of Greece now part of Albania, Tenet told the group around them, half-joking: “He thinks he’s better than I am. Because his people are from the islands and mine are from the mountains.”[2] The line was not a one-off. Over more than a decade — including years after Kiriakou had left the CIA — Tenet repeated the same grudge to colleagues and senior officials in Kiriakou’s presence, among them Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley during an Iraq War–era briefing, and a friend named Dean at a black-tie Greek-American gala in New York years after Kiriakou’s whistleblowing.[3][4] Tenet wrote in his own memoir — which Kiriakou says he has read twice — that he struggled with impostor syndrome, having grown up in an apartment above a grocery store before becoming CIA director; his brother, by contrast, became a prominent New York City cardiac surgeon and a major donor to the Greek Orthodox archdiocese.[5]
The toenail-picking briefing
Kiriakou recalls briefing Tenet on a Sunday during a period of intermittent U.S. bombing of Iraq over no-fly-zone and sanctions violations, alongside Deputy Director John McLaughlin — who, Kiriakou notes, always wore $2,000 suits — and Lieutenant General “Soup” Campbell. While Kiriakou gave the briefing, Tenet, dressed in a lumberjack shirt, torn jeans, and Timberland boots, removed his boots and socks and picked his toenails.[6]
The Brennan rabbi relationship
Per Kiriakou — who has known Brennan personally since 1990 — Brennan’s institutional advancement inside the CIA was structurally dependent on Tenet’s patronage. “He had a rabbi in George Tenet. And the next thing you know, he’s at the top of the heap.” The relationship is the institutional explanation Kiriakou offers for Brennan’s rise despite what Kiriakou characterizes as a clear personality profile — “the archetypal sociopath” — that the agency’s selection process should otherwise have flagged.[7][8]
Tenet also gave Bob Grenier, his Iraq Mission Manager from 2002, direct personal access to the Director of Central Intelligence — one of the perquisites that came with the newly created position.[9]
EIT acceptance
In late October 2001 — at a cocktail party in the days following the September 11 attacks — Tenet personally accepted the pitch from contract psychologists Mitchell and Jessen for what became the enhanced interrogation techniques program. The agency signed the Mitchell and Jessen contract in January 2002. The first detainee on whom the program was applied was Abu Zubaydah, captured by John Kiriakou’s team in Pakistan in March 2002.[10][11]
The Five Eyes file-opening
In the early-2000s reorganization of relationships among the Anglosphere intelligence services after September 11, Tenet personally ordered that the Five Eyes — the U.S., U.K., Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand services — “literally open the files” to each other. The directive established the contemporary practice of Five Eyes liaison officers sitting at each other’s headquarters.[12][13]
The “prism of smoke” quote
Tenet’s memoir contains the paraphrased line cited repeatedly by Kiriakou in his characterization of the post-9/11 U.S. national-security mood: “All major foreign policy decisions after 9/11 were viewed through the prism of smoke from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.” Kiriakou treats the line as accurate description — “absolutely true” — and applies it to his own framing of the moral conduct of senior CIA personnel of the period, including Jose Rodriguez, James Mitchell, and Bruce Jessen.[14]
Kiriakou’s broader assessment
In the Kiriakou framing, Tenet belongs to the senior-CIA-figures-of-the-post-9/11-period cohort — alongside John McLaughlin, Michael Morell, Jose Rodriguez, and Rick Pavitt — whom Kiriakou holds responsible for “a lot of crimes that were committed in the name of national security.” Kiriakou treats Tenet as categorically distinct from John Brennan, however: Brennan, in Kiriakou’s framework, “plotted against an elected president of the United States,” which is a different and more dangerous category of conduct than the EIT-era senior leadership’s failures.[15]
”Have they lost their minds?”
John Kiriakou served as George Tenet’s personal notetaker at the Principals Committee meeting on the eve of the Iraq invasion, February 2003. Tenet was the sole participant seated at the conference-room table; Kiriakou sat directly behind him.[16]
When General Tommy Franks concluded his order-of-battle briefing with the statement “If all goes as planned, we can be in Tehran by August,” Tenet discreetly reached forward and turned off his microphone. He turned to Kiriakou and said: “Did he say Tehran or did he say Baghdad?” Kiriakou confirmed: “He said Tehran.” Tenet said: “Have they lost their minds?” He then turned the microphone back on and sat quietly for the remainder of the briefing. In a separate telling, Kiriakou attributes the same reaction — “Have these people lost their minds?” — to Tenet on hearing the CENTCOM commander’s Tehran remark, with Deputy Director Jim Pavitt separately waving off the idea back at the office: “They’re not going to invade Iran — these people don’t understand anything about the region.”[17][18][19][20] Back at the deputy director’s office after that same Principals Committee meeting, Kiriakou says he asked the deputy director whether he had known the U.S. was about to invade Iran; the deputy director brushed it off — “these guys don’t know anything about the Middle East” — and recounted that an unnamed National Security Council official had told the room, as it broke up, that Iraqis would “throw flowers at us” when U.S. forces crossed the border.[21]
The Prince Bandar ultimatum after 9/11
Kiriakou says he was also the notetaker in a separate, tenser meeting shortly after the September 11 attacks, in which Tenet — visibly livid — told Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar that the United States would begin killing people, potentially including named members of the House of Saud, if the Saudis did not cooperate.[22]
The Pollard ultimatum to Clinton
When President Bill Clinton came close to releasing Jonathan Pollard at Israel’s repeated urging, George Tenet delivered an ultimatum: “If you release Pollard, I will resign, and the head of every intelligence agency in the American government will resign.” Clinton did not release Pollard.[23][24]
‘27 CIA eyes only’
Immediately after Abu Zubaydah’s capture, Kiriakou says Tenet personally ordered the case restricted to a list he called “27 CIA eyes only” and instructed Kiriakou directly not to leave the wounded prisoner’s bedside — an order Kiriakou followed even after 24 hours awake, at one point turning a ceiling fan on full blast to stay uncomfortably cold enough not to fall asleep.[25] When Kiriakou returned from the capture, Tenet ordered him not to discuss any aspect of it with anyone — the operation was so highly classified and compartmentalized that even inside the CIA it could not be discussed — and sent him to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade for a briefing.[26]
Kiriakou notes that Tenet was not fired over the September 11 attacks, remaining CIA director for another five years before he went on to help launch the Iraq war, which Kiriakou says was also built on false intelligence.[27]
Handing Abu Zubaydah to the CIA
John Kiriakou says CIA director George Tenet went to President Bush on July 31, 2002 and asked him to turn Abu Zubaydah — then cooperating with the FBI’s Ali Soufan — over to the CIA, which Bush, “because he didn’t know what was going on,” did.[28][29]
‘Slam dunk’ and ‘have these people lost their minds’
John Kiriakou says George Tenet told President Bush the Iraq WMD case was a “slam dunk” with no supporting analysis behind it.[30] As Tenet’s notetaker in a pre-invasion secure teleconference chaired by Dick Cheney, Kiriakou heard the CENTCOM commander say forces could be “in Tehran by August”; Tenet muted his microphone, asked Kiriakou “did he say Tehran or Baghdad,” and muttered, “Have these people lost their minds?”[31][32]
’A war criminal’ with a book advance (News Beat)
John Kiriakou calls George Tenet — “a nice guy” and hero of the Greek-American community — a war criminal who, rather than face accountability, received a $6 million book advance and a seat on the board of a New York vulture fund.[33]