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.
The man Kiriakou knew
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]
Patronage, and the Brennan rise
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]
After September 11
The Bandar confrontation
Kiriakou singles out the meeting with Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud after September 11 as the only occasion — in another telling, one of only two — on which he saw Tenet lose his composure entirely. Kiriakou was the notetaker; Tenet was visibly livid, and told Bandar that the United States would begin killing people, potentially including named members of the House of Saud, if the Saudis did not cooperate.[10]
Kiriakou has given the warning almost verbatim: “If we don’t start getting help from the Saudi government on this case, we’re going to start killing people, a lot of people, and some of them are going to be named al-Saud.”[11] Addressing a 2026 conference he framed it as a warning issued in the language of alliance rather than of threat. Tenet put the finding to the ambassador plainly — that three members of the al-Saud family were in the personal diary of the man then believed to be al-Qaeda’s number three — and then told him: “Bandar, I’m telling you I’m telling you because we’re allies. We’re going to start killing people, a lot of people. And some of them are going to be named al-Saud.”[12][13]
The pressure had a specific cause. The services the CIA turned to — the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Saudis — all said they did not know what was going on, which Kiriakou says “wasn’t true”; sixteen or seventeen of the hijackers were Saudi, and Bandar’s own wife had transferred $50,000 from her personal account to them. Asked whether the United States should have gone after Saudi Arabia, his answer is one word of agreement — but he is careful about what was known at the time: “We suspected, but… there was no smoking gun.”[14][15]
What Bandar did with the warning, in Kiriakou’s account, was to have the three princes killed within weeks — which Kiriakou treats as a setback rather than a favour, since it removed the only people who could have been asked to explain the numbers.[16]
Opening the Five Eyes files
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.[17][18]
Accepting the interrogation program
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.[19][20]
Abu Zubaydah: “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.[21] 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.[22]
Kiriakou also says 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.[23][24]
The road to Iraq
”Slam dunk”
John Kiriakou says Tenet told President Bush the Iraq WMD case was a “slam dunk” with no supporting analysis behind it.[25]
In Kiriakou’s account the phrase was not Tenet’s own conviction but a line delivered to a customer whose preference was already known: Tenet understood there were no weapons, but understood equally that Dick Cheney “really, really wanted there to be weapons of mass destruction.” The paper the agency had actually written said the opposite — a nuclear programme disbanded in 1985, no evidence of an intercontinental ballistic missile programme beyond decades-old shells buried in the desert, a chemical programme ended in 1991 under UN inspection, and biological weapons whose presence or absence could not be established either way.[26][27][28]
”You’re just going to have to take one for the team”
When the Washington Post ran a front-page article saying the administration had lied, and the “slam dunk” quote left Tenet publicly holding the deception, Kiriakou says Tenet complained directly to Condoleezza Rice that it was unfair — “I told you that there were no weapons and you told me that I had to say there were weapons.”[29] Kiriakou had “never seen George this angry ever.” Rice’s answer, in the words he gives as exact, was: “George, you’re just going to have to take one for the team.”[30] He offers the exchange as the terminal case of groupthink inside a bureaucracy “where everybody thinks he’s smarter than everybody else.”[30]
The microphone, and “Have they lost their minds?”
Kiriakou served as 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.[31]
The episode turns on a small physical gesture. 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 — alone at the table in the CIA director’s conference room — reached in front of himself and “very discreetly” turned off his microphone before speaking.[32]
Only then did he turn round to check what he had heard: “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 “just kind of sits there for the rest of the briefing.”[33][34][35]
Kiriakou has told the same story with the setting given as a pre-invasion secure teleconference chaired by Dick Cheney, and with the reaction rendered “Have these people lost their minds?”[36][37][38] In that telling Deputy Director Jim Pavitt separately waved off the idea back at the office: “They’re not going to invade Iran — these people don’t understand anything about the region.”[39]
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.[40]
The Pollard ultimatum
When President Bill Clinton came close to releasing Jonathan Pollard at Israel’s repeated urging, 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.[41][42]
Who persuaded him
Asked directly whether one person led the charge to implement torture, Kiriakou answers that the decision was Tenet’s — “at the end of the day, it was George Tenet, who was the CIA director at the time” — but that the initiative was not his. Tenet, he says, “was convinced to implement this program” by a group of subordinates he names with their titles: Cofer Black; James Pavitt, the deputy director for operations; John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the CIA; and John Brennan, then the agency’s executive director.[43][44]
What he stresses about that group is not that they dissembled but that they did not. Kiriakou calls them “very bad people” and then makes the point that the description is compatible with sincerity: “to this day, all the rest of them believe they were doing the right thing.”[44]
Kiriakou’s assessment
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.[45]
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.[46]
The personal verdict is harsher than the categorical one. Kiriakou calls 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.[47] He 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.[48]
The microphone, switched off
One of Kiriakou’s closest portraits of Tenet is of a few seconds in a wartime video teleconference chaired by Dick Cheney, in which the CENTCOM commander finished a briefing by saying that if things continued to go this well they could be in Tehran by August.[49][50]
What Kiriakou records is the management of the reaction rather than the reaction itself. Tenet paused, leaned forward, turned his microphone off, and turned round to ask his note-taker: “did he say Baghdad or did he say Tehran?” Told that the general had said Tehran, he said — with the microphone still off — “have they all lost their minds,” then turned back around and switched the microphone on again.[50]
The detail Kiriakou preserves is that nothing was said into the room. The judgement was passed backwards, off the record, to a subordinate, and the meeting continued. His own reaction was the thought that people had no idea what they had gotten into.[51]
Taking the case from the FBI
The transfer of the Abu Zubaydah case from the FBI to the CIA is, in Kiriakou’s account, a decision Tenet asked for personally. The friction behind it was bureaucratic and, he stresses, technical as well: even after 9/11 the two agencies’ computer systems were not compatible, so Ali Soufan’s daily cables went to FBI headquarters and the CIA simply did not see them, receiving instead an occasional memo — “Yeah, we’re talking to him. So, here’s a memo.”[52][53]
“In late July of 2002 George Tenet, who was the CIA’s director at the time, went to President Bush and asked President Bush to turn primacy of the case over to the CIA, to take it away from the FBI and give it to the CIA.” Kiriakou treats the president’s assent as the unexplained hinge of the whole episode: “Why George W. Bush agreed to do that is something that I don’t think we’ll ever understand. He’s never talked about it. It wasn’t in the torture report and George Tenet has never talked about it, but that’s what happened.”[53][54]
The FBI’s answer was to withdraw, and not only from the site: knowing what was coming, “the FBI withdrew all of its personnel, not just from the secret site, but from the country that the secret site was in.”[54]
Kiriakou also gives a figure for what Tenet was paid afterwards for his own account of the period: “George Tenet got 6 million for his book.”[55]