The Japanese diplomat FBI sting was, in John Kiriakou’s telling, an entrapment operation run against him while he was chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A man who introduced himself as the “number three” official at the Japanese embassy — an Arabic speaker who knew Kiriakou’s Middle East background — took him to lunch and, at the end, cold-pitched him: “if you give me information, I can give you money.”[1][2][3] Offended, Kiriakou walked out and reported it to the Senate security officer, who sent it to the FBI.[4] The FBI then had him meet the man four or five more times, conducted in Arabic since the man’s English was poor, to draw out what he wanted and how much he would pay — an offer that came to $5,000 a month, which Kiriakou says he never accepted and calls standard pay for “a run-of-the-mill spy.” Kiriakou kept reporting each contact back to the FBI, unaware there was no Japanese diplomat: the man was an FBI agent, revealed only in the 15,000 pages of discovery in Kiriakou’s later case.[5][6][7][8] They were trying, he says, to get him to commit “actual espionage” so they could charge him.
At the final lunch, the man claimed he had been promoted and was being transferred to Cairo as the Japanese embassy’s number two; Kiriakou never saw him again. A year later, in December 2012, Kiriakou was arrested and charged with three counts of espionage, one count of making a false statement, and one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981.[9] The same discovery that revealed the fake diplomat also surfaced a memo chain: John Brennan wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding Kiriakou be charged with espionage; Holder replied that his people did not believe Kiriakou had committed espionage; Brennan wrote back to “charge him anyway and make him defend himself.” A separate memo from the undercover FBI agent to his supervisor, Peter Strzok, concluded Kiriakou was “clearly not going to take the bait” and recommended ending the operation.[10][11]