John Kiriakou

John Chris Kiriakou (born August 9, 1964) is an American former Central Intelligence Agency analyst and case officer who served from 1990 to 2004. He led the team in Pakistan that captured Abu Zubaydah, refused training in the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques, and in December 2007 became the first U.S. government official to publicly confirm that the CIA waterboarded detainees. He was later prosecuted under the Espionage Act for confirming the name of a covert officer to a journalist and served 23 months in federal prison.

Since his release, Kiriakou has written nine books^[1] and works as a podcast host and commentator on intelligence, foreign policy, and the prosecution of whistleblowers. He has traveled to 72 countries and lives approximately three miles from the White House in Washington, D.C.^[2][3] At the start of 2026 he delivered a UK speaking tour comprising fifteen engagements — five with a professor of English literature, five with a retired actor, and five with a retired MI6 officer.^[4]

In early 2026 — following the viral spread of a clip in which he recounted his unsuccessful auction bid for the artifact known as Lincoln’s last turd — Kiriakou achieved a degree of internet meme celebrity, with a single clip drawing approximately fifteen million views. He is widely referred to in this period as “the hummus guy” or “the slow-motion hummus guy,” in reference to his repeated public commentary on the CIA’s use of rectal feeding with hummus.^[5][6]

Early life

Kiriakou was born and raised in New Castle, Pennsylvania, a small rural town about an hour north of Pittsburgh in Amish Country.^[7][8] The town had 50,000 residents during his childhood and has since declined to roughly 18,000; Kiriakou cites the arrival of DEA and ATF field offices as evidence of the change.^[7] Both of his parents were public school teachers — his father, who held a PhD in music, was an elementary-school principal for 44 years, and his mother a third-grade teacher.^[9][10] He is the oldest of three children, with a brother and a sister.^[9] Both parents grew up poor — Kiriakou says his mother once missed a month of school for lack of shoes — and his father was drafted and served in the Korean War, a subject he never spoke about afterward.^[11] Four of his first and second cousins served on the ground in the Vietnam War, two drafted and two who volunteered for the Marines.^[12]

Family genealogy: Rhodes, the Ottomans, and the Christodoulou name

All four of Kiriakou’s grandparents came from the Greek island of Rhodes, which had been under Ottoman Turkish rule for 450 years beginning in 1456 — “we were the slaves of the Turks” — before Italy took control in 1917; Rhodes did not formally join Greece until 1947.^[13][14] When Kiriakou later applied for Greek citizenship, the Greek Embassy told him he actually had a stronger case for Italian citizenship, since Ottoman-era Greek records were poor while Italian colonial records were thorough. His grandparents had immigrated to the United States on Italian passports — his father’s parents in 1931, his mother’s parents in 1934 — and Kiriakou still possesses the passports, along with a 1930 receipt for 100 olive trees his grandfather bought in Rhodes (evidence, he says, that “he intended to remain”) and a document from the Italian army authorizing his grandmother to teach Italian soldiers Greek.^[15][16]

The family’s actual surname, Kiriakou learned, is not Kiriakou at all but Christodoulou (“servant of Christ”); the name changed when an illiterate ancestor named Marcos, arrested for stealing a potato while starving, gave a court his father’s first name — Kiriakos (Charles) — in place of a surname, and the clerk wrote it down as his own.^[17] Kiriakou has since connected, through a 23andMe DNA match, with the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Pittsburgh — a genetic fourth cousin — who corroborated a family legend that they descend from Saint Christodoulos, who traded land on Patmos to the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople in exchange for the cave where St. John received the Book of Revelation.^[18]

On his mother’s side, the family descends from a long line of Greek Orthodox priests from Katavia, the southernmost village on Rhodes, where they also worked as farmers and sponge divers — sponge diving having been economically vital before synthetic sponges existed, with Rhodes and Kalymnos once supplying most of the world’s supply.^[19][20] A death record in the village church states that Kiriakou’s great-great-grandfather, a priest, was killed by a shark while sponge diving; his grandmother maintained instead that he was murdered by the Turks for refusing to stop teaching children to speak Greek.^[19] That maternal line traces further back to the Trebizond region on the Black Sea in Anatolia, from which the family fled Ottoman-era massacres of Greeks — paralleling those of the Armenians and Assyrians — settling in Rhodes’s remote, inaccessible mountain villages specifically to stay out of reach of the Turks.^[21] Kiriakou’s maternal grandfather’s large family was decimated by the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic; he subsequently married Kiriakou’s grandmother — she was 14, he was 18 — and the couple emigrated, settling first in Weirton, West Virginia, then Warren, Ohio, both mill towns.^[22]

On his father’s side, Kiriakou’s paternal great-grandfather had 19 children and worked the fields as Ottoman subjects; after the catastrophic 1920 Greco-Turkish population exchange — what Greeks call “the catastrophe of 1920,” in which two million Greeks were expelled from Turkey and 150,000 Turks from Greece — the Greek government actively encouraged young men to emigrate.^[23] Kiriakou’s grandfather left Rhodes for the U.S. in 1920, having never seen an automobile before his voyage, and settled in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, working as a slab cutter for U.S. Steel for ten years and saving $20,000 (roughly $250,000 today).^[24] He returned to Rhodes in 1930 to marry Kiriakou’s grandmother, receiving a dowry of two land plots — one beachfront (deemed worthless for farming at the time, but sold by Kiriakou’s father and aunt in 1991 for a fortune) and one farm plot on which he planted the 100 olive trees.^[25] He then abandoned the newly planted trees and farm to rush his new bride to the U.S. ahead of a law that would make citizenship harder, sailing on the SS Saturnia — a ship Kiriakou says later became a WWII troop transport before being scuttled off Taiwan in the 1970s.^[26] The family arrived in Canonsburg in February 1931; Kiriakou’s father was born on the kitchen table in Farrell, Pennsylvania in 1934, and Kiriakou’s grandfather worked in the steel mill until 1964 before opening a second grocery store.^[27] Kiriakou is named after this grandfather, John Chris Kiriakou, per Greek Orthodox naming tradition; the grandfather was a fierce anti-royalist, while Kiriakou’s grandmother was a staunch royalist regarding the Danish-descended royal family imposed on Greece.^[28] That grandmother, the oldest of four children (her brother George died at 17 of tuberculosis), was sent to school by her father and learned English, Turkish, and Italian in addition to Greek, later teaching at the only school on Rhodes in 1927 — Kiriakou still has a photograph of her teaching that year.^[29]

The family was intensely musical. His father held a PhD in music and ran a Greek band for 50 years; Kiriakou took classical piano for 12 years and played clarinet, and he and his brother paid their way through college playing Greek weddings and baptisms in the band. His brother went on to become a major Hollywood music producer with seven number-one hits and “tens of millions of dollars,” and his sister into investments. A book on the history of Greek music in America includes a photo of his father.^[30][31][32]

As a child he was preoccupied with baseball and football, and spent time exploring nearby cemeteries — initially hunting for salamanders, later studying the names on the gravestones of the town’s industrial founders.^[9] When he was eight or nine, his grandfather told him a story he later worked to verify: in 1934 the grandfather had been standing in line at the Franic Savings and Loan in Farrell, Pennsylvania — near Sharon Steel — to cash his paycheck when John Dillinger and his gang walked in, announced they were there to rob the bank and not the people, took the bank’s money, and walked out.^[33][34] Decades later, while writing his first book, Kiriakou drove to the Mercer County, Pennsylvania Historical Society to check whether the story was too good to be true. The archivist produced the original Sharon Herald reporting confirming the holdup — and the article quoted Kiriakou’s grandfather by name. He has since visited Dillinger’s grave in Indianapolis with his son Max.^[34][35][36]

The shortwave radio

At age nine, his father bought a box of junk at an auction for fifty cents that contained a broken shortwave radio. Once repaired, the radio became a formative obsession: Kiriakou listened to BBC London, Radio Moscow, and stations from Cuba, Ecuador, China, and Mongolia.^[37][38] Late at night, slowly scrolling through the dial, he would occasionally pick up a voice reading only numbers. For years he could not explain what it was; he eventually understood it was a KGB spy reporting in using a one-time pad. He told his parents at age nine that he wanted to be a spy, and they responded, thinking it cute, by giving him walkie-talkies, disappearing ink, and a code reader for Christmas that year.^[39][40] James Bond movies and the comedy Get Smart shaped his image of what a spy was as a child; he says he genuinely believed he would grow up to become James Bond.^[41] At sixteen, driving with his father past Frazier’s Pond on Old Plank Road, he restated that he wanted to be a spy in the Middle East rather than pursue the science degree his father wanted for him.^[42] By age fourteen his father had built a forty-foot tower with a shortwave antenna behind the house and run the wires into Kiriakou’s bedroom; that year, with money saved from his paper route, Kiriakou bought a $1,000 shortwave base unit — “a lot of money in 1978, like buying a car.”^[43] He credits the shortwave radio with giving him the travel bug and the determination to leave New Castle for Washington.^[44]

Christmas 1975 — Richard Welch

Kiriakou traced his desire to do the work he eventually did to a specific moment at Christmas 1975, when he was eleven. At his grandparents’ house, his grandfather said: “Did you see the news? They killed a CIA man in Athens.” His grandfather speculated: “He must have been spying on Greece.” His father corrected him: “No, Dad, we have CIA people all around the world working with those governments. He probably wasn’t spying on Greece.” Kiriakou’s reaction was excited enthusiasm. Thirty years later, he was in Greece working the 17 November Task Force to find the killers of Dick Welch.^[45][46]

Father, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the recruiter

At fifteen, the Iranian hostage crisis obsessed Kiriakou; ABC had created Nightline specifically to give nightly updates and he stayed up late to watch. An Army recruiter came to Newcastle High School offering free tube socks for anyone who came in for a conversation. Kiriakou mentioned offhand he might go for the socks. His normally gentle father said: “If you go down there on Saturday, you and I are going to have a serious problem, boy.” He skipped it.^[47][48][49] At sixteen he told his father he wanted to be a spy in the Middle East. His father’s response: “Come on, you still with the spy thing? Can’t you be a dentist or something?” Kiriakou told him he was serious.^[50][51]

As a child, Kiriakou’s family had relatives in the Washington, D.C. area and would visit for summer vacations; his father’s cousin, who was also his godfather, owned a prominent steakhouse in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia frequented by senators, congressmen, bankers, and other Washington figures.^[52]

New Castle’s industrial decline

Kiriakou considers New Castle, Pennsylvania — where he grew up from age two to eighteen — his hometown, though he was actually born in nearby Sharon because Farrell had no hospital; New Castle had roughly 40,000 residents during his childhood, down to under 20,000 by the time of recording.^[53] He dates the town’s economic collapse to 1977, when he was in eighth grade, and the Youngstown Sheet and Tube steel plant closed, prompting families to relocate en masse to Florida and California for work: “the town just died… that was the end of it.”^[54] In the summer of 1982, working for his congressman, he visited the president of J&L Steel in his office in the Youngstown/Pittsburgh area and was told the plant hadn’t had a steel order in two months because Japanese seamless steel tubing had undercut American riveted tubing on price.^[55] As a childhood memory from 1972, he recalls his uncle “Sonny” saying he intended to vote for George Wallace, comparing Wallace to Truman as tough on Japan — illustrating the era’s anti-Japanese sentiment in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio.^[56] He has maintained a lifelong group of close friends from New Castle — Gary Sanco, Russ Coletta, Guy Cabellus, and David McCracken (who died at 48) — spanning both political parties, who served as each other’s best men and godparents despite differing politics.^[57] He says he excelled at history and debate in high school, especially arguing both sides of an issue, citing James Madison’s practice of writing a bill for the House of Representatives and then leading the debate in opposition to his own bill as an ideal he admired.^[58]

Education

The week after he turned 18, Kiriakou moved to Washington, D.C. and enrolled at George Washington University — the only school to which he applied. He chose it because it sat two blocks from the White House and because it was one of only three schools in the country at the time with a degree program in Middle Eastern studies; he was one of four students in the inaugural cohort.^[59][60] His interest in the region had been sparked by the Iranian hostage crisis: “we’re on the brink of war with Iran and I was coming up to draft age.”^[59] At GW he majored in Middle Eastern studies with a focus on Islamic theology and studied Arabic and oil economics.^[61]

His father, lacking the $4,600 annual tuition, pushed for the University of Pittsburgh and a degree in Soviet studies. Kiriakou refused — “I don’t care about Soviet studies, I don’t have any interest in Russia” — took out substantial loans, and attended GW for Middle Eastern studies anyway.^[62][63]

Kiriakou says only three U.S. colleges offered Middle Eastern studies majors when he applied — Brigham Young, Rutgers, and GW — and he chose GW for its central Washington location. He was one of only four students in the program; the other three were Jewish and mainly interested in Israel, and none pursued Middle East careers afterward — one sold commercial real estate, one became a Bear Stearns investment advisor, and one earned a PhD and became a professor.^[64][65] Because GW’s program did not offer Arabic, and Georgetown’s Arabic class would not admit him as a late-start consortium student, he enrolled instead in Greek at Georgetown, taught by Dr. James Latiades, dean of the school of languages and linguistics, who told him his Greek was “not bad” but sounded like “weird 1930s era island slang” and placed him in the beginner class anyway.^[66] In college he also excelled at “contemporaneous speaking” — improv debate in which competitors are given a topic and five minutes to prepare a speech — recalling a 1980 topic on whether to open a U.S. military base in the United Arab Emirates.^[67]

He stayed at GW for a Master’s in Legislative Affairs with a focus on foreign policy analysis, explaining that after undergrad he “wasn’t adult enough to start [his] life.”^[68] During his master’s program he took Psychology of Leadership, a class taught by Dr. Gerald Post — an “eminent psychiatrist” who held a PhD in political science, a PhD in psychology, and an MD, and who referred to himself as a “political psychiatrist.”^[69][70] The class taught how governments manipulate world leaders; the example that stayed with Kiriakou was that Stalin, having learned from spies that Roosevelt was gravely ill, insisted the Yalta Conference be moved from Tehran to Yalta — forcing Roosevelt to fly days around the war zone, and arriving so exhausted that, when Stalin insisted they begin immediately, “Roosevelt gave up Poland just to get to bed. Forty-five years of communism in Poland resulted.”^[71][72][73] Post — unknown to his students — was a CIA officer working undercover as a professor to identify candidates who would fit the agency’s culture.^[74]

CIA recruitment

A final assignment in Post’s class required students to shadow their bosses for a week and write a psychological analysis. Kiriakou was working at the time for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union in Washington under a “mean, tough, old-school union organizer” who had had his back broken by strike-breakers in 1970s New York.^[75] Midway through the shadowing week the two argued; Kiriakou called him a racist, and the man — instead of striking him as Kiriakou expected — responded with the line “my penis is bigger than yours.”^[76] In a separate retelling, Kiriakou says the boss’s reaction to being called a racist was to grow so angry his fists balled up, at which point Kiriakou quit on the spot.^[77] He wrote his evaluation diagnosing the man as “a sociopath with psychopathic and possibly violent tendencies.” Post returned the paper with an A and a note: please see me after class.^[78]

In his office Post closed the door and said, “I’m not really a professor here. I’m a CIA officer undercover as a professor here, looking for people who would fit into the CIA’s culture. I think you would fit. Would you like to join the CIA?”^[79][80] Kiriakou’s own account of his motivation was prosaic: “The truth was, I was getting married in 6 weeks, and I didn’t have a job. So, I said, Yeah, sure. I’d love to join the CIA. And the next thing I knew, I was in the CIA.”^[81][82] Post picked up the phone, and in rolling his Rolodex Kiriakou noticed a card labeled “Oliver North home.” North had just been acquitted in Iran-Contra; Post had worked very closely with him. Post died of COVID.^[83][84] He gave Kiriakou an address in Rosslyn, Virginia, and said: “Go there and ask for Bob.”^[85] Kiriakou was hired into the office Post had created, LDA (Leadership Development Analysis, later the Office of Leadership Analysis), within which Post had also created the Political Psychology Division; Kiriakou’s first job there was to be “Saddam Hussein’s intelligence community psychologist” — nicknamed, in his words, “the Saddam Whisperer."^[86]

"Bob”

Bob — a name Kiriakou never confirmed was real — was a “6’6”, 320-pound, loud, smiling” man who later turned out to be the director of human resources for the entire CIA.^[87][88] Bob’s opening question was “Have you ever betrayed a friendship?” He then sent Kiriakou to an unmarked, one-story building in Vienna, Virginia, for an interview with three people who identified themselves only as a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and an anthropologist.^[89]

Part of what Post said he saw in Kiriakou, beyond writing ability, was a set of “sociopathic tendencies” — not sociopathy itself, but a willingness to work in legal, moral, and ethical gray areas. Applicants were tested on this directly: given a scenario in which an Indonesian Second Secretary for Economic Affairs, cultivated for six months with lunches, dinners, a chartered fishing trip, and a helicopter tour, still could not be identified as recruitable, other candidates suggested doubling down and spending more time and money; Kiriakou answered that the case officer should simply break into the embassy and steal the data, and the instructor confirmed this was the doctrinally correct response.^[90] Kiriakou separately recalls then-Director Mike Pompeo telling a Washington think-tank audience that CIA officers “lie, we cheat, we steal, and then we go to work the next day and do it all over again” — a line Kiriakou affirms as accurate to the job.^[91]

The interview was fifteen minutes long and consisted of three questions: describe your relationship with your mother, describe your relationship with your father, and a repetition of have you ever betrayed a friendship? When Kiriakou answered no the second time, the anthropologist responded, “that’s the answer we were looking for.”^[92] Kiriakou was then asked to provide urine, blood, and hair samples and sent home.^[92]

Bob then directed Kiriakou to a full day of testing at the George Washington University medical school auditorium, alongside 250–300 other applicants: a current-events multiple-choice test, a blank world map to label, and a personality inventory running to thousands of questions, which used repeated items — “I like boxing” recurring at intervals — to check for consistency in applicants trying to game the test.^[93] Kiriakou finished all three tests first, in 45 minutes.^[94]

The polygraph

The CIA polygraph is administered before hiring, after a three-year probationary period, and every five years thereafter for the rest of an officer’s career.^[95] During the pre-hire and three-year polygraphs, examiners ask “lifestyle questions” — about sexuality, deviance, and criminal history — that are dropped from subsequent re-investigations.^[96]

Acting on advice from Dr. Post, Kiriakou focused on a single speck on the wall throughout the examination and answered yes-or-no without reflection.^[97] The exam was administered by a young Black woman in her late twenties who told him beforehand, “I want you to pass.”^[98] During his exam the polygrapher abruptly asked whether he had ever had sex with a man; Kiriakou later learned this was a “turd thrown into the middle of the room” to test reactions.^[99] The only thing Kiriakou had ever stolen, he disclosed, was a toy pistol taken from a neighbor’s house at age six and later returned; he understood the exam’s real target vulnerabilities to be whether an applicant was secretly gay, deeply in debt, a drug addict, or a gambling addict.^[100] The polygraph flagged a reaction not to the sexuality question but to one about credit-card debt; he passed the retest and the overall exam about a week later.^[101] Upon joining the CIA, he was instructed not to tell anyone — including his wife — because he might go undercover or deep cover. He told her anyway, and admitted as much when asked about it on the polygraph: “She’s my wife. What am I going to do?”^[102][103] He passed; Bob later told him, “they’re fighting over you at headquarters.”^[104]

After passing his polygraph, Kiriakou was offered interviews with three CIA offices: two in the Directorate of Intelligence — the North Korea Political Analysis Branch and the Iraq-analyst slot in the Office of Leadership Analysis — and one operations-officer (“cat B officer”) slot in the Office of Near Eastern Operations.^[105] He disqualified himself from the Near East operations track within the first ten seconds by telling interviewers that a lifetime posting to the Middle East sounded great but “my wife would either leave me or kill herself,” and was cut on the spot.^[106] He won the Office of Leadership Analysis Iraq-analyst job by citing his study of Islam under Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Middle Eastern politics under Bernard Reich — noting Reich had been called into the State Department in 1982 to help head off a coup attempt in Saudi Arabia.^[107] He negotiated a start date of January 6, 1990 (processed as the 7th, since the 6th fell on a Sunday); his job offer letter bore no CIA seal, only an “Office of Personnel” heading.^[108]

Kiriakou’s first wife — a ballet teacher from Warren, Ohio who moved to Washington for him — knew almost nothing about his CIA application beyond the fact that he was applying for a government job; she hoped he would eventually agree to move back to Ohio and sell life insurance with her cousin Dean, an idea he rejected, telling her he would “rather cut my own throat than move back home.”^[109][110] Both Greek, they had met at a Greek wedding after their parents pushed them together and became engaged when he was 22; he says they had “literally nothing in common other than the fact that we were both Greek.”^[111]

First day

On his first day at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Kiriakou — as the most junior new hire — had to park a third to half a mile away in the “North 40,” and walked past the Patrick Henry statue, the seal in the floor, the “you shall know the truth” plaque, and the Memorial Wall of Honor, 40% of whose honorees remain undercover even in death.^[112] He was told that day that he must tell people the “CIA thing didn’t work out” and that he had instead gone to the State Department — a cover story his first wife had to maintain, and one that ultimately damaged their marriage.^[113] Among the hires who onboarded alongside him were a recent graduate of the Falls Church Academy of Beauty who became a master disguise-maker — and later won a medal with Kiriakou for a joint operation in Athens — and a college cartoonist who became a master document forger.^[114] The head of security declared to the new hires: “The gravest challenge facing the United States today is the threat of Soviet communism.” Kiriakou thought: “Do you not watch the news? There is no such thing as Soviet communism anymore.” The Soviet Union collapsed eleven months later.^[115][116]

CIA career

Kiriakou’s fifteen years at the CIA divided into two equal halves: seven years as an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence, including service as the agency’s chief historian on Saddam Hussein in the period leading into the First Iraq War, and — beginning in 1997, “halfway through my career” — a transfer to operations as a counterterrorism case officer.^[117][1]

Analyst years (1990–1997)

August 2, 1990 — the Oval Office briefing

Eight months into his CIA career, Kiriakou was in the shower with a waterproof shower radio — common at the time — when he heard the announcement of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The CIA had published a paper four and a half weeks earlier predicting Saddam was going to attack. Kiriakou rushed into the office, and his boss said: “Don’t take your jacket off. We’re going to the White House.”^{[118][119][120]}

In the Oval Office he found President George H.W. Bush, the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, the CIA Director, his boss, and himself — the most junior person in the room at age 25. When Bush asked “Well, now what do we do?” everyone turned to look at Kiriakou. “I was 25 years old. And I’m looking at him like — and then it took me a second like, ‘Oh. Oh. Uh yes. Well, Mr. President, as you know, Iraqi troops crossed the border at 2:00 this morning. They’ve taken the whole of Kuwait. The royal family has fled to Saudi Arabia…’” He describes it as the most intimidated he has ever felt: “Not only am I meeting the President and the Vice President and the CIA Director and the National Security Advisor, but they’re asking for my advice on issues of war and peace. I’m 25 years old.”^[121][122]

When Bush asked who was now governing occupied Kuwait, Kiriakou briefed on Dr. Ahmed Katib — whom he had written an article about a month earlier simply because the man interested him. Katib’s mother had been a slave in the household of the Kuwaiti royal family; the Arabian Peninsula had slavery until 1955. After slavery ended, as a form of compensation, the royal family sent Ahmed to the American University of Beirut, where his college roommate was George Habash. Together they founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Vice President said: “Jesus Christ.”^[123][124]

Kiriakou later entered Kuwait City with U.S. Marines on Liberation Day, February 27, 1991, describing his analytical work during the Iraqi invasion as where he “made his bones.”

State Department rotation, Arabic, and the Powell call (1993)

Kiriakou remained in the Directorate of Intelligence until August 1993. To qualify for the Senior Intelligence Service, CIA officers are required to complete a rotation in the policy community (the White House, State Department, or Defense Department) and a rotation in another directorate (operations, science and technology, or administration). Kiriakou did his policy rotation at the State Department and used the time to complete a year of Arabic-language training, which he described as mastering the language completely.^[125][126] Before his first assignment, to Saudi Arabia, he paid roughly $200 to the Rosslyn School of Languages in Arlington, Virginia for three Saturday sessions to learn the Arabic alphabet, since there was no internet at the time to self-teach.^[127] In Saudi Arabia, he found that the minister of transportation — a UCLA graduate and member of the royal family who had become minister around age 23 — had deliberately made street signs Arabic-only, even in the diplomatic quarter, purely to inconvenience English-speaking foreigners.^[128] His formal immersion Arabic training came via a CIA rotation to the State Department as head of the economic section, with full-time instruction in Manama, Bahrain; he was the only member of his cohort to reach fluency within the first year, rather than needing a second year at the Tunis language school.^[129]

Later in 1993, Kiriakou was in the morning briefing when his secretary came in to tell him General Colin Powell was on the phone and had asked for him by name. Powell asked a single question: if the Iraqis were going to kill President Bush, who would run that operation and where would they be located? Kiriakou told him it would be Iraqi-intelligence’s Basra station chief, Sabre Abdul-Aziz al-Douri, operating from Baghdad, and gave him the address. Eight hours later, the United States fired forty-seven cruise missiles into Iraqi-intelligence-service headquarters. The attack was in the middle of the night in Baghdad; the only person killed was a janitor. Kiriakou came into work the next morning and said to his boss: “I killed that janitor yesterday.” His boss replied: “You didn’t kill the janitor. Powell killed the janitor. You had no idea what Powell was going to do with the information.” Kiriakou: “Intellectually, I knew he was right. But that has bothered me since 1993. I think about that janitor all the time.”^{[130][131][132][133][134][135][136][137][138]}

Bahrain (1994–1996)

Kiriakou served at the U.S. embassy in Bahrain under Ambassador David Ransom, whom he described as a wonderful boss. On one occasion, Ransom asked Kiriakou to accompany him as interpreter to a courtesy call on the Bahraini Minister of Al-Awqaf and Islamic Affairs, who spoke no English. After the meeting, the minister told Kiriakou directly: “Your Arabic is excellent, young man.” The ambassador echoed the compliment in the car.^[139][140]

One documented incident from that posting involved a former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain working as a fundraiser for the Bob Dole presidential campaign who solicited and received $50,000 from the Bahraini Foreign Minister and another $50,000 from the Amir personally — both contributions illegal under U.S. campaign-finance law restricting foreign-national donations. On Ambassador Ransom’s instruction, Kiriakou omitted the second contribution from his cable reporting the meeting.^{[141][142][143]}

Kiriakou also served as the human-rights officer at the CIA station, required to report violations to Congress — including cases where security services beat demonstrators to death in custody and then called the family to collect the body. He would confront the Bahraini Minister of Interior. Simultaneously, he said, the CIA station chief would meet with the same minister an hour later and offer $10 million in exchange for establishing a secret prison where the CIA could send detainees to be tortured. The minister listened to the station chief.^[144]

At a Rotary Club lunch in this period, a Bahraini deputy minister pointed across the room at a table where the US Ambassador and several State Department officials were sitting and told Kiriakou: “Look — the CIA guys.” Kiriakou asked what made him think so. The answer: “That’s the thing about the CIA. They always sit together.” None of those men were CIA. Kiriakou was the CIA officer — sitting alone at a different table. He simply laughed and said: “Yeah, you can’t put one by you, man.”^{[145][146][147]}

Working under State Department cover, Kiriakou says he was required to keep such distance from the CIA that he could not even speak with agency officers stationed in Bahrain, and once had to smuggle a CIA-mandated cultural-sensitivity training VHS tape home in a diplomatic pouch to watch it in secret, since he could not view it at the embassy: “No one at the State Department was supposed to know that I had any CIA connections.”^[148] He served as control officer during Admiral William Crowe’s visit to Bahrain — the admiral, then commander of the U.S. naval component there, had made a 1976 statement, repeated annually thereafter, that “pound for pound, Bahrain is the best friend the United States has in the world.”^[149] Duties included accompanying Crowe’s wife on a carpet-buying excursion and attending the courtesy call on Bahrain’s foreign minister, whom Kiriakou liked for being Harvard-educated and speaking better English than he did.^[150]

His wife’s gynecologist in Bahrain — an Indian doctor — was killed in a bombing during the unrest while Joanne was preparing to deliver their second child; the couple decided she would return to Ohio to give birth instead, with Kiriakou planning to fly home two weeks before the due date.^[151] On June 25, 1996 — his eighth wedding anniversary, with Joanne in Ohio having given birth three weeks earlier to their second son, Constantine — Kiriakou felt a massive explosion at his Bahrain residence, large enough that he instinctively rolled off the bed and covered his head despite having experienced war zones before.^[152] He learned the next morning, via a call from his mother and CNN International, that the explosion had been the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.^[153]

Kiriakou’s Yale sophomore intern from this posting — a very smart young man with whom he stayed loosely in touch — remained at Yale for a master’s and a PhD and then took a position at the Pentagon in what Kiriakou described as a new under-secretariat for intelligence. Kiriakou invited him over to brief the CIA deputy director on Pentagon thinking about Iraq. The briefing appalled Kiriakou; his boss kept looking at him during it. Walking the intern out to his car afterward, Kiriakou said: “Michael, I have to ask you, when did you become a fascist?” The intern turned and said: “We’re in charge now. We’re in charge and Saddam Hussein’s going to die.”^{[154][155][156]} Kiriakou characterized the intern as having been working for the senior Pentagon officials who later appeared in Vanity Fair exposés about how the United States ended up in Iraq; his broader interpretation was that the neoconservatives had bided their time knowing Dick Cheney was their champion and was the one actually running the administration.^[156][157]

In another instance Kiriakou returned from Yemen to headquarters planning only to do accounting paperwork and go home to sleep. His boss saw him and asked if he could fly back to Sudan by 3:00 p.m. — there was a walk-in and no one at post spoke Arabic. Kiriakou went home, did a load of laundry, and flew back.^[158][159]

Transfer to operations (1997)

In 1997 Kiriakou transferred to operations and attended case-officer training at The Farm, the CIA’s clandestine training facility in Virginia, where his strongest skills were counterterrorist driving and marksmanship — despite never having touched a real gun before training began.^[160] He was sent for additional advanced driving training in the Nevada desert.^[161]

Greece (1998–2000)

Kiriakou’s first case-officer assignment, beginning in 1998, was Athens, where he was specifically tasked with disrupting Revolutionary Organization 17 November, the deadliest terrorist group in Greek history.^[162][163] Athens at the time was rated “critical threat” for terrorism — the highest level — and the embassy spent more on security than its counterpart in Beirut.^[164] Kiriakou’s first operational boss laid down a rule he kept the rest of his career: “Never lie to medical, finance, or security. They’ll put you in prison. Never lie to me. I’ll put you in the hospital.” The security concern specifically was that a vulnerability — a drinking problem, a drug habit, a gambling debt — could become a lever for a foreign intelligence service: “I need 50 grand right now, and I can make it right for you.”^[165]

He carried weapons constantly: a 9mm Glock in a fanny pack at his waist, a snub-nose .38 revolver on his ankle, and a buck knife in his back pocket, with two spare Glock magazines in the fanny pack — 47 rounds in all — and his boss gave him the Smith & Wesson buck knife on his first day, telling him it was “just in case things go to shit”; Kiriakou still carries it, 27 years later.^{[166][167][168][169]} He carried them everywhere, including to church — describing asking God to forgive him for bringing weapons to church, but he was literally never without them.^[166] He drove a fully armored BMW 540 — the first 540 in Greece, requiring its 5-liter engine to carry the weight of the armor; it could not be insured locally and had to be covered through a German company.^[170] Gust Avrakotos, a mentor and father figure, worked with him on the 17 November task force; when Kiriakou offhandedly said a previous 17 November victim — the chief of the Hellenic National Police — had been a torturer, Avrakotos grabbed him by the lapels and slammed him against the wall: “Mylonas was my friend.” Kiriakou told him to get his hands off him “or I’m going to make you very sorry.” Avrakotos let go and later said: “I really respect you for the way you reacted.” They were friends after that.^[171][172]

On an early visit to the Greek Intelligence Service, its chief — a four-star general — told him “no Greek would ever wear shoes like that. Those are American shoes,” prompting Kiriakou to buy Greek shoes to better blend in among informants; he was later told his spoken Greek carries an Australian-sounding accent rather than American, and that his American accent in Greek has grown stronger with age.^[173][174]

Housing and the Kifisia house

The Athens embassy’s housing officer failed for weeks to find the family adequate housing, initially offering the house on Deliyanni Street where CIA station chief Richard Welch had been assassinated — which Kiriakou refused outright — before leaving him in a too-small two-bedroom apartment.^[175][176] Kiriakou found and negotiated a five-bedroom house himself, in the northern Athens suburb of Kifisia — about 10 degrees cooler than central Athens — with a small yard containing five fruit trees, including a roughly 200-year-old olive tree.^[177] A local olive-oil company pressed the homeowners’ olives into oil for a fee, or took the olives outright in exchange for 25% of the pressed oil; the family used oil from their own tree for cooking throughout their two years in Athens.^[178] Kiriakou once ate roughly 200 small plums from the yard’s tree in a single day while Joanne was away on the island of Chios, competing for the fallen fruit with a resident “Attic tortoise,” a species common around Athens.^[179] Joanne separately inherited her grandmother’s 600-year-old stone house on Chios, which had originally formed part of the defensive wall built around the village to protect against Turkish raids.^[180]

His regular Greek-side contact was a brigadier general in the Greek National Intelligence Service (NIS). The man disliked Americans generally and Greek Americans in particular, considering them traitors and ideologically reactionary; this was during the Pasok socialist government and the general was a committed ideological partisan. His practice: wait for an American holiday when the embassy was closed, then call Kiriakou to report a terrorist passing through the airport, forcing him to go do surveillance and wreck his day.^{[181][182][183]}

His first recruitment was an elderly former defense attaché of an unnamed enemy country who had witnessed the 1975 assassination of CIA Athens station chief Richard Welch and was never interviewed at the time because of his country of origin. Twenty-five years later, Kiriakou tracked him to his bank night-watchman job, knocked on the door, and introduced himself with his real name: “I’m John Kiriakou from the CIA and I’m here to change your life.”^[184] The man replied, “My friend, I’ve waited thirty years for this day.”^[185]

His first agent recruitment used the asset acquisition cycle from scratch. Working the 17 November files, he looked specifically for Greeks who had been arrested decades earlier but had refused to talk even to police — reasoning that anyone willing to engage at all, even abusively, showed some capacity to be worked with.^[186] He identified a Greek communist street thug, “George,” arrested by Greek police in the 1970s, tracked him to a neighborhood coffee shop, and obtained his phone number by bribing a waiter with a $50 tip against a roughly $2 bill.^[187] He approached George under the pretext of needing earthquake-related tile repair work after a recent Athens earthquake, paid him roughly $500, and completed the recruitment; in the CIA station’s tradition of announcing new recruitments to applause and a tossed Snickers bar, Kiriakou was the first in his training-class cohort to make one, receiving the first “Snickers bar.”^[188][189]

He recruited a separate, highly sensitive source inside a terrorist group whom he could only meet on Greece’s west coast — a roughly three-and-a-half-hour drive he covered with wine-country tourism as cover, driving at speeds of 105 mph.^[190]

Bill Clinton’s visit and cover blown at the Intercontinental

Kiriakou served as the notetaker in Bill Clinton’s meeting with the leader of the Greek opposition (who became prime minister shortly after). Present: Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, the Ambassador, and the Greek delegation. Clinton came to Kiriakou specifically: “Would you like something to eat?” Kiriakou declined. Clinton said: “Oh, are you with me? Sorry — I thought you were Greek.” Kiriakou: “I kind of am, but not really.”^{[1][191][192][193]} After the meeting, Clinton was standing alone near Kiriakou — three feet away — when the elevator opened and Hillary and Chelsea emerged. Hillary had a stone expression. Clinton said: “Boy, we sure had a good time at the Parthenon this morning, didn’t we, Hill?” She stared. He repeated it. She said: “Jesus Christ, Bill. It rained all day. I’ll be in the room.” She walked past. Clinton looked at Kiriakou. Kiriakou caught his eye. Clinton said: “Let’s get the fuck out of here” and walked to the elevator.^{[194][195][196][197][198]}

A month after the Clinton meeting, Kiriakou met his most trusted Greek agent at the Intercontinental Hotel under alias. The same room service waiter who had catered Clinton’s buffet appeared at the door and recognized him. The agent saved the moment: “Some nephew I have — I come all the way from Chicago and he makes me stay in a hotel.” Kiriakou: “They can never meet in this hotel again.” Agent: “Clearly.”^{[199][200][201]}

The bubble-gum bet

A CIA colleague nicknamed “Bill” won a roughly 350-euro betting pot from a group of Greek intelligence officers during a drunken night out by shooting a piece of bubble gum, stuck to the center of a paper target, off the target — over his own shoulder, with the gun held upside down. Bill afterward revealed he had been a member of the 1984 U.S. Olympic shooting team, a fact none of the Greeks had known when they bet against him.^[202]

The motorcyclist

While moving to a new house in Athens, Kiriakou was driving his armored BMW with a large television in the back seat. A motorcyclist was staying in his blind spot — speeding up when Kiriakou sped up, slowing down when he slowed. At a major intersection he put the car in park, pulled his gun, got out, and said: “What do you want, you son of a bitch?” The motorcyclist smiled: “I’m not afraid of your gun.” The light turned green; Kiriakou got back in and drove away. The motorcyclist got off one shot that nicked the bumper. Investigation concluded it was probably a carjacking attempt — the motorcyclist had seen the television and was waiting to follow him somewhere isolated.^{[203][204][205][206][207]}

In a fuller retelling, Kiriakou dates the incident to about two months after the family moved into the Kifisia house — placing his Athens tour’s start around 1998 — and says he had just bought a 50-inch television, notable for its size at the time, from an Athens electronics store, and it was sitting on the back seat of his car during the move.^[208] Joanne, driving ahead with the children, first alerted him by phone that she was being followed; the motorcyclist then fell in behind Kiriakou instead, and Kiriakou attempted to ram him with the car, reasoning it had to be 17 November.^[209] Stopped in traffic near the country’s largest hospital, the motorcyclist approached the car saying, in Greek, “I’m not afraid of your gun,” and grabbed for Kiriakou’s drawn pistol before Kiriakou chambered a round; the man produced his own weapon and fired, missing.^[210] A Greek police investigation concluded it was an attempted carjacking — the motorcycle’s plate was stolen — targeting his BMW and the visible television rather than a targeted terrorist attack; the assailant had no idea Kiriakou was a CIA officer or that his car was armored.^[211] While no one at the Athens embassy questioned his conduct afterward, colleagues back in Washington asked whether he could have avoided pulling his gun, and some began to describe him as “a hothead” — a label Kiriakou says reinforced rather than caused his operational paranoia, deepened further by the fact that 17 November had, at that point, never been caught or even successfully identified.^[212][213]

The morning his first marriage ended

Kiriakou’s first wife, Joanne — a first-generation Greek-American ballet teacher with no CIA clearance — had accompanied him to the Athens posting with their two children, then ages six and three.^[214] In April 2000, one morning while shaving, Kiriakou’s six-year-old son — sitting on the bathroom floor watching him — volunteered: “I told Mommy she shouldn’t kiss Uncle Stelios on the lips. She should only kiss you on the lips, and she told me to mind my own business.” Kiriakou described the sensation as being electrocuted. He wiped off the shaving cream, went to the bedroom where Joanne was sleeping, and kicked the bed. When he asked who Stelios was, she said: “Don’t believe everything a six-year-old says.” He told her he was leaving before he did something he would regret for the rest of his life, got in his fully armored BMW 540 with two firearms, and drove to work.^{[215][216][217][218]}

That afternoon, Joanne began calling repeatedly. He let it go to voicemail. Eventually his secretary came in: Joanne had been in a car accident. A driver five cars behind her, impatient in the Greek manner, had T-boned her as she made a left turn, pushing the car onto the sidewalk and demolishing it, both children inside; she broke her wrist.^{[219][220][221]} At the scene, the driver became agitated and called Joanne a whore in Greek. Kiriakou beat him unconscious in the street and, by his own account, broke his own hand doing it — the injury required surgery that night and a follow-up surgery back in the U.S., and he says he still carries a titanium plate with two screws in the hand and has not regained full use of it.^[222][223] He noted: “Any other day I would have let it go.” He was arrested at the scene, invoked diplomatic immunity, and was held briefly — the cell door left open, his guns returned. It is a crime in Greece to call another man’s wife a whore, and the police captain, on establishing that the driver had done so, charged him separately from the assault.^{[224][225][226]} Kiriakou asked that the charges against the driver be dropped given the circumstances. The driver later filed a civil lawsuit; it was thrown out due to Kiriakou’s diplomatic immunity. He described it as the only fight of his entire life.^[227][228]

The Athens ambassador initially moved to expel Kiriakou over the fight, but the station chief negotiated a 24-hour wait to see whether it made the Greek newspapers; when it did not appear anywhere the next morning, Kiriakou was allowed to stay.^[229] His division chief nonetheless told him by classified email that he would spend about a year in an informal “penalty box” — no promotions, no advancement — following the blown cover and the altercation, though with no permanent harm to his career.^[230] When Kiriakou told his mother in Rhodes that he and Joanne were divorcing, her first reaction was to ask whether she could call his sister, “because she’s going to be so excited” — Joanne having never been popular with his side of the family.^[231]

Saunders, the manifesto, and the evacuation

In March 2000, Kiriakou’s neighbor Stephen Saunders, the British defense attaché, was assassinated by 17 November. A subsequent 17 November manifesto identified Kiriakou by name as the originally intended target. Within hours, the embassy collected Joanne and the children from school and the family flew home on the noon Delta flight to New York; embassy staff packed and shipped their belongings, including Joanne’s car, which had to be driven into a shipping container.^[232][233] The marriage ended; Kiriakou described his response at the time as “deluded.” At the airport during the evacuation, Joanne told him: “I want a divorce. I can’t do this anymore.”^{[234][235][236]} He divorced her and later married a CIA officer. At JFK, as he flew on to Washington and Joanne and the children continued to Cleveland to stay with her family, she offered her hand to shake; he refused, telling her “don’t insult me like that,” and walked away.^[237]

The divorce and the custody standoff

Kiriakou says Joanne, in the days after he caught her with Stelios, was “fully prepared to end my career” by falsely accusing him of domestic violence — which would have cost him his firearms authorization and, with it, his operations career — but she never followed through with the CIA’s internal reporting office.^[238] Kiriakou and Joanne separated as they left Athens in August 2000; the divorce was finalized in summer 2002, and around that time he began dating, then moved in with, a CIA analyst he refers to elsewhere as “Catherine,” whom he calls the most brilliant person he ever met.^[239] After the separation he drove from Washington to Ohio every other weekend for the next eleven years to see his two sons, missing none except during his post-9/11 Pakistan posting, at a total cost he estimates at $250,000 and three cars — putting more than half a million miles on those three successive cars over the eleven years.^[233][240] Joanne did not file for divorce for some time; Kiriakou calculated child support by dividing his salary across 26 pay periods and began sending Joanne that amount immediately, landing within $25 of the figure the court later calculated independently — which the judge said was unprecedented in her experience.^[241] He eventually pressured her into filing by sending a note on Tiffany & Co. stationery informing her he was cutting her child support in half effective immediately; she filed for divorce the next day.^[242] Kiriakou also took Joanne to court over a related custody-transfer dispute — she required him to drive past his own parents’ Newcastle, Pennsylvania home to Warren, Ohio and back, adding ninety minutes to his trip; a judge ruled in his favor and ordered Joanne to deliver the children to his parents’ house instead.^[243]

In the summer of 2001, preparing to take his sons to Disney World, Kiriakou’s mother called from Joanne’s parents’ house in Ohio to report the house looked abandoned for weeks; Kiriakou concluded Joanne had taken the boys and disappeared, and was so distressed on the drive to his parents’ house that he had to pull over twice to vomit from stress.^[244][245] He used his CIA surveillance training to locate the boys, staking out four or five likely hiding places daily and finding Joanne’s car, on the fifth day, at her mother’s best friend’s house.^[246] He then walked into his childhood Greek Orthodox church during Sunday liturgy, waited until the congregation knelt for communion, and took his eight-year-old son Chris from the front pew where Joanne and her parents were sitting.^[247] Chris, who panicked and stared at him “like he had seen a ghost,” had been told by Joanne that his father had been killed in a car accident.^[248] Joanne’s mother subsequently told police that Kiriakou had shouted a threat of violence to the entire congregation while taking his son — a felony charge of aggravated menacing that was dropped before trial.^[249] The dispute was ultimately resolved when Kiriakou’s father drove to the Stateline Diner on the Pennsylvania–Ohio border to receive his younger son, Constantine, from Joanne’s father — an exchange Kiriakou compares to the prisoner exchanges in Bridge of Spies.^[250]

Counterterrorism training of foreign services (2000–2001)

Kiriakou returned to the United States from Athens in August 2000. Between that posting and the September 11 attacks, his assignment was training foreign intelligence services worldwide in counterterrorism operations.^[251] Because of his Arabic and Middle East field experience, he handled all Middle Eastern services. The curriculum included entry procedures (busting down doors, placing charges on doors), weeks of surveillance and counter-surveillance, and counterterrorism operational tactics.^[252][253]

He described Jordan’s intelligence service as arguably the best or second-best in the Middle East at the operational level. The structural reason: fifty percent of Jordan’s population is Palestinian refugees or their descendants — Jordanian citizens carry green passports, Palestinians black — and in 1968 the Palestinian group Black September attempted to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy and came close enough to be fighting on the palace steps. The Jordanians built a world-class service simply to survive, trained by the CIA, MOSSAD, and the Saudis.^{[254][255][256][257][258]} At a joint training event at a rural U.S. facility, a Jordanian captain spotted a deer walking past, called it a gazelle, said it looked tasty — and within five minutes the deer had been shot and a pot of venison stew was being made: “I didn’t think I was going to be skinning a deer today as part of work.”^{[259][260][261]} During the same event a group of Jordanians were confused by auto-flush toilets; a Jordanian colonel stood in front of the urinal pressing the pipe, punching it, then standing with his trousers open unable to understand why it wasn’t flushing. Kiriakou explained you just walk away. The colonel’s response: “You Americans, you’re so advanced. How does it know you’re not there anymore?”^[262][263]

September 11, 2001

Two months before the attacks, on July 6, 2001, CIA Counterterrorism Director Cofer Black appeared unannounced before a visiting Middle Eastern delegation with a warning. Black said the CIA was intercepting code words from al-Qaeda training camps indicating an imminent massive attack: “The honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey.” “There’s going to be a huge wedding.” “There’s going to be a huge football game.” Most tellingly: “Camp commanders are on the phone with their students, crying and telling them, ‘I’ll see you in paradise.’” Black ended by begging the delegation: “If you have any sources inside al-Qaeda, please help us.” At day’s end, Kiriakou went to Black’s office and asked if the briefing had been a performance for the visitors or a genuine alarm. Black said: “I was deadly serious. Something terrible is going to happen.”^{[264][265][266][267]}

Kiriakou had a 9:00 a.m. White House meeting scheduled for September 11 with Condoleezza Rice — about an obscure Government Printing Office publication, Foreign Policy of the United States, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, 1949–1967, whose thousand-page volume contained the names of three surviving former CIA sources. Rather than relocate three hundred-year-old men, the plan was to ask Rice to pull three pages from the volume.^{[268][269][270]} When Kiriakou arrived at Cofer Black’s office at 8:30 to say the car was waiting, his secretary had the TV on and one tower was burning. Just as he remarked it was impossible not to see the tower in the clear weather, the second plane hit. The secretary said: “Did you see that or did I imagine it?” Kiriakou ran to his office: “Guys — two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center. I think we’re under attack.”^[271][272]

CIA headquarters was ordered to evacuate twice before anyone actually left. It took Kiriakou two hours to exit his parking space and another two to travel three and a half of the seven miles to his apartment. He abandoned his car and walked, the Pentagon burning in view. At the head of the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge — where he would normally turn for his apartment — he saw the Deputy National Security Adviser running barefoot: “He’s the guy who’s supposed to be protecting us today, and he was so frightened he ran from the White House with no shoes.” He began crying: “I kept saying to myself, ‘How could this happen? How could this happen?’”^{[273][274][275][276][277][278]}

He reached his apartment where his girlfriend — later his wife, also a CIA officer — was waiting. They went to the roof and watched the Pentagon burn, then walked to find a blood mobile and were told the line was twenty-four hours long. He said to her: “We’ve got to get back to work. This is ridiculous.” They walked three and a half miles back to his car, drove across the median, and returned to headquarters. He didn’t leave for four days, sleeping under his desk; they used bolt cutters to cut the chain on the cafeteria doors, took all the food, cooked it, and laid it out on tables in the hallway. The agency later wrote the Marriott a check for $10,000–15,000: “we stripped the place.”^{[278][279][280][281][282][283]} He volunteered repeatedly to go to Afghanistan; frustrated at being kept on low-level “name traces” work while colleagues deployed, he ultimately forced the assignment by telling the deputy director of the Counterterrorism Center he would quit the CIA for Exxon if not sent — the deputy director assigned him chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan starting the next day.^[284][285]

Cofer Black — whom Kiriakou called “a god inside the CIA” who took 9/11 as a personal failing to atone for, contrasted with his “psychopathic, murderous” successor Jose Rodriguez — rose from his desk when Kiriakou left for Pakistan, shook his hand, and whispered: “Kill them all.” Kiriakou: “Really? Are we really there already?”^{[286][287][288]} Earlier, Black had told President Bush, when asked how long Afghanistan would take: “Within a matter of weeks, flies will be walking on the eyeballs of your enemies, Mr. President.”^[289]

Pakistan and Abu Zubaydah (2001–2002)

Kiriakou led the CIA’s counterterrorism efforts in Pakistan, where in March 2002 his team captured Abu Zubaydah, then believed to be a senior al-Qaeda figure.^[290][291] Kiriakou personally drafted the standard operating procedure for CIA raids on al-Qaeda safe houses in Pakistan, and ordered roughly $50,000 in tactical equipment — charged to his CIA credit card — from galls.com, a police-supply website based in Kentucky, which arrived a week later via diplomatic pouch.^[292] His first raid using that equipment captured two 19-year-old Tunisians who broke down crying and were taken to Rawalpindi jail.^[293] A subsequent raid, working off a tip passed to him at lunch, captured a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad — the group that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and which merged with al-Qaeda in 1995.^[294] During the wounded Abu Zubaydah’s medical treatment and transport, Kiriakou wore a red t-shirt printed with SpongeBob SquarePants, a gift from his children; he kept the blood-stained shirt afterward, sealing it in a plastic bag and taking it home because he believed it might be historically significant.^[295] CIA overseas pay layered post differential, danger pay, and language pay; his first station chief, when he had once complained about his salary, had said: “There are a lot of GS-15 millionaires walking the halls.” In only eight months in Pakistan — with all the additional pay — Kiriakou came home and bought a house.^{[296][297][298]} He separately describes routinely working 110–120 hours per two-week pay period against an 80-hour cap while in Pakistan, plus danger pay, post differential, Arabic differential, and Greek differential, joking that his paychecks had to be delivered “in a wheelbarrow.”^[299]

After returning from Islamabad, Kiriakou was named chief of the counterintelligence branch of Alec Station (the Osama bin Laden unit), a job he privately called “chief of the walk-in branch,” since much of the work involved screening al-Qaeda sympathizers who came to U.S. embassies pretending to offer intelligence while really casing embassy security.^[300]

The seven old-timers and CIA marriage culture

Seven retired senior CIA officers had volunteered to come back as contractors after 9/11 for purely patriotic reasons. All were Senior Intelligence Service-level; most had been at least Director of Near Eastern Operations; one had been Deputy Director. Because they were contractors they couldn’t hold management positions — so they worked for Kiriakou, then in his early thirties. He described learning more from them in six months than from the rest of his career combined. Kiriakou had been using the embassy’s trunk line — a Washington 202 area code phone — to call a CIA officer he was dating each morning, reaching her in the previous evening in Washington. When a colleague overheard him say “love you, mwah” and asked about wedding bells, Kiriakou demurred: “I don’t know. I just got divorced, and I really don’t want to be a two-time loser.” The colleague — a former chief of Near Eastern operations — polled the branch: “I’ve been married four times. Jim, how many times have you been married? Five for me. Bill — four. Dave — three. Two-time loser? Welcome to the CIA, kid.”^{[301][302][303][304][305][306][307][308]} Kiriakou: “The CIA has the highest divorce rate in all of government because you are trained to lie and you lie all day every day and a lot of guys can’t turn it off when they go home at night.”

EIT refusal and the French DGSE pitch

In the first week of May 2002, two months after the capture of Abu Zubaydah, Kiriakou was personally offered certification in the enhanced interrogation techniques and refused. The offer took the form of a hallway conversation in the CIA cafeteria, in which a friend from the Counterterrorism Center listed ten techniques and represented that “the President approved it and the Justice Department approved it.” After consulting a senior officer on the seventh floor — who advised him “this is a torture program … somebody’s going to go overboard, and they’re going to kill a prisoner … you want to go to prison?” — Kiriakou declined. In total, fourteen CIA officers were offered EIT certification; two initially declined, one subsequently changed his mind, and Kiriakou was the only one in the end who refused.^{[309][310][311]}

Refusing cost him a promotion. He went to the deputy director of the Counterterrorism Center’s office — an old friend — and said: “Damn it, what do I have to do to get promoted around here? I just caught the number three of al-Qaeda with these two hands, and I get passed over for promotion. What — do I have to catch Bin Laden to get promoted around here?” The senior officer he had consulted on the seventh floor — the one who had advised him to refuse — promoted him out of cycle, calling the situation “a travesty.” A friend on his promotion panel later told him that the chief of counterterrorism had characterized his refusal as a “shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism.”^[312][313]

He was leaving Pakistan for a vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico when a cable from headquarters redirected him to break into an apartment in a third country and plant a bug; the vacation was rescheduled by a month.^[314] During his Pakistan posting Kiriakou conducted near-daily liaison meetings with foreign intelligence services. In one notable instance an officer of the French foreign intelligence service attempted to conduct a covert-recruitment pickup on Kiriakou himself — arranging a residential-corner meet rather than a public venue and instructing Kiriakou to “get in” a car pulling up to him. Kiriakou refused the maneuver on the spot: “You’re not using tradecraft on me.”^[315][316]

Cofer Black later visited Pakistan with Jose Rodriguez, with Kiriakou as their control officer. Black’s affection for the Pakistani-English idiom was on display: when Pakistani officers described an uproar as “a great human cry,” Black would gleefully press them — “Are you saying there was a great hue AND cry? Not just the hue?” — to their confusion. Kiriakou also showed Black a high-value prisoner chained up in a shared safe-house bedroom, too dangerous to place in the general jail.^{[317][318][319]}

Asset relationships and the bear-hug pat-down

Kiriakou described the genuine emotional bonds with assets. One asset cried and gave him a big hug when he left the country. Another regularly brought him thoughtful gifts (a used-bookstore book on Diego Rivera after Kiriakou mentioned liking him). But with a bonafide terrorist asset who bragged about his attacks, the “big hug” served a second purpose: patting the man down to make sure he wasn’t carrying a gun to shoot Kiriakou mid-meeting. He was always armed in those meetings.^{[320][321][322]} Asked why a case officer rather than Ground Branch or JSOC was tasked with taking down al-Qaeda safe houses, Kiriakou explained: “The Ground Branch guys only know how to kill people. The idea was to take people alive.”^{[323][324][325]}

He also described the rank-and-file fighters captured. They were universally illiterate, from isolated villages in their home countries, with no job prospects. The local imam would approach them: “Go to Afghanistan and make jihad against the Americans. We’ll give you $300 a month, and if you’re martyred, we’ll give your parents $500 as a martyrdom bonus.” They could not find the United States on a map. “These were children.” At the higher command level, motivation was different: Osama bin Laden personally objected to the establishment of US military bases in Saudi Arabia; other al-Qaeda leadership objected to America’s staunchly pro-Israel foreign policy.^{[326][327][328]}

The first Jordanian prisoner

The very first prisoner Kiriakou interrogated in Pakistan in early 2002 was a Jordanian who had survived Tora Bora and the American bombing, blood squirting from his ears from the blast. He answered every question truthfully; asked why, he said: “I’m your prisoner. What good would it do me to lie to you? I know you already knew the answers.” Then he turned to Kiriakou: “I assume you’re Christian… I would like to invite you into the embrace of Islam. I’ll be your godfather.” Kiriakou thanked him and declined.^{[329][330][331]}

The Tora Bora survivor at the coffee shop

For an operation requiring deeper cover, Kiriakou grew a long bushy beard and wore shalwar kameez to blend in. He identified a group of mid-level al-Qaeda operatives who visited the same Arab coffee shop every day at 10:00 a.m., and began arriving at 9:30 with an Arabic-language newspaper to sit alone. For weeks neither he nor the targets made contact. Gradually, a single man in the group began to nod. Eventually: “Salam.” Then conversation.^{[332][333][334]}

The man was from Egypt. His wife and nine-year-old daughter were in Cairo. He had a five-year-old son he had never met — his wife was pregnant when he left to make jihad. He wanted to go home. He had been hiding in a cave at Tora Bora when the U.S. fired a cruise missile directly into it; he was one of two survivors. He described the explosion as the most hideous sound he had ever heard. When he came out, his ears were bleeding. He just wanted to go home.^{[335][336][337][338]} Kiriakou told him: “I wasn’t completely honest with you. I’m actually not Lebanese. I’m actually American. More than that — I’m an American CIA officer.” The man did not run. He said: “I’m willing to listen.” Kiriakou arranged an Egyptian passport, a flight home, and a substantial cash payment. At the airport, Kiriakou asked: “Why did you allow me to recruit you?” The man’s answer: “Because I’ve been here five years and you’re the only person who ever asked me about my family.”^{[338][339][340][341][342]}

Guantanamo Bay (interim assignment, summer 2002)

Following his Pakistan tour and the capture of Abu Zubaydah, Kiriakou — “a big star after Abu Zubaydah” — was approached by a senior agency official with an offer to fill in as interim Chief of the CIA station at Guantanamo Bay until a permanent Chief was named. Kiriakou had never previously been to Cuba and accepted on that basis. The posting took place during the summer of 2002, between his Pakistan and subsequent assignments.^[343]

On the strength of the Abu Zubaydah capture, Kiriakou was promoted to executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations.^[344][345] On his first day in the job the deputy director told him he could not be briefed on anything until he had gone to the Office of Security and signed his secrecy agreements; the office had six separate classified contracts prepared for him, each barring him from ever revealing what he was about to be read into.^[346] His final tour was as counterterrorism officer at the United Nations Security Council in New York, after which he resigned to enter the private sector, later returning to government as chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.^[345]

Iraq 2003 and leaving the CIA

Kiriakou served as personal notetaker for CIA Director George Tenet at the Principals Committee meeting on the eve of the Iraq invasion in February 2003, seated directly behind Tenet as the sole additional CIA presence in the room.^[347][348] In a separate pre-invasion Iraq briefing that same year, an unnamed CIA meteorologist with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Penn State told Tenet the skies would clear over Baghdad with no sandstorm risk — an episode Kiriakou cites as illustrating the sheer breadth of in-house CIA expertise: “We can do everything here.”^[349] Kiriakou identified the 2003 invasion as the point at which his worldview fundamentally changed: everyone at the CIA knew the Iraqi government had nothing to do with 9/11, and that the weapons-of-mass-destruction justification was a lie being fed to the American people. CIA officers were “practically killing each other” over the assessment — the Department of Energy said chemical weapons existed; the CIA said they did not. They did not exist: “We knew there were none.”^[350][351] He had entered the agency believing clearly in a world of good guys and bad guys where the United States was unambiguously the good guys; that clarity, he said, does not survive experience: “Life is not that clear-cut. It’s not that simple.”^{[352][353][354]}

Kiriakou left the CIA in 2004. He has said he resigned at the very top of his game rather than being marginalized — the departure was driven by his divorce and a wish to spend more time with his children, not by any career setback.^[355]

Post-CIA career

Private intelligence consulting (2004–2009)

Following his CIA departure, Kiriakou worked in private intelligence — applying the same operational and analytical skills he had used at the agency, with the constraint that he could not use classified information. Three engagements from this period are publicly documented:

• A Cypriot billionaire engagement: the subject’s only daughter was engaged to a London-based Greek-Cypriot man Kiriakou identified, over six weeks of work, as a drug-smuggling embezzler.^[356][357]
• A Romanian silver-mine engagement: Kiriakou predicted a Romanian municipal election outcome on behalf of a mining company that needed the village atop the mine to be relocated rather than blocked. Data source: connection requests to every Orthodox Christian in Romania on LinkedIn.^[358][359]
• An Omani oil-field engagement: brokered with the Omani government a military operation to clear al-Qaeda from a 99-year-lease oil field on the Yemen border.^[360][361]

The work was facilitated by office space and a part-time secretary provided to Kiriakou by Mack McLarty, the former White House Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton, at his firm McLarty Associates (then Kissinger McLarty).^[362]

Kiriakou also took a 2008 contract from professional propagandist John Rendon — at $25,000 for four op-eds — to rehabilitate the U.S. press reputation of Indonesian general Joko Widodo, banned from the United States for personally killing six pro-democracy student protesters. No newspaper published the op-eds.^[363][364]

Senate Foreign Relations Committee (2009)

Kiriakou served in 2009 as the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under chairman John Kerry. Kerry had personally recruited him to reactivate the committee’s long-dormant investigative function, last operative in 1972.^[365][366]

In the SFRC role, Kiriakou:

• Traveled to Yemen as part of the embassy-closure process, encountering Deputy CIA Director Steve Kappes in the Sanaa Marriott lobby.^[367][368]
• Toured the Dubai government’s underground CCTV operations facility, built by Siemens, with full-country coverage.^[369][370]
• Attempted the reopening of the Dasht-i-Leili massacre investigation promised by Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign — an effort that resulted in a top-secret-classified “go fuck yourself” non-response from the CIA and Kerry’s subsequent refusal to take the story to the Washington Post.^[371][372]

Decision to go public (2007)

Kiriakou kept silent for approximately five and a half years after learning of the CIA torture program, having resigned from the agency two years after discovering it. He believed enough more directly involved people were objecting and that the program would be stopped from within. CIA physicians from the Office of Medical Services had reportedly invoked the Hippocratic oath in protest. When the program was finally shut down in 2006, Kiriakou attributed the decision to internal CIA leadership under Director Porter Goss, who concluded the program was producing no actionable value.^[373][374]

The trigger came in a two-day sequence of statements from President George W. Bush. On a Wednesday, Bush looked directly into the camera at a press conference and stated, “We do not torture.” Kiriakou, watching with his wife — also a senior CIA officer — said: “He is just lying to the American people.”^[375] Two days later, leaving the White House for Camp David, Bush stopped to tell a reporter that if there was torture it was the work of a rogue CIA officer. Kiriakou understood this as the agency preparing to blame him specifically — he had been the only officer to object internally and had already been passed over for promotion for doing so. He told his wife: “Brian Ross’s source is at the White House and they’re going to pin this on me.” He called ABC News journalist Brian Ross immediately and agreed to an interview, deciding to answer every question truthfully: “I decided to defend myself.”^{[376][377][378][379]}

He had expected the December 2007 interview to be a one-day story. The CIA’s response — continuing to leak to the Washington Post, forcing Kiriakou to respond publicly again and again — extended it. When the agency escorted a female friend of his out of the White House, suspended her clearance, and told her never to come back, Kiriakou concluded they were attempting to ruin people around him and resolved to keep speaking.^[380] Looking back, Kiriakou has said the one thing he would have done differently was to retain an attorney before speaking publicly. He gave approximately fifty follow-up interviews, each pushing closer to classified material. The original disclosure was correct and necessary — “somebody had to say something. We were committing a war crime, a crime against humanity” — but managing the aftermath without professional guidance was a mistake.^[381] He has since generalized this into advice for potential whistleblowers: secure an attorney before taking any action, emphasizing the importance of proactive legal protection.^[382] A New York Times journalist later told Kiriakou that on the day of his arrest, every one of the paper’s national-security sources went silent, and stayed silent for six months — which Kiriakou believes was the actual point of his prosecution and those of other whistleblowers.^[383] He has said the prosecution inadvertently made him famous, elevating him to a role as a national spokesman on human rights and anti-torture issues and opening doors he otherwise would not have had.^[384]

The Japanese-diplomat sting and the covert-operative disclosure

From the December 2007 ABC News interview through his arrest in January 2012, three separate FBI surveillance teams were assigned to Kiriakou simultaneously; his phone calls and emails were also being intercepted. He had no knowledge of any of this for three years.^[385][386] The FBI investigation was officially closed in December 2008 — his attorneys received a declination letter stating DOJ was declining to prosecute. Three weeks later Barack Obama became president and, at the urging of John Brennan — a former boss of Kiriakou’s who had become the number two at the National Security Council — Obama asked Eric Holder at the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case.^[387][386] Kiriakou has noted the irony that he had volunteered on Obama’s 2008 campaign and taken his own children to the inauguration before that same administration indicted him — the sixth of eight whistleblowers charged under the Espionage Act during Obama’s presidency.^[388]

In approximately 2011, while Kiriakou was working as chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the number-three official at the Japanese Embassy called and invited him to lunch. The man’s English was so poor they spoke only in Arabic. At the end of the meal he offered to pay Kiriakou for information: “If you give me information, I can give you money.” Kiriakou refused, threw twenty-five dollars on the table, walked out, and went directly to the Senate Security Officer to report the contact. He was asked to call the diplomat back and have additional meetings — he did, five total. (The diplomat was subsequently promoted to deputy ambassador in Cairo.)^{[389][390][391][392][393][394]} Among the 15,000 pages of classified discovery later received, Kiriakou found a memo from the diplomat — who, it turned out, had never been a Japanese diplomat — to Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who later placed him under arrest, recommending the operation be closed: “He’s clearly not going to take the bait.” The entire operation had been an FBI sting to develop a real espionage charge. His lead attorney Plato Cacheris told him: “Because they have a shit case and they know it’s shit and that’s why we’re going to trial.”^{[395][396][397]}

The actual disclosure that led to conviction came through a different chain. A journalist named Matthew Cole contacted Kiriakou claiming to be writing a book on the Abu Omar rendition. Cole showed him a cover mockup and a list of names, asking him to identify any contacts. Kiriakou said he knew none of them. Cole then referenced a name from Kiriakou’s first published book, said he thought the individual’s name was John, and Kiriakou confirmed the surname. That was the crime.^[398][399] Kiriakou did not know the officer was still active under cover; he believed him retired. What Cole did not disclose: there was no Abu Omar book. Cole was secretly working as an investigator for Guantanamo defense attorneys. He passed the name to Human Rights Watch, which passed it to the attorneys, who filed a classified motion asking a judge to order the officer to sit for a deposition. The judge recognized the name as classified, turned it over to the FBI, who traced it back to Kiriakou.^{[400][401][402]} At the same time, David Petraeus confirmed the names of ten covert operatives to his girlfriend, CIA Director Leon Panetta publicly identified the six Navy SEALs on the bin Laden raid, and a disgruntled former officer outed seven more operatives on his personal website. None were charged. When Kiriakou asked his attorney why, the reply was: because they didn’t blow the whistle on the torture program and embarrass the agency.

Arrest, charges, and the plea

On January 12, 2012 — nine months after Kiriakou had left the Senate — two FBI agents (one of whom Kiriakou would later identify as Peter Strzok) summoned him to the Washington Field Office under the pretext that they needed his help on a similar matter. The phone words “anything for the FBI” — which he gave before learning the meeting was an interrogation — were later deployed by the prosecution as evidence of cooperation. The agents revealed mid-meeting: “We know you’ve been giving information to the Guantanamo defense attorneys. … And we’re raiding your house right now as we speak.” At the conclusion of the interview Strzok asked the lead interviewing agent: “Did he implicate himself?” and then physically placed handcuffs on Kiriakou. Twenty-two FBI agents simultaneously raided his home; his wife Heather, a CIA officer herself, was present with their infant son (Kiriakou has given the boy’s age at the time as both two and three months) and managed the scene alone for five to six hours, the agents confiscating her cell phone, his and his mother’s laptops, thumb drives, a binder of his business cards, and his desk calendar. Kiriakou says he “felt very, very violated.”^{[403][404][405][406][407][408][409]} Kiriakou’s request to speak to his attorney prevented his on-the-spot arrest; the case was thereafter conducted as an Espionage Act prosecution under the personal direction of John Brennan. Heather was fired from the CIA the same day; the sole stated reason was that she was married to him. Kiriakou noted the irony that the CIA actively encourages agency romances because both partners hold clearances and can discuss work.^[410][411] That night Kiriakou told his wife he was going to kill himself; his actual plan was to go to the garage, start the car, and lie on the back seat to “let it finish me,” but she sensed something was wrong and insisted he come upstairs instead — he was not yet ready but relented.^{[412][413][414]} His brother called the next day to tell him this would turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to him — a claim Kiriakou says took him fourteen years to accept as true.^{[415][416][417]} His then-wife separately advised him to keep talking publicly, reasoning that the government would eventually move on to its next target — which it did, to Edward Snowden — so that his own account would become “the side of record.”^[418]

Among the 15,000 pages of classified discovery material he later received, Kiriakou found three internal memos. One was from John Brennan to Attorney General Eric Holder instructing him to charge Kiriakou with espionage. Holder wrote back that his people did not believe Kiriakou had committed espionage. Brennan wrote again: “Charge him anyway and make him defend himself.”^[419][420] Tom Tillman, the former U.S. attorney for Utah during Trump’s first term, later described the Kiriakou case as “the template for the Democratic Party’s policy of lawfare” — his exact words. Kiriakou’s own characterization: “This is a guy that I think was testing lawfare on me. He ruined me. I went bankrupt. I lost my wife and kids. I lost my job. I lost my freedom for two years. And they said, ‘Ha, it works.’ And then they went after Donald Trump” — first General Flynn, then Manafort, then the president himself.^{[421][422][423]}

Kiriakou had separately produced an unwelcome career intelligence-community assessment concluding there was no Russian interference in the 2016 election. President Obama, unhappy with the assessment, met with John Brennan, James Clapper, and Joe Biden to demand a different one. The result was the National Intelligence Assessment that served as the genesis of the Russia-collusion narrative. A Hollywood studio subsequently dropped Kiriakou from a project for being on “the wrong side of the Russia gate issue.”^[424][425] Kiriakou has separately called Brennan a criminal outright.^[426]

Kiriakou was initially charged with five felonies: three counts of espionage, one count of making a false statement, and one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. He had not committed espionage and the government knew it. Prosecutors waited until he had filed for bankruptcy, then dropped the espionage charges, then threatened to add a conspiracy charge and a second false-statement count.^[427][428] Kiriakou says he went personally bankrupt under $1,150,000 in legal fees the same week the three espionage charges and the false-statement charge were dropped.^[429]

Kiriakou retained an eleven-attorney defense team led by Plato Cacheris, with Mark McDougall and Bob Trout as principal co-counsel, at a total cost of approximately $1.2 million.^[430][431] The initial Justice Department offer was a plea to one espionage charge with thirty years in prison, framed as: “Take this deal, Mr. Kiriakou, and you may live to meet your grandchildren.” Kiriakou declined. Subsequent offers descended unusually — 10 years, then 8, then 5, then 3.5 — a pattern Cacheris characterized as unprecedented in his 52 years at the D.C. criminal bar and as definitive evidence that the government’s case was weak. The federal government wins ninety-eight point two percent of its cases, according to a ProPublica study published during his proceedings; his attorneys’ assessment of his realistic exposure if convicted and sentenced was twelve to eighteen years, probably closer to eighteen. He was advised that going to trial in the Eastern District of Virginia (the “espionage court”) would mean facing a jury drawn from CIA, FBI, DoD, and IC-contractor personnel — by OJ Simpson’s pro-bono jury consultant, who had volunteered his services as the uncle of a close friend of Kiriakou’s and had also worked George Zimmerman’s and William Kennedy Smith’s cases; the consultant told him the case would be a winner anywhere except the Eastern District of Virginia.^{[432][433][434][435][436][437]} He and his wife sat at the dining-room table with a calculator to determine how long the family could survive financially with him in prison, given a realistic 12-to-18-year exposure (with a possible ceiling of 24) against a plea offer of two and a half years.^[438] When first charged, at age 48, Kiriakou faced up to 45 years in prison; he has compared his situation to that of Aaron Swartz, who faced roughly twenty stacked felony charges and died by suicide.^[439]

Kiriakou and his wife stayed up all night discussing the offer and initially decided to reject it and go to trial, reasoning a jury would see how ridiculous the case was; his eleven attorneys — whom the Washington Post had called “legal titans” — rushed to his house at 7:00 a.m. to talk him out of it, led by the eldest, Plato Cacheris.^[440][441] The attorney Kiriakou most liked and respected pulled him aside on the morning he was about to go to trial: “If you were my brother, I would beg you to take this deal.” He said: “This can be a blip in your life — or it can be the defining event of your life. Make it the blip.” That conversation convinced him to accept the plea. He had five children; he could not risk dying in prison.^{[431][442][443]} The final accepted deal was twenty-three months on a reduced charge with all other charges dropped — formally 30 months at FCI Loretto, of which twenty-three were served. Kiriakou has said that if the CIA had simply told him to “shut up” after his first ABC interview, he “probably would have” dropped the matter — but the prosecution that followed instead made civil liberties his life’s work.^[444][445]

Three of his five children were young at the time — ages eight, six, and one. His explanation: “I’ve been in this fight with the FBI, and unfortunately I lost. I’m going to have to move to Pennsylvania for two years and teach bad guys how to get their high school diplomas.” They were sad but accepted it. After a few visits, his eight-year-old son entered the visiting room through a door marked “Inmates Only” and asked what inmate meant. Kiriakou said: “It means prisoner.” The son asked: “So — do you work here or are you a prisoner here?” Kiriakou had to stop and tell him the truth: he was a prisoner, for a complicated reason, because he had done the right thing for the American people but the FBI was angry at him. Of the five children, the eight-year-old was the only one who had significant difficulty with the situation; he received counseling.^{[446][447][448]}

Kiriakou says the media split sharply on how to describe him during this period: MSNBC consistently called him “CIA leaker,” Fox News consistently called him “CIA whistleblower,” and CNN switched from “leaker” to “whistleblower” after anchor Christiane Amanpour objected on air.^[449] He credits attorney Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project — whom he contacted after she was quoted defending him in a Washington Post article — with much of that turnaround, saying her outreach to reporters gradually shifted coverage in his favor as the Justice Department was “leaking like a sieve” to portray him as a dangerous criminal.^[450][451]

Prison (2013–2015)

Kiriakou served twenty-three months of a thirty-month sentence at FCI Loretto. He received no halfway-house placement upon release.^[452] At sentencing, the judge ordered that Kiriakou be sent to a minimum-security work camp — a designation with no fences, no bars, and unlocked doors, where inmates work in town on their own honor not to abscond — but the Justice Department, furious at the order, arbitrarily redirected him instead to the adjacent regular prison, citing his CIA training as making him a “national security threat,” a rationale Kiriakou pointed out was inconsistent with not sending him to a maximum-security penitentiary if he were genuinely so dangerous.^[453] In response, Kiriakou said yes to every media interview request he received; Jake Tapper drove to the prison to interview him for CNN, and he gave multiple interviews to NPR and ABC News, becoming a minor celebrity in the Greek press as a dual U.S.-Greek citizen who had stood up to the American government. He told the warden directly that if he had been sent to the minimum-security camp as originally ordered, he would never have sought out the media at all.^[454] The night before going in, Jose Rodriguez — the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and the man who had said Kiriakou had “displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism” — tweeted at him: “don’t drop the soap haha” with a laughing emoji. Kiriakou gave himself an hour or two to calm down and then tweeted back: “Jose, I am on the right side of history and you are not.”^[455]

During the sentence Kiriakou’s second mortgage was anonymously paid off — a development he learned of through a letter from his bank to his wife. The benefactor was identified only years later as Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, who has subsequently become a personal friend.^[456][457] His CIA pension was confiscated upon conviction — twenty years of government service. “I’m going to have to work till the day I die.”^[458][459] As of a 2015 accounting, he still owed his attorneys $880,000.^[460] Financial hardship became severe enough that the family qualified for food stamps, free milk, a $90 monthly welfare cash payment, additional assistance as a nursing mother, and Medicaid.^[461] His three-year term of supervised release required him to maintain a 40-hour-per-week job — loss of which would send him back to prison — to remain within the Washington, D.C. metro area, and to file monthly financial-disclosure reports documenting even minor purchases.^[462] John McCain subsequently attempted but failed to reverse the pension forfeiture via a 2016 NDAA amendment that died with his brain-tumor diagnosis.^[463][464] Kiriakou wrote Doing Time Like a Spy about the experience — a memoir of applying tradecraft to prison survival — which won multiple awards. He says he wrote five books total while incarcerated, and made extensive use of Freedom of Information Act requests — including filing them on behalf of other inmates — as research material for books about them.^[465]

After prison: surveillance, apologies, and credit

After his release, Kiriakou discovered that the NSA had been intercepting his communications and leaking information from those intercepts to reporters at the New York Times. He learned this when a Times reporter called him and read back the contents of a private conversation.^[466] He also received apology emails from FBI agents who had worked his case — agents who said they had been ordered to build a case against him and felt it was unjust. Two of them called his attorneys to apologize in person, telling them the prosecution was a political case and they were just following orders. Kiriakou’s response: “No hard feelings. Water under the bridge.”^{[467][468][469]}

In 2017, Kiriakou learned Peter Strzok’s name when a Washington Post reporter called for comment on Strzok’s firing from the FBI: “I said, ‘I don’t know anything about Peter Strzok other than what I’ve read.’ He said, ‘No, Peter Strzok arrested you in January of 2012.’” Kiriakou’s published statement: “Karma’s a [expletive] and now it’s his turn.”^[470]

A CIA friend informed Kiriakou that he had appeared on a slide in a security briefing under the heading “the insider threat.” When the briefing audience began booing, the instructor asked why, and attendees responded that Kiriakou “was a legitimate whistleblower” and “in the end, he was the one who was right.” His image was subsequently removed from the slide.^[471] After he went public, a retired Deputy Director emailed him; Kiriakou saved the email as a souvenir: “You’ve chosen a difficult road. I’m glad somebody did. I only wish I had had the courage to do it myself.”^[472]

When the McCain-Feinstein anti-torture amendment passed into law in December 2014, Senator John McCain rose on the Senate floor and credited Kiriakou by name: “If I had not told the American people that the CIA was torturing prisoners in their name, we would never have known.” Kiriakou cited this as the reason he says it was worth going to prison.^[473] At a later dinner at the Greek ambassador’s residence in Washington, an intelligence-committee senator approached him and said: “Hey, welcome home. So glad you’re back. Sorry things played out the way they did.” Kiriakou told the senator he had been very disappointed that the senator had not stood up for him. The senator became angry and said: “Look, it took all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance.” Kiriakou: “Oh, you’re afraid of them. Like, now it makes sense. I thought you were the congressional overseers. You’re afraid of them.”^[474][475]

Kiriakou’s attorney warned him after sentencing that the CIA was upset his sentence was so short; by his account, every person who publicly attacked him is now dead or retired. Through Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings on loving one’s enemies, and the Orthodox saint Nectarios of Aegina, he reached a point where he no longer carried hatred for the people who prosecuted him.^[476]

Greek citizenship and the EU whistleblower law

The Greek government granted Kiriakou Greek citizenship within twenty-four hours of his arrest, on the request of the Greek ambassador in Washington. On his release from prison the Greek government hired him to draft a new whistleblower-protection law; the Greek Parliament passed it, the European Union adopted it, Kiriakou testified in Brussels, and the law is now in effect across the EU.^[477][478]

Post-prison career rebuild

After his release, with thirty days to find a job or be sent back to prison, Kiriakou took a position at the Institute for Policy Studies — which he describes as the oldest liberal think tank in Washington — writing about prison, sentencing, and judicial reform; the Bureau of Prisons initially denied the arrangement as inappropriate given his own case, and backed down only after Kiriakou threatened to make it a media story.^[479] The think tank paid him no salary, requiring him instead to raise his own funding, including through GoFundMe, and he says he earned roughly $18,000 that year.^[480] Kiriakou’s career rebuilding combined journalism, a syndicated column distributed through Consortium News to approximately 200 small-town newspapers, a regular column in Covert Action Magazine, paid speaking engagements, and an adjunct professor position at the University of Salamanca in Spain, where he teaches a graduate-level history of terrorism course.^[481] He has stated he plans to work until the day he dies because he has “literally nothing saved — it all went to the attorneys.”^[478][482]

The pardon push

Kiriakou is actively seeking a presidential pardon. A first letter was drafted by Ronald Reagan’s former Deputy Attorney General; signatories include Tucker Carlson, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Doug Diesson, Sid Miller (Texas Agriculture Commissioner), and the former U.S. Attorney for Utah, and was delivered to U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin. A second letter is in preparation with Dr. Phil, Ken Higgian (Trump-administration transition team head), and others. As of October 2025, CIA Director John Ratcliffe has issued a one-sentence statement that the CIA has no objection to a Kiriakou pardon, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has done the same.^[483][484] Kiriakou says he cannot predict when or whether a pardon will come, noting that Trump might pardon two dozen people at once and then go months without pardoning anyone.^[485] Because his conviction was a national-security offense, Kiriakou remains legally ineligible to hold a CIA position again absent a presidential pardon; at a December 2020 event he noted he had been passed over for one of that evening’s pardons, which instead went to figures from the Russia investigation.^[486]

Current podcasting

As of May 2026 Kiriakou hosts three monetized podcasts: Deprogram (Monday through Friday on YouTube and Rumble, co-hosted with two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist editorial cartoonist Ted Rall); Deep Focus with John Kiriakou (longer-form interview show; first scheduled guest was Roger Waters); and John Kiriakou’s Dead Drop on Apple Podcasts — “all the stories from my career” — which at the time of the May 2026 interview was ranked seventh in the world on the platform, and which Kiriakou has elsewhere described as ranking in the top 200 of roughly six million podcasts worldwide.^{[487][488][489][490][491]} In mid-2026 Kiriakou launched a fourth show, John Kiriakou’s Briefing Room.^[491]

Personal life

Marriages and family

Kiriakou was married twice. His first wife, Joanne, was a first-generation Greek-American ballet teacher with no CIA clearance (see Greece (1998–2000) for the collapse of the marriage in Athens); she taught him that he was “not as good at compartmentalizing” the stress of the work as he believed, since he could not explain his absences or the names of female colleagues to her.^{[492][493][494]} She strongly disliked his working for the CIA; on one occasion he came home still wearing an operational disguise, and she screamed and called 911.^[495] His second wife — whom he met while stationed in Pakistan and married after his tour there, and refers to as Heather in some interviews and as Catherine in his podcast Dead Drop — is a senior CIA officer whom Kiriakou described as “the smartest person, man or woman, I’ve ever met in my life.” She holds a bachelor’s degree in foreign service and a master’s in national security from Georgetown, was accepted to Harvard Law School but elected to join the CIA, and is now CEO of a major company.^{[496][497][498]}

She attended the ABC News interview and told him afterward that he had done well and hadn’t said anything classified.^[499] Years earlier, after his 2007 LA Times op-ed on Iran ran — despite a CIA general counsel’s office attorney warning him by phone not to write about Iran, to which Kiriakou responded “fuck you, I don’t work for you” and submitted the finished piece to the Publications Review Board anyway, which cleared it within 24 hours with no changes — she was called into the CIA’s Office of Security and accused of having leaked top-secret information via the op-ed, which Kiriakou says was actually sourced from United Press International and Spanish-language wire reporting on an Iranian bicycle-factory purchase in Venezuela and machine parts in Bolivia.^[500][501] On January 16, 2012, before walking to the FBI’s Washington field office for the interview that led to his arrest, he told her: “This just doesn’t smell right to me.” The agents showed him surveillance photos of an undercover CIA facility, accused him of leaking to Guantánamo defense attorneys, and told him agents were raiding his house as they spoke — prompting him to demand his attorney immediately.^[502][503]

She was entirely supportive through the legal proceedings and his imprisonment. After he came home and they were back on their feet and he was off supervised release, the PTSD set in — delayed, not immediate. She decided to leave. She was an executive at a defense contractor; Kiriakou described himself as a peace and human-rights activist: “The two don’t really mesh.”^[504][505] As of February 2026 he is divorced.^[506] His ex-wife once asked him to imagine what his life would look like had he never blown the whistle: Kiriakou’s answer was that he would be just getting ready to retire from the CIA, recovering from a first heart attack, and fifty pounds overweight — a hypothetical she agreed was probably accurate.^[507]

Kiriakou has four sons and one daughter. At the time of the Athens exfiltration his two oldest sons were approximately three and six.^[508] At his 2012 sentencing his five children were roughly 19, 16, 9, 7, and 1; by mid-2026 he gave their ages as 33, 30, 21, 19, and 14.^[509][510] The toll of his case, prosecution, and imprisonment on his family was, by his account, total: he described himself as no longer having a family. One son remains close — they speak nearly every day. The others are estranged, partly from embarrassment, partly from what Kiriakou described as lies spread during the period of media attention.^[511] He has said three of his five children do not speak to him because of his conviction, and elsewhere that “several” don’t — a price he calls very high to have paid.^[509][512]

Faith and Greek Orthodoxy

Kiriakou was raised cradle Greek Orthodox, with all four grandparents having immigrated to the United States from Greece; Orthodoxy was the center of his family’s community life, including Greek school two evenings a week.^[513] New Castle once supported several ethnic Orthodox churches — Greek, Antiochian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and Albanian among them — alongside Syrian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Serbian Orthodox communities and a large population from the Greek island of Karpathos; by the time of Kiriakou’s 2026 retelling only the Greek church (15 families) and the Antiochian church (30–40 families) remained, and the Russian church had closed the week before the interview.^[514][515] As a child, starting around age nine, his family switched from the Greek church to the Antiochian church and its St. Herman’s school after their priest was no longer “in his right mind”; he remains friends with people from that community fifty years later.^[516] In college he joined AHEPA (the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association), which raised money for the church, funded wildfire relief in Greece and Cyprus, and built a hospital in Thessaloniki.^[517]

Kiriakou made a pilgrimage to Mount Athos in 2006, staying three nights at three monasteries on a pilgrim’s visa.^[518] He visited Jerusalem twice in 2022, going straight to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at 6:00 a.m. on his first morning.^[519] During his CIA career he traveled to Damascus and viewed what is venerated as the head of John the Baptist, held in a silver coffin at the Umayyad Mosque.^[520] His grandmother gave him her own grandfather’s icon of St. John the Baptist, painted around 1800, which he keeps in his bedroom and plans to pass to his children.^[521] A Greek Orthodox friend from Kalamata once showed him a photograph of himself with the monk-saint Paisios of Mount Athos, taken during an early-1980s visit, and let Kiriakou hold the prayer rope Paisios had given him.^[522] He also described the village of Agia Markella on Chios — his first wife’s home island — where a pool marks the spot where the saint’s father is said to have beheaded her, and where the water reportedly turns orange and bubbles spontaneously each year on her feast day.^[523]

Kiriakou describes himself as a “staunch, almost militant” supporter of the Byzantine Empire and owns a purported 10th-century Byzantine hand grenade, made in the shape of a fish marked with crosses, bought at a London antiquities auction.^[524] He opposes the modern Greek royal family on the grounds that it has no Greek blood and is Bavarian and Danish, and separately opposes restoration of the Iranian monarchy.^[525] His own family was politically split on the monarchy question: his paternal grandfather was a small-r republican who supported Eleftherios Venizelos, founder of modern Greece, while his paternal grandmother was a royalist; his maternal grandparents were anti-fascist activists who hated the monarchy outright.^[526] A 23andMe DNA test identified him as a genetic cousin of Metropolitan Savas of Pittsburgh, tracing back to a shared ancestor from Patmos — corroborating, from a separate source, the family’s Christodoulou origin story and its legendary descent from Saint Christodoulos.^{[527][528][529]}

In a rapid-fire word-association segment, Kiriakou offered: Vladimir Putin — “Baptized”; Donald Trump — “Confused”; George W. Bush — “Clueless”; Benjamin Netanyahu — “The Antichrist”; Tucker Carlson — “one of the sweetest, most genuine men [I’ve] ever met”; and Piers Morgan — “Respect.”^[530] Asked who he would handpick as the next president, he named Carlson, calling him “as honest as the day is long”; Carlson has told him he has no plans to run.^[531] Of all his many podcast appearances, Kiriakou says his most natural exchanges are with Carlson, his deepest was Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett, and his most enjoyable was a two-hour conversation about Orthodoxy with Jay Dyer.^[532]

His father’s death

Kiriakou’s father, who had Parkinson’s disease causing tremors and balance problems, died after falling backward down the basement steps of the family’s 1910 arts-and-crafts four-square house, fracturing his skull; Kiriakou’s mother, present at the time, saw blood come from both his ears.^[533] An emergency-room doctor told Kiriakou the brain bleed was so severe the pressure was forcing his father’s brain down into his spinal column and that no surgery could help; his father died roughly fifteen minutes after being taken off life support.^[534] Kiriakou’s mother, diabetic for 25 years, went blind within three weeks of her husband’s death after the stress aggravated her diabetic retinopathy.^[535]

Depression and turning point

Kiriakou described struggling with depression his entire life. After his second divorce he reached a point where he could not get out of bed. The self-assessment in his fifties: unemployable, a convicted felon, barely able to pay rent. He said to himself: “What’s wrong with you? You don’t have to answer to anybody.” He decided to stop feeling sorry for himself, identify what he was genuinely good at — writing and storytelling — and build from there. He described this single decision as what turned his life around.^[536][537] As of May 2026, Kiriakou said the preceding year had been especially good and that he hadn’t been this happy in twenty years.^[538]

Astrophotography and the sixteen-hour day

Kiriakou took up astrophotography as a hobby — photographing planets, nebulae, and galaxies. He said it requires great patience, which suited him. He sets his alarm for 4:00 a.m. to answer Cameo requests until 7:00 a.m. before starting his regular workday, and works approximately sixteen hours a day. He no longer holds a gym membership due to time constraints but takes long walks with earbuds.^[539][540]

James

Kiriakou described a friend named James who served seventeen years of a twenty-year violent felony sentence. After release, unable to find meaningful employment with a violent conviction, James went overseas and worked in pornography. Things did not improve. He decided to commit suicide but did not want to make a mess at his mother’s house. He drove to a Walmart parking lot, put a gun in his mouth — and an off-duty ATF agent pulled into the adjacent space. The agent drew his weapon: “Drop the gun.” James said: “You don’t understand — I’m going to kill myself, not rob the Walmart.” He was disarmed. Charged with felon in possession of a firearm — a mandatory minimum of eight years — he got out on bail.^{[541][542][543]}

James called Kiriakou every day saying he was going to kill himself. Kiriakou told him every day that he was not going to kill himself and urged him to fly to Washington to decompress. On July 4th, 2023, James’s sister was lighting a firecracker; it exploded in her hand and severed two fingers. James called Kiriakou to report the accident. Kiriakou noted that James sounded good — “I feel really good about things.” Two days later, James’s sister called Kiriakou. Her fingers had been reattached in surgery, but that was not why she was calling. James had killed himself the previous night. He had sounded good because he had made up his mind. He left a note to his mother that said: “Call John and tell him I said I was sorry.” He had walked to a neighbor’s house and hanged himself from an oak tree.^{[543][544][545][546][547][548]}

Travel

Kiriakou described studying abroad in his junior year of college, living in London with his girlfriend, whom he named as Mary Jane. After the academic year, they backpacked for three months across Europe — adding Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Cairo at his insistence. He described that summer as the happiest period of his life: “I remember thinking, I will never be as happy as I am now.” The summer gave him a travel bug he has never been able to quench. He has since visited 72 countries (planning to add at least six more) and 48 of the 50 U.S. states. He and the girlfriend remain Facebook friends: “She’s the one that got away.”^{[549][550][551][552][553][554]} Of all the countries visited, he names Oman as his favorite for natural beauty and Syria as the most historically fascinating, since ordinary daily surroundings there date to events mentioned in the Bible; his least favorite posting was India, whose people he described as mean to one another. He was twice the target of assassination attempts and narrowly escaped two car bombs in his career, one of which killed roughly four dozen people and wounded hundreds.^[555][556] He is a dual U.S.-Greek citizen. At 61 he was actively searching for a small condo in Athens — a lifelong aspiration where he could retire or spend a few months at a time writing books. He noted Athens real-estate prices were “skyrocketing” because the Chinese and Israelis were buying property in bulk, an illustration of China’s broader approach: “They don’t need to invade the country because they just buy it.”^[557][558]

In early 2026 he had recently been to Poland and to Ireland — Belfast, Cork, Dublin, and Waterford before continuing to Scotland — meeting with European intelligence and law-enforcement officials.^[559][560]

Encounters

Kiriakou has a cousin, a decorated Vietnam War veteran with multiple Bronze Stars, the Combat Valor device, and a Purple Heart, who once retrieved a 9mm handgun from his garage before a lunch outing with Kiriakou — a convicted felon legally barred from being around firearms — explaining he never knew when they might run into Antifa; Kiriakou made him put the gun back.^[561] Kiriakou has also said his Wikipedia page contains what he considers an egregious error claiming he was convicted of espionage, when he was not, and that he intends to have two friends who are registered Wikipedia editors correct it.^[562]

Kiriakou recounted being on a flight to New York for his brother’s wedding when Hillary Clinton was seated in the first row. A child approached for an autograph; loud enough for several rows to hear, Clinton said: “Get lost, kid.”^[563][564] Per a story told to Kiriakou by Clay Constantinou — head of fundraising for Clinton’s Mid-Atlantic region — when the Lewinsky scandal broke, all six regional fundraising chiefs agreed Clinton had to resign and approached Al Gore, who was fully on board. They reserved a conference room at the Willard Hotel, one block from the White House. Clinton walked in, looked at them, said “I have let you down, friends,” and began crying. Someone shouted “We love you, Bill!”; Clinton said “I love you”; the room dissolved into hugs and chants of “four more years.” Constantinou’s conclusion: “Somebody ratted us out. He knew exactly what he was walking into.” Gore never became president.^{[565][566][567][568]}

Kiriakou relayed a story from CIA colleague John Nixon about Director Michael Hayden, who reportedly moved around the agency accompanied by a young man carrying a portable soda cooler so Hayden could always have a cold drink — including in sensitive meetings. Nixon’s reaction: “Should we get a personal air conditioning for this guy or something?” Kiriakou’s: “This is the head of NSA and the CIA.”^[569][570] A friend of Kiriakou’s later left the State Department to provide close protection for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Asked how it was going, the friend said the only person less popular at the CIA than Pompeo was “Mrs. Mike Pompeo,” who treated the security detail as personal servants — “You, go get my dry cleaning. You, walk my dog” — until the detail told her: “With all due respect, we’re here to protect your husband from getting shot.” The friend called her “a monster.”^{[571][572][573]}

On fear and legacy

Kiriakou describes a near-total absence of fear throughout his career: “I’m not afraid of anybody. And I don’t really know why that is.” He attributes it partly to tempo — “I was so busy I just didn’t have time to really process the emotion of fear” — but also to something physiological: “Maybe there’s just some switch in my brain that never activated a sense of fear.” He notes that CIA psychiatrists would characterize this as evidence of sociopathic tendencies, and credits it as the specific personality trait that made him an effective case officer while also making him constitutionally unable to participate in the torture program: “That’s why I blew the whistle — cuz I’m not a sociopath.”^{[574][575][576][577]} Kiriakou summarized his view of his own legacy: “History has smiled on me.” The public understanding of the CIA’s torture program, and the role his disclosure played in bringing it to light, had vindicated him in a way he felt confident about at the time of recording.^[578][579] Despite everything, Kiriakou says he would still recommend a CIA career, citing that he loved his time there, visited 72 countries, and met kings, presidents, and prime ministers.^[580] He recalls a former CIA deputy director’s mantra — “the job of the CIA is to recruit spies to steal secrets” — which Kiriakou considered technically true but incomplete, since the agency also flies around the world to kill people and overthrow governments.^[581] He relays advice from an old CIA timer that careers typically take off around the ten-year mark, once an officer is promoted into a position of authority, and stresses that new officers must know right from wrong in their own gut, since the agency will not teach it to them.^[582]

Internet meme celebrity and acting career

In early 2026 Kiriakou achieved a sudden form of internet celebrity, described as having occurred “literally overnight.” The principal vector was a clip in which he recounted his unsuccessful auction bid for the artifact known as Lincoln’s last turd — a story he had originally told on the Julian Dorey Podcast in episodes 278 and 279, a year earlier. The clip accumulated approximately fifteen million views. Black Twitter audiences in particular embraced him as a recurring subject. “You’re like the most famous guy on the internet now.”^[5][583][6] Kiriakou has noted the irony that he had been telling most of these same stories for nineteen years, across ten books, with little attention, until the specific date of February 28, 2026, when a clip caught the YouTube recommendation algorithm and went viral.^[584] He has separately pushed back on press coverage that treated the broader wave of conservative Protestant conversion to Orthodoxy as a new phenomenon fueling the “manosphere,” saying the trend has in fact been building for 35 years.^[585]

Through a friend, Tyrell Vanto (son of Jesse Vanto), Kiriakou was cast in a film role written specifically for him — a former CIA operations officer serving as the director of security to a billionaire — in a Vanto-directed production filmed during October 2025 in Mexico. He has subsequently become a member of the Screen Actors Guild and, in 2026, voted in his first SAG Awards (now called the Actor Awards) after watching every nominated film and series. His co-star in the production was Jeff Fahey.^{[586][587][588][506]}

Tradecraft and on-the-job stories

Rules of the trade

Kiriakou’s first station chief told him early in his career: “Never lie to medical, security, or finance — not only will they ruin your career, they can put you in prison. And never lie to me.” He has tried to live by it.^[589] As a young case officer, he built rapport with a highly sensitive source flown to Washington by discussing soccer, Broadway shows, and baseball (Cal Ripken) at the Ritz-Carlton in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, impressing his boss with his ability to speak knowledgeably on any subject — a skill he attributed simply to reading widely.^[590] Standard guidance on cover stories: keep the lie as simple as possible because simple lies are easier to maintain. His default was “I work for the State Department — civil service, not foreign service.” If pressed on details, give an answer so boring no follow-up questions come: “I’m involved in international training related to trade and trade negotiations.” This almost always ended the conversation.^[591][592]

The CIA’s annual operating directive (OD), issued in December for the coming year — now from the Director of National Intelligence rather than the National Security Adviser — ranks priorities from Tier Zero to Tier Five. Tier Zero: existential threats (currently Venezuela, Russia, China, war in the Middle East). Tier One: counterterrorism, counter-proliferation. Tier Two: probably counter-narcotics. Tier Three: the Sahel, rare earth metals, Taiwan. Tier Four: Western Europe. Tier Five: issues the CIA effectively considers someone else’s problem.^{[593][594][595][596]}

Finding CIA headquarters work on Iraq under the Clinton administration unstimulating, Kiriakou checked the internal jobs board and found a counterterrorism position requiring Greek or Arabic fluency. He told the station chief who was the hiring authority that he had no operational experience, only seven and a half years as an analyst, but spoke both languages. The station chief’s response: “It’s a lot easier and a lot cheaper to take a linguist and teach him operations than it is to take an operations officer and teach him languages.”^[597][598]

His first question on his first day at the CIA was: “Where’s the UFO stuff?” — the origin of his recurring framing of the CIA and the UFO question. He was told that UFOs are entirely the Pentagon’s domain; the CIA collects and analyzes foreign intelligence. “I believe in UFOs, besides the fact that I saw one” — an incident with his father.^[599][600] That sighting took place when he was seventeen, driving with his father through Pennsylvania Amish country to work a midnight diner shift: a silent, hovering, orange trapezoid-shaped craft with round lights at each corner, roughly 1,500–2,000 feet up, that departed at what he described as incalculable speed. He and his father chose not to report the sighting to police for fear of being thought crazy, and told only his mother, the next day.^[601][602] He cited a leaked drone video tracking an orb off the coast of Yemen in which a Hellfire missile struck the object and bounced off, with the orb then changing direction in defiance of physical laws.^[603][604] Separately, he recounted an F-14 pilot based at Langley Air Force Base in Norfolk, Virginia, telling him around 1977–78 that all the pilots there had seen unexplained phenomena, including one the pilot personally followed as it descended into the water, stayed submerged, and then resurfaced — describing the object’s shape as cylindrical, like a cigar.^[605][606]

On the wave of drone sightings over New Jersey in late 2024, Kiriakou said his initial assumption was that it was a defense-department exercise; a friend who is a New Jersey state trooper told him police were working under the impression that a Department of Energy or Department of Defense cargo shipment, possibly nuclear or a missile, had gone missing.^[607] He also cited a 60 Minutes segment featuring current and former commanding generals from Langley Air Force Base stating the drones were too small to be safely shot down with fighter jets and were suspected to be hostile, likely Chinese — noting a Chinese ship was off the New Jersey coast at the time.^[608] He found it suspicious that the government did not instruct the public to shoot the drones down if they were confirmed hostile or of unknown origin, and said he was told all U.S. drones large enough to carry missiles were deployed overseas, leaving none close enough to New Jersey to intercept.^[609][610] A Pentagon friend told him drones are vulnerable to laser pointers, which can short-circuit and crash them — illustrated, Kiriakou said, by a video of protesters in Santiago, Chile downing a police drone with laser pointers.^[611]

Cover, polygraph, and slips

Flying from Milan to Eastern Europe, Kiriakou sat next to an Italian man who would not stop asking what he did for a living. After several deflections, Kiriakou told him: “Look — I smuggle women and cigarettes from Eastern Europe, okay? Are you happy now?” The man said: “I don’t think I approve.” Kiriakou: “I didn’t ask for your approval.” The man sat silently for the rest of the flight.^[612][613] Meeting a source in a hotel room, Kiriakou called room service for coffee and said, without thinking: “Hi, this is John Kiriakou in room 610.” The source — who knew him only by an alias — perked up immediately. Kiriakou recovered: “To protect your safety, I had to check in under an alias. That’s the made-up name.” The source accepted it. He described this as the only time in his career he made a mistake breaking cover.^[614][615] During a later security-clearance investigation, an FBI agent asked him: “Have you ever been arrested?” He instinctively answered: “In the United States?” The agent asked what that was supposed to mean. Kiriakou recovered: “Oh, no, no, no — I’ve never been arrested” — while thinking about the times overseas he couldn’t discuss.^[616][617] He once sat on the lid of a toilet for nine hours, listening through the crack in a door to a polygraph session in an adjoining room — monitoring whether the subject would lie to the polygrapher and security officer present. He couldn’t move or shift position and thought he was going to faint.^[618][616] In CIA operations training, trainees were required to buy a rubber ball and stick it to their car’s radio antenna so that instructors teaching surveillance detection could visually track the vehicle without losing it; for years after leaving the CIA, whenever cars still had antennas, Kiriakou would smile at spotting rubber balls on other cars, recognizing the next class of trainees.^[619] He says he still spots what he takes to be intelligence-surveillance vehicles with some regularity in Athens, though not in Cyprus.^[620]

In Islamabad, Pakistan, Kiriakou was stopped at a roadside checkpoint of the kind set up by underpaid police to extract small payments from travelers. He was traveling on a non-U.S. passport and under cover. He began speaking Greek — reasoning there was no chance a Pakistani checkpoint officer would recognize the language — showed his European passport, paid five dollars, and drove away.^[621][622] In Santa Barbara, California — which he described as his favorite place on earth — he was meeting a foreign intelligence target and blew through a stop sign at approximately 10:00 p.m. A colleague, a former police officer who was not undercover, got out of the car with hands raised. The officer drew his weapon. The colleague explained they were CIA officers on an operation and asked the officer not to enter anything in the system. The officer checked Kiriakou’s alias driver’s license, came back giddy: “This doesn’t come back to anything. I can tell it’s an official license — it has the hologram — but it doesn’t go back to anything.” Kiriakou: “Yeah, that’s kind of the idea.” The officer: “Wow, this is so cool. I probably can’t tell anybody about it, right?” Kiriakou: “Please don’t.” The officer returned the license and wished them a good night.^{[623][624][625][626]}

Recruitment and ethics

A station chief told Kiriakou he had been an operations officer for twenty-five years and in that time had recruited nine people. He said: “You’ve been here two years and you’ve recruited five.” Kiriakou’s response: “And every one a badass.” The station chief told him he had a knack for the work. Kiriakou attributed it to genuinely enjoying people’s company, reading prolifically, and being able to carry on conversations about any subject.^{[627][628][629][630]} Six months before the September 11 attacks Kiriakou was running a sensitive double-agent operation; he disclosed there was an attempt on his life as part of it: “I am neither confirming nor denying that it was the Iranians that tried to kill me. But I’m saying I have had hatred for the Iranian regime ever since.”^[631][632] Kiriakou also led a “locks and picks” team on a break-in operation, working with a foreign liaison intelligence service, to bug the house of a terrorism financier on an island reachable only by boat. The front door was a reinforced German security door the team’s lockpicker said would take two weeks to defeat, but Kiriakou walked around back and found a five-dollar Yale lock, letting the team in immediately.^[633]

In a college lecture Kiriakou uses to illustrate the absence of ethical rules for CIA operations overseas, he asks students to imagine: you have recruited a bonafide terrorist whose intelligence has disrupted attacks and saved American lives. In a meeting, he says: “Tonight, you’re going to get me a prostitute. If you don’t, I’m not going to talk to you anymore.” About eighty percent of students raise their hands when asked who would do it. He tells them: “In real life, you probably would. It’s not very nice. It’s a dirty business. But what if he asks for a child prostitute?” About ten percent still raise their hands, but the answer is absolutely not. “There are no rules. Your job while overseas is to break the law. Headquarters is not going to tell you employee rule number 305 says you can’t provide child prostitutes. You have to know in your heart what’s right and what’s wrong.”^{[634][635][636][637][638][639]}

Encounters on the way out

Running into one of his former recruited assets at Dulles Airport — a man Kiriakou called Abdullah, granted refugee status and eventually an American citizen — Abdullah was working as a baggage handler. He called Kiriakou’s name; Kiriakou was stunned to hear him speak English. Kiriakou: “Oh my god, Abdullah, what are you doing here?” Abdullah: “It’s crazy. I became an American.”^[640][641] Driving in southern Virginia with his wife, also a CIA surveillance-detection instructor, Kiriakou became convinced a pickup truck was following him. He took a complicated detour off Interstate 64 and back on; the truck stayed on him. At a red light, with the truck alongside, he told his wife he was going to crash the car in front of him and get away. She said: “You will not crash the car in front of you. You’re not under surveillance. You’ve been overly trained.” It took everything he had not to do it. The truck exited at the next off-ramp. He had never been under surveillance.^{[642][643][644][645]}

Kiriakou also recounted an incident during his CIA career in which his car broke down. When he reported this to his supervisor, the exchange moved to a secure code room — a formal SCIF environment — where his supervisor said, obliquely, that the CIA was prepared to “help with a car” in exchange for an hour of his time inside the code room. Kiriakou understood this as a euphemism: the offer was financial assistance in exchange for agreeing to something — the nature of which he did not disclose — in a room where the conversation would be deniable.^[646]

Hollywood, books, and spy stories

Kiriakou had never read a spy novel until 1991. On Liberation Day in Kuwait City, the only English-language book he could find in the ruins was John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He described it as “revelatory” and went on to read the entire le Carré catalogue. His assessment: no American author comes close to le Carré on the espionage novel. He also named Tom Clancy’s early works (The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games) and Frederick Forsythe’s The Day of the Jackal as standouts.^[647][648] His favorite spy film is Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest — a choice he acknowledged no one would see coming. He has watched it approximately one hundred times and enjoys it equally on every viewing.^[649][650]

Kiriakou was the script consultant on The Bourne Ultimatum, in addition to several other CIA movies and two CIA-related TV shows, working to keep scripts true to life. His characterization of the gap between Hollywood and reality: “What you see in a Bourne movie is somebody’s entire career packed into one operation, two hours.” The reality is “hurry up and wait” — surveillance he described as “soul-crushing,” sitting for hours or days.^{[651][652][618]} He has written television pilots as a hobby since 2007 and has sold several; besides The Bourne Ultimatum, he names script- or security-advisor credits on From Paris with Love, Kill the Messenger, and The Kite Runner, and as of early 2024 was script advisor on a new CBS series, True Lies, based on the James Cameron film.^[653]

Oliver Stone bought the rights to Kiriakou’s first book and wanted to adapt it as a History Channel mini-series: “how did good, patriotic Americans become torturers, kidnappers, and murderers in 48 hours after 9/11 — and how did that happen?” They wrote the first episode together and submitted it; History Channel dropped it. Two years later, Stone called back: “Did we sell a show together?” Kiriakou explained what it was. Stone: “What was that show about?” Kiriakou explained again. Stone: “Did we write anything?” Kiriakou said yes, the first episode. Stone: “Send me that, I’m looking for something to do.” He sent it. The next day Stone called back: “Yeah, I’m not interested anymore.” Kiriakou’s characterization: “He’s a strange guy. He’s hard to get along with.”^{[654][655][656][657]} After Kiriakou came home from prison and could not find employment, Yoko Ono called him to see how he was doing.^[658] In a separate telling, Kiriakou has described a completed sale of a TV series with Stone to the History Channel, and a second series partnership with Alec Baldwin for AMC.^[659]

A CIA colleague from the Counterterrorism Center, Joe Weisberg — “a lovely guy, but the work just wasn’t really for him” — walked up to Kiriakou one day and said he had quit: “I’m not married, I don’t have any kids, so I think I’m going to go to Hollywood and find my fortune.” He wrote a novel (partially redacted by the CIA) that Kiriakou described as “pretty good,” then appeared in the New York Times as the creator of The Americans — the TV series about KGB “illegals” living in the United States as ordinary Americans. The show ran seven seasons and made Weisberg “rich beyond his wildest dreams.”^{[660][661][662]} Kiriakou confirmed that KGB illegals — the premise of The Americans — were entirely real and operated successfully: “as recently as three or four years ago, a group of illegals was outed right here in my own neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia.”^[663][664]

Prison: the Aryans

A rumor circulated among the Aryan inmates at FCI Loretto before Kiriakou’s arrival that he had been a hitman for the CIA who killed Muslims. The Aryans considered this admirable. The Aryan shot-caller pulled him aside and asked if it was true. Kiriakou’s response, which he described as quick thinking: “It was wartime and we all did things we weren’t proud of.” He did not confirm or deny. The shot-caller said: “That’s cool, man. That’s cool.”^[665][666]

Prison: fellow inmates

Kiriakou describes his pod as home to a range of memorable characters, material he later drew on for his prison memoir. One, nicknamed “Truck,” was a former long-haul trucker and serial killer — from an era before routine DNA testing — who picked up prostitutes at roadside restaurants, strangled them, and threw their bodies from his truck, drawing a 40-year sentence; Truck constantly sought Kiriakou’s approval, saving him a seat for Steelers games and tipping him off about radio stations.^[667] Kiriakou refused to let another inmate, convicted of murder-for-hire, move into his empty second bunk after learning the man had run up a $100,000 gambling debt to the mob, taken out a life insurance policy on his own business partner, hired a hitman to kill him, gotten caught, and then cooperated against the hitman to reduce a potential life sentence to 20 years — reasoning he wanted “no rats” in his cell.^[668] That inmate, nicknamed “Cat in the Hat” for an elongated head, was overheard telling another prisoner that Kiriakou had been called to the lieutenant’s office as a “rat” (he had actually been signing a waiver for a Jake Tapper interview); Kiriakou told Truck, sitting beside him, that he’d heard Cat in the Hat call Truck a rat instead. Truck beat the man nearly to death without another word, requiring a helicopter medevac to Pittsburgh and adding five years to Truck’s sentence.^[669]

Kiriakou also orchestrated an elaborate prank on a fellow inmate, an Italian Ponzi-scheme convict who constantly bragged about a yacht and villa he no longer owned: Kiriakou forged a “merry-go-round” release-processing checklist, substituting the man’s name and number for his own, convincing him he had won his appeal — the ruse ended with prison staff arresting the man for attempted escape when he tried to process out and sending him to solitary confinement before a transfer to another facility.^[670] A Gambino crime-family boss later approached Kiriakou to say the prank was “some sick shit” — not a complaint, since the Ponzi schemer’s constant talking had annoyed everyone, but an acknowledgment of just how far Kiriakou had taken it.^[671] Separately, a self-described “sovereign citizen” inmate obtained a letter from a federal judge that he misread as ordering his release from Bureau of Prisons jurisdiction; he packed his belongings and presented the letter at the facility gate, resulting in six months in solitary confinement followed by a mandatory hourly check-in regime after his transfer to a medium-security facility, on the grounds that his sovereign-citizen filings constituted an escape risk.^[672] Kiriakou has also recounted witnessing a fight break out over a dispute about a shared television while he continued watching a Steelers game; called afterward to the lieutenant’s office and told he had been caught on camera sitting in the middle of the fight, he denied any knowledge of it.^[673]

After the CIA

At a mandatory Deloitte ethics class after leaving the CIA, a scenario was presented: you’re about to close a $50 million deal with a Japanese company, but a competitor undercuts you by $4 million, and one of the Japanese officials suggests going to a strip club. Kiriakou’s answer: “Let me go to the bank and get $200 in singles.” The ethics instructors called his boss. He told the boss: “I’m not actually taking anybody to a strip club.” He attributed the response to having spent a career where such an operation would be entirely routine.^{[674][675][676]}

As senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2011, Kiriakou was stationed in Djibouti to investigate terrorism in Yemen and Somalia. The U.S. Ambassador asked if he wanted to drive to Somaliland the next day. He said yes. The ambassador, defense attachés, and chief of security drove him in. He described Somaliland as “an okay place” — functioning, non-violent, oriented toward trade and regional relations, completely separate from the chaos of Mogadishu. He supported the ambassador’s view that the U.S. should recognize it.^{[677][678][679]}

Kiriakou described the Irish intelligence service and the Garda as first-class at two specialties. First: anti-money laundering investigations. Second: counterterrorism — because so many Irish went to Libya and Lebanon in the 1970s to train with Carlos the Jackal, who was simultaneously training the IRA, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Nidal Organization, and others. The Irish government developed exceptional expertise in recruiting spies to penetrate these groups, and has maintained that expertise ever since.^{[680][681][682]}

On whistleblowing

The Whistleblower Protection Act exempts national security whistleblowers. For someone at the CIA, Pentagon, FBI, DEA, or the congressional intelligence oversight committees, there is no mechanism for a protected disclosure. The instruction is to go through the chain of command — but if the chain of command is what is violating the law, the only remaining option is the media, which carries the risk of criminal charges, bankruptcy, and career destruction. Kiriakou cited this as a reform he feels strongly Congress must address.^{[683][684][685]} The comparator case: NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who reported warrantless interception of American communications. After exhausting internal channels (inspector general not cleared, general counsel dismissive, Pentagon IG unhelpful), he went to the House Intelligence Committee and was charged with nine felonies including seven counts of espionage and two counts of theft of government property — “the property being the information he had in his brain that he walked out of the building with.” Charges were dismissed the night before trial, but only after he lost his pension, savings, wife (who stayed with NSA), and five children. He ended up working at the Genius Bar of an Apple store in Bethesda, Maryland.^{[686][687][688][689]} After one talk on the subject, a 72-year-old audience member told Kiriakou he wanted to make a change but felt too old to join the CIA and try to reform it from within, and proposed instead simply suing the agency; Kiriakou embraced the idea as a legitimate form of accountability.^[690]

If he ran for office

When asked what he would run on if he sought public office, Kiriakou cited Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign as his model. Carter — then a relatively unknown one-term governor of Georgia, surrounded by Senate heavyweights in early debates — said simply: “I will not tell a lie.” In the immediate aftermath of Watergate, Americans responded to that directness. Kiriakou said he would make the same pledge and run on genuine congressional oversight of the intelligence community.^{[691][692][693][694]}

In 1983, as a George Washington University sophomore chairing the College Democrats speakers committee, he read that George McGovern was weighing another presidential run and wrote offering GWU’s Marvin Theater for the announcement. McGovern called him back personally. At the event McGovern brought Mo Udall, Academy Award–winning actor Cliff Robertson and his wife Dina Merrill, and Frank Mankiewicz (Robert Kennedy’s former press secretary). Afterward McGovern invited Kiriakou back to his apartment, where he and his wife made tuna sandwiches. McGovern finished third in the 1984 Democratic primary behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart — party insiders pressing him to drop out because he was pulling young voters from the preferred candidates.^{[695][696][697][698][699]}

Bibliography

By his own count Kiriakou has written nine books^[1] — eight published, with the ninth (Remains of the Day: The Definitive Guide to Washington, D.C.’s Historic Cemeteries) delayed at press as of August 2025. Titles named in the source corpus:

• The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror — his first book; reached #5 on the New York Times bestseller list; out of print as of August 2025; translated into Spanish and Greek and a #1 bestseller in Greek with multiple Athens-list printings.^{[700][701][702]}
• Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison — won both the PEN First Amendment Award and the Foreword Reviews Memoir of the Year.^[700][703]
• The Convenient Terrorist: Abu Zubaydah and the Weird Wonderland of America’s Secret Prisons^[703]
• The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis^[703]
• The CIA Insider’s Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection — devoted to surveillance and surveillance-detection tradecraft.^[704][705]
• The CIA Insider’s Guide to Lying and Lie Detection^[704]
• The CIA Insider’s Guide to Disappearing and Living Off the Grid^[704]
• Remains of the Day: The Definitive Guide to Washington, D.C.’s Historic Cemeteries — first of a commissioned five-book cemetery series; delayed at press as of August 2025.^[704][706]

Forthcoming cemetery series

The publisher commissioned four further volumes following acceptance of Remains of the Day:

• Whispers in the Dirt — the definitive guide to New York City’s mob graves (in progress)
• The historic cemeteries of Chicago
• The country-western graves of Nashville
• The graves of America’s most notorious serial killers^[706]

See also

• Moral Injury
• Matthew Cole
• Jesselyn Radack
• Heather Saunders
• Below World’s End
• 1993 Bush Kuwait assassination plot
• Revolutionary Organization 17 November
• Richard Welch
• Stephen Saunders
• Gerald Post
• The Farm
• Asset acquisition cycle
• Enhanced interrogation techniques