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 town about an hour north of Pittsburgh in Amish Country.[7] Both of his parents were public school teachers; his father was an elementary school principal. He is the oldest of three children, with a brother and a sister.[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] 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.[8]
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.[9] 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.”[10] He credits the shortwave radio with giving him the travel bug and the determination to leave New Castle for Washington.[11]
Education
Kiriakou attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., 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.[12]
His interest in the region had been sparked at age fifteen by the Iranian hostage crisis: “we’re on the brink of war with Iran and I was coming up to draft age.”[12] At GW he majored in Middle Eastern studies with a focus on Islamic theology and studied Arabic and oil economics.[13]
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.”[14] During his master’s program he took a class on the psychology of leadership taught by Dr. Gerald Post, an “eminent psychiatrist” with doctorates in political science, psychology, and medicine.[15] Post — unknown to his students — was a CIA officer working undercover as a professor to identify candidates who would fit the agency’s culture.[16]
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.[17] 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.”[18] Kiriakou quit on the spot and 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.[19]
In his office Post revealed his CIA cover and asked whether Kiriakou would like to join the agency. Six weeks from his wedding and with no job prospects, Kiriakou agreed. Post picked up the phone, called a number from a Rolodex — Kiriakou recalls noticing the card Oliver North home in the wheel — and sent him to an address in Rosslyn, Virginia to ask for “Bob."[20]
"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.[21][22] 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.[23]
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.”[24] Kiriakou was then asked to provide urine, blood, and hair samples and sent home.[24]
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.[25] 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.[26]
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.[27] 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.[28] He passed; Bob later told him, “they’re fighting over you at headquarters.”[29]
CIA career
Kiriakou joined the agency in 1990 and spent his first 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.[30][1] In 1997 — “halfway through my career” — he 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.[30][31] He was sent for additional advanced driving training in the Nevada desert.[32]
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.[33][34] 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.[35]
In Greece he carried a 9mm Glock in a fanny pack on his waist, a snub-nose .38 revolver on his ankle, a buck knife in his back pocket, and two spare magazines.[36] 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.[37]
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.”[38] The man replied, “My friend, I’ve waited thirty years for this day.”[39]
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 his wife and children from school and the family flew home on the noon Delta flight to New York; embassy staff packed and shipped their belongings.[40]
Pakistan and Abu Zubaydah
Kiriakou later 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.[41][42] In the first week of May 2002, two months after the capture, 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.[43][44][45]
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.[46]
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.”[47][48]
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.[49]
Bahrain
Kiriakou served at the U.S. embassy in Bahrain under Ambassador David Ransom. 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.[50][51][52]
He left the CIA in 2004.
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.[53][54]
- 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.[55][56]
- 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.[57][58]
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).[59]
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.[60][61]
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.[62][63]
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.[64][65]
- Toured the Dubai government’s underground CCTV operations facility, built by Siemens, with full-country coverage.[66][67]
- 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.[68][69]
Prison and the anonymous mortgage
During his 2013–2015 federal prison 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.[70][71]
Current podcasting
As of September 2025, Kiriakou hosts two daily podcasts:
- Deprogram, co-hosted with two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist editorial cartoonist Ted Rall — a daily YouTube news-commentary show.
- Deep Focus with John Kiriakou — a longer-form interview show. First scheduled guest: Roger Waters.[72][73]
Personal life
Kiriakou was married twice. His first wife, a ballet teacher with no CIA clearance, taught him that he was “not as good at compartmentalizing” the stress of the work as he believed; he could not explain his absences or the names of female colleagues, and the marriage ended.[74] His second wife is a senior CIA officer whom he met while stationed in Pakistan and married after his tour there.[75] At the time of the Athens exfiltration his two sons were approximately three and six years old.[76] As of February 2026 he is divorced.[77]
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][78][6]
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.[79][80][81][77]
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.[82][83][84]
- 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.[82][85]
- The Convenient Terrorist: Abu Zubaydah and the Weird Wonderland of America’s Secret Prisons[85]
- The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis[85]
- The CIA Insider’s Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection — devoted to surveillance and surveillance-detection tradecraft.[86][87]
- The CIA Insider’s Guide to Lying and Lie Detection[86]
- The CIA Insider’s Guide to Disappearing and Living Off the Grid[86]
- 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.[86][88]
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[88]