Kiriakou’s Russian media work is his daily radio show on Sputnik, a Russian state-owned media company, which he has hosted for seven and a half years (elsewhere he says seven years, and elsewhere dates the run 2017 to 2024). John Kiriakou says he initially declined, then agreed on the condition — written into his contract — that he could “say anything I want and criticize anyone I want, including Vladimir Putin.”[1][2][3][4][5] He says only the Russians offered him work at all after his release from prison, contrasting this with being shunned by the CIA and the broader U.S. media landscape; he has said he took the job purely for financial reasons after being turned down for work as a convicted felon by Uber, Lyft, Safeway, Target, and even as a baggage handler at Reagan National Airport.[3][5] In other retellings he adds being turned down by DoorDash and local grocery stores, and says he was fired at the end of his first day as the Reagan National baggage handler once the employer realized he was a convicted felon.[6] He notes The New Republic published a 2018 article calling him “the CIA spy who became a Russian propagandist.”[7] He has never been asked to say or not say anything: on the morning of the invasion he opened by condemning it and refused to use the state term “special military operation,” calling it the “Russian invasion of Ukraine” and demanding Russian forces withdraw immediately.[8][9][10][11] On the Salisbury Novichok poisoning of a Russian dissident and his daughter, he says he stated on air that it was the work of the KGB or its successor agency — “this is what the Russians do, they poison people” — rejecting his co-host’s alternative theories of a Ukrainian false flag or Russian mafia involvement.[12] His weekly Thursday segment on the show, “Criminal Injustice,” featured journalist Kevin Gosztola and Paul Wright, founder of the Human Rights Defense Center and publisher of Prison Legal News; in one telling he places it on a Sputnik program called Loud and Clear, co-hosted with Brian Becker.[13][14] He notes the Washington Post accused him of “weakening our democracy” over the segment — for airing stories like a Pennsylvania judge jailing children for a private-prison bribe — and that Georgetown University separately published an academic paper claiming the same segment was “perpetuating Russian stereotypes” of the American judicial system.[15][16][17] Kiriakou describes the show as government-funded, structurally comparable to Voice of America — no advertising, aimed at an American audience as an instrument of Russian soft power — and argues that what interests Russian media is his CIA background rather than the show itself, since it gives him a platform to expose crimes he says he witnessed there.[18][19] He also writes for Consortium News (since 2015), Covert Action Magazine, and the Scheer Post.[20]
Kiriakou’s Russian-media ties nearly extended to Moscow itself. He says he received an engraved invitation, all expenses paid, to a Moscow dinner marking RT’s 15th anniversary — a VIP table that included Michael Flynn, Jesse Ventura, Jill Stein, and Mike Maloof, with Vladimir Putin appearing briefly to shake hands. Having just been released from prison, Kiriakou asked the judge overseeing his release for permission to travel; she refused. He says he was relieved in hindsight, given that several attendees were later investigated — Flynn was arrested, and Stein was called a traitor.[21] Despite hosting the show, Kiriakou describes Putin as a hater of free speech, a war criminal, and a tyrant he considers a dictator.[22]
Platform bans and the end of the Sputnik show
Kiriakou says the Justice Department, Treasury Department, and FBI targeted Sputnik and RT for closure, and that RT was successfully shut down across the United States and the entire European Union.[23] Sputnik was dropped by YouTube, Spreaker, Spotify, iTunes, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn, and its listenership fell from between 35,000 and 38,000 a day to about 250.[24] Banned from other platforms, Sputnik and RT were forced onto Rumble; Kiriakou says he initially expected a Trump/Bannon “echo chamber” but found it the only place they could speak without censorship, calling it strange that press freedom now depends on figures like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.[25][26] He says he is still regularly taken down and demonetized on YouTube for saying words like “Vladimir Putin,” “Russia,” or “abolishing the CIA,” and that RFK Jr. and Kim Iversen have faced similar treatment.[27]
The Sputnik show itself ended when the Biden administration sanctioned the Russian banks used for its payroll, making receipt of his paycheck legally treated as money laundering; Kiriakou hosted the show from August 2017 until around October 2024.[28]
Post-Sputnik work
Kiriakou’s radio show led, in his account, to his own TV show, a podcast, and speaking engagements, and to a wave of subsequent podcast appearances — Julian Dorey, Tucker Carlson, Patrick Bet-David, Sean Ryan, Joe Rogan, and Diary of a CEO, the last of which he says most broke him out.[29] His weekend RT show was renamed Deep State, and the resulting viral attention led the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to sign him for representation in books, Hollywood, consulting, and licensing.[30] Since leaving Sputnik and RT, he has hosted two YouTube shows — Deep Program, a daily show with former LA Times editorial cartoonist and two-time Pulitzer finalist Ted Rall, and Deep Focus with John Kiriakou, a weekly, more in-depth interview show — plus an Apple Podcasts show called Deadrop about what makes a spy tick.[31][32] He also hosts CIA Declassified on Unifyd TV, which uses declassified CIA documents to examine historical episodes; he has confirmed on the show that the CIA killed Chilean president Salvador Allende and overthrew the South Vietnamese government.[33]