The detail surfaces in an unlikely place. Arguing that the official account of the Nordstream sabotage defied the physics of deep diving, Ted Rall — a diver himself — broke off to ask John Kiriakou whether he dived.[1]
The answer
Kiriakou’s reply supplies a small, dated piece of his own biography: “I took lessons in the pool of the American embassy in 1991. And then I went diving once, in the Red Sea at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in like ‘92. And then I never went again.”[1][2]
Three facts sit inside it. The instruction took place in an embassy swimming pool rather than a commercial dive school — an unremarkable arrangement for diplomatic personnel overseas, and a reminder that the compound supplied recreation as well as offices. The single open-water dive was in the Red Sea. And the interest ended there.
Why it was asked
The question was not idle. Rall was building an argument that the pipeline, lying at something like 280 feet, was beyond the reach of the recreational divers the official story implicated — that a recreational limit is around 130 feet, that pressure and air consumption scale so steeply with depth that a diver at 260 feet would have seconds on the bottom, and that placing charges in that time is not possible.[2]
He contrasted this with genuinely deep work, describing a relative who had been a professional diver in the French Navy installing nuclear devices at depth using submersibles and mixed gases — the kind of operation, in his phrase, that only a state can mount.[2]
Kiriakou agreed with the conclusion rather than the technical demonstration: the sabotage required not merely real expertise but state expertise and capability.[3] On the physics he offered only his own thin credentials, which is why the biographical detail appears at all.
Note
Kiriakou’s substantive position on who carried out the Nordstream attack, and his view of the man arrested for it, is treated separately.