Matthew Cole is an American national-security journalist. Per John Kiriakou, Cole’s reporting has led to the federal incarceration of five whistleblowers — Kiriakou himself among them. Kiriakou: “I honestly believe in my heart that Matthew Cole’s work as a journalist is a cover — that he is either in the employ of the FBI or somehow under the control of the FBI. Nobody’s that stupid. Nobody is that careless. You’re a national-security correspondent and your tradecraft is so bad that your reporting has led to the incarceration of five national-security whistleblowers — how’s that possible?”[1][2]
The email exchange that landed Kiriakou in prison
Per Kiriakou’s account: Cole emailed him in 2010 ostensibly researching a book on the CIA rendition of cleric Abu Omar. After Kiriakou said he couldn’t help identify any of the rendition team, Cole asked about a CIA officer who had appeared in Kiriakou’s own first book under the pseudonym “John”. Kiriakou: “In my response I said, ‘Oh, you mean John Doe? I said, I don’t know — he’s probably retired and living in Virginia somewhere.’ But what I did in that email was I confirmed his last name. And that’s what they got me on.”[3][4][5]
Per Kiriakou: “Matthew Cole was not writing a book about Abu Omar. He was pretending to write a book about Abu Omar, and in fact he was secretly working for the Guantanamo defense attorneys. So they took John Doe’s name and they put it in a classified motion and asked the judge to allow them to depose him. The judge recognized the name as being classified and turned it over to the FBI. The FBI went to Human Rights Watch and said, ‘Where’d you get this name?’ And they said, ‘We got it from Matthew Cole.’ So they went to Matthew Cole, ‘Where’d you get this name?’ ‘I got it from John Kiriakou.’ And then they arrested me, charged me with five felonies including three counts of espionage.”[5][6]
Three espionage charges were eventually dropped; Kiriakou pleaded to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 — “for confirming the name. Now the name was never made public — never made public — and nobody had ever been prosecuted for this crime in American history. I was the first person.”[6][7]
The approach, told in more detail
A 2026 retelling dates the first contact to July 2008 rather than 2010, and squares with the arrest by his own arithmetic — “three and a half years later, I was arrested by the FBI.”[8][9] The two dates are recorded as he has given them.
In this account the approach came in three stages rather than one. Cole sent a list of twelve names and asked whether Kiriakou knew any of them well enough to arrange an interview for the Abu Omar book; Kiriakou did not. Cole sent a second list of twelve more; Kiriakou answered that “kidnapping wasn’t my thing at the CIA” and that the only thing he knew about the case was what he had read in the Washington Post.[10][11] Only the third email asked the question that mattered: “What about the guy that you mentioned on page 160-something of your first book? I think his name is John.”[11] Kiriakou also states that the book itself was a prop — the cover Cole had sent him as a PDF was one “he just made it up on the internet.”[12]
The chain by which the name travelled back is given here with an extra link. The Guantánamo defence attorneys put the name in a classified motion; the judge recognised it as a leak and turned it over to the FBI; the attorneys said they had it from Human Rights Watch; Human Rights Watch said they had it from their own investigator; the investigator said he had it from Cole; and Cole said “John Kiriakou gave it to me. John Kiriakou was my source.”[13][14] Kiriakou’s summary of the consequence is flat: “And then they arrested me and changed the course of the rest of my life.”[14] He served 23 months.[14]
The SEAL Team Six subpoena
In 2026 the Justice Department subpoenaed Cole, seeking his testimony about two years of contacts and conversations in an effort to identify the sources for his reporting on a failed SEAL Team Six operation inside North Korea.[15][16] Kiriakou marks his own angle on the story as different from everyone else’s: “Most people are talking about this in terms of attacks on press freedom. I’m talking about it because Matthew Cole put me in prison.”[16]
The mission Cole reported was an attempt to plant a listening device in Kim Jong-un’s office during nuclear talks, carried out under complete radio blackout. It failed on contact: flashlights from a North Korean fishing boat turned toward the team as they came ashore, and believing themselves discovered, they shot the fishermen and punctured their lungs so the bodies would sink.[17][18] Kiriakou reads the leak as coming from inside, from people frustrated that the unit was “attempting incredibly stupid operations and only getting publicity for the successful ones.”[18]
To the statement from Cole’s lawyer — that his client “has dedicated his professional life to bringing official misconduct to light”, will not be intimidated, and “will honor his commitment to his sources” — Kiriakou’s reply is two words, the second of them cut off: “That’s bull.”[19][20] He notes the irony without softening it: Cole “refuses to out his sources” for the SEAL Team Six story, and “now, all of a sudden, he’s a champion for freedom of the press” — having, in Kiriakou’s account, previously burned Reality Winner and Terry Albury and named Kiriakou himself to the FBI and the grand jury.[14][21][22]
The reporter behind the burned sources (Scott Horton, 2021)
John Kiriakou identifies Matthew Cole — “the guy that got you busted” — as working at The Intercept, and “the same guy that got Reality Winner busted.”[23] In the same breath, however, Kiriakou is careful to absolve the outlet in Daniel Hale’s case: Hale, he says, outed himself by going public, and “they didn’t blow his identity.”[24]
In a separate interview, Kiriakou extends the same accusation to a third case, blaming Cole for his own imprisonment as well as the imprisonments of both Reality Winner and FBI whistleblower Terry Albury, arguing that a pattern repeating three times means Cole is “secretly working for the FBI.”[25]
Named alongside Esposito
In his 2023 account Kiriakou identifies the pair rather than the individual: “the two national security journalists at The Intercept, Richard Esposito and Matthew Cole, were the journalists responsible for sending me to prison.”[26]
He raises it not as a personal grievance but as one instance in a sequence that also takes in Reality Winner, Terry Albury and Daniel Hale — the pattern set out at the Intercept’s exposed sources.[26][27]
See also
- Mort Halperin — author of the IIPA; wrote Obama defending Kiriakou after the conviction
- Leon Panetta — Kiriakou’s example of a senior official who leaked covert CIA names and was never prosecuted
- Valerie Plame
- John Kiriakou