Peter Strzok served as head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. John Kiriakou has described Strzok’s role in two phases of the investigation against him.
First, discovery documents from Kiriakou’s case included a memo to Strzok from an FBI agent recommending they end an operation in which an undercover FBI agent posing as a Japanese diplomat had repeatedly lunched with Kiriakou, attempting to induce him to accept payment for classified information. The agent wrote: “We should end this operation. He’s clearly not going to take the bait.” Kiriakou had in fact reported every meeting back to the FBI, not knowing the “diplomat” was himself an FBI agent.[1] Kiriakou has recounted the same memo in other interviews, there identifying Strzok by name as the counterintelligence-division head to whom the undercover agent reported when recommending the operation’s end.[2][3]
Second, when Kiriakou arrived at FBI headquarters on January 12, 2012 — having been lured there under false pretenses while agents simultaneously raided his home — Strzok was present at the conclusion of the interview. As Kiriakou left, Strzok asked the interviewing agent: “Did he implicate himself?”[4] Strzok later physically placed the handcuffs on Kiriakou.[5] Kiriakou has separately identified Strzok as the agent who personally arrested him and charged him with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, over his ABC News interview and a subsequent New York Times interview: “It was Peter Strzok who put the cuffs on me… charged me with five felonies including three counts of espionage.”[6]
Kiriakou learned this only in 2017, when a Washington Post reporter called to tell him that Peter Strzok had been fired from the FBI and asked for a comment: “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 was: “Karma’s a [expletive] and now it’s his turn.”[7]
The arrest
“The FBI agent that physically put the handcuffs on me was none other than Peter Strzok.”[8]
Kiriakou describes what Strzok later became known for without softening it: “he was cheating on his wife with an attorney at the FBI, and he was the one that was exchanging these text messages with his girlfriend about Donald Trump — and they’re not going to stand for Donald Trump’s election, and they’re going to take him down, and they’re going to block everything he tries to do. And he just made it so partisan, so stupidly.”[9]
He accepts the irony put to him: the bureau that set out to destroy Martin Luther King’s marriage was, decades later, run in part by agents doing the same thing.[10]
The mole in his unit
The more serious charge Kiriakou attaches to Strzok’s name comes from Jim Bamford’s Spy Fail: that the FBI lost ten of its Chinese sources over a decade — killed or arrested — “because Peter Strzok’s counterintelligence unit at the FBI had a Chinese mole in it,” a former CIA operations officer who had moved to the bureau as a Chinese translator and was quietly arrested in 2019.[11][12]