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John Kiriakou's observation, from inside the CIA, that the collapse of the Soviet Union changed nothing about how the agency worked on Russia. The marching orders given to his colleagues on the Russia account were not to change policy at all: Russia was treated as the same enemy it had been as the Soviet Union, with a brief exception during the Yeltsin presidency.
Russia was always the same enemy is an observation John Kiriakou offered in July 2026, as a first-hand contribution to a discussion of why relations between the United States and Russia never improved after the Cold War.
What he saw
Kiriakou is careful to place himself. He spent many years at the CIA as a Middle East specialist, not a Russia specialist.[1]
What struck him was what happened to the colleagues who did work on Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. “Their marching orders were not to change CIA policy at all. Russia was seen as the same enemy that it always had been as the Soviet Union during Cold War.”[1]
He allows exactly one exception: a very brief period during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, in the late 1990s. Outside of that window, in his account, American foreign policy toward Russia did not change at all.[2]
The question it framed
Kiriakou put the point as a question to the historian Peter Kuznick — why relations did not improve when the Soviet Union fell apart — and the answer he received ran through the shock therapy of the 1990s, the American withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002, the invasion of Iraq, and the eastward expansion of NATO.[2]
The value of Kiriakou’s own contribution is narrower and institutional. Whatever the diplomatic record shows, the working assumption inside the agency’s Russia account survived the disappearance of the state it had been built against.[1]
Sourced from John Kiriakou's on-record public statements. See his profile for the full body of his interviews, podcast appearances, and short-form video.
