Savas Kalenderidis is a Greek intelligence officer whom John Kiriakou counts as a personal friend, and about whom he was asked directly in December 2025: was it true that the CIA, together with Turkish intelligence, had tried to kill a Greek intelligence officer in 1999 outside the Greek embassy in Nairobi?[1]
The denial
Kiriakou did not need the name supplied. “I in fact he’s a good friend of mine Savas Kalenderidis. No, they did not.”[2] Pressed with “You would say,” he repeated it: “No.”[2]
The denial is one of a small number of occasions on which Kiriakou has been asked to confirm a specific American assassination attempt and has refused the premise outright rather than declining to answer.
The man
His description of Kalenderidis is warm and unqualified: an absolutely lovely man, a national hero in Greece, whose friendship Kiriakou says he thoroughly enjoys.[2]
He also recommends his work, with a practical caveat. Kalenderidis runs what Kiriakou calls an awesome YouTube podcast, sometimes as often as four times a day, jumping on to record whenever something even slightly interesting to him reaches the news — but he does not speak a word of English, so the recommendation only holds for people who speak Greek.[2][3]
Nairobi, 1999
What Kalenderidis was actually doing, in Kiriakou’s account, was taking part in an operation to help protect Abdullah Öcalan, the founder of the PKK.[3]
Kiriakou then corrected himself mid-sentence on the crucial point of who found out — “And the Greeks became aware I’m sorry the Turks became aware that he was in the Greek Embassy in Nairobi” — and described the seizure: the Turks worked with Kenyan intelligence to divert part of Öcalan’s motorcade, grabbed him, and turned him over to the Turks.[3][4]
Öcalan has been in Turkish custody ever since. Kiriakou’s account attributes the operation to a Turkish–Kenyan liaison rather than to any American hand, which is consistent with his denial of the assassination story that prompted the question.