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.