Scott Horton is an American antiwar journalist and interviewer, and one of the very few commentators John Kiriakou singles out by name for intellectual force: “Scott Horton, who is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever engaged with on these issues.”[1] The formulation recurs almost unchanged across appearances — “one of the most brilliant people I I’ve ever met”[2] — and its fullest version is the least guarded: “this guy is absolutely brilliant. I I wish my brain could work in such a linear fashion as his does. I I could sit and just listen to him talk all day.”[3][4] Horton has also written extensively on Afghanistan; when an interviewer raised his name in that connection, Kiriakou interrupted to say “oh, he’s wonderful.”[5]
The Piers Morgan panel
The occasion Kiriakou returns to is a televised panel hosted by Piers Morgan at which he and Horton took one side and Alan Dershowitz and Danny Ayalon the other.[6][2] Kiriakou describes it as “the equivalent of a WWE Smackdown”[3] and characterises the format the same way elsewhere — “it’s like smackdown on that show half” the time — adding that Morgan keeps inviting him back “because I don’t interrupt people.”[7] Of the opposing pair he is blunt: “when you’re on with Duritz, Duritz never shuts his mouth.”[2]
Neither he nor Horton was scheduled. Kiriakou, by his own account a semi-regular on the programme, was called at fifteen minutes’ notice because a guest had dropped out; Horton was the other fill-in.[8][9] What he remembers is the relief of seeing who else was on the call: “I log on and I see Scott and I was like, ‘Oh, thank God Scott’s here.’ … as soon as I saw Scott Horton, I thought, ‘Okay, this is going to be a serious intellectual conversation.’”[10][11]
Kiriakou’s identification of the fourth panellist varies between tellings. He names him as Danny Ayalon, “General Danny Ayalon … former Israeli general”[2], in two accounts, but in two others describes the man opposite him only as “the former head of Mossad”[4][12]. The variance is preserved here rather than resolved.
What was argued
Two arguments came out of the panel, and Kiriakou has retold both.
The first was that Jeffrey Epstein had been a Mossad access agent — “somebody who gives a foreign intelligence service access to important people who have important information” — a claim he says he made with 100% confidence, and one he grounds in the observation that a foreign service does not recruit Bill Gates or Bill Clinton or Prince Andrew but the man standing next to them.[4][13] Dershowitz, he says, “practically had a stroke when I said it” and answered that as Epstein’s lawyer he would have known: had his client been working for the Israelis, he could have gone to the White House and obtained a more favourable sentence.[14]
The second was that Israel spies on the United States as a matter of course. Kiriakou stated it as fact from the panel — “Jonathan Pollard was not an anomaly” — and put the FBI’s own count behind it: at least 187 undeclared Israeli intelligence officers spread across the United States, identified through the 1990s and lodged inside American defence contractors.[6][15] The Israeli side laughed; Morgan put it to the panel that there had been no spying since Pollard’s arrest, because the prime minister had said so. Kiriakou’s reply was that this was “simply not true”, and he offered his own first day at the CIA in 1990 as the evidence — he was warned about Israeli espionage against the United States on it.[12][15][16][17]
A separate exchange from the same programme, which Kiriakou recounts as the moment he was cross-examined by the host rather than the guests, turned on Hamas: asked whether Hamas was a terrorist organisation and whether 7 October had been a terrorist attack, he answered yes to both, and was met with “then what are you doing on this show?” His answer was that a policy of killing “women, children, the elderly” and levelling every hospital, school and apartment block is genocide.[18][19]
As interviewer
Horton has interviewed Kiriakou repeatedly on his own programme, including on the pressure applied to independent journalists — the conversation in which Kiriakou grouped himself, Max Blumenthal and MintPress News together as targets of the same campaign.[20]