John Kiriakou served as a senior investigator for the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee under chairman John Kerry, a role he also describes as adviser to the committee.[1][2] He was still holding the post — “the most prestigious committee on Capitol Hill” — when the weight of a federal investigation into him came to a head with his arrest in January 2012.[3]
AIPAC’s welcome and the Holy Land offer
John Kiriakou served as senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2009 to mid-2011 under chairman John Kerry. He says two AIPAC representatives walked unannounced into his office on his first day and offered an all-expenses-paid trip to the Holy Land, name-dropping seven colleagues already going; he refused repeatedly and finally told them to get out of his office.[4][5][6] More broadly, he says the committee’s staff were “never permitted to do anything that might anger the Israelis” — that they always had to think about Israel first and the United States second, something he says he long resented.[7] As chief investigator for the committee, he also ran a study of the hawala system, the informal money-transfer network he identified as one of the principal channels through which al-Qaeda moved operational money in the post-9/11 period.[8]
On Congress: “narcissism and cashing in”
Kiriakou has been blunt about his view of the lawmakers he worked alongside as chief investigator: “most of these guys and women seek only to promote their own narcissism and to cash in. It’s not about the country. It’s about power and about enriching themselves.”[9]
The Arab Spring and a policy vacuum
Kiriakou says that while he was on the committee during the Arab Spring, Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry “just got caught up in the euphoria of change and people power” without giving any thought to what would happen afterward — a policy vacuum he blames for the chaos that followed in Libya, Syria and Egypt.[10]