# Sixteen people knew

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
>
> Cite as: "Sixteen people knew," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/sixteen-people-knew/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*John Kiriakou's answer to why deeply held secrets do not leak: at the outset only sixteen people in the entire federal government knew about the CIA torture programme, which is why it stayed hidden for years.*

- **Programme:** The CIA torture programme
- **Initial circle he gives:** 16 people in the entire federal government
- **Later:** Hundreds, with dozens carrying it out
- **The principle:** Too few people read in for a leak to occur

Asked why, if the government leaks constantly, nothing has leaked about crash retrievals or recovered craft, [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou) offered a structural answer drawn from the one deeply compartmented programme he knows from the inside.

## The reasoning

Having been in the [CIA](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia) for fifteen years and having been read into special compartmented programmes, he said, he could only conclude that such things are *"so compartmentalized, so stovepiped, that there are too few people who actually are read into the program to leak it."*[1]

## The example

He then produced his own case as the proof. *"You know, this is how torture didn't leak for so long. In the beginning, there were only sixteen people in the entire federal government who knew about the torture program."*[1]

The circle widened later — *"later on it was hundreds of people. There were dozens that were actually carrying out the torture"* — but the point he is making concerns the early period, when the number was small enough that secrecy held on its own.[1]

## What the argument concedes

The answer is an unusual one for Kiriakou to give in that setting, because it cuts against the interest of the people asking. His host had raised a claim that governments leak deliberately to secure funding, and had wondered why the pattern did not hold for the subject at hand. Kiriakou's answer accepts that a genuinely small compartment can hold — and by implication that the absence of leaks is not evidence that there is nothing to leak, nor evidence that there is.

It also carries an implicit account of his own significance. On his telling, the torture programme did not surface through the ordinary porousness of Washington. It surfaced because one of the sixteen decided to talk.

## See also

## See also

- [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou)
- [Central Intelligence Agency](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia)
- [CIA and the UFO question](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-ufo-question)
- [Enhanced interrogation techniques](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/enhanced-interrogation)

## Sources

1. Podcast UFO Live Shows (2025-10-24), at 05:21. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b6OyFgK-Hg&t=321s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-10-24-podcast-ufo-live-shows-podcast-ufo-live-shows/

---

From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/sixteen-people-knew/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt