In the week before 19 May 2017 Kiriakou travelled to Iceland, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and Ireland to speak about national security whistleblowing and transparency.[1] He described the trip as revelatory, and it was his first journey abroad since Trump’s election.[1][2]
The itinerary
There were four separate events in Germany alone. He sat on panels at two film festivals, in Luxembourg and in Belgium, and stressed that these were not gatherings of what he called fringe people or WikiLeaks people: his fellow panellists included the Luxembourg Minister of Justice and the German Minister of Foreign Affairs. On his third day in Germany he spoke to the German Parliament, and afterwards had lunch with the National Security Advisor.[3]
Kiriakou said he was taken aback that people in such important positions, with such prominent roles in national security, wanted to hear what he had to say about transparency and about the classification of criminal acts. The contrast he drew was blunt: it was, he said, nothing like the treatment he had received in the United States over the previous five and a half years.[4]
What he took from it
Asked what he made of the interest, Kiriakou offered a political reading rather than a flattering one. European governments, he said, had been reluctant to do anything to upset the United States while Barack Obama was president, simply because Obama had engaged them on issues; they disagreed with the American position on whistleblowing and transparency but were willing to keep quiet about it. Under Trump they were, in his phrase, perfectly panic-stricken, and now willing to put their foot down.[5]
He returned to the same theme at the end of the interview, when asked what most concerned him. He had expected European allies to dismiss Trump as a buffoon and a reality television star; instead he found them panic-stricken. This was, as they saw it, the man with his finger on the nuclear button, and his unpredictability had an effect on their economies and their societies. They were desperate for a steady hand and for American leadership, and in Kiriakou’s assessment they were not getting it — which he predicted would be bad not only for the United States but for every country that considered itself a friend of the United States.[6]
The pattern he described in 2017 — a reception abroad markedly warmer than the one at home — is one he has returned to repeatedly since.