The Bay of Piglets is the host’s coinage for the repeated small-scale attempts to land armed men in Venezuela, adopted by John Kiriakou on 22 October 2025 with the concession “I wish I had thought of that.”[1]
Twice already
The conversation began with what an American move on Venezuela would physically require. Kiriakou noted there were no ground troops in the area, though the country is close enough that this could change quickly; the host proposed that anything else would amount to an amphibious invasion.[2]
Kiriakou’s answer was that it had been tried. “Which is what they’ve tried twice in Venezuela already. You remember these bozos who got wrapped up as they were coming ashore.”[3]
The email
What makes the passage more than a history lesson is what happened next. “One of them actually emailed me a couple of weeks ago saying: hey, I really want to be on your show. I want to blow the whistle on communism in Venezuela.”[3]
Kiriakou’s reply, as he reports it, was two sentences and contained the distinction he has spent a decade defending. “I’m like: yeah, you’re not a whistleblower. No, you’re not coming on my show.”[3]
The refusal is consistent with his published position that a whistleblower is a person who reports evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality or a threat to public health and safety — and that a captured participant in an armed incursion, whatever his politics, does not qualify by wanting to talk.
What he expected instead
Asked what was coming, Kiriakou agreed with the host’s published guess. “I think we’re looking at some sort of amphibious assault. I think that we’re looking at an air war.”[4]
He then set out the reasoning he believes underlies it, and rejected it in the same breath. “It’s funny, Ted — the idea behind all this is apparently what the idea was behind George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq: that you bomb the hell out of a country, and then of course, in your logic, the people will rise up against their leader — because that’s what will make the Americans start bombing — and then they overthrow him, and then they throw flowers at us when we cross the border, and everybody lives happily ever after.”[4][5]
The host supplied the last item — a free trade agreement — and Kiriakou finished the thought: “and that never, ever, ever happens.”[5]