The Belgian intelligence director is a figure John Kiriakou knows at one remove, described on the DeProgram programme in September 2025 when a viewer asked for his thoughts on Belgian intelligence. Kiriakou declined the obvious joke and offered a connection instead.[1]
The friendship
“This is one of those small-world stories,” he began. “When I was a senior in high school, we had a foreign exchange student from Brussels, Pete Jambon. And Pete and I are still close buddies. He comes back to the States just about every year and we’re all in each other’s weddings and we’re godfathers to each other’s kids — Pete and my three other closest friends.”[1]
The brothers took different paths: “Pete went into private business, became very wealthy. His brother went into government and became the director of the Belgian intelligence service.”[2]
The conversation in Atlanta
They met at a wedding. “The last time he was here in the States, we met up in Atlanta to go to another one of our best friends’ son’s wedding.” Kiriakou asked after the brother, and learned the portfolio had grown: “they made him intel director and deputy prime minister. It’s the craziest thing.”[2]
His follow-up — “how’s he fitting in with intelligence?” — produced the part of the exchange Kiriakou tells the story for.[2]
The prejudice, and the defence of it
“He said, ‘You know, I never realised that my brother had a hatred for Arabs.’ And I’m like, ‘What? You guys don’t hate anybody.’”[3]
The brother’s reply, whenever challenged, was the appeal to privileged information: “Oh, you don’t see what I see. If you could see what I see…”[3]
Kiriakou recognised the formula. “Oh, Pete, I hear that all the time” — the claim being that if you had the access, “you’d want to kill everybody.” His answer was his own service record: “Well, no. I used to have access to what you had access to, and I never wanted to kill anybody.”[3]
His assessment of the service
Kiriakou’s professional judgement of Belgian intelligence follows from the same conversation and is narrow rather than dismissive: “the Belgians are very good when it comes to Arabs, and they pretty much ignore everything else. It’s all about the Arabs.”[4]
Asked what drives the focus, he pointed to a fear of the country’s Palestinian refugee population — “they’re panicked at the idea that … they might be terrorists” — a preoccupation the hosts traced back to the bombing campaigns that hit Western Europe in earlier decades.[4][5]