The bug in the bedroom is John Kiriakou’s account of finding a listening device in his own house during his posting to Bahrain, told on the DeProgram programme in September 2025 during a discussion of embassy surveillance.[1]
The discovery
Kiriakou sets the scene with the country’s alignment: Bahrain “is like joined at the hip with the United States, defence and foreign policy wise”, and he was “the human rights officer in Bahrain.”[1]
The find was accidental and physical. “One night I’m lying in bed with my wife and I’m reading a book and it was really, really hot. I had no shirt on. So I’m reading a book and this thing falls onto my chest. I’m like, ‘What the fuck is this?’”[1]
He traced it upward: “So I look up. The air conditioning vent is directly above me.” The object identified itself: “I pick this thing up. It’s clearly a bug. It has wires sticking out of it. There’s a little battery, a little watch battery on it.”[2]
Reporting it
Kiriakou’s handling was improvised. “So I put it in a Ziploc bag. And the next day I took it into the embassy and I took it to my chief.”[2]
The confirmation was immediate and unceremonious: “He’s holding it up. He goes, ‘Yep, it’s a bug.’”[3]
Kiriakou’s own question was practical — “Well, now what am I supposed to do?” — and his reconstruction of the entry ran through his wife’s rare absences: “My wife almost never leaves the house, but she must have gone grocery shopping or something, or took our son to the park or whatever. And they immediately went in and planted this bug in the bedroom, no less. In the bedroom.”[3]
What it was for
Kiriakou is emphatic that the household contained nothing to listen to. “My wife was a ballet teacher. She wasn’t a CIA officer. I would never, ever discuss anything with her because she wasn’t cleared.”[3][4]
The explanation his chief supplied located the motive elsewhere: “It’s ‘cause you’re writing that damn human rights report. He said, ‘They don’t like you one bit.’”[4]
The other sign of disfavour
In the same breath Kiriakou described the Bahraini custom of sending departing embassy officers a Rolex — a gift that, exceeding the twenty-five-dollar limit, had to be declared to the Treasury Department and either surrendered or bought back at auction.[4]
He was, he says, the only person in the entire embassy who did not receive one when he left. “I didn’t even get a ‘thank you, come again.’ Nothing.” Told bluntly that they hated him, he agreed: “They hated me.”[5]