In February 2025 the Trump administration was reported to be preparing to thin the CIA workforce on the same terms it had used elsewhere in the federal government.
The terms
The offer was a deferred resignation: take it, and you are paid for six to eight months, you do not have to come to work, and then your contract ends and you go and do something else. A CIA spokesperson described the exercise as an effort to infuse the agency with renewed energy, and the Wall Street Journal reported that the object was to bring the agency into line with the president’s priorities, including targeting drug cartels.[1]
Kiriakou’s reading
Asked whether he accepted the stated rationale — that the agency was being pointed at the Western Hemisphere rather than at Europe and the Middle East — John Kiriakou answered: “yeah, in part.”[2]
He credits the president with a consistent anti-war disposition “at the core of his ideology,” says he welcomes it, and adds that “there’s no reason why we should always be at odds with Russia and China.” If Marco Rubio is right that the United States must accept the inevitability of a multipolar world, then, in Kiriakou’s view, it must.[3]
On the cartels specifically his objection is bureaucratic rather than strategic: “why is the CIA at odds with the Drug Enforcement Administration when really at the end of the day drugs crossing the border into the United States is a bad thing and we should all be working together to stop it?”[3]
The Guantánamo question
Asked in the same conversation about reopening Guantánamo, Kiriakou was unequivocal: he is “strongly opposed to doing anything with Guantanamo other than closing it.” The alternative he sets out is the constitutional one — charge them with a crime, give them their day in court, let them face a jury, and incarcerate them if guilt is proved. “But putting them in a no man’s land in a limbo at Guantanamo isn’t going to work for anybody.”[4]
Asked how the public could know what was being done in its name, he pointed at the structural problem: Guantánamo is effectively off limits to almost all journalists, which leaves only the congressional oversight committees — and those, he says, “really have turned into little more than cheerleaders for the various elements of the deep state.”[5]