The diplomatic stool collection is the practice, confirmed by John Kiriakou in August 2025, by which visiting foreign leaders remove their own bodily waste from the country they are visiting rather than leave it behind. He was asked about it after reports that Vladimir Putin had done so following a meeting in Alaska, and treated the story as unremarkable.
The practice
Kiriakou’s first response was flat: “That is actually not uncommon.” Pressed, he repeated it — “That is not That is not at all uncommon.” Many leaders who come to the United States collect their own faeces to take back and dispose of in their own toilets.[1]
Why
The reason he gives is that there are entities within the United States government that will gladly and happily collect that material.[1] What they are collecting it for is DNA and health information — a point he and Rall arrived at together, and which Kiriakou confirmed without elaboration.[2]
The intelligence value of the second category is the more immediate one: the health of a head of state is among the most closely guarded and most sought-after facts about any government, and a biological sample answers questions that no amount of reporting can.
Who does the collecting
Rall’s assumption was that some unfortunate hotel employee is sent to scoop it out of the toilet. Kiriakou corrected the picture: “Yeah, but the poor slob at the hotel is really a CIA officer undercover as a hotel employee.”[2]
Asked whether he would have taken that assignment or resigned, his answer was immediate and unhedged. “No, I’d say no. You got to draw the line somewhere. You have to have some self-respect.” And then, on the range of what he did accept in twenty years at the agency: “there are a lot of things that I did for my country, and that’s that’s not one of them.”[3]
The exchange is one of the few places where Kiriakou draws a personal line inside the trade rather than a political one — the objection is not that the collection is illegal or ineffective, but that he would not have done it.