The Egyptian intelligence chief’s son is a coincidence John Kiriakou reported at the top of a broadcast in November 2025, interrupting Rall’s complaint about being tired in order to explain his own.[1]
The question
Kiriakou was in Oxford, Ohio, visiting his son. About a week earlier, his son had asked him whether he knew Muhammad Farag.[1]
His answer was that he did: Farag had been the head of the Egyptian intelligence service some thirty-five years before, and Kiriakou had met him in Cairo.[1]
The connection
The reason for the question was that Farag’s son was Kiriakou’s son’s marketing professor — and wanted to meet him.[1]
Kiriakou remembered him too, from the other end of the same acquaintance: “He was a little kid when I was there. He’s like seven or eight years old.”[1][2]
The dinner
The two parties went out to dinner the night before the broadcast, and it got late — which, Kiriakou said, was why he was so beaten up on air.[2]
Rall’s reply was the joke the story invited: that partying in Oxford, Ohio can go way past eight o’clock at night, so it can get pretty crazy there.[2]
The episode is a small illustration of something Kiriakou returns to about a career in liaison work — that the officers and chiefs of foreign services he dealt with in the 1980s and 1990s have families, and that those families turn up decades later in unrelated corners of American life.