The Farragut West encounter was a brief exchange — or rather a single sentence, unanswered — between John Kiriakou and two National Guardsmen stationed in a Washington Metro station, which he recounted on 5 November 2025.
The setting
He was not looking for a confrontation. “I went downtown yesterday afternoon to have coffee with a friend, and there were two National Guardsmen in the Farragut West Metro station.”[1]
The location is the load-bearing detail of the story. Farragut West sits in the federal office district a short walk from the White House, and Kiriakou’s assessment of it is dismissive of any security rationale for troops being there at all: “Farragut West — probably the single safest Metro station in the entire Metro network.”[1]
Talking himself out of it, and failing
What he describes next is an internal argument he lost. “As soon as I saw them at a distance, I was like: don’t say anything. Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything.”[1]
He then walked up to them. “And I said, ‘You guys should be ashamed of yourselves.’ And I walked away.” Asked what they did, he was clear that nothing followed on either side: “They didn’t say anything.” Pressed, he added the limit of it — “That’s all I said.”[1]
Where it sits in his politics
The encounter is a personal coda to a position Kiriakou had already argued at length: that the federal deployment of soldiers into American cities is a political display rather than a response to crime, and that its authors count on the deployment becoming ordinary. He raises it in a passage about public revulsion at the ICE raids and the troops on the streets — “even people who are anti-illegal immigration, they don’t like the way this is being handled: the goons on the streets of the city, the National Guard” — and offers his own conduct as an instance of the reaction rather than as advice.[2]
He makes no claim to have changed anything. The two men said nothing, he walked on, and the story ends there. Its interest lies in the shape of it: a former government officer, rehearsing silence, unable to keep to it.