Reading a proposed domestic-terrorism bill in early 2021, John Kiriakou said what struck him was that it created no new crimes. What it created were permanent new agencies: a domestic-terrorism body inside the Department of Homeland Security and another inside the FBI, both focused on the radical right.[1]
He said the idea had been discussed thirty years earlier, and that he had been in the room.
The London trip
“On my very first trip to London as a CIA officer — I’d been to London many times, of course, but as in my first trip as a CIA officer — we talked with MI5 about their duties as a domestic intelligence service.”[2]
The distinction he draws is the operative one: MI6 is famously the foreign intelligence service; MI5 does only domestic intelligence. “They don’t have the power to arrest, but they don’t need to arrest anybody — that’s what Scotland Yard is for.”[2]
The proposal
Kiriakou dates the conversation to 1992 or 1993 and describes the object plainly: “we were talking about setting a similar thing up in the United States, either parallel to the FBI or as a part of the FBI, that would just spy on American citizens and then provide that intelligence to the FBI to effect arrests.”[3]
He does not say who proposed it, at what level it was considered, or why it went no further at the time.
The observation
What he adds is the arithmetic: “and here we are all these years later, thirty years later, and it looks like it’s going to come to pass.”[3]
The point is not that the 2021 bill descended from the 1992 discussion — Kiriakou claims no lineage — but that an arrangement the United States declined to build when it was proposed to it appeared to be arriving anyway, under a different name and a different justification. He notes that the idea of an agency dedicated to the radical right had itself “been discussed since the early 1990s.”[1]
In the same conversation he sets out why he thinks such a body would be self-feeding rather than stabilising: agencies expand, dissent that is pushed off mainstream platforms radicalises, and the radicalisation then justifies the agency. He agreed, when it was put to him, that pushing the right off the internet would tend to produce exactly the enemy the new units would exist to watch.[4]