The oath to the Constitution is the ground on which John Kiriakou rests his answer to the charge that a former officer who speaks has broken faith. Asked whether he clears what he says, he answers by putting the two undertakings in order of precedence.[1]
“On our first day at the CIA, we put our right hands up in the air and we swore to protect the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. And both Ray and I took that very seriously. I want to protect secrets just like anybody else does, but the Constitution is more important.”
The morning it was sworn
Kiriakou’s account of the day itself is fixed in its details: he was met at the front gate and taken into an auditorium full of other new hires, where he raised his right hand and swore to uphold the Constitution.[2][3][4] The size of the room varies with the telling — “about 30 other people,” “a couple of hundred other new hires,” “the 300 or 400 people in that auditorium.”[2][5][6] What does not vary is the negative half of the formula: “I didn’t swear to keep the agency’s crimes a secret. I swore to uphold the Constitution — and I meant it.”[2][4]
He was proud to have been hired, and says the judgement he now makes about the room is retrospective: “I now realise I was probably the only one in the room who actually took that seriously.” Elsewhere he softens it into disbelief rather than accusation — “I can’t believe that I was the only one… but I did. I took it seriously.”[5][6]
The rule of precedence
Kiriakou states the relationship between the two documents as a hierarchy rather than a balance: “when anything — whether it’s a law or a policy or a signed secrecy agreement — is in conflict with the Constitution, the Constitution wins out every time.” Where two oaths conflict, “you have to defer to the higher authority.”[7][8] His reason for putting it that high is not procedural: “without the Constitution we have nothing, we have chaos. It’s the Constitution that makes this a great country; it’s the Constitution that allows us to believe in things like American exceptionalism.”[6]
Ray McGovern, on the same programme, states the point in contractual terms. He describes receiving perhaps two warning letters a year from the agency and ignoring them “because they don’t have a leg to stand on.” His reasoning: “that little contract that I signed, that said I won’t reveal any information that is prejudicial to the national security, is just a contract. It’s not the Constitution. I took a solemn oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That has a First Amendment in it. That trumps things.”[9][10]
Correcting the record about what he promised
Kiriakou uses the oath most often to rebut a specific characterisation of his own case. “One of the things that people say about my going public with this was that I had promised not to reveal classified information. That is not true. I took an oath to uphold and to defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies domestic and foreign, and I took that oath very, very seriously.”[11] He makes the same correction against the language of his prosecution — that he swore “to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not to cover up the CIA’s dirty little secrets” — and dates his decision to answer Brian Ross truthfully in December 2007 to it.[12]
Answering his prosecutor’s claim that the conviction showed “we have to take our oaths seriously,” he replied: “well, I took my oath seriously. My oath was to the Constitution. On my first day in the CIA I put my right hand up and I swore to uphold the Constitution — and to me torture is unconstitutional.”[13][14] He also invokes it against the espionage charge itself: “I’m a patriot. I’ve always been a patriot. And I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.”[15]
The oath and the torture program
The oath is also how Kiriakou explains his reaction on first being told about enhanced interrogation techniques in mid-2002 — “that’s a torture program. You can use whatever euphemism you want. It’s a torture program. I don’t want any part of it.” Taking the oath seriously, along with respect for international law and human rights, is what made him “the human rights guy at the CIA, which is not career enhancing.”[16]
His strongest formulation of the conflict turns the oath’s own wording against the agency: the torture program “was a blaspheming against what we were supposed to stand for. When I put my right hand up in the air and I swore to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, I meant it — and sometimes the enemy is ourselves.”[17]
He does not present himself as having acted on it promptly. “I’m ashamed to tell you my objection came later. I kept my mouth shut for a long time.”[11]
The limits both men keep
Neither treats the priority as licence to publish anything. McGovern draws his own line at the presidential briefings he delivered — “I am very, very careful not to reveal anything of any substance having to do with those briefings. That is sacrosanct, and I would never violate that trust” — and at anything that would risk sources and methods. Kiriakou’s version of the same limit is the prepublication review he mostly submits to, with named exceptions.[18][9][19]