The Piers Morgan panel is John Kiriakou’s account of a recurring television appearance he uses both to explain why he changed his mind about Piers Morgan and to recount two of his sharper on-air exchanges.
He had loathed Morgan — “I really did” — until Morgan’s producers began pursuing him for the show. He went on, and “he treated me really well.”[1] He has since appeared repeatedly, including on the JFK files and, in December 2025, on Piers Morgan Uncensored.[2][3]
The panel
The appearance that matters put him alongside Scott Horton — the libertarian, he specifies, “not the Atlantic Monthly journalist Scott Horton, although he’s okay, too” — against Alan Dershowitz and a senior former Israeli official. “There were four of us, Scott Horton and I on the one side, and the other side was Alan Dershowitz and” the Israeli.[4][5]
Kiriakou does not identify the fourth panellist consistently. He calls him General Danny Ayalon and identifies him as being from Mossad; elsewhere simply “the former head of Mossad”; and once he corrects himself mid-sentence — “it was Danny, was it Danny Ayalon? He was the head of Mossad… Danny Yat. Thank you” — settling on a different name.[4][6][7]
The panel was hostile — “it was harsh, man. And they were at each other’s throats” — and Kiriakou spent much of it watching.[4][8] He says the format works against him: the show assumes guests will interrupt, and Morgan will break it up if it gets out of hand, “but it’s not really in my nature to interrupt. I have to force myself to do it on that show.”[9]
Hamas, October 7th and Gaza
Morgan eventually turned to him and asked whether he considered Hamas a terrorist organisation. Kiriakou’s answer distinguished periods: “I didn’t, until October 7th, when they attacked civilians. I believed that they were a liberation organization. But when they murdered civilians, yes.”[8] Asked whether October 7th was a terrorist attack, his answer was “in part, yes.”[8]
Asked then for his position on Gaza, he gave it without qualification: “the Israelis are wrong and they need to get out of Gaza immediately.” The reasoning he offered was a rule about policy rather than a judgement about a party: “you can’t have as your policy kill everybody. That’s the definition of genocide. And if anybody should know genocide, it should be the Israelis.”[10]
Epstein, Dershowitz and “who knows?”
The other exchange Kiriakou retells came when he said on air that he believed Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli spy — an “access agent,” in the version he prefers, “collecting information from American politicians.”[11][12]
Dershowitz, who had been Epstein’s attorney, interrupted “like attorneys do”: “that is outrageous. If he had been a spy, he would have told me, because I was his attorney and I could have gone to the White House and I could have gotten him a better sentence.” Kiriakou treats the objection as self-refuting: “wait a minute. You could have gone to the White House to say, go easy on Jeffrey Epstein because he’s an Israeli spy collecting information from American politicians? If I were the president, I would have hung him from a tree.”[13][14]
Morgan then put the question to the Israeli directly — “was he a spy?” — and got a laugh and “who knows?”[13][14] Kiriakou reads that non-answer as the tell of the evening: the man “was kind of into it in terms of having a fun time… he wasn’t going to admit to anything,” and when the claim that Israel had not spied on the United States since Jonathan Pollard was raised, Kiriakou answered that Israeli spies were exposed in Washington in 1991 — “and he just goes like, okay. I busted him. He doesn’t care. It’s all a big joke.”[11][15][6] Dershowitz, by contrast, “kept interrupting and just coming in and hitting me over and over.”[15] Kiriakou’s own assessment of the round is modest: “I think I rattled him just a little bit.”[12]
Morgan’s reversal
What Kiriakou reports next is the part he says heartened him. Morgan replied: “I’ve finally come around on this issue and I have to agree with you” — from a man who had been “Joe Zionist from the very beginning.”[10][16]
He accepted his co-host’s qualification that one would have hoped for such moral clarity on 8 October 2023 rather than years later, and added the obvious rider: “better late than never, seriously.”[16]