The Puerto Rico thirds is the account of the island’s politics John Kiriakou reports having been given on the ground, and which he has since adopted as his own summary of why the island’s status does not move. He has given it at least twice: as reported speech in February 2026, during a discussion of a Puerto Rican independence flag carried at an American sporting event, and in his own voice in July 2025, as the evidence for a distinction he draws about what kind of colony Puerto Rico is.[1][2]
The conversation
“the last time I went to Puerto Rico, um, I was talking with a, um, with a guy, he’s kind of mid-level Puerto Rican government official. And I asked him to explain to me what people’s positions were on, um, on independence.”[1]
The answer was a clean split. “he said, ‘Oh, we are very evenly divided.’ He said, ‘Fully a third of Puerto Ricans want independence. A third of Puerto Ricans want statehood. Uh, to be to be a member of the United States as a state. And a third of Puerto Ricans want to just leave things exactly the way they are right now.’”[3]
The official’s own conclusion followed: “And because of that, nothing’s ever going to change.”[3]
The earlier telling, from July 2025, is compressed to the point of shorthand — “even the Puerto Ricans are split. You know, a third a third a third” — and gives the three positions in a different order, statehood first, then independence, then “leave things just the way they are.” It carries no attribution to the official; by 2025 the split is simply something Kiriakou asserts.[2]
A colony, but not a settler colony
The 2025 telling arrives inside an argument about Israel, whose founding Kiriakou’s interlocutor had called the last settler-colonial experiment, with Puerto Rico and Guam offered as possible rivals for the title. Kiriakou concedes the colony but refuses the category: “Puerto Rico is not a settler colonial experiment. It’s the locals who live there. We just govern them.” The thirds are what he produces next, as the reason the arrangement persists.[2]
On the statehood third specifically, he is dismissive in a way he attributes to the agency he worked for. Discussing which allies the United States is genuinely close to, he recalls “the deputy director joking that Norway was going to become the 51st state” — and endorses the joke’s premise: “If there ever was a 51st state, wouldn’t be Puerto Rico, it’s going to be Norway.”[4]
Kiriakou’s own position
He volunteers his preference without claiming standing for it — “I mean, yeah, uh, personally, if I were Puerto Rican, I think I’d want independence” — and agrees with his interlocutor’s observation that the flag at the event sat awkwardly beside a celebration of Puerto Rican culture as part of the United States.[3]
He then draws the comparison that appears to interest him more. “I never understood why the Scots voted not to be independent from from the Brits” — a result that, he says, stunned him: “I really believed that was going to be it. It was going to be I thought it wasn’t even going to be close.” His grounds are economic: “not like the Scots couldn’t handle themselves economically. They have a viable economy.”[5]
What he saw of the island
Asked by a Puerto Rican listener in April 2026 whether he had any stories about the CIA in the American territories, Kiriakou put the limits of his own contact plainly: “I only went to Puerto Rico once when I was with the CIA and it was just sort of a courtesy visit just to see what was going on vis-à-vis the drug trade.”[6] His answer about what the American presence there actually consists of is a description of governing rather than spying. Across Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Marianas — “any American territory anywhere” — the subject is “drugs, drugs, drugs,” with the South Pacific the exception, where it is “China, China, China.”[7] In Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands that means “a gigantic DEA presence and an almost equally large FBI presence, because the whole idea is to build criminal cases that can be prosecuted.” He says he never met a CIA officer actually assigned to the island — only visitors like himself.[8]