The Vietnam speech is a paid engagement John Kiriakou described on 25 February 2026, when a viewer asked him to shed some light on it in the same message that asked about Frank Snepp.
“The speech in Vietnam is going to be on the morning of the 10th of August.”[1]
The booking
Kiriakou named the intermediary and the audience without prompting. “I’m represented right now by a speakers bureau in New York called Gotham Artists and they booked this speech for me to give to 300 Australian investment bankers at their annual convention.”[1][2]
The pairing is an unusual one on its face — a former CIA officer prosecuted under the Espionage Act addressing a bankers’ convention in Hanoi — and Kiriakou treated it as a windfall rather than an incongruity.
The trip
He was taking family. “My brother-in-law is so excited that he’s going to go with me. We’re going to meet in Washington. We’re going to fly to Vietnam through South Korea. And take a couple of extra days for ourselves.”[2]
The reason for the extra days is that he had never been. “I’ve never been to Vietnam. I’ve always wanted to go. And uh I think this is going to be a blast.”[2]
Asked whether the Hanoi Hilton or the tunnels were on his list, he took both: “Yes and yes. Yes to both.” His only complaint was the length of the visit — “I only regret that I don’t have more than you know 5 days” — because otherwise he would have had suits made, at about a hundred dollars apiece.[3]
The corpus records the engagement as described rather than as completed; Kiriakou gave the date five and a half months in advance and no later account of the trip appears in the source material.