Ending a long account of his prosecution given to a New Zealand audience in August 2017, John Kiriakou added a cost that had been incurred only weeks earlier.
The line
Having said that he would do the whole thing over again, that somebody had to say something, that transparency is real and important, and that a democracy cannot function without it, he listed what it had cost. “It’s cost me my marriage,” he said. “My wife left three months ago. She said it’s just too much work to be Mrs. John Kiriakou.”[1]
His own comment on the reason was one sentence: “To tell you the truth, I don’t blame her.”[1]
The frame he puts around it
The remark closes the talk rather than derailing it. Kiriakou moves straight from the separation to the conclusion he had been building toward: “But I had to do the right thing, and this was the price that we all have to pay. It was all worth it.”[1]
The cost is framed around the household throughout the same talk. Explaining why he took the plea, he recalls the attorney he most respected telling him that the deal was about “inflicting the least amount of pain on yourself and your family,” and that he could be “home early enough that your children won’t even remember you were gone.”[2][3]
Relation to his other accounts
The attribution of the marriage’s end to the whistleblowing is consistent across his later tellings. In 2025 he said the case “cost me literally everything, my marriage, my career, my freedom, my children.”[4] Asked in 2026 why his divorce, rather than the CIA or federal prison, was the source of his post-traumatic stress, he explained that home had always been the place he could go back to, however hard the job got.[5][6] He has also credited his wife with the advice that shaped his public response after his arrest: that he had done nothing wrong, that he was a whistleblower and not a leaker, and that he had to keep talking about the case until his side of the story became the side of record.[7]