The Ukraine call whistleblower is the intelligence officer whose August 2019 complaint about a call between Donald Trump and the president of Ukraine led to Trump’s first impeachment. John Kiriakou has consistently declined to treat him as a whistleblower, and is equally consistent that this does not license naming him.
The procedural objection
Kiriakou puts the disclaimer first: “I’m on record as saying that I don’t believe that this is a real whistleblower — and it’s not because the whistleblower has taken one partisan position or taken another partisan position.”[1]
The position took a few months to harden. Speaking two weeks after the complaint surfaced, in October 2019, he was still openly undecided — “I’m of two minds on this whole issue” — and conceded at the outset that the man “does meet the definition of whistleblowing, which is bringing to light any evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality or threats to the public health or public safety.”[2][3] Taken at face value, he said then, an analyst detailed to the National Security Council who came across the information and reported it “did the right thing” — and it was “the agency as an organization” that then “did exactly the wrong thing by taking over the whole process.”[4]
Twelve days later it had hardened, and the hardening is datable. On 15 October 2019 he stated the conclusion without the hedge — “this is not a whistleblower, he’s an anonymous source for the Democratic staff and the House Intelligence Committee” — and noted he had said the same thing on Tucker Carlson’s programme the previous week.[5] The president retweeted a quotation from that appearance; Kiriakou’s account of finding out is that he went home, put a ballgame on, and “then my phone just blew up.”[6]
In the same conversation he adds a wrinkle to the chain he elsewhere traces cleanly: there were “reports that he actually went around his chain in the very beginning and went directly to Adam Schiff on the Oversight Committee,” before ending up with his superior — and that once the Justice Department deemed the complaint not credible and “killed it,” it was Schiff who then went public.[7][8] He marks the first step as a report rather than a fact, and the article follows him in that.
The objection is the route. There is “a very specific MO that one has to go through to report waste, fraud, abuse or illegality in the intelligence community: you go to your supervisor, from there to the Inspector General, the Inspector General then goes to the oversight committees. That’s not what happened. Not even remotely close to what happened in this case.”[1][9]
What did happen, as he traces it: the whistleblower went to his supervisor, the supervisor to the Inspector General, the Inspector General to the General Counsel’s office, the General Counsel to CIA leadership, back to the Inspector General, on to the Director of National Intelligence’s Inspector General — “and then not to the oversight committees, but to the Justice Department.”[9] His October 2019 account of the same chain adds Gina Haspel by name and stresses how wide the circulation became: from the immediate supervisors it went to the attorneys at the General Counsel, up through the leadership, “it went to Gina Haspel, it went to the IG, it went to every Tom, Dick and Harry it seems at every senior level of the CIA,” and only then to the DNI’s inspector general.[10]
The statutory point is narrow and he states it flatly: the DNI’s inspector general is required to investigate and, if he finds the complaint truthful, forward it to the oversight committees. “The law doesn’t say investigate it and then send it to the Justice Department for political advice.”[11] Asked whether there are consequences for that, he said no — it belongs to the class of statutes that will never be enforced, alongside over-classification, “one of those things that’s just going to be ignored.”[12][13]
The stylistic tell
The second objection is textual. The published complaint is “not a straight account of what the whistleblower claims to have seen or wants to reveal. It’s a very legalistic document, clearly written by a team of attorneys.”[14]
Kiriakou grounds that in training. CIA analysts go through six months of writing instruction at the Farm, “because they want every CIA analyst to write in exactly the same style — so that when the president reads the PDB every morning, no matter who wrote it, it looks exactly the same.” The complaint “is not in that CIA DI writing style. It’s in a style of attorneys.”[15]
His conclusion: whatever the officer originally wanted to report “was overtaken by the CIA’s general counsel and the CIA’s leadership,” and what emerged was, in the description he gave on air at the time, “an anonymous source for the Democratic staff of the House Intelligence Committee.”[16]
In the earlier telling he draws the inference from his own hand rather than from the Farm curriculum: he went through the same analytic training the complainant did, “there’s a certain writing style that the CIA beats into you — I still write in that style even though I’ve been gone from the CIA for 15 years and I’ve been out of analysis for 22.”[17] The complaint is not in it, and the conclusion he drew in 2019 was numerical rather than legalistic: “this whistleblower report was written by a committee.” He believed there was not one whistleblower but a group of people being fronted by one, with the lawyers’ chop and the leadership’s chop on the document and several analysts contributing to it.[17][18]
The three possibilities
The 2019 formulation leaves all three live at once: “is this a legitimate whistleblower, is this a whistleblowing by committee, or is this a CIA operation against the president? We truly don’t know.”[19]
Each branch carries a different fate. If the man is legitimate, Kiriakou expected his career to be finished — a CIA manager will ask what stops him ratting out the organisation next, over rendition tomorrow or a torture programme after that, “can they trust this guy?”[20][21] If instead it was a committee product or an operation, he expected the man to be fine, and noted the agency has “lots of black funds available” and an established way of parking someone: a scholar-in-residence posting at his own university for two to four years, then a full pension and a quiet exit.[19][22]
Everybody in the building knew
Kiriakou’s objection to naming the man was never that his identity was secret inside the agency. The night before the October 2019 interview a CIA friend telephoned him and told him the name; he asked whether it was already out, and was told no — “everybody in the building figured it out.”[23] The New York Times description published the week before was, he said, easily enough to identify the officer, and it took colleagues “but a minute.”[23]
He expected a leak from the Republican side — “the Republicans are extraordinarily hostile to this whistleblower and I wouldn’t be surprised if the whistleblower’s identity is leaked” — and said the environment was far more politically charged than the one he had faced in 2007, when three credible threats were made against his own life.[24][25] Asked outright who it was, he declined: “I’m dying of curiosity, but I don’t want to mess up his life any more than he’s got in store for him.”[26]
How he saw the memo
One detail Kiriakou said nobody was discussing: the write-up of a presidential call is a memcon, and memcons “are usually very tightly held and they do not leave the NSC.”[27] That an analyst had access to one told him the document had been handed over: “when I was an analyst we never ever had access to write-ups of the president’s conversations with anybody.”[27]
He also rejected the reported figure of twenty people on the Trump–Zelensky call, putting the usual number at four and “on rare occasions” five.[28]
On motivation
Kiriakou notes that the professional consensus cuts against him here: whistleblower attorneys hold that motivation is irrelevant so long as waste, fraud, abuse, illegality or a threat to public health or safety is reported. “But I struggle with that, because in this case it seems to me that motivation would be the heart of the argument. I would want to know what the whistleblower’s motivation was, because it would help me to conclude whether or not it was a real whistleblower.”[29]
Against naming him
The defence is unqualified. “I can’t see any reason, any legitimate reason, why you would have to reveal the identity of the whistleblower. That just doesn’t make any sense to me.”[30]
He describes the consequence in career terms he knows well: internally the man “is probably never going to work in a serious job again, even if he’s able to remain inside the CIA — the battle lines are going to be drawn, his career is finished,” and once named he will have trouble even getting follow-on employment. “And that’s just not fair. We can disagree about the methodology, we can disagree about the information or the import of the information — but ruining the guy on purpose is exactly what we should be standing up and opposing.”[30][31]
And on Republican access
Asked whether Republicans had a fair complaint about being unable to interview the officer, Kiriakou said yes, and argued it from his own case. After blowing the whistle on the torture programme he was subpoenaed by the Senate Armed Services Committee and spent “a solid eight or nine hours” with staff — half Democratic, half Republican — “in the vault, the SCIF it’s called, so we could speak freely … in a classified setting. And the questions from both sides were all relevant. They were all down in the weeds. They were all investigative in nature.”[32]
However partisan Capitol Hill had become, “I can’t help but to think that the staffs at least would have been professional, and the Republicans probably should have had the opportunity to interview that whistleblower.”[33]