Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is a group of former U.S. intelligence officials — retired CIA, FBI, NSA and some DOD personnel — of which John Kiriakou is a member.[1][2] It confers the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. Kiriakou recounts that when Joe Kent went public on intelligence matters, he tracked down Kent’s contact information and arranged for VIPS to give him the Sam Adams Award — though, he notes, the two had never spoken.[3][2]
Kiriakou identifies fellow VIPS member Bill Binney as the former number-four official at the NSA, and cites Binney’s study concluding that the data downloaded from the DNC server was extracted at a speed no internet connection could achieve remotely, implying a local, not Russian, leak.[4]
Sam Adams Award to Joe Kent (2026)
John Kiriakou said on the PBD Podcast in April 2026 that when Joe Kent went public with the identity of the American intelligence figure whose leak scooped the Iran strike, Kiriakou immediately reached out for Kent’s contact information and, on behalf of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, presented Kent with the group’s Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence — despite the two men never having spoken directly.[5][6]
The letter to Ecuador (2018)
After Ecuador cut off Julian Assange’s communications in 2018, VIPS wrote to the Ecuadorian president through the country’s embassy in Washington. John Kiriakou, who delivered the petitions, says the letter carried “something like three or four dozen signatures of retired intelligence professionals from CIA, NSA, FBI, Homeland Security and the uniformed military and military intelligence services — so we like to think we’re a group of people who know what we’re talking about.” The delegation was “received very warmly” at the embassy. “I like to think that the letter had some impact. I’m not sure, but at the very least it didn’t hurt.”[7][8]
Four days before Assange was removed from the London embassy, Kiriakou said the group had not yet discussed repeating the exercise but that “the time is ripe — we need to do it now, like this weekend, immediately,” and volunteered to take the lead.[9]
Membership, as Kiriakou describes it
Introducing the group in 2023, Kiriakou described it as co-founded by Ray McGovern and “made up of retired officials from the CIA, FBI, NSA, the military, and the British MI5 and MI6” — the last a detail he does not always include.[10]
The occasion was the group’s award of its Sam Adams Award for integrity in intelligence to Daniel Hale.[10]
The founding memo, and the silence after it
Ray McGovern dates the group to January 2003 and describes its first act as a memorandum to President Bush, written on the assumption “that he didn’t know what’s going on” and sent “the same day as Colin Powell spoke.” Its content was a flat contradiction of the case being made — “there was dribble that was all made up” — and a warning that “if he didn’t widen the circle of his advisors beyond those clearly bent on a war, it would be a catastrophe.” McGovern’s comment on being vindicated: “we take no pleasure in the fact that we’re right on that.”[11][12]
The memorandum got attention because “our initial thing went out on the AFP wire. And that’s why we got some play. Since then, we’ve been pretty much shunned.” A later memo to President Obama on Afghanistan — “Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. Obama, you’re letting these generals and these sycophants like Bobby Gates run roughshod over you” — drew none.[13][14]