Will Hurd is a former CIA case officer, U.S. congressman and OpenAI board member. John Kiriakou says he mentored Hurd — then a junior case officer with “a gift” for convincing people to commit espionage — before Hurd resigned to run for Congress in a court-mandated majority-Hispanic district, which he won three times.[1][2] Hurd briefly ran for president in 2024, gave up his seat, and joined the board of OpenAI; Kiriakou offers him as an example of the intelligence and technology worlds coming together, keeping “one foot in the game and one foot in business.”[3] In a separate interview Kiriakou gave a fuller account of the same mentorship, calling Hurd “an awesome case officer, as honest as the day is long” despite their differing politics, and recalling Hurd announcing his resignation to run for Congress; Kiriakou notes Hurd — who is half Black, half white — won three times in the same Supreme Court-mandated majority-Hispanic district before his 2024 presidential run and subsequent seat on the OpenAI board.[4][5][6] Kiriakou has repeated the mentorship claim in at least two further interviews, in each case calling Hurd an “awesome” or “gifted” officer with “a gift for recruiting people,” who left the CIA after about six years, was elected to Congress three times from the same majority-Hispanic Texas district, ran briefly for president, and now sits on the board of OpenAI and chairs the board of another AI company.[7][8]
An intelligence placement?
Asked whether Hurd’s political and tech-industry trajectory could be an intelligence-community placement rather than an independent career, Kiriakou says he doubts it, though he does not rule it out entirely: “Is that the just embedding an operative there? … It’s possible, but I would say no.” His reasoning is that Hurd went to work first for a former CIA boss who had already left the agency to make money in the private sector — ordinary career succession rather than a run operation.[9]