John Kiriakou

CIA career (1990–2004)

After obtaining his master's degree, Kiriakou accepted a job as a federal investigator at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in May 1988.^[9] However, he withdrew after Jerrold Post, a CIA psychiatrist who taught him in a psychology course at George Washington University, identified him as a potential candidate to be recruited into the CIA and recommended him to the Directorate of Intelligence.^[12] On January 7, 1990, Kiriakou began working as a leadership analyst at the agency focusing on the Persian Gulf.^[13]

Kiriakou spent the first eight years of his career as a Middle East analyst focusing on Iraq.^[14] He learned Arabic and, from 1994 to 1996, was assigned to the US Embassy in Manama, Bahrain, as an economic officer. He returned to Washington, D.C. to work on Iraq until 1998, when he transferred to the CIA's Directorate of Operations.^[14] He then became a counter-terrorism operations officer and worked in Athens, Greece, where the CIA targeted 17N and other Greek left-wing terrorist groups, and spied on secular Palestinian revolutionaries.^[15] In 2000, Kiriakou returned to CIA headquarters.^[14]

Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, Kiriakou became Chief of Counterterrorist Operations in Pakistan. In that position, he led a series of military raids on al-Qaeda safehouses, capturing dozens of al-Qaeda fighters. Kiriakou led a raid on the night of March 28, 2002, in Faisalabad, Pakistan, capturing Abu Zubaydah, then thought to be al-Qaeda's third-ranking official.^[14] He left the CIA in 2004.^[16]

Work after the CIA

From 2004 until 2008, Kiriakou was a senior manager at Deloitte & Touche's competitive intelligence practice.^[17] During that time, he also worked as an adviser for several Hollywood films, such as Brüno and Kite Runner.^[18][13][3] From September 2008 until March 2009 and April 2011 to April 2012, Kiriakou was a terrorism consultant for ABC News.^[19][20]

Following Senator John Kerry's (D-MA) ascension to the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, Kiriakou became the committee's senior United States Senate investigator, focusing on the Middle East, international terrorism, piracy, and counter-narcotics issues.^[3] In 2011, he left the committee to become managing partner of Rhodes Global Consulting, an Arlington, Virginia-based political risk analysis firm.^[21]

Background

In 2006, senior law enforcement agents with the Criminal Investigation Task Force told MSNBC.com that they had been cautioning against the use of enhanced interrogation methods since 2002, within the US Department of Defense, and that the interrogation tactics used in Guantanamo Bay by a separate team of military intelligence investigators were unproductive, not likely to produce any reliable information, and probably illegal. Having found responses from army commanders running the detainee camp unsatisfactory, they took their concerns to David Brant, director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), who alerted Navy General Counsel Alberto J. Mora.^[22] On December 6, 2007, The New York Times advised the Bush administration that they had acquired and planned to publish information about the destruction of tapes made of Zubaydah's interrogation, which were believed to show instances of waterboarding and other forms of possible torture.^[23][24][25]

December 2007 ABC News interview

On December 10, 2007, Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC News, in which he described his participation in the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who was accused of having been an aide to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.^[26] Kiriakou said that he did not witness Zubaydah's interrogation in Guantanamo Bay, but had been told by CIA associates that it had taken only a single brief instance of waterboarding to extract answers.^[27] In 2009, it was reported that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded at least 83 times.^[28] The treatment "broke" Zubaydah, although the torture generated little or no useful additional information to what was already known.^[29][30]

Kiriakou was the first US government official to confirm that waterboarding was used to torture prisoners at CIA black sites during interrogations.^[16][31][32] Following the interview, Kiriakou's accounts of Abu Zubaydah's waterboarding were widely repeated and paraphrased on social media.^[b][31] In the following months, he became a regular guest expert on news and public affairs shows on the topics of interrogation and counter-terrorism.^[13]

Kiriakou has said that he chose not to follow internal whistleblowing procedures to report claims of torture because he believed he "wouldn't have gotten anywhere"; his superiors and the congressional intelligence committees were already aware of the methods.^[33]

2012 indictment and subsequent conviction

On January 23, 2012, Kiriakou was charged with disclosing classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee, Deuce Martinez, in classified activities.^[37][38][39] In addition, Kiriakou was alleged to have lied to the CIA in order to have his book published.^[40] His criminal defense lawyer was Robert Trout.^[41] Another member of his defense team, Jesselyn Radack,^[42] told Politico that the government was wrong to deny Kiriakou whistleblower status.^[35]

According to PEN America:

The specific charges were that in 2008, Kiriakou confirmed the name of a CIA officer—which was already well known to people in the human rights community, according to the Government Accountability Project—to someone who claimed to be writing a book about the agency's rendition practices. In a separate 2008 incident, Kiriakou gave a New York Times journalist the business card of a CIA agent who worked for a "private government contractor known for its involvement in torture." That agent had never been undercover and his contact information and affiliation with the CIA was already publicly available on the Internet. Kiriakou faced up to 45 years in prison and millions of dollars in legal fees for these charges.^[33]

On April 5, 2012, Kiriakou was indicted for one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, three counts of violating the Espionage Act, and one count of making false statements for allegedly lying to the Publications Review Board of the CIA.^[43] He initially pleaded not guilty to all charges and was released on bail.^[44][45] Starting September 12, 2012, the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia conducted a closed Classified Information Procedures Act hearing for Kiriakou's case.^[46]

On October 22, 2012, Kiriakou agreed to plead guilty to one count of passing classified information to the media thereby violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act; his plea deal spared journalists from testifying in a trial. All other charges were dropped.^[47][48][49] He was sentenced to 30 months in prison on January 25, 2013, making him the second CIA employee in history to be jailed for revealing classified material of CIA undercover identities in violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.^{[33][36][50][51]}

Imprisonment

In January 2013, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and intelligence adviser to Barack Obama, sent the president a letter signed by eighteen other CIA veterans urging that Kiriakou's sentence be commuted.^[36] Kiriakou received a prison "send off" party at the exclusive Hay–Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C., hosted by political peace activists dressed in orange jumpsuits and mock prison costumes.^[52]

On February 28, 2013, Kiriakou began serving his term at the low-security Federal Correctional Institution, Loretto, in Loretto, Pennsylvania.^[48] While in prison, Kiriakou wrote letters that were published online, including one to the whistleblower Edward Snowden, in which he expressed his support and gave advice.^[53][54]

On February 3, 2015, Kiriakou was released from prison to serve three months of house arrest at his home in Arlington, Virginia. Following his release, Kiriakou said his case was not about leaking information but about exposing torture, continuing, "and I would do it all over again." He has since expressed interest in campaigning for prison reform.^[55]

New York Times reporter Scott Shane has referenced the Kiriakou case as an instance of Obama's prosecutions of journalism-related leaking having a chilling effect on coverage of national security issues.^[56]

Rudy Giuliani pardon scandal

In July 2018, Kiriakou signed a $50,000 agreement with Karen Giorno, a former campaign advisor to Donald Trump, as payment for lobbying for a pardon, with the promise of an additional $50,000 as a bonus if it was granted. In 2020, Kiriakou met with Rudy Giuliani, to lobby for a pardon. At the meeting, an associate of Giuliani suggested that they could help Kiriakou for the price of $2 million, which Kiriakou refused. Kiriakou later told The New York Times about the meetings, with both Giorno and Giuliani disputing Kiriakou's account.^[62][63] Giuliani has since been accused by a former aide of selling pardons for money.^[64]

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Kiriakou is a founding member of the organization Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). In September 2015, Kiriakou and 27 other members of VIPS' steering committee wrote a letter^[65][66] to President Barack Obama challenging a recently published book that claimed to rebut the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA's use of torture.^[67]

Related media works

In 2014, Silenced, a documentary by James Spione on American whistleblowers was released, featuring Kiriakou alongside National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Andrews Drake and whistleblower attorney Jesselyn Radack.^{[68][69][non-primary source needed][70]} The documentary was later nominated for an Emmy Award in 2016 and has received several awards from film festivals.^[71]

Torture

In 2017, Kiriakou accused Gina Haspel, a CIA officer nominated by Trump to the post of CIA director, of overseeing the waterboarding of suspected al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah at a CIA black site in Thailand. ProPublica published an article based on Kiriakou's accusations, but later retracted it, noting that Haspel was not in charge of the base when Zubaydah was interrogated.^[57][72]

In a 2018 op-ed for The Washington Post, Kiriakou again criticized Haspel, writing: "While I went to prison for disclosing the torture program, Haspel is about to get a promotion despite her connection to it." Kiriakou said the time he spent in prison was "worth every day" because revelations about the CIA's use of torture led to Congress's enactment of a specific ban on waterboarding and other techniques used at the black sites.^[73]

Jeffrey Epstein

In July 2025, Kiriakou stated on Patrick Bet-David's podcast that he believed Jeffrey Epstein had been a Mossad "access agent" used to gain proximity to influential individuals and obtain sensitive information. Kiriakou described Epstein as a "textbook case" of such an operative. His allegations received media attention. No publicly available evidence confirms the allegations.^[74][75]