John Kiriakou Went to Prison for Telling the Truth, and He'd Do It Again

John Kiriakou walked into Theo Von’s studio carrying letters for a presidential pardon application and the kind of stories that make you feel like you’ve been living a very small life. He’s the CIA officer who went on ABC News, confirmed the agency’s torture program, called it illegal, and then watched the government charge him with three counts of espionage. Potential death penalty. He took a plea, did 23 months in a low-security federal prison the CIA specifically lobbied to send him to instead of the minimum-security camp a judge had ordered. His response to all of it, delivered with the calm of a man who once nearly shot a Pakistani intelligence officer he’d mistaken for an assassin: he’d do it again.

The episode runs nearly two and a half hours and covers an almost absurd amount of ground. Superdelegates. The Yalta Conference. Acoustic Kitty, the CIA’s $20 million program to wire a cat for espionage before a taxi killed it on its first mission. Israeli listening devices hidden in gift baskets. Rectal feeding as an interrogation technique. A serial killer in federal prison nicknamed Truck who saved Kiriakou a seat for every Steelers game. Theo Von, to his credit, mostly stays out of the way and lets the man talk. That’s the right call.

The Part Where He Almost Shot Someone

Kiriakou’s Pakistan chapter is where the storytelling really locks in. He’s the chief of counterterrorism operations in early 2002, busting down doors three nights a week, and he notices a man on a motorcycle with a red helmet, which stood out because, as Kiriakou puts it, nobody in Pakistan wore motorcycle helmets. Multiple sightings at different times and distances. Classic surveillance. He was certain the guy was going to kill him. He told his station chief. The station chief said they’d have teams out. Kiriakou went to his meeting at the safe house anyway, and on his way out made a decision that probably saved a man’s life.

General Muhammad, are you following me? And he says, no. Why? I said, because I’m under surveillance. I’m 100% sure that I’m under surveillance and I’m going to kill the guy this afternoon.

It turned out the Pakistani intelligence service had put its worst surveillance officer on him, a guy so incompetent he was riding in Kiriakou’s blind spot instead of two blocks back. The whole thing started because Kiriakou was being too friendly and his Pakistani counterparts decided nobody could be that nice without an ulterior motive. Espionage paranoia eating its own tail.

On Torture, Israel, and Why Nobody Gets Charged

The hour on post-9/11 CIA operations is the densest and the most uncomfortable. Kiriakou walked into Pakistan with no interrogation training, no rulebook, and a boss who hugged him goodbye and whispered ‘kill them all.’ He describes the torture program not with the sensationalism of a thriller but with the bureaucratic specificity of someone who read the cables. Two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, designed the techniques. The government paid them $108 million. Neither has been charged with a crime. Kiriakou finds this straightforwardly insane.

They’ve never been charged with a crime. So charge them. If these guys are as bad as we say they are, charge them with a crime. If they’re as bad as we say they are, find them guilty, sentence them to death, and execute them.

On Israel, Kiriakou goes further than most former intelligence officials will go on the record. He believes Israel had advance warning of 9/11 and stayed quiet because they knew the American response would serve their strategic interests. He’s careful to separate that claim from the wilder conspiracies he explicitly rejects. He’s also unambiguous that what’s happening in Gaza meets the international legal definition of genocide. He said it on Piers Morgan’s show to Alan Dershowitz’s face, and he says it again here without breaking stride. On AIPAC’s ability to spend $35 million to unseat Thomas Massie from a congressional seat paying $180,000 a year, he’s got a clean explanation: it’s the only foreign-interest lobbying group in America that doesn’t have to register as a foreign agent. He once had to register for writing four op-eds in support of the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce.

I went to prison for telling the truth. And I would do it again in a heartbeat. In a heartbeat. Nobody else has gone to prison for ratting out the CIA and its illegal programs. I was proud to do it.

Federal Prison, the Mob, and the Guy Named Truck

The prison section shouldn’t work as well as it does, but Kiriakou is a natural storyteller who understands pacing. He arrives in a low-security federal prison, gets immediately recruited to sit with the Aryan Brotherhood because he’s not gay, not a rat, and not a child molester, and spends several months eating in the wrong section of the cafeteria until a captain in the Bonanno crime family looks at him across the room and tells him to come sit with the Italians instead. He describes the Mob guys as genuinely the most honorable people he met in there. You believe him. The story involving Truck, a long-haul trucker and convicted serial killer who kept saving Kiriakou seats for football games, ends with Kiriakou engineering a prison beating through a single well-timed lie, then delivering a threat so calm and specific that the victim apologized and the whole unit reassessed him entirely. It’s both funny and genuinely alarming, which is basically the register the whole episode operates in.

Kiriakou’s new book collects his CIA guides to surveillance, lie detection, and disappearing off the grid. His podcast, John Kiriakou’s Briefing Room, launches in about four weeks. If this conversation is any preview, it’s going to be one of the more densely sourced shows in the intelligence space, which is either reassuring or terrifying depending on how you feel about the 10,000 to 15,000 foreign intelligence officers currently operating in Washington DC. The spy museum is advertising that number on the sides of buses. Kiriakou confirms it’s probably accurate.