John Kiriakou

Kiriakou was born on August 9, 1964, the oldest son of elementary school educators Christos "Chris" Kiriakou and Stella Kiriakou in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and raised in nearby New Castle, Pennsylvania. His grandparents had immigrated from Greece. His younger brother Emanuel Kiriakou is a musician. Kiriakou graduated from New Castle High School in 1982 and attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he earned a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies and a master's degree in legislative affairs. Prior to working at the CIA, he worked as a high school teacher, having taught US actor Jared Leto. ==CIA career==

Kiriakou was recruited into the CIA out of graduate school by Jerrold Post, a CIA psychiatrist who was Kiriakou's professor at George Washington University. He spent the first eight years of his career as a Middle East analyst specializing on Iraq. In 2000, Kiriakou returned to CIA headquarters. Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, Kiriakou was named 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. He left the CIA in 2004 to take up a consulting job. ==Work after the CIA==

From 2004 until 2008, Kiriakou worked as a senior manager in the Big Four accounting firm Deloitte & Touche's competitive intelligence practice; during that time, he also worked as an adviser for several Hollywood films, such as Brüno. In 2011, he left the committee to become managing partner of Rhodes Global Consulting, an Arlington, Virginia-based political risk analysis firm. From April 2011 to April 2012, he resumed counter-terrorism consulting for ABC News. == Disclosing torture ==

In 2006, senior law enforcement agents with the Criminal Investigation Task Force told MSNBC.com that they began to complain in 2002 inside the US Department of Defense 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. 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, believed to show instances of waterboarding and other forms of possible torture. 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. Kiriakou said that he did not witness Zubaydah's interrogation, but had been told by CIA associates that it had taken only a single brief instance of waterboarding to extract answers: Following the interview, Kiriakou's accounts of Abu Zubaydah's waterboarding were widely repeated and paraphrased on social media. The treatment "broke" Zubaydah, as he eventually told his interrogators of al-Qaeda terrorism plots. However, the torture and waterboarding of Zubaydah generated little or no useful additional information to what was already known. Kiriakou has said that he chose not to blow the whistle on torture through internal channels because he believed he "wouldn't have gotten anywhere" because his superiors and the congressional intelligence committees were already aware of it. ==Trial and sentence==

After the ABC News interview, Kiriakou exchanged emails with a freelance writer. In the emails, Kiriakou disclosed the name of a former CIA colleague who had participated in the detention and interrogation program; the employee was, at the time, still undercover. The freelance writer then shared the name with lawyers representing detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. The name then appeared in a sealed legal filing submitted by the defense attorneys. Although the name was not made public at the time, the disclosure angered federal officials, and the resulting federal investigation led to Kiriakou's arrest. The name that was disclosed appeared on The New York Times website in October 2011. 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. In addition, Kiriakou was alleged to have lied to the CIA in order to have his book published. His criminal defense lawyer was Robert Trout. His other lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, told Politico that the government was wrong to deny Kiriakou's whistleblower status. 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. Kiriakou initially pleaded not guilty to all charges and was released on bail. Starting September 12, 2012, the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia conducted a closed Classified Information Procedures Act hearings in Kiriakou's case. 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. On January 25, 2013, Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison, making him the second CIA employee to be jailed for revealing classified material of CIA undercover identities In February 2013, New York Times reporter Scott Shane referenced the Kiriakou case when he told NPR that Obama's prosecutions of journalism-related leaking were having a chilling effect on coverage of national security issues. 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. ==Imprisonment==

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. On February 28, 2013, Kiriakou began serving his term at the low-security Federal Correctional Institution, Loretto, in Loretto, Pennsylvania. 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. ==After prison==

Following his release, Kiriakou briefly worked for the Institute for Policy Studies, before joining Russian state-owned Radio Sputnik. In an interview with The New Republic, he said that he had full editorial control at Radio Sputnik, but declined to show his contract. 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. 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. ==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 ==Views==

Politics In college, Kiriakou was the vice president of George Washington University's College Democrats chapter. Kiriakou stated that his support for the Democratic Party began to wane once the party became more conservative under Bill Clinton, and that he left the party after being charged by the Department of Justice under Barack Obama. Kiriakou supported Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic primaries. After joining Russian state-owned Radio Sputnik as a host, Kiriakou spoke out against perceived anti-Russian fearmongering. He expressed skepticism that the Russian government was responsible for the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. He also denied that Bashar al-Assad's regime was involved in the Douma chemical attack and praised Assad as "the only thing standing between the Syrian Christian community and a massacre of historic proportions". ==Publications==

• ''The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror'' (Bantam, 2010) discusses the CIA's response to 9/11 and their involvement in the Middle East during the George W. Bush administration. • ''The Convenient Terrorist: Abu Zubaydah and the Weird Wonderland of America's Secret Wars'' (Skyhorse, 2017) is an account of the hunt for Abu Zubaydah, his capture, interrogation, torture, and incarceration at Guantanamo. • Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison (Rare Bird Books, 2017) is a memoir about Kiriakou's 23-month prison term, which he began serving on February 28, 2013, for passing classified information to the media, thereby violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The book includes Kiriakou's blog series "Letters From Loretto" in addition to discussion of the US prison system. • ''The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis'' (Simon & Schuster, 2020) • ''How to Disappear and Live Off the Grid: A CIA Insider's Guide'' (Skyhorse, 2022) • ''Lying and Lie Detection: A CIA Insider's Guide'' (Skyhorse, 2022) • ''Surveillance and Surveillance Detection: A CIA Insider's Guide'' (Skyhorse, 2022) == Awards ==

The CIA awarded Kiriakou with 10 Exceptional Performance Awards, a Sustained Superior performance Award, the Counterterrorism Service Medal, and the State Department's Meritorious Honor Award. In 2016, he was awarded the Sam Adams Award. Also in 2016, he was given the prestigious PEN First Amendment Award by the PEN Center USA. == Related media works ==

In 2014, Silenced, a documentary featuring Kiriakou by James Spione, was released. The film explored the US Government's response to whistleblowers who disclosed covert violations of constitutional privacy laws and terrorism laws. The film revealed in detail the personal toll on Kiriakou, National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Andrews Drake and whistleblower attorney Jesselyn Radack, each of whom had questioned practices or reported crimes within the NSA, CIA, military, and other organizations. Silenced was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2016. Having an analogous theme as the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, which portrays similar treatment of Edward Snowden. Silenced has been the official selection and recipient of several awards from multiple film festivals even before its release to major cable networks in March 2015. In early 2026, edited clips from interviews and documentaries featuring Kiriakou went viral on various social media sites, including Instagram, TikTok, and X, where in these edited clips his voice was sped up or slowed down for dramatic or comedic effect, drawing millions of views. ==See also==