John Kiriakou

John Chris Kiriakou ( ; born August 9, 1964) is an American former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, author, and whistleblower who, in 2007, exposed the CIA's use of torture during the war on terror. He was an intelligence analyst and operations officer for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and a senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Kiriakou joined the CIA in 1990 as an analyst. He became the chief of counterterrorist operations in Pakistan following the September 11 terrorist attacks and led the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who was then believed to be a high-ranking al-Qaeda member. Kiriakou left the CIA in 2004, joining the private sector thereafter. In 2009, he rejoined government service as a U.S. Senate investigator under John Kerry.

In December 2007, Kiriakou became the first US government official to openly confirm that waterboarding was used to torture prisoners at CIA "black sites" during interrogations. In 2012, he was indicted for disclosing CIA officer identities to reporters, receiving a sentence of 30 months in prison after pleading guilty. After his two-year imprisonment ended in 2015, Kiriakou received multiple awards recognizing his whistleblowing, including the PEN First Amendment Award and the Sam Adams Award.

Since his release, Kiriakou has been an activist on issues of intelligence, whistleblowing, prison reform, civil liberties, covert foreign policy, and the national security state in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. After running a podcast for Russian state-owned Sputnik, he began his own podcast shows. In 2026, edited clips of Kiriakou on podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience and The Diary of a CEO went viral online.

Early life Kiriakou was born on August 9, 1964, in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and is of Greek descent. He was raised in New Castle, Pennsylvania. Both of his parents were elementary school teachers; his father became an elementary school principal. His younger brother is the musician Emanuel Kiriakou.

Kiriakou attended New Castle High School, where he was a member of its American Field Service program, debate society, Key Club, and played baseball. He was an honors student in high school and also played in the school band.

As an undergraduate, Kiriakou completed a Greek-language program at Georgetown University and spent his junior year studying abroad at the University of London. He was also the vice president of the College Democrats chapter at George Washington University, during which time he hosted George McGovern. He briefly worked as a high school teacher before joining the CIA, and taught actor Jared Leto, who considered him his favorite teacher.

Intelligence career

CIA career (1990–2004) After obtaining his master's degree, Kiriakou accepted a job as a federal investigator at the US Office of Personnel Management in May 1988. 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. On January 7, 1990, Kiriakou began working as a leadership analyst at the agency focusing on the Persian Gulf. 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.

Work after the CIA From 2004 until 2008, Kiriakou was a senior manager at Deloitte & Touche's competitive intelligence practice. During that time, he also worked as an adviser for several Hollywood films, such as Brüno and Kite Runner.

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.

Whistleblowing

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. 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.

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. 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. In 2009, it was reported that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded at least 83 times. The treatment "broke" Zubaydah, although the torture generated little or no useful additional information to what was already known.

Kiriakou was the first US government official to confirm that waterboarding was used to torture prisoners at CIA black sites during interrogations. Following the interview, Kiriakou's accounts of Abu Zubaydah's waterboarding were widely repeated and paraphrased on social media.

Subsequent correspondence with journalists After the ABC News interview, Kiriakou exchanged emails with reporters Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, and Scott Shane. In the emails, Kiriakou disclosed the names of former CIA colleagues who had participated in the detention and interrogation program; with at least one CIA employee still undercover at the time.

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. 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. Another member of his defense team, Jesselyn Radack, told Politico that the government was wrong to deny Kiriakou 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. He 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 hearing for 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Post-release career Following his release, Kiriakou briefly worked for the Institute for Policy Studies, before joining Russian state-owned Radio Sputnik. After leaving Sputnik, he later started his own podcast shows in addition to appearing on leading podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience and The Diary of a CEO. In 2026, he became an internet personality when edited clips of Kiriakou recounting his experiences went viral on social media platforms.

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. One particularly popular clip was a snippet of an interview where Kiriakou described a night-time airstrike involving 47 cruise missiles that accidentally killed a janitor at Iraqi intelligence service headquarters.

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. Giuliani has since been accused by a former aide of selling pardons for money.

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

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. The documentary was later nominated for an Emmy Award in 2016 and has received several awards from film festivals.

Views and activism

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.

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.

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.

Select publications

The Convenient Terrorist: Abu Zubaydah and the Weird Wonderland of America's Secret Wars (Skyhorse, 2017) Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison (Rare Bird Books, 2017) The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2020)

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. In 2025, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the College Historical Society of Trinity College, Dublin.