John Chris Kiriakou ( ; born August 9, 1964) is an American former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, author, and whistleblower.
In 2007, Kiriakou exposed the CIA's use of waterboarding at black sites as part of the broader enhanced interrogation techniques employed during the war on terror. Kiriakou was federally indicted for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, receiving a sentence of 30 months in prison after entering a plea deal. After his two-year imprisonment ended in 2015, Kiriakou received multiple awards recognizing his whistleblowing, including PEN's First Amendment Award and the Sam Adams Award.
Kiriakou joined the CIA's Counterterrorism Center in 1990 as an intelligence analyst. He became the chief of counterterrorism 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. In 2004, Kiriakou left the CIA, to join the private sector thereafter. In 2009, he rejoined the U.S. federal government as a senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under John Kerry.
Since his release from prison, 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 John Chris Kiriakou was born on August 9, 1964, in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and is of Greek descent. He was raised in New Castle, Pennsylvania. He is the oldest son of Christos and Stella Kiriakou. Both of his parents were elementary school teachers; his father became an elementary school principal. His grandparents had immigrated from Greece. His younger brother is the musician Emanuel Kiriakou. He also has a sister, Tina.
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. In his autobiography, Kiriakou recalled viewing the Iranian Revolution on television as a teenager as a pivotal event which began his interest in international affairs. After high school, he received a scholarship to attend George Washington University (GWU), where he majored in Middle Eastern studies. He received his bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies from the Elliott School of International Affairs at GWU in 1986 and, in 1988, obtained a master's degree in legislative affairs from the same university.
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 U.S. 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.
Kiriakou spent the first eight years of his career as a Middle East analyst focusing on Iraq. He learned Arabic and, from 1994 to 1996, was assigned to the U.S. 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. 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. In 2000, Kiriakou returned to CIA headquarters.
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. He left the CIA in 2004.
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. From September 2008 until March 2009 and April 2011 to April 2012, Kiriakou was a terrorism consultant for ABC News.
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. In 2011, he left the committee to become managing partner of Rhodes Global Consulting, an Arlington, Virginia-based political risk analysis firm.
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 U.S. 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."How '07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate", The New York Times 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."Part One of the Transcript with John Kiriakou", ABC.com 7 December 2010 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 U.S. 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. In the following months, he became a regular guest expert on news and public affairs shows on the topics of interrogation and counter-terrorism.
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.
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. 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 alerted federal officials to a leak, 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.
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.
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. He initially pleaded not guilty to all charges and was released on bail.Radack, Jesselyn. "Feds ready whistleblower trial." Salon. April 13, 2012. 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. 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. 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.