About
John Kiriakou is a former CIA analyst and counterterrorism operations officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News.
Immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Kiriakou became the CIA’s chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan. In that capacity, he led a CIA team in a series of raids resulting in the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who was then considered al-Qaeda’s third-ranking official.
Following Abu Zubaydah’s capture, Kiriakou refused to be trained in the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” describing them as a “torture program.” He then became Executive Assistant to the CIA’s Deputy Director for Operations, where he served as the Director of Central Intelligence’s principal Iraq briefer.
Kiriakou left the CIA in March 2004. He later served as a senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as senior intelligence advisor to Committee Chairman Senator John Kerry.
Throughout his career, Kiriakou received 12 CIA Exceptional Performance Awards, the CIA’s Sustained Superior Performance Award, the Counterterrorism Service Medal, and the State Department’s Meritorious Honor Award.
In 2007, Kiriakou appeared on ABC News in an interview with Brian Ross, during which he became the first former CIA officer to confirm that the CIA waterboarded detainees and he labeled waterboarding “torture.” Kiriakou’s interview revealed that this practice was not the result of a few rogue agents, but was official U.S. policy approved personally by the President.
Awards received by John Kiriakou:
- November 2013: the Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma County, California honored Kiriakou as its “Peacemaker of the Year.”
- November 2015: the prestigious PEN First Amendment Award for his writing from prison.
- In 2016, retrieved April 2025: former intelligence and law enforcement colleagues gave him the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence.
- Later in 2016: awarded the Blueprint International Whistleblowing Prize for Bravery and Integrity in the Public Interest.
The Justice Department started investigating Kiriakou immediately after his media appearance. Five years later, the government finally succeeded in piecing together enough information to prosecute him criminally. He became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act–a law designed to punish spies, not whistleblowers.
Eventually, in order to avoid a trial that could have resulted in separation from his wife and five children for up to 45 years, he opted to plead guilty to one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in exchange for a 30-month sentence.
Kiriakou is the sole CIA officer to go to prison in connection with the U.S. torture program, despite the fact that he never tortured anyone. Rather, he blew the whistle on this horrific wrongdoing.
Even more troubling is the fact that CIA officers who actually engaged in torture after 9/11 have never been prosecuted, nor have the officials who condoned or ordered torture, the attorneys who wrote memos justifying the torture or the CIA official who destroyed evidence of the torture.
Kiriakou reported to federal prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania on February 28, 2013 to begin serving his sentence, where he continued to speak out in a series of “Letters from Loretto,” which provided a stunning portrait of prison life. He was released from prison in February 2015.
Kiriakou is widely considered to be one of the country’s foremost national security whistleblowers. He bravely served his country and blew the whistle on torture. In 2012, he was honored with the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage, an award given to individuals who advance truth and justice despite the personal risk it creates. Two days prior to sentencing, he was also honored by inclusion of his portrait in artist Robert Shetterly’s series “Americans Who Tell the Truth,” which features notable truth-tellers from American history. That portrait is now in the permanent collection of Philadelphia’s Museum of Peace. Another of his portraits, by famed Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, appears in the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. And a third, by photographer Andres Serrano, is a part of the collection of London’s Tate Museum of Contemporary Art.
In November 2013, the Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma County, California honored Kiriakou as its “Peacemaker of the Year.” He received the prestigious PEN First Amendment Award in 2015 for his writing from prison. And in 2016, his former intelligence and law enforcement colleagues gave him the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. Later that year he was awarded the Blueprint International Whistleblowing Prize for Bravery and Integrity in the Public Interest.
Kiriakou writes columns for Consortium News and for Covert Action Magazine. His first book, “The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror,” rose to #5 on the New York Times bestsellers list. His second book, “Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison,” was published in May 2017. It was named a finalist for the Foreward Reviews Memoir of the Year. His third book, “The Convenient Terrorist: Abu Zubaydah and the Weird Wonderland of America’s Secret Wars” was published in July 2017.
Kiriakou is also the author of a series of books for Skyhorse Publishing, including the CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis; The CIA Insider’s Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection; The CIA Insider’s Guide to Lying and Lie Detection; and the CIA Insider’s Guide to Disappearing and Living Off the Grid. His eighth book, Remains of the Day: The Ultimate Guide to Washington, DC’s Historic Cemeteries, will be published in 2025.
