Straight Talk with Mark Bouris
CIA Whistleblower Speaks Out "This is how the US & Iran war will end"
25 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
John Kiriakou, welcome to Straight Talk, mate. Thank you. Thank you. Very happy to be with you. It's a mad time at the moment, like geopolitically across the world. So it's actually very timely to have an opportunity to speak to someone like you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
I've been following your stuff for a long time. Huge fan. We love what you do. Thank you. The fact that you've got Greg's surname, that helps, by the way. I know, right? We got to stick together. Yeah. Someone called Boris and someone talking to someone called Kiriako. Cool. Okay.
So maybe you could just, John, you could just give me a little bit of a background on you because our audience here in Australia in particular loves to know how you grew up, what were the influences in your life, particularly as a kid, your mom, your dad, your grandfather, your grandmother, your regional area, where'd you grow up? Give me a little bit of a background on you.
Sure. I was born and raised in western Pennsylvania in a very rural, tiny town in Amish country north of Pittsburgh by about one hour. Really, my biggest influences in my life were my dad and my grandfather, my father's father. My entire family emigrated to the United States from Greece, from the island of Rhodes. All four of the grandparents in 1931 on my dad's side, 1934 on my mother's side.
The week after I turned 18, I went to Washington, D.C., went to school at George Washington University. I earned a... I earned a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies, and I stayed for a master's degree in legislative affairs with a focus on American foreign policy analysis.
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Chapter 2: What led John Kiriakou to become a CIA officer?
My graduate school advisor, it turned out, was undercover as a graduate school advisor. He was a CIA officer looking for people who might fit into the CIA's culture. He believed that I would fit into the CIA's culture, and he recruited me into the CIA. I spent 15 years there. The first half of my career was in analysis, specifically on Iraq.
And then the second half of my career was in counterterrorism operations. I served many tours overseas in counterterrorism. I was the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan just after the 9-11 attacks.
and um that's where things sort of begin to turn i was uh i'm sorry to say that i was the only person who objected to the cia torture program i did so internally which just fell on deaf ears and then after i left the cia i decided finally to go public in a nationally televised interview and i i said that the cia was torturing its prisoners that torture was official U.S.
government policy and that the policy had been personally approved by the president. And all hell broke loose, as you might imagine. But in the meantime, I took a job as the chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, working for John Kerry.
After I left the Foreign Relations Committee, the government fell on my head and I was arrested and charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage for that interview with ABC News, in which I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. To make a long story short, I was facing 45 years in prison. They offered me 23 months. Whoa.
If I would just take a plea, I turned down the plea, much to the consternation of my attorneys, who then told me that they would resign as my attorneys if I didn't take the plea. Because I was realistically, they said, facing 12 to 18 years. Take the 23 months and make it go away. And so I did. And you know, the funny thing, Mark, is that
I was at the CIA a long time, and I would have assumed that they knew me. And if they thought that prison would silence me, they didn't know me at all. So I did my 23 months, and I've been a vocal critic of the CIA and of torture and of human rights abuses ever since.
That's a pretty crazy story. So if I go back to a period when you decided to go to university and study Middle Eastern studies, that's probably a bit out there back then.
Well, I'll tell you something that's more out there. When I was nine years old, My father took me to an auction and he bought a box of junk. I still remember he paid 50 cents for it. It was just a box of just junk that was left over. But that junk happened to include a shortwave radio and it opened up an entire new world for me.
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Chapter 3: How does the CIA recruit spies effectively?
And we did all that. But then we also went to, you know, Istanbul and Jerusalem and Cairo at my insistence. And I was hooked. How'd that end up with that girlfriend? You know, we're still Facebook friends, but I will admit to you that she's the one who got away.
So, John, was it more of a curiosity from your point of view? Were you insanely curious about what's going on in the Middle East, their culture, what drives them to be that way? Or were you doing this for country? No, in other words, for your nation. Did you feel as though I have a duty to understand the region and protect my country? Which was it?
That's a good question. It was kind of a combination of the two. On the one hand, yeah, I was so fascinated by the whole place. For example, even as a teenager, I wanted to know how these little royal families in these little tiny countries got to be royal families. And why was, for example, the Kuwaiti family a ruling family and not a royal family and all the others were royal families?
And why were some emirs and sheikhs and the others were princes and kings? And I loved it. What made the job easy, easier, was that... The United States has always had very close relations with these countries. And so we were always seen as as the good guy. And, you know, relations were close and we weren't targeting these countries for anything.
recruitment because, you know, our intelligence liaison relationships were close enough that they were giving everything to us anyway. So when I was working there, it was Iranians that I wanted to go after or Iraqis that I was going after or or Syrians or Russians and Chinese for that matter. It wasn't we didn't have this.
We didn't have the kind of relationship with these different countries that would have caused any kind of friction or difficulty. And it made life very, very easy for me there.
So like you were posted to Bahrain, for example, and you were with the American embassy. But, you know, with the CIA, what, I mean, we see the movies, et cetera, but what are you actually doing when you're sitting in there? I mean, obviously, I don't want you to give any state secrets, but what's your process?
Are you trying to recruit somebody to give you information about what's going on in the region, or are you interrupting their telephone lines? What are you doing? What happens day to day, generally?
Well, I'll answer you in two ways. I worked for a deputy director at the CIA. I was his assistant, my last headquarters position. And he had a mantra that he used to repeat every single day, that the job of the CIA is to recruit spies, to steal secrets, and then to analyze those secrets so that the president can make the best informed policy. That was the bottom line.
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Chapter 4: What were the personal costs of John Kiriakou's intelligence work?
Our wives are going to be friends. Our children are going to play together. And eventually, when the time feels right in my gut, I'm gonna ask you to commit espionage for me. Treason, maybe, in some cases. And you're gonna do it. Maybe because you think I'm great and you love me and you love this friendship we've developed. Maybe it's for the money.
Maybe it's because you've been passed over for promotion and you want to get revenge against your boss. Maybe it's because you just love the United States because you love these Hollywood movies and you want a piece of it. Or maybe you're an adrenaline junkie and you just love the excitement of the clandestinity. But for one reason or another, you're going to say yes to that pitch.
Does the CIA, the organization, profile these individuals for you? They say, okay, John, you're going to a cocktail party tonight. There's a dude there from Syria or Korea, wherever the case may be. We've already profiled this individual.
He fits in the profile, some of these categories, or are you just randomly walking the room and sort of saying, I meet 50 people, out of those 50 people, I'm going to profile six, target myself.
Nine times out of 10, you just go in cold and you have a pocket full of business cards and you just hand them out to everybody. Once in a while, I can count twice in my career where headquarters sent me a cable and saying, there's this party at such and such an embassy. We heard the North Koreans are going to be there or the Russians are going to be there. And so I say, okay.
And then I make sure that I go and I, you know, in one case, I actually did surveillance on the North Korean for several days before the party. And I noticed that he was literally going fishing every day after work so that he could eat. Wow. And I thought, OK, well, if he doesn't if he doesn't run screaming from the room. I'm going to take him to a nice restaurant.
I'm sorry to say that he ran screaming from the room, but not literally, figuratively. So that went nowhere. But usually you just go work the room. Hey, how are you? Hey, I'm John Kiriakou from the American Embassy. So nice to see you. Oh, what do you do for a living? Oh, you work at the port? That sounds fascinating. What do you do at the port? You know, whatever it is, it's fascinating.
And I want to hear more about it. So you've got to be good on the chat.
I mean, you've got to be... Is that something naturally you're good at? Like, were you always good on the chat? Yes. You know the sweet spots. You know the sweet spots. You know from their reactions. You must have been... Were you trained to say...
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Chapter 5: Why did Kiriakou oppose the CIA's torture program?
There is an enormous staff of psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists at the CIA. Enormous staff. And so you're well trained in what to look for and then what to do once you've spotted what we call a vulnerability. Now, a vulnerability doesn't necessarily have to be negative. Maybe your vulnerability is you really, really love your kids.
And in your country, whatever country you happen to be from, your kids don't really have the kind of educational and economic opportunities that they might have in the United States. So if you want your kid to go to Harvard... Done. Wow. We can put your son or daughter in any university in America, and if you give me two hours in your code room, I'll pay for it. Wow. That's that naked. Yeah.
Nine times out of ten, this is strictly a financial agreement. You give me money, I'm sorry, you give me information, I give you money. It's as simple as that. Can you talk to me about when you were posted to Athens in Greece and what you were doing there? Sure, that was very specifically a counterterrorism position.
There were several groups, you know, it's funny, when I first saw the position was open,
It said this was for a counterterrorism operations officer working against two Greek groups, one called Revolutionary Organization 17 November, the other called Popular Revolutionary Struggle, but also working against Arab groups, most specifically the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP General Command, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Palestine, as well as the Abu Nidal organization and the Libyans. They said that the successful candidate will have either Greek or Arabic language fluency. As it turned out, I was the only person in the CIA that was fluent in both Greek and Arabic. And so I got the job. It was just about then that communist Arab terrorism went away.
It just, the PFLP and the DFLP and Abu Didal, they don't exist anymore. These were old men. They retired. They moved to Damascus and they lived happily ever after. The Greeks were out killing people all the time. They killed the British defense attache when I was there.
They had previously killed the American CIA station chief, two American defense attaches, the Turkish ambassador, the Turkish deputy ambassador, the Greek Minister of Finance, the Minister of Communications, the head of the Central Bank. This was a terrible, terrible group. Wow.
And so my job was to work with the Greek National Intelligence Service and the Greek National Police to try to infiltrate these two groups and to destroy them from the inside. And what happened? We stirred up a hornet's nest. And they murdered my next door neighbor, the British defense attache, Stephen Saunders. I liked Stephen very much. Stephen had a huge personality.
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Chapter 6: What happened after Kiriakou revealed the torture program?
And Stephen was making fun of me. We were standing. It was Stephen, the French, the American attache, and me. And Stephen was making fun of me in a friendly way. And he said, you Americans... You're so paranoid about security. He says, this is an EU country. It's a NATO country. What are you so afraid of? And everybody chuckled. And I said, you Brits live in a dream world.
If you think that because they have pretty beaches and palm trees, that they're not going to kill you if they have the chance. Believe me, if they have the chance, they're going to kill you. And then they killed him. As an assassination. They assassinated him in broad daylight on the main road from our neighborhood to the British and American embassies in April of 2000.
I was about a quarter of a mile behind him when they killed him. A taxi driver pulled him out of the car and rushed him to a hospital. He died 20 minutes after they got there. 17 November usually would drop a manifesto at the site of the hit. Sometimes they would put it in a garbage can and call a leftist newspaper and tell them where to find it. Rarely they would mail it to the newspaper.
They didn't leave a manifesto when they killed Stephen. And so four months passed and I went into work one day like I did, you know, every day. And my boss runs into my office and he said, did you see the manifesto? I said, what manifesto? He said, the Saunders manifesto. I said, they didn't drop a manifesto. He said, no, they dropped it today. Have you seen it? And I said, no.
He said, they talk about you. And I said, me? That's not possible. I said, I've been so careful with my security. I'm more careful than anybody I know. He shows me the manifesto. It says in Greek, we saw the big spy. It says, but we knew he was armed and he was driving an armored car. And so we elected to carry out the revolutionary sentence on the war criminal Saunders. Whoa.
And my boss said, you have to go. Yeah, I said, go where? He said, you have to go home like right now. I said, I just took my kids to school. I can't just go home now. He said, we'll pick up your kids. We'll pick up your wife. You have to go now. I went to the airport in an armored car.
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Chapter 7: How does Kiriakou analyze current Middle East tensions?
They had an armored car pick up my two sons and my sons were little. They were like six and three. And they picked up my wife. We got to the airport and I said to her, I am so sorry. And she said, I want a divorce. I'm not doing this anymore. Wow. So we flew to New York. She flew to she flew to Cleveland. I flew to Washington and started working again. 17 November from headquarters.
They lasted another like 18 months. One of the bomb makers was carrying a bomb to put under the car of a Greek shipping magnet. And the bomb went off and it blew his hands off and it blew his right eye out. And as he was bleeding to death, he confessed to a policeman that he was 17 November. He gave the names of all of his comrades and the location of their weapons cash.
And then the cop saved his life. And so the entire group was destroyed in April of 2002. And most of them are still in prison. A couple of them have done their time and have gotten out. But the founder, the lead assassin, and the two lead bomb makers, three lead bomb makers, are doing sentences of 1,765 years. You were the target in actual fact.
Did you ever think to yourself, is this worth it? I mean, is my country worth it? Oh, yeah. Is my curiosity worth it? At that point, did you think that?
Yes, I did. And my solution... in my deluded state was to then divorce her and marry a CIA officer. So that's what I did.
And not long after this, we have 9-11. And of course, 9-11 was tragic, but bigger news than probably anything we've had in the last 50 years. And then you got posted to, where'd you get posted from there?
Pakistan as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations. Wow. It was the biggest job I ever had in my life.
That's a big deal. That's a big job.
Yeah.
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Chapter 8: What role does media manipulation play in public perception?
And they said, yes. I said, why in the world would we send them to Cuba? And they said, and I thought this was a great idea, we're going to keep them in Cuba for two or three weeks until we can figure out which federal district court to charge them with. The idea was that we would charge all of them with terrorism or conspiracy or providing material support for terrorism.
And we would charge them in Washington, New York, or Pennsylvania because that's where the fourth plane went down. I said, that's a great idea. loaded everybody onto a series of C-12s, flew them to Guantanamo. We put 770 people there at one point. But then someone in Vice President Dick Cheney's office observed, you know, they don't really have any rights in Guantanamo. It's ours. We control it.
But it's not American territory. So they don't have any U.S. legal rights there. Why don't we just keep them there forever? And then that became the policy.
I presume that maybe you can help me out here, but as a result of not having any rights and it's not being on U.S. soil, you can pretty much do to them whatever you want to do in order to find out whatever it is you need to find out.
And that's where the big split came for me. I did not yet know that there was a formal torture program. I learned that in May of 2002. Torture actually began on August the 2nd, 2002. But I remember saying to my boss, this is illegal. This is clearly a violation of the Geneva Convention. And it's a violation of U.S. law as well. We shouldn't be doing this. And he said...
Listen to me, because I'm only going to say it once, he said. This has already been worked out at a pay grade far above yours or mine. We're not here to make these decisions. We're here to do as we're told. And that didn't sit right with me. So I went back to headquarters at the end of my tour in Pakistan and
May of 2002, I was in the sandwich line in the CIA cafeteria, and one of the senior officers from the Counterterrorism Center came up to me very casually and said, oh, hey, I'm so glad I ran into you. I meant to ask you, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques? I had never heard that term before. And I said, enhanced interrogation? I said, what does that mean?
And he said, we're gonna start getting rough with these guys. I said, well, what does that mean? And then he described these 10 techniques. Everything from a smack across the face to waterboarding and sleep deprivation and freezing. Freezing. They called it the cold cell. I can describe it in a moment. I said, that sounds like a torture program. He said, it's not torture.
The president approved it and the Justice Department said we can do it. I said, give me an hour. I need to think about this. I walked out of the cafeteria. I went up to the seventh floor of the CIA. That's the executive floor. And I asked a very, very senior official for whom I had worked in the Middle East 10 years earlier for some advice. I knocked on his door, no appointment.
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