In the years following 2001, the U.S. found themselves reeling from the fresh, painful wound of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The vast majority of the country was focused on rebuilding and very few people cared about what was happening behind closed doors. Most people didn’t want to know. One person decided that they needed to.
That man was John Kiriakou.
A 14-year veteran of the CIA, Kiriakou wasn’t some low-level desk officer. He was part of the team that captured Abu Zubaydah, a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative and associate of Osama bin Laden, in 2002.
But his journey to fame begins long before Zubaydah’s arrest.
Kirakou joined the CIA out of graduate school at George Washington University, where he was recruited by psychiatrist Jerrold Post. Post, posing as a professor, gave Kiriakou an assignment to write a physiological profile on his boss. Kiriakou aced the assignment and Post officially brought him into the CIA.
In the early part of Kiriakou’s CIA career, he was sent all over the place. He began his time as an agent as a Middle East analyst specializing on Iraq. From there, he moved to Bahrain to serve as an economic officer with the U.S. embassy. He would eventually return home to work in the Directorate of Operations.
After his final stint abroad as a counter-terrorism operations officer in Greece, tragedy struck his homeland as the 9/11 attacks rocked the foundation of the U.S. to its core. In that chaos, Kiriakou was promoted to Chief of Counterterrorism Operations in Pakistan. The role put him on the front lines of the War on Terror, leading capture after capture of al-Qaeda fighters, including Zubaydah.
While his 2004 departure into the private sector ended his time in public service, his work as an agent would be felt for years to come. That impact began in 2007.
On Dec. 10 of that year, Kiriakou sat down with ABC News and dropped the news heard around the world. He would reveal that while Zubaydah was in custody he would be waterboarded, a technique considered torture under international law.
It was the first breadcrumb in a long trail of questionable ethical behavior of prisoners at the hands of the U.S. Government.
Two years later, the full picture came out and it was worse than anyone could’ve imagined. Zubaydah wasn’t just waterboarded once, or twice or even a handful of times. He was waterboarded 83 times over the course of a month.
Zubaydah wasn’t the only one who was tortured. Prisoners in facilities such as Guantanamo Bay were subject to beatings, binding in contouring positions, sleep deprivation, sexual assault, abuse and confinement in coffin-like boxes. All for results that Kiriakou believed didn’t work.
The program Kiriakou helped expose was darker than even he had known.
Instead of investigating the CIA’s tactics, the Senate Intelligence Committee turned its attention to Kiriakou. Prosecutors called him “a reckless leaker,” while former intelligence colleagues described his actions as “reprehensible” and “a betrayal of the trust the U.S. Government put in him.”
In 2012, the government indicted him on one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, three counts under the Espionage Act and one count of making false statements. An indictment that carries a 45-year sentence.
Instead, he pled guilty and was slapped with a 30-month sentence in a low security facility in Loretto, PA. He followed his conscience and paid the price.
Kiriakou was released in 2015 and has refused to be quiet since. He has taken every microphone handed to him through podcasts, interviews, op-eds, panels and everything in between.
Since that fateful day in 2007 to now, his argument has not changed; a democracy cannot function when its government hides what it does in the name of its people. Torture wasn’t just morally wrong, it didn’t even work.
“I love this country more than anything else in the world, and I want it to do the right thing,” Kiriakou said in an interview with The Diary of A CEO. “We’re a country of laws and we have to obey our laws.”
Now in his 60s, Kiriakou is still making the rounds to anyone that will listen. He’s still saying the same stuff he did in 2007 and still insisting the American public has the right to know.
