John Kiriakou: The CIA Program That Destroyed America From the Inside

OR: What the beast machine does to the people who refuse to stop pulling at its wires.

The United States government imprisoned exactly one person for the CIA’s torture program. Not the man who designed the waterboarding. Not the man who signed off on it. Not the deputy director who ordered the destruction of 92 videotapes of interrogation sessions (92, in case you thought maybe he was just tidying up a small backlog). Not the lawyers who wrote the legal memos authorizing the whole operation, memos so tortured in their own logic that calling them legal analysis is a little like calling a ransom note correspondence.

One person went to prison. The one who told a journalist it was happening.

His name is John Kiriakou. He served 14 years in the CIA, helped capture Abu Zubaydah in 2002, and in 2007 sat down with ABC News and said the words “the CIA used waterboarding” and “I think that is torture.”

He did not leak documents. He did not burn a source network. He said two sentences on camera that happened to contradict the official position of the United States government, and for that, in 2013, Barack Obama’s Justice Department handed him 30 months in federal prison under the Espionage Act.

The Espionage Act. The law written in 1917 to prosecute German saboteurs during World War I. Used by Obama against more whistleblowers than every previous American president combined, all the way back to Wilson, who wrote the thing. Every president before Obama had used it three times total. Obama used it eight times, and one of those eight was a man who confirmed on television what the Senate Intelligence Committee would later spend $40 million and six years to confirm in a classified report nobody is allowed to fully read.

Thirty Months for Saying a Word Out Loud

While Kiriakou was being processed into federal prison, here is what was happening to everyone else involved in the program he confirmed existed.

Jose Rodriguez, the CIA’s Director of Counterterrorism, ordered the destruction of those 92 videotapes. Those tapes documented interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. They were evidence in multiple federal proceedings. Destroying them was, by any reading of federal obstruction law, a serious crime. Rodriguez wrote a book called “Hard Measures” in which he defended everything he did. His book got a publisher. He got a publicist. He is fine.

John Yoo is the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the primary legal memo authorizing enhanced interrogation, the one that concluded waterboarding was not torture because the pain it causes does not rise to the level of “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or death” (actual standard, from an actual memo, drafted by a person who had apparently never been waterboarded). Yoo is now a tenured law professor at UC Berkeley, which is, and I want you to really absorb this, the school that became nationally famous for student protests against right-wing speakers. He teaches law. To law students. Who will become lawyers. This is the country we live in.

James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen are the two psychologists who actually built the program. Neither had experience in interrogations. Neither spoke Arabic. They reverse-engineered a military SERE training program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, designed to help American soldiers resist torture if captured) and turned it into an offensive interrogation system, which is like reverse-engineering a seatbelt into a restraint device and then billing the government $81 million for the innovation. That is the number. $81 million, paid to Mitchell Jessen and Associates, to design a program the Senate report would later describe as producing no unique intelligence and disrupting no attacks. They settled a civil lawsuit in 2017. The CIA paid their legal fees.

Kiriakou served 23 months of his 30-month sentence, was released to home confinement, and has spent the years since doing podcasts and writing columns for Reader Supported News, because when you survive the federal government trying to make an example of you, apparently you do not stop talking. Which, good.

The Senate Spent $40 Million to Confirm What Kiriakou Said for Free

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report is one of the stranger documents in American political history, and not just because of its contents. It took six years. It cost $40 million. It ran to 6,700 pages in its full classified version, of which exactly 525 pages have ever been made public, meaning roughly 92% of the definitive government account of the CIA’s torture program remains classified, which is either a coincidence or a perfect number given Rodriguez’s 92 tapes.

What the released portion confirmed: the program was not effective. The CIA misled Congress about what the program involved and what it produced. The CIA misled the Justice Department when seeking legal approval. The agency had created an internal culture of concealment so complete that the Inspector General’s office, conducting its own separate review, found the CIA had hacked into Senate Intelligence Committee computers to monitor the investigation while it was in progress. The CIA’s own Inspector General confirmed this. The CIA initially denied it, then admitted it, and then Director John Brennan apologized.

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Nobody went to prison for hacking the Senate computers.

Nobody went to prison for misleading Congress.

Nobody went to prison for destroying the 92 tapes.

John Kiriakou went to prison for a television interview.

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The $81 Million Question Nobody Thought to Ask

There is a version of this story that focuses on the specific horrors of the torture program itself. Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a single month. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. Sleep deprivation, stress positions, confinement in small boxes, rectal feeding administered with “excessive force” according to the Senate report’s own language. That version of the story is real and documented and demands its own reckoning.

But the story of John Kiriakou is different, and in some ways more clarifying about how power actually functions, because it is not about what the government did in secret. It is about what the government did publicly, in open court, with press coverage and a sentencing hearing and a federal judge, to the one person who said it out loud.

They built a message. The message was not complicated. It was: the people who run programs do not go to prison. The people who talk about programs do. If you work for us and you see something that you believe is wrong and illegal, and you tell anyone, we will find a 109-year-old law about German spies and we will put you under it. We will take your pension, your clearance, your career, and your freedom. And while we are doing that, the people who designed the thing you exposed will be on book tours.

That message was received. You can measure how well it was received by counting the number of senior intelligence officials who have gone public about anything significant since 2013. The number is very small. The country is very large. The gap between those two facts is where the actual story lives.

Kiriakou knew the cost and said it anyway. He is still saying it. The question the CIA never managed to answer is a simple one: if the program worked, if it was legal, if it was necessary, why did they need him to be quiet about it so badly?

You already know the answer. So did he. So do you.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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Wolf left a fun job working at a big tech company and making loads of money to be a dirt poor journalist living in a rundown motel in order to write about people in power that are accountable to no one but themselves. This is, financially speaking, the dumbest decision a person can make, and yet here we are. Lily is a semester away from her journalism degree and would prefer not to fund the rest of it through debt that compounds while she sleeps. Neither of us does this because it pays well. We do it because someone has to, and apparently we drew the short straw. A paid subscription keeps this whole operation functional and Lily closer to a car than a bus pass.