John Kiriakou

John Chris Kiriakou (born August 9, 1964) is an American author, journalist and former intelligence officer.

Kiriakou is a columnist with Reader Supported News and co-host of Political Misfits on Sputnik Radio.

He was formerly an analyst and case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, counterterrorism and a consultant for ABC News.

Kiriakou was born on August 9, 1964, the son of elementary school educators in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and raised in nearby New Castle, Pennsylvania.

His grandparents had immigrated from Greece.

Kiriakou graduated from New Castle High School in 1982 and attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he earned a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern Studies and a master's degree in Legislative Affairs.

Kiriakou was recruited into the CIA by a graduate school professor who had been a senior CIA official.

Kiriakou spent the first eight years of his career as a Middle East analyst specializing on Iraq.

He maintained a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance.

He learned Arabic and, from 1994 to 1996, was assigned to the American 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 became a counter-terrorism operations officer and worked in Athens, Greece, on Eurocommunist terrorism.

In Greece, Kiriakou recruited foreign agents to spy for the United States, and was nearly assassinated by leftists.

In 2000, Kiriakou returned to CIA Headquarters.

Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, Kiriakou was named 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 to take up a consulting job.

From 2004 until 2008, Kiriakou worked as a senior manager in Big Four accounting firm Deloitte & Touche's competitive intelligence practice.

He was the first U.S. government official to confirm in December 2007 that waterboarding was used to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners, which he described as torture.

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.

Kiriakou said that he did not witness Zubaydah's interrogation, but had been told by CIA associates that it had taken only a single brief instance of waterboarding to extract answers:

"... He was able to withstand the waterboarding for quite some time. And by that I mean probably 30, 35 seconds ... and a short time afterwards, in the next day or so, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate."

Following the interview, Kiriakou's accounts of Abu Zubaydah's waterboarding were widely repeated and paraphrased, and he became a regular guest expert on news and public affairs shows on the topics of interrogation and counter-terrorism.

From September 2008 until March 2009, Kiriakou was a terrorism consultant for ABC News.

Following Senator John Kerry's (D-MA) ascension to the chairmanship 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 2009, however, it was reported that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded at least 83 times.

The treatment "broke" Abu Zubaida and he told his interrogators of al-Qaeda terrorism plots.

However, most of the useful information was obtained prior to Abu Zubaida's waterboarding and the torture resulted in little or no useful additional information.

Kiriakou has said that he chose not to blow the whistle on torture through internal channels because he believed he "wouldn't have gotten anywhere" because his superiors and the congressional intelligence committees were already aware of it.

After the ABC News interview, Kiriakou exchanged emails with a freelance writer.

In the emails, Kiriakou disclosed the name of a former CIA colleagues who had participated in the detention and interrogation program; the employee was, at the time, still undercover.

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 angered federal officials, and the resulting federal investigation led to Kiriakou's arrest.

In 2011, he left the committee to become managing partner of Rhodes Global Consulting, an Arlington, Virginia-based political risk analysis firm.

From April 2011 to April 2012, he resumed counter-terrorism consulting for ABC News.

He speaks often at colleges and universities around the country about the CIA, terrorism, torture, and ethics in intelligence operations.

In 2012, Kiriakou became the first CIA officer to be convicted of passing classified information to a reporter.

He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.