Is Iran the 'Leading State Sponsor of Terrorism?' (w/ John Kiriakou) | The Chris Hedges Report
As the U.S. seeks to label Iran as a mass sponsor of state terrorism, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou looks inward, examining the decades of US-backed terror campaigns waged towards imperialist ends.
This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
In an attempt to justify and garner popular support for the American-Israeli war on Iran, the Trump administration is pressuring its allied nations to join the US in designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as the world’s greatest sponsor of state terrorism. The administration points to Iran’s participation in the Axis of Resistance, which includes Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine and Ansar Allah in Yemen, as evidence for its position. This raises the question of whether Iran, by supporting proxy organizations, is doing anything differently from what US intelligence agencies have done for many decades.
To answer this question, Chris Hedges speaks with John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst and counterterrorism operations officer who worked in West Asia. Kiriakou is known for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, for which he was the sixth person convicted under the Espionage Act. In this interview, Kiriakou makes the distinction between organizations that carry out terrorism and those that are fighting for national liberation from foreign oppressors.
Kiriakou explains that throughout recent history, many countries or organizations backed by the United States have engaged in terrorist acts, and that the US has used the terrorist designation “as a cudgel against countries that we don’t like or whose policies we disagree with,” making the designation lose its meaning.
Hedges and Kiriakou discuss US support for terrorists, including the State of Israel, which Kiriakou calls “an extreme example” of an entity that uses violence, and the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a “cult” co-founded by Maryam Rahjavi, an Iranian who opposes the Islamic Republic of Iran and who has cultivated strong ties with both Democrats and Republicans in the US.
They conclude the interview with an analysis of the current US-Israel war on Iran and how it plays a part in Israel’s goal to create chaos in the region. Kiriakou laments that the US has missed many opportunities to partner with Iran in curbing terrorism and narcotics production. He warns that the US’ aggression against Iran will likely result in unintended blowback.
This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
In filmmaker Annemarie Jacir’s new film, Palestine 36, one of the most pivotal moments in Palestine’s history is brought to life for the first time through cinema.
In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, host Chris Hedges speaks with Jacir about the 1936–39 Palestinian uprising against British colonial rule — a mass revolt that laid the groundwork for the modern Palestinian struggle, and also the crushing of Palestine’s organizational infrastructure that culminated into the founding of the Zionist state a decade later.
Jacir explains that this period represents “the beginning of the national movement for liberation in Palestine,” emphasizing its scale and significance as “the first really mass uprising” that spread from “countryside to city” and “across classes.” For her, revisiting this moment is essential to understanding everything that followed, as “it sets up everything for the Nakba in 1948 and the loss of Palestine.”
Jacir explains how her film reconstructs not only the revolt itself but also the conditions that shaped it—British colonialism, offensive attacks on Palestinian labor, and the exploitation of the Palestinian elite’s fractured nature and ambitions for power. In her research, Jacir says she was struck by the extent of that brutality, noting, “I was really… surprised… I’d never really heard about that under the British,” only to later uncover detailed accounts in archival records, including testimonies from British soldiers themselves. In fact, “it’s the blueprint of military occupation that we live today,” she says.
But Jacir frames Palestine 36 as more than a historical drama. It is, she says, about “a moment of real possibility” and the moral choices faced by those living under oppression. Even during production—disrupted by the war in Gaza—the film’s themes felt urgently contemporary. “There is no past and present,” she reflects. “We’re still living the same thing.”
Host
Chris Hedges
Executive Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Margaret Flowers
Transcript:
Margaret Flowers
Crew:
Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript
Chris Hedges: A State Department cable signed by Marco Rubio has ordered US diplomats to pressure allies to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Lebanon’s Hezbollah as terrorist organizations. The March 16th cable instructs US diplomats to raise the issue with foreign counterparts by March 20th and coordinate with Israeli officials. The campaign is part of the effort to brand Iran as the world’s leading sponsor of state terrorism because of its support for Shiite militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as Hamas in occupied Palestine. But is Iran, by supporting proxies, doing anything the United States has not engaged in for decades? And can the groups that Iran supports always be classified as terrorist organizations? Hamas, which is Sunni rather than Shia, was not formed as a terrorist group. It was formed as part of the Palestinian struggle for liberation when the secular leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization failed to deliver on its promises to create a Palestinian state. Hezbollah also was not formed as a terrorist group. It was birthed as an opposition force to fight against Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000. The Houthis, as well, rose up to fight a repressive Saudi-backed regime in Yemen.
While these groups, like all resistance groups including Jewish Militias that founded the state of Israel and the African National Congress, have carried out acts of terrorism, including bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, and hijackings to achieve their goals of liberation, they are not strictly terrorists or nihilistic killers. They are fighting in their eyes for an end to occupation and liberation. How is this different from the U.S. backing of proxy organizations?
The CIA has long funded and armed groups that use terrorism as a tactic. Cuban anti-Castro organizations funded by the CIA, for example, placed a bomb on a Cuban commercial airliner in 1976 that killed all 73 passengers on board. The CIA helped fund and form death squads in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, and later during the war in Iraq, armed and trained murderous Shiite militias.
The U.S. backed right-wing terrorist organizations in Italy during the so-called ‘Years of Lead’ from the late 1960s into the early 1980s were also backed by the U.S. From 1979 to 1990, Washington provided support for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The Contras seeking to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government carried out an estimated 1,300 terrorist attacks. The U.S. also provided extensive military aid to Syrian militants fighting the Syrian regime. These Islamist groups abducted and tortured journalists and foreign aid workers and carried out executions by beheadings.
Joining me to discuss the designation of Iran as the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism is John Kiriakou. John worked for the CIA from 1990 to 2004, first as an analyst and later as a counterterrorism operations officer overseas in Bahrain, Athens, and Pakistan, where he was the CIA’s chief of counter-terrorist operations. He led a series of military raids on al-Qaeda safe houses in Pakistan, capturing dozens of suspects, including the 2002 raid that captured Abu Zubaydah, then thought to be the third-ranking member of al-Qaeda. He was also the first CIA officer to publicly confirm that the CIA water-boarded prisoners and that such an action was torture.
He also confirmed that torture was an official U.S. government policy rather than wrongdoing by a few rogue agents. He became the sixth whistleblower indicted under the Espionage Act by the Obama Administration and was sent to prison for two and a half years.
I have this question, John. Is there any intelligence agency anywhere in the world that you know of that does not contract out either with individuals or proxy groups who, I think, would fit the classical definition of terrorism or being a terrorist.
John Kiriakou: I think just about every country does things that may be illegal, that others might object to. Certainly, the United States and its major allies, the UK, France, for example, others that are close to the United States, have committed acts even recently that I think you or I or any reasonable person would consider to be acts of terrorism, certainly.
Chris Hedges: The designation of Iran as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, and I tried to make that point in the introduction, the groups they sponsor are not nihilistic terrorist groups per se. Where does that come from? And can you compare Iran and its support for proxies or “terrorist groups” with other countries, including Saudi Arabia?
John Kiriakou: Sure. First, I think we owe viewers a definition of terrorism. The generally agreed upon definition of terrorism is the act of carrying out violence in the civilian population for the purpose of creating terror for a political purpose. Supporting national liberation organizations is not an act of terrorism. It’s just not. Whether we disagree with that or not is a separate issue, but it’s just not an act of terrorism.
I would add that there are close U.S. allies, you named Saudi Arabi for example, that if we were to hold the Saudis to the same definition, would be at least as guilty as the Iranians. Look at the havoc that the Saudis have wreaked, for example, in Yemen. It’s incalculable and it’s gone over the course of decades. Look at what the United States has done. You mentioned the Contra rebels. That’s a great example. But look at others. Look at the Greek military junta, for example, that carried out acts of terrorism against its own people. Look at Israel that has carried out assassinations all over the world.
We could even point the finger at the government of India, for that matter, for carrying out assassinations and terrorist attacks in Canada, blowing up a 747, no less. So really, the complaint that I have with this terrorism designation is that because we’ve manipulated the definition so many times over the years, and we’ve used that designation as a cudgel against countries that we don’t like or whose policies we disagree with, it’s become meaningless to place a group or a country on the list of terrorists. It means nothing now in the end.
Chris Hedges: Iran, it’s a very repressive regime, - I was thrown in jail there once and deported in handcuffs another time - but it doesn’t appear to carry out the spate of targeted assassinations against opponents, especially outside its borders that Israel does.
John Kiriakou: Right. I mean, Israel is, in my view, an extreme example. I mean, if you happen to be an Iranian military official or nuclear scientist or businessman who is carrying out trade that the government of Israel disagrees with, and you happen to be in Vienna or London or Dubai, for example, you can easily be assassinated by Israeli officers there as you could be in the center of Tehran.
And let’s talk about the center of Tehran. The Israelis use cutouts. They use recruited assets on the ground to carry out acts of terrorism in the center of Tehran targeting military officials and scientists.
Chris Hedges: Explain what a cutout is.
John Kiriakou: Sure, a cutout is a person recruited to carry out an action that gives the initiator of the action plausible deniability. So, for example, if you don’t want to send an Israeli government, an Israeli intelligence officer into Tehran, you assess that the risk is too high, you recruit, let’s say, an Afghan refugee to do it. He might do it for $100. Or you recruit somebody that’s already in Iran, maybe an Iranian national who has the ability to come and go. Perhaps you recruit that person in Dubai and send it back to Tehran to carry out this act. But there are a million ways to commit acts of terrorism, and the Israelis use a lot of them.
Chris Hedges: Well, we have long supported Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which was based in Iraq, and I think it’s an anti-Iranian resistance group, but I think that was on the list of designated terrorist groups for…
John Kiriakou: Oh, decades, decades. Chris, I’m so glad that you brought up the MEK because I feel like I’ve been the only one talking about the MEK in recent months and nobody knows what in the world I’m talking about. The MEK, the Mojahedin-e-khalq, is a terrorist group that’s been around since the 1960s. It’s more of a cult than anything else. It was formed by a husband-and-wife team in the late 1960s to carry out terrorist attacks in Iran. Now, these attacks weren’t just against the Shah and the Shah’s governmental officials, there were attacks against Americans, against the American ambassador, for example, in Tehran, against the highest-ranking U.S. Army general posted in Iran, a lieutenant general.
Chris Hedges: Am I right, John, that they were killed, right?
John Kiriakou: They were killed. That’s right. At least the ambassador was killed. You’re exactly right. The Mojahedin-e-Khalq was based in camps in the mountains of northeastern Iraq. And Saddam Hussein even gave them a radio station with which to transmit their propaganda to Iran. Now, it was set up as a communist group, but it wasn’t really communist. It was, as I said, more of a cult. The founder, Rajavi, his first name escapes me, disappeared one day, just disappeared, was never seen again. His wife, Miryam Rajavi, was rumored to have assassinated him and had his body buried. But in any event, she took over the organization and immediately started working to open a channel of communication with the West.
It was in 2009, Chris, during the Barack Obama administration with Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State that the US government decided to lift that terrorism designation from the MEK. And immediately the MEK was feted in Washington, in New York, in London.
Hillary Clinton used her influence to get the Brits to lift the terrorist designation, the French and others. And then the MEK leadership was very smart in that it recognized the need to hire high-powered lobbyists in Washington. And so, they hired the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Howard Dean, a Republican and a Democrat. They spent millions and millions of dollars on Capitol Hill trying to win friends and influence people, and they were successful. And so now we have this terrorist, this murderer, this cult leader, Miriam Rajavi, arriving in Washington and being treated as a conquering hero. Why? Because she hates the Ayatollahs. And our government hates the Ayatollahs. Now, this led to a bigger problem, in my view.
We know that the Israelis have provided an inordinate amount of so-called ‘intelligence’ to the U.S. government since the beginning of this conflict with Iran. I use air quotes around intelligence because, in my view, a great deal of it is just made up out of thin air. For example, this ridiculous assertion that there are Iranian terrorist sleeper cells in cities across the United States. I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve received from people in such disparate locations as Cleveland, Ohio, and Honolulu, Hawaii, and Oklahoma City, and Denver, and Miami, asking, is it true that there are Iranian terrorist cells embedded in my city? No, it’s not true. That was a lie that the Israelis made up to convince the American people that we needed to overthrow this government in Tehran, number one.
Number two, Miriam Rajavi takes Israeli money. The Israelis brag about it in their media. Miriam Rajavi tells the Israeli government that the people of Iran are on the brink of an uprising. All the government needs is a little shove. It’s a house of cards. It’s going to topple when the first missile flies and there will be democracy and everybody will live happily ever after. And anybody with any brain, anybody who has ever followed developments in Iran would have been able to say that that was preposterous, that no such thing would happen.
A third point, I was intimately involved in the planning for the 2003 Iraq War, something of which I’m not at all proud. I was the executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations. One of the things that I learned then, I mean, I guess I already knew it, but I learned it definitively, was that the United States, no matter its intent, will never be seen as a liberator. It will be seen as an invader and an occupier. And so, for the average Iranian, it is better for them to live with the system that they have now than to risk the chaos that invariably comes from an American Israeli. I can only imagine what the average Iranian thinks about a joint invasion by the United States and Israel.
Chris Hedges: The Israeli objective appears in Iran different from the American objective. I mean, who knows what the objective is? I’m not sure Trump knows. But they would like to see the regime changed. I think Trump foolishly thought that decapitating the top of the Iranian regime would give him a Venezuela-type situation. The Israeli goal is really to create a failed state, to destroy Iran.
John Kiriakou: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Chris Hedges: Well, of course, we were urged by the Israelis to start the Iraq war. Iraq is fractured into antagonistic factions. Syria is a failed state. They’re carrying out a Gaza-like obliteration of southern Lebanon as I speak. And it seems clear, and Netanyahu has been lobbying for the war with Iran for almost four decades, that what they would do is like to splinter, destroy, fragment, and only 60 % of Iranians are Persians. People don’t know that it’s a very ethnically, religiously diverse country. But as somebody who’s studied terrorism for a long time, it’s those failed states that really spawn terrorist groups, isn’t it?
John Kiriakou: It really is. You know, you’re exactly right about the Israelis. The Israelis believe that they benefit from surrounding countries being mired in chaos. For example, in Syria, the Israelis benefited from never-ending war there. I always maintained that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. And that Bashar al-Assad was no threat to Israel.
But then you put the former co-founder of ISIS in charge, a man who was a longtime member of Al-Qaeda. He immediately begins pogrom against minority communities, whether they’re Druze or Christian or what have you. And that’s supposed to be better for whom?
In Iraq, the same thing. The Israelis were threatened by a central government led by Saddam Hussein. They benefited from chaos. Their view was if Iraqis are busy killing each other, they’re not going to be a threat to Israel, they won’t threaten to kill Israelis. We saw the same thing happen in Libya. Now we’re seeing the same thing happen in Iran. I think that you’re exactly right that the Israelis really want, at the end of this, is a failed state. They want to see decades where Iranian is pitted against Iranian and they just simply take years and years to kill each other.
Chris Hedges: I want to raise something that you know and I know, but most people who follow the Middle East don’t know, and that is that at certain pivotal moments, Iran was our ally. Iran has a very antagonistic relationship with the Taliban. And when the Sunni militias were ascendant, Iran worked with the United States to support Shia groups, including sending armed Iranians into Iraq with our blessing.
John Kiriakou: Yes, that’s exactly right. And we’re not talking about the period of the Shah of Iran. We’re talking about post-Shah Iran. You know, this is something that I’ve always felt very strongly about. We’ve missed issue after issue after issue on which we could have cooperated with the Iranians. We could have cooperated with the Iranians on counterterrorism, on counter-proliferation, even counter-narcotics.
I’ve told this story, Chris, many times. When I was the senior investigator in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I told the chairman, Senator John Kerry, that I wanted to go to Afghanistan to do a study on the cultivation of heroin poppy. And so, I flew out to Bagram Air Base. They were waiting for me. They weren’t happy about it. But I said that I needed to fly to Kandahar and then to Helmand province, the capital of Lashkar Gah, in order to do this study. I wanted to go into the poppy fields. I wanted to interview farmers. They hated the idea. It’s the only time in my career that I ever pulled rank on someone. And I said, look, with all due respect, because I’m a senior congressional staff member, I have brigadier general status, and I am ordering you to fly me to Kandahar and Lashkar Gah.
And we got in the helicopter and we went. Well, when we get to Lashkar Gah, we get into a couple of Jeeps and with a translator, a security detail, we go into the poppy fields, and we stumble on a poppy farmer. And I asked him what in retrospect was a very naive question. I said, “Why do you grow poppy when instead you could grow things with two growing seasons, like onions or tomatoes or pomegranates?”
He was very frustrated with me. And he said, angrily, “The Americans told me in 2001 that if I told them where the Arabs were, I could grow all the poppy I wanted.” I said, ”What Americans told you could grow poppy?” And as soon as those words came out of my mouth, my military handler said, “Meeting’s over. We’re under threat”, which we weren’t. He pulled me back to the Jeep and we went back to the base. And then I had to fly back to the air base at Bagram. In any event, I fly back to Washington. I write a very strongly-worded report and I send it to a friend of mine at the Drug Enforcement Agency. And he calls me back a few days later and he said, “Buddy, you know you’re never going to get this published, right?” And I said, “Why not?” And he said, “Afghanistan produces 93 % of the world’s heroin. Almost all of that heroin goes to Iran and Russia. And we want them to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies.” And of course, Senator Kerry would never allow it to be published. And I had to kill it.
Well, here we are all these years later. And we cannot get a handle on our fentanyl problem. The fentanyl that we deal with is made in China. And why won’t the Chinese work with us to stop it? Because they want us to be addicted to fentanyl. It weakens our society.
So here we’re in this position where we tried to wreck Iranian society for decades rather than to go to the trouble of cooperating, rather than going to the trouble of trying to identify common ground where we could work with them and maybe begin to improve relations, which have been so poor since 1979. We elected instead to try to get their people addicted to heroin, maybe have some of them die, work with the Israelis to assassinate their scientists and their military leaders and just let them devolve into a chaos that we hoped would last for many years.
Chris Hedges: The other thing about targeted assassinations, I know because I’ve intimately followed Israel’s assassinations of Hamas leaders, some of whom I knew, of course, is that what it does is inevitably strengthen or see the solidification of the hardliners, the most fanatic, because the message is why negotiate? Why speak? Why try to make deals? They’ll just kill you. And you go from, I knew Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, one of the co-founders of Hamas, and then after he was assassinated in 2004, along with Sheikh Yassin, the other co-founder, I knew his successor, Nizar Rayyan, you end up with a Yahya Sinwar. And this is just true inevitably, that all of these targeted assassination campaigns, and maybe that’s what they want…
John Kiriakou: Right.
Chris Hedges: It creates people who are much more rigid.
John Kiriakou: I think that’s exactly right. Because then those people are easier to attack politically and easier to isolate. I think that’s exactly what the plan was. And another part of the plan, and this is something that has sort of moved into the arena of public discourse, is the accusation that everybody who doesn’t toe the line is anti-Semitic.
I mean, you’re anti-Semitic. I’m anti-Semitic. Tucker Carlson’s anti-Semitic. Everybody who doesn’t agree with the Likud line or the farther-to-the-right line in the Likud coalition government is an anti-Semite. I have a good friend who was an IDF Special Forces officer, is now an American citizen and married to an American. And he told me that he was actually taught in school to automatically accuse anybody who criticized Israel in any way of anti-Semitism, that it served to silence dissent. And so, we see that now to the point where it’s beginning to backfire and people just aren’t buying it anymore.
Chris Hedges: Do you have any idea, or had you heard in your years in the CIA, what is the quality of Iranian intelligence? Is it considered good or weak, or do you have any idea?
John Kiriakou: No. Yeah, it’s considered to be one of the less effective services. Part of the problem is that it’s tough for them to find decent training. They’ll get a little bit of training from the Russians. They might get a little bit of equipment from the Chinese, but that’s about it. The rest of it is sort of done in-house and they’re just not very good at it.
Chris Hedges: In terms of using this stick of Iranians, and of course that has been one of the reasons for the sanctions, using this stick of Iran being the world’s, I think they call it “the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism,” are there other factors that essentially mitigate that profile? I don’t know if you can do comparisons, but are there ways by which we can put Iran in some kind of perspective given other nations that support groups that we consider terrorist groups?
John Kiriakou: Sure. Let’s look at Pakistan. One of the most memorable tours that I ever had in the CIA was in Pakistan. I loved every minute that I was in Pakistan. And I enjoyed working with the Pakistani intelligence service and the Pakistani military. That is not to say that they don’t actively support a myriad of terrorist groups. They do.
I’ve always said that it’s as though there are two parallel Pakistani intelligence services, ISI. There is the half that I worked with, every one of whom was trained at Sandhurst. And then you go to the ISI headquarters, and you see some of these guys with very long beards. They’re the ones who formed these groups like the Jaish-e-Mohammed or the Kashmiri liberation groups. They’re the ones that financed the attacks on the Jewish Center in Mumbai and the Western hotels in Mumbai. Bonafide terrorists. But the Pakistanis are our friends when it comes to Al-Qaeda and working against the Taliban. Never mind that they created the Taliban. Now they’re working against the Taliban. And so, they are friends.
Chris Hedges: That’s an important point, John, because the Saudis and the Americans funneled, I don’t know, billions through the ISI, and the ISI consciously funded the most radical elements of the Taliban and refused to support more moderate or democratic resistance movements.
John Kiriakou: That’s exactly right. And not only funneled billions of dollars, gave them state-of-the-art weapons to use against the Soviet military. It turned the tide of the war, but then they kept the weapons to eventually use against us. So yeah, there’s a lot of very poor planning. We could say the same thing about the Indians in that the Indians support their own Kashmiri separatist groups, extremist groups. And it’s the Indians that blew up the 747 in Canada. It’s the Indians that carry out hits or attempted hits against Sikh activists or Indian leftists or anti-Hindu nationalists in places like Canada or the UK. There’s plenty of blame to go around and not to even begin to discuss what the CIA does on a daily basis.
Chris Hedges: I remember interviewing you before and you talked about after the attacks of 9-11, the gloves were off. I mean, everything the Church Commission had tried to prevent, which were assassinations and torture and everything else, it just evaporated.
John Kiriakou: It really did. We used to always hear about this golden age of the CIA as a law-abiding pillar of our democracy that began in 1975 with the advent of the Church and Pike Committees. And that just simply wasn’t true. Yes, they, they did clear out a lot of the old timers, the assassins, the coup plotters, the MK-Ultra, Dr. Mengele’s. Sure, they were fired in 1975 and 1976, but then Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, and everything changed because he was obsessed with communism and obsessed with Central America. And the next thing you know, the CIA is overseeing a secret war in Central America and cocaine is somehow magically finding its way into American society. So, was there really a golden age? If there was, it only lasted for a minute.
Chris Hedges: But after 9-11, didn’t the rate of assassinations by U.S. intelligence officials skyrocket, or am I wrong on that?
John Kiriakou: No, you’re absolutely right. And skyrocket. I wish there was an even stronger word. Executive Order 12333, which was signed by President Ford in 1975, as one of its provisions, banned assassinations by the CIA. The CIA was out just killing everybody it didn’t like until 1975. President Ford put an end to that. 12333 was amended by Ronald Reagan to allow targeted killings of any person posing a clear and present danger to the United States, an American citizen, or an American installation. 12333 was again amended just in the days after 9-11 to allow the CIA to assassinate opponents at its discretion. And so, skyrocket it did to the point where the agency set up teams, formal offices with an administrative structure even, a career panel, a promotion panel where your job was to fly around the world and kill people.
And then you would get a fitness report that, yes, he killed these people and he missed this one and he couldn’t find that one. So, we’ll pass him over for promotion this time. We’ll promote him next time if he kills the next five people. I mean, this is the craziness that we adopted at the CIA post 9-11.
Chris Hedges: Just to close on the war with Iran, I’m curious what your thoughts are. But given the fact that Israel and the United States have assassinated, including of course the Supreme Leader, these major figures, and before that, in the first Trump administration, they assassinated Soleimani, the general. Do you see the Iranians essentially attempting to pay us back?
John Kiriakou: I do. It’s something that I think we should be thinking of. You know, Chris, one of the very first things that I learned in my CIA operational training was how to handle something called a walk-in. A walk-in is someone who literally walks in off the street into an American embassy and says,” I have information that I want to pass to the CIA.”
And so, I was frequently the walk-in officer because I have multiple foreign languages. I would put on a disguise. I would go to the walk-in room, which was usually outside the hard line. Not always. 95 times out of 100, and I’m specific about this 95 because studies have been done internally. 95 times out of 100, these were just crazy people. The CIA has a chip in their head, they have a message, the head of Al-Qaeda is Queen Elizabeth, that kind of thing. We used to get that all the time.
Chris Hedges: I just want to interrupt because those people always come to journalists and want you to write up exactly that. Just so you know, you’re not the only one plagued by those people.
John Kiriakou: It was very frustrating and it was a great waste of my day. But you have to take every one of them seriously just in case that one is the real McCoy. Now of the other five, some are what we called “intelligence brokers”, where they actually do have a little nugget of intelligence and they’ll give it to you and they want $500. But then they’re going to go to the British embassy and sell it to them and the French embassy and the Chinese and the Russians and they’ll sell it to all of them. And that’s a month’s salary. They did pretty well for themselves for that week.
Some are the real McCoy. Usually it’s about one out of a hundred, maybe less than one out of a hundred, that’s the real deal. A nuclear scientist, an intelligence officer, a senior military officer. But then the other one out of a hundred is called an “intelligence probe”. This is somebody sent by the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Iranians, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda. They’re coming in to pretend that they want to be a walk-in, but really they’re looking to see where the cameras are, how much of the glass is bulletproof or bomb proof, how heavy the door is, is the door armored, how far inside the embassy can they get, how many people that they encounter have sidearms, and they amass this intelligence in their databases just in case they need to attack the United States. It helps them to identify the weak link in the chain. And so, for example, in Pakistan, a walk-in could never get anywhere near the actual embassy itself. There’s a little hut out in the parking lot and we’re going to meet with that person out in the parking lot. But there were some embassies that I worked in where we welcomed them right inside the building.
In one case, we met with walk-ins inside the MSG, the Marine Security Guard uniform room, with the guns in their racks on the wall, which was lunacy to me. But then they know that, well, if the United States attacks, let’s say Iran in this example, they know that the American embassy in XYZ country is a weak link, and then that’s the embassy they’re going to hit.
Chris Hedges: Do you think that, I mean, it’s a kind of, for every reaction, there’s a reaction. I am certain that the genocide in Gaza will eventually spawn what we will call terrorism. These Palestinian militants don’t have an air force. They don’t have the ability to carry out what we would consider state terrorism. I’m just wondering if you see that coming vis-a-vis Iran.
John Kiriakou: I do. If I were an Iranian leader or an Iranian intelligence officer, I would be plotting my revenge starting right now. Yes. And I said a moment ago, there are no Iranian sleeper cells in the United States. They don’t need to have sleeper cells. They need to have a cell in a country or a city where the United States has diplomatic interests, let’s say. There’s a huge Iranian population in Dubai. Is there an Iranian cell in Dubai? Probably. I would guess that there would be. And I would want to hit an American interest in Dubai or in Islamabad or in Manila or someplace where it’s less likely to be protected.
Chris Hedges: Well, I think throughout the region, many Shia, certainly in Iraq, Iraq is about 60 % Shia, Bahrain is primarily Shia, they see this as a war on Shiism. And we have already seen a series of attacks by Shiite militias in Iraq on American interests. So, I think it’s important to understand that you can recruit beyond Iranian citizenship.
John Kiriakou: That’s exactly right. Many Lebanese are Shia. Most Bahrainis, as you said, are Shia. There’s a large minority Shia population in Kuwait. There’s a Shia population in the Emirates. Most of them are expatriates. There’s a large Shia population in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, around the oil fields. There are Shia in Afghanistan, the Hazaras. There are Shia in Pakistan.
Chris Hedges: It’s what they call blowback.
John Kiriakou: That’s exactly what they call it.
Chris Hedges: Great, thanks John. I want to thank Sophia, Thomas, and Max who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
Photos
President Trump Holds News Conference After US Captures Venezuelan President Maduro
PALM BEACH, FLORIDA - JANUARY 03: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio listens as U.S. President Donald Trump addresses the media during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club on January 03, 2026, in Palm Beach, Florida. President Trump confirmed that the U.S. military carried out a large-scale strike in Caracas overnight, resulting in the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT - A Palestinian militant fighter of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Hamas movement, fixes the headband of the group on his comrade’s forehead as vehicles of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (not pictured) transport the second batch of released Israeli hostages in the south of Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, on October 13, 2025. (Photo by Bashar TALEB / AFP) (Photo by BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images)
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Hezbollah members salute and raise the group’s yellow flags during the funeral of their fallen comrades Ismail Baz and Mohamad Hussein Shohury, who were killed in an Israeli strike on their vehicles, in Shehabiya in south Lebanon on April 17, 2024. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT - Palestinian members of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Hamas movement, take part in a gathering on January 31, 2016 in Gaza city to pay tribute to their fellow militants who died after a tunnel collapsed in the Gaza Strip. (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS / AFP) (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)
Hector Gramajo [Misc.]
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TOPSHOT - Shiite fighters from the Hashed al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation) launches missiles on the village of Salmani, south of Mosul, on October 30, 2016 during the ongoing battle against Islamic State group jihadists to liberate the city of Mosul. (Photo by AHMAD AL-RUBAYE / AFP) (Photo by AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP via Getty Images)
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25th Annual Pen Center USA Literary Awards Festival Show, Los Angeles, America - 16 Nov 2015
John Kiriakou (Photo by Rob Latour/Variety/Penske Media via Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT - Huthi rebel fighters inspect the damage after a reported air strike carried out by the Saudi-led coalition targeted the presidential palace in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on December 5, 2017. (Photo by Mohammed HUWAIS / AFP) (Photo by MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP via Getty Images)
From left: Former Greece Prime Minister Georgios P
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Female NLA Soldiers at Training Camp
Female soldiers of the NLA (National Liberation Army of Iran) stand in formation holding AK-47s at a training camp east of Baghdad, Iraq. Women make up nearly half of the NLA, the armed wing of the Mujahideen Khalq Organization, an Iranian dissident group. | Location: East of Baghdad, Iraq. (Photo by © Jacques Pavlovsky/Sygma/CORBIS/Sygma via Getty Images)
Saddam Hussein welcomes his people In Baghdad, Iraq On October 17, 1983-
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Mojahedin - The Iranian Opposition Army In Iraq In July, 1994.
IRAQ - JULY 01: Mojahedin - the Iranian Opposition Army in Iraq in July, 1994 - Massoud Rajavi- leader of the National Liberation Army. (Photo by Antonio RIBEIRO/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
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President Barack Obama
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Howard Dean Speaks At A DNC Event
Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair (and former Vermont Governor) Howard Dean speaks during a ‘Grassroots Democracy Bond’ event at Scholz Garten, Austin, Texas, September 26, 2006. Grassroots Democracy Bond is a small donor fundraising program utilized by the DNC (Democratic National Committee). Visible behind Him is a DNC banner. (Photo by John Anderson/The Austin Chronicle/Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT - Former US Vice President Mike Pence (L) and President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) Maryam Rajavi (R) attend a demonstration against the Iranian regime in Brussels on September 6, 2025. The protest is called by the opposition organization The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and demonstrators ask for the implementation of UN Security Council resolutions against the Iranian regime. (Photo by Simon Wohlfahrt / AFP) (Photo by SIMON WOHLFAHRT/AFP via Getty Images)
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Shah Of Iran And Wife
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919-1980), Shah of Iran, and Empress Farah Pahlavi of Iran on a state visit to Persia where they visited the Achaemenid Palaces at Persepolis, Iran, 5 March 1965. (Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
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Senior official of Hamas Abdel Aziz Al-R
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Hamas Leader Injured In Israeli Missile Attack
GAZA CITY, GAZA STRIP - JUNE 6: (FILE PHOTO) Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Islamic militant group Hamas, attends a demonstration June 6, 2003, in Gaza City, Gaza Strip. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of the Islamic militant movement Hamas, and some 14 other people were wounded in an missile strike in the Gaza Strip September 6, 2003, medics said. Hamas officials said Yassin was treated in hospital fPakistan
Two Islamic militants from the radical group Jaish-e-Mohammed (Army of the Prophet) have gone underground after the organization was banned by Pakistan’s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in the outskirts of Karachi, on June 18, 2002. (Photo by Yannis Kontos/Sygma via Getty Images)
Yahya Sinwar, head of the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas
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Battle Of Jalalabad
Portrait of unidentified Afghani mujahideen (or guerillas), with a US-made Stinger missile launcher, on a road during the battle for Jalalabad, Afghanistan, March 8, 1989. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
Frank Church Speaking to Newsmen
(Original Caption) Senator Frank church (D-Idaho), chairman of the Senate Select committee on Intelligence, tells newsmen July 10 that his committee, which has been investigating CIA activities, has been getting Excellent cooperation from the White house. But he said the F.B.I. had not turned over material requested nearly two months ago.
Ronald Reagan and George Bush Waving
(Original Caption) 8/23/1984- Dallas, TX- President Ronald Reagan and running mate Vice President George Bush wave to the gathered delegates 8/23 in the Dallas Convention Center as the 33rd Republican Convention nears an end. Both are waving to the delegates from behind the podium.
President Ford Signing Nixon Pardon
US President Gerald Ford (1913 - 2006) signs a document granting former President Richard Nixon a full pardon, at the White House in Washington on September 8th, 1974. (Photo by UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT - Iranian mourners gather for the burial of slain top general Qasem Soleimani in his hometown Kerman on January 7, 2020. Soleimani was killed outside Baghdad airport Friday in a drone strike ordered by US President Donald Trump, ratcheting up tensions with arch-enemy Iran which has vowed “severe revenge”. The assassination of the 62-year-old heightened international concern about a new war in the volatile, oil-rich Middle East and rattled financial markets. (Photo by Atta KENARE / AFP) (Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images)