John Kiriakou

Who is John Kiriakou?

John Kiriakou is a former CIA analyst and case officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News, blogger for Huffington Post, and author.

He is notable as the first official within the U.S. government to confirm the use of waterboarding of al-Qaeda prisoners as an interrogation technique, which he described as torture.

On October 22, 2012, Kiriakou pled guilty to disclosing classified information about a fellow CIA officer that connected the covert operative to a specific operation. Kiriakou became the second CIA worker convicted of violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, after Sharon Scranage. He was the first person to pass classified information to a reporter, although the reporter did not publish the name of the operative. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison on January 25, 2013, and reported to the low-security Federal correctional facility in Loretto, Pennsylvania, to begin serving his term on February 28, 2013.