John Kiriakou Receives Hist Medal after Trinity Address on Torture, Conscience, and the CIA

“John Kiriakou received the College Historical Society’s Gold Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Public Discourse at an event in the GMB Chamber on April 7th, when he spoke about intelligence work, torture, whistleblowing and the role of personal ethics inside state institutions. Introduced as the Society’s “final and perhaps most anticipated medal ceremony” of the 256th session, the event combined a formal presentation with an extended conversation on Kiriakou’s career in the CIA and the consequences of his later decision to speak publicly about the agency’s conduct. In opening the ceremony, the Society described Kiriakou as a former CIA analyst specialising in the Middle East who later served in counter-terrorist operations in Pakistan before becoming known internationally as a whistleblower. The Hist said the medal was intended to recognise his contribution to “justice, integrity, and open debate”, placing him in a line of previous recipients that, according to the chair, includes figures such as Bernie Sanders, Rory Stewart and Stella Assange. Accepting the award, Kiriakou said he was “humbled” by the honour, while also noting the scale of the company he was joining. He told the audience that he tries to live according to an ethical code and said that, with age, he had become more convinced that expediency is never a sufficient reason to do something one knows to be wrong. This question of whether people act on what they already know to be right became the central theme of his remarks. Kiriakou told the chamber that the culture of the CIA encouraged officers to think of life as morally ambiguous, but said he had come to reject that view. Some situations, he argued, are not “a shade of grey” at all, but plainly right or wrong. He used a series of examples to make the point that institutions do not necessarily provide ethical limits for the people working inside them. In his account, officers may find themselves in situations where there is no formal guidance, no immediate intervention, and no rulebook capable of answering the deeper moral question. That led him to the issue most closely associated with his public profile: the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the CIA after 9/11. Kiriakou recalled being approached in 2002 about becoming certified in their use, and said that he immediately understood the phrase to refer to torture. Although, as he put it, the programme had been approved at the highest levels of the US government, he said that legality did not resolve whether it was moral or ethical. His address returned several times to that distinction between what is authorised and what is defensible. He also spoke about the consequences of his decision to speak publicly. Kiriakou said his refusal to accept the programme led, ultimately, to his imprisonment, describing his own “stubbornness” as the reason he went to prison for 23 months. He told the audience that he had never apologised for what he did and would not do so, because he believed he had been right. The closing note of the speech was emphatic: students, he said, should not assume that standing alone means they are wrong. The event then moved into a moderated discussion on his career. Asked how he had first joined the CIA, Kiriakou recounted being approached while studying at George Washington University by a professor who later revealed that he was a CIA officer working undercover on campus. He described the recruitment process that followed in detailed terms, including written exams, psychological interviews, medical testing and a polygraph. From there, the conversation shifted to the work of a CIA operations officer. Kiriakou described the agency’s “asset acquisition cycle” as “spot, assess, develop, recruit”, and said that the job, reduced to basics, is to recruit spies, obtain secrets and analyse the information gathered. Much of this section focused on the mechanics of building relationships with intelligence targets: identifying people with access, gaining their trust, and slowly turning familiarity into cooperation. In Kiriakou’s telling, the work was often built less on dramatic confrontation than on patience, personal rapport and sustained attention. He illustrated that process with a series of stories from postings abroad, including efforts to cultivate foreign officials through lunches, travel and personal favours. He also described the risks of misjudging a potential recruit, recalling one case in which a recruitment attempt went badly wrong and led to a diplomatic complaint. These anecdotes gave the audience a sense of the texture of intelligence work beyond its public image, showing it as a profession shaped as much by social calculation and improvisation as by secrecy alone. Later in the discussion, Kiriakou spoke at length about his posting to Pakistan after 9/11 and the operation to capture Abu Zubaydah. He described repeatedly volunteering to be sent overseas before eventually being assigned to Pakistan as chief of counterterrorism. His account of the hunt for Abu Zubaydah focused on the practical work involved: reviewing intelligence, bringing in a targeting analyst, narrowing a large pool of possible locations, coordinating with Pakistani intelligence and the FBI, and preparing simultaneous raids. He described the final stages of the operation in close detail, from tracking a landline connection to identifying the correct house and forcing entry in the early hours of the morning. The audience Q&A then widened the focus of the event. One audience member asked whether Kiriakou had ever become genuinely close to the people he recruited. He said that he had become friends with most of them, apart from a small number of cases where he was dealing with people he personally disliked. He also described reconnecting with former contacts years after leaving the CIA, despite rules forbidding such contact, and said some of those relationships resumed easily even after long gaps. Another exchange moved away from Kiriakou’s biography and towards the legal questions surrounding torture. An audience member asked him to assist with an article on the Torture Convention and the Geneva Convention, a request he accepted, telling the room that he was “delighted” to help. The moment briefly shifted the tone of the event, underscoring how closely some questions from the floor were tied not just to his personal story but to the broader legal frameworks surrounding US conduct after 9/11. A later question asked about the idea of the CIA whistleblower itself, and whether intelligence agencies sometimes allow controlled leaks to appear as acts of dissent. Kiriakou said that they do, arguing that governments leak classified information regularly in an effort to shape public opinion. He distinguished this, however, from what he described as genuine whistleblowing, which in his view is typically met with prosecution, retaliation and lasting personal consequences rather than public approval. Asked how people could tell the difference between a controlled leak and a real whistleblower, Kiriakou said the clearest marker was usually the response of the state. A genuine whistleblower, he argued, would “almost immediately face an espionage charge” or some comparable punishment. In making that point, he referred both to his own case and to Edward Snowden, saying that neither man had acted with criminal intent as he understood it, but had instead tried to expose government wrongdoing. The final audience question turned to Kiriakou’s own decision to go public. Asked whether there had been a final moment that pushed him into speaking out, he said the turning point came when ABC News journalist Brian Ross contacted him to say he had a source alleging that Kiriakou had personally tortured Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou said that claim was false, and told the audience that the call became the moment at which he began to consider defending himself publicly. Taken together, the ceremony, moderated discussion and audience Q&A covered both the official arc of Kiriakou’s career and the set of ethical arguments for which he is now best known. The Hist framed the occasion as an honour for his contribution to public discourse; Kiriakou used it as an opportunity to return to the themes that have defined his public life since leaving government service: torture, accountability, institutional pressure, secrecy and the obligation to act on personal conviction. After the ceremony, Kiriakou encouraged students to come forward and meet him in person, or to take a picture.

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