John Kiriakou wasn’t exactly down and out. But he was struggling.
Not only was John broke, he was drowning in legal fees he owed to the lawyers who’d defended him when the federal government came after him. Despite an impressive resume, whose entries included Arabic fluency, a storied CIA career and authoring bestselling books, he couldn’t find a decent job. He wound up on food stamps. Whether the hitch was his age (61) or being blacklisted by U.S. government, who could say?
About those last three items: under different circumstances, in a fairer country during a better time, John would have been considered a hero. To those who knew the truth, that’s exactly what he was. John Kiriakou was the whistleblower who exposed the CIA’s Bush-era torture program, infamous for waterboarding and other atrocities. Rather than the medal and a ticker-tape parade he deserved, the government sent him to federal prison for nearly two years—for the crime of telling a set of awful truths. They destroyed his marriage, stole his pension and framed him as the bad guy.
Now he’s a meme. Actually hundreds of memes. If you’ve been online in the last month, odds are you’ve seen some iteration of CIA John, as twentysomethings call him, over and over and over.
John and I knew each other for years, having appeared on one another’s radio shows, and became friends. He’s kind but serious, affable but not one to suffer fools. He’s smart, intellectual and reads voraciously. You can easily picture him as the CIA officer he used to be, hobnobbing with sketchy characters in a hotel bar in Qatar, but he also wouldn’t be out of place in the faculty lounge at a university. In this era of gleeful ageism, John is the kind of older white dude that youth culture reflexively rejects. He’s hardly someone you’d expect Generation Zers to respond to like the Beatles arriving at Idlewild.
“I didn’t know how to go about turning things around” after he was released. John told me. “So I just decided to start saying yes to podcasts. If you’re a 17-year-old kid and you’ve got a podcast that your high school buddies listen to, the answer is yes. Then, about two years ago, I started getting invitations to go on bigger podcasts.” John spent his days appearing on one podcast after another. He was busy. But he still couldn’t earn a living.
Then some kid made a TikTok.
“My niece called me and said, ‘Uncle John, you are blowing up on the Internet.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘There are these hilarious shorts of you.’ I said, ‘From what?’ She said, ‘I don’t know. It’s some podcast that you did, but they’re hilarious. You should go on TikTok and look.’ I went on TikTok, and I recognized from what I was wearing that it was from the ‘Diary of a CEO’ podcast. Some kid just took that interview, cut my stories up into shorts, changed my voice from my regular voice to an ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks’ voice and then to this deep ogre’s voice, and then laser beams are shooting out of my eyes.”
“It went crazy to the point where I’m approaching a billion views. It’s nuts to me. The next day, I was filming a documentary with a German production company on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. We were down at the Pentagon for three hours, and 10 people stopped me for selfies. These guys said, ‘What’s up?’ I said, ‘I’m not really sure. I seem to have exploded online, but I don’t know why.’”
John’s life has changed…forever? Who knows?
Who knows why the algorithms love him?
What is certain is, thanks to that TikTok and the podcast episode that inspired it, John’s penchant for truth-telling has lifted him from relative obscurity—unlike Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, he wasn’t a household name—to international renown.
I’ve had a first-row seat to John’s reversal of fortune.
About a year ago, we decided to co-host a fast-moving daily podcast in which we analyze and comment upon the day’s news, with an emphasis on foreign affairs. “DeProgram” puttered along last year, steadily picking up subscribers. Then, as I witnessed one evening a couple of weeks ago in Washington, John exploded. And so has our show.
“That night you and I went out to dinner, and we were stopped how many times just at dinner?” John recalled. “It was nuts. We couldn’t get through dinner at this random Chinese restaurant in Chinatown.”
Cameo, which lets you hire a celebrity to record your bespoke video, called John to tell him he’d set the app’s all-time record for requests. He’s been approached by Tom Ford to become a spokesman for their glasses. Answer: yes. Also by Viagra. Answer: no. He’s been signed by Creative Artists Agency.
John Kiriakou is America’s biggest, newest, unlikeliest star. People invite him to their weddings, reach out to him when they’re feeling suicidal (he calls back), declare that they could stare into his eyes and listen to his voice forever. He does have a nice voice.
“I went to dinner with a group of friends,” John says. “We always get together and think big thoughts and have these very intellectual conversations. One of the professors from Georgetown brought her 16-year-old daughter. She was just staring at me the whole time, like she couldn’t believe she was having dinner with CIA John. Then I noticed a couple of times, like I’m talking to her mom, and she’s discreetly going ‘click.’”
John is happy and relieved, but also conflicted. “It’s a little disappointing at the same time, because I like to think that I’m a serious person,” he says. “I have serious things to say. People have gone back to watch my appearances on Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. Rogan’s producer told me the other day that my appearance on Rogan in October is now the third most-watched Rogan episode ever, behind Donald Trump and Elon Musk. For ages, I was fourth behind Matthew McConaughey. Now I’m 1.1 million views above Matthew McConaughey. For what reason? Just because I have lasers shooting out of my eyes?”
Why John?
“Somebody said to me, it’s because people believe that I’m telling the truth. There’s so much spin out there and so much political bullshit on both sides that people are looking for someone who’s telling the truth, Ted.”
As John’s co-host, I’m getting a little residual late-life love too, as suddenly strangers who watch our podcast have begun greeting me on the street. No Cameo requests yet though.
I asked John: Is it fair to say that, hilariously and bizarrely, the Internet has discovered that they’re in love with your authenticity as the result of a completely inauthentic portrayal on TikTok?
“You’ve hit it on the head,” he replied. “There it is right there.”
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)
