He was an intelligence analyst and operations officer for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a consultant for ABC News.

[12] He became a counter-terrorism operations officer and worked in Athens, Greece, where the CIA targeted 17N and other leftist Greek terrorist groups, as well as secular Palestinian revolutionaries.

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.

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

[citation needed] On December 10, 2007, Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC News[17] 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.

[18]Following the interview, Kiriakou's accounts of Abu Zubaydah's waterboarding were widely repeated and paraphrased,[Note 3][7] and he became a regular guest expert on news and public affairs shows on the topics of interrogation and counter-terrorism.

[20][21] 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.

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

According to PEN America:The specific charges were that in 2008, Kiriakou confirmed the name of a CIA officer—which was already well known to people in the human rights community, according to the Government Accountability Project—to someone who claimed to be writing a book about the agency's rendition practices.

In a separate 2008 incident, Kiriakou gave a New York Times journalist the business card of a CIA agent who worked for a "private government contractor known for its involvement in torture."

[33] On October 22, 2012, Kiriakou agreed to plead guilty to one count of passing classified information to the media thereby violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act; his plea deal spared journalists from testifying in a trial.

[35] In February 2013 New York Times reporter Scott Shane referenced the Kiriakou case when he told NPR that Obama's prosecutions of journalism-related leaking were having a chilling effect on coverage of national security issues.

[10] In summer 2013, Kiriakou wrote an open "Letter From Loretto" to Edward Snowden, published by the blog Firedoglake, expressing his support and giving advice; urging him to not, "under any circumstances, cooperate with the FBI".

[39] In July 2018, Kiriakou signed a $50,000 agreement with Karen Giorno, a former campaign advisor to Donald Trump, as payment for lobbying for a pardon, with the promise of an additional $50,000 as a bonus if it was granted.

"[41] Kiriakou said the time he spent in prison was "worth every day" because revelations about the CIA's use of torture led to Congress's enactment of a specific ban on waterboarding and other techniques used at the black sites.

[citation needed] In January 2022, Kiriakou commented to Declassified UK about their allegations that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a non-profit corporation funded by the United States Congress, had funnelled millions of dollars into British independent media groups since 2016.

He said: "In 2011, the US Congress changed the law that forbade the Executive Branch from propagandizing the American people or nationals of the other 'Five Eyes' countries—the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.