PARDON HIM ALREADY! John Kiriakou
The Dr. Phil Podcast
Dr. Phil McGraw
4.3 • 13.5K Ratings
🗓️ 4 September 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
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Summary
John Kiriakou, a former CIA: What happens when exposing the truth comes at the ultimate personal cost?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | John, thank you so much for joining me today. |
| 0:05.9 | Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Phil. |
| 0:08.2 | Such a pleasure for me. |
| 0:10.4 | Well, you have been a busy guy in your profession. |
| 0:16.0 | A couple of quotes that I want to attribute to you, and you can own them or not. |
| 0:20.7 | I want to be sure I'm right. |
| 0:22.8 | One is, you said, I exposed the CIA and went to prison for it. Is that something you said? |
| 0:29.9 | It is. You said there are some things we should not do, even in the name of national security. |
| 0:37.0 | Is that something you said? Indeed, it is. All right. This is something that you took very seriously in your life. Why did you go into the CIA? Were you recruited? I was recruited in graduate school, but to tell you the truth, |
| 0:55.9 | I was only considering jobs in public service. I'm the grandson of four grandparents who |
| 1:05.0 | emigrated to this country from Greece. And in our household, while I was growing up, |
| 1:10.2 | it was instilled in all of us, really, that |
| 1:13.0 | we owed this country such a great debt of thanks for giving us a new life in this wonderful |
| 1:20.4 | country that we needed to pay that debt back. And so my parents were elementary school teachers in the public school system, |
| 1:29.6 | and they instilled in us the notion that we should go into public service as well. |
| 1:34.8 | So you went into public service, but you didn't sit around in the sandbox as a kid |
| 1:40.2 | envisioning yourself being a CIA agent. |
| 1:49.8 | Actually, I did. When I was nine, I told my parents that I wanted to be a spy when I grew up. And they bought me walkie-talkies for Christmas that year. |
| 1:55.8 | I remember. Yeah. And then when I was 16, I said specifically, I remember telling my father that not only did I want to be a spy, but I wanted to be a spy in the Middle East. And so I went to George Washington University and got an undergraduate degree in Middle Eastern studies. I stayed at GW for a master's degree in legislative affairs, but with a concentration |
| 2:20.7 | in foreign policy analysis, thinking if I can't get into the CIA, I'll go to Capitol Hill |
| 2:26.8 | or I'll go to the Foreign Service. And then as it turned out, my graduate school advisor |
| 2:32.4 | who gave me an A on a paper, it was a psychology exam, asked me to, |
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