Black sites. Honeypots. Artificial intelligence.
Welcome to the side of espionage you were never meant to see.
In a new conversation with host Mario Nawfal, former CIA officer John Kiriakou — the whistle-blower who exposed America’s post-9/11 torture program, describes a world of spycraft that has grown colder, smarter, and far more invasive than anything from the Cold War.
The trench-coated agent in a dark alley is gone. Today’s spies hide in code, in data streams, and in the “smart” devices inside our homes.
Kiriakou knows that world better than most. Once part of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, he publicly confirmed in 2007 that U.S. interrogators had waterboarded prisoners, calling it, plainly, “a method of torture.”
“I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in December 2007,” he recalled later.
The revelation shattered decades of silence and cost him his freedom. But his warning went deeper: what began as physical abuse has evolved into digital control. Surveillance, he says, has simply gone wireless.
“Even if torture works, it cannot be tolerated — not in one case or a thousand or a million,” Kiriakou once said. “If their efficacy becomes the measure of abhorrent acts, all sorts of unspeakable crimes somehow become acceptable.”
During his talk with Nawfal, Kiriakou described how foreign intelligence...
The government on Thursday clarified that claims circulating on social media over the Indian LCA Tejas Mk1 suffering an oil leakage at the Dubai Airshow 2025 are false. The Press Information Burea...