Former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou has sparked fresh controversy after claiming that Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party tried to force him to apologize for remarks he claims were merely his analysis of the conventional military capabilities of Delhi and Islamabad.
Kiriakou said that when he received the letter from Pakistan demanding an apology, he replied directly and told them that he would deal with the letter with complete disregard.
After that, he said, PTI never contacted him again.
Kiriakou shared his analysis of the India-Pakistan conflict during an interview with ANI in October.
He mentioned that “Pakistan will be on the losing side” and that a war between the two nations would not bring any positive result. “Nothing – absolutely nothing – good will come from a direct conflict between India and Pakistan, because Pakistan will lose. And I don’t mean nuclear weapons, but exclusively conventional war,” he said.
Kiriakou’s remarks drew widespread backlash and online abuse from people in Pakistan. However, he was most touched by a letter from Chairman Imran Khan’s party, PTI, which has been led by former Punjab Chief Minister Chaudhry Parvez Elahi since March 2023.
(WKiriakou said the letter condemned his remarks “in the strongest possible terms” and demanded “an immediate apology to His Excellency, the former Prime Minister (Imran Khan), members of the party (PTI) and the people of Pakistan.
Despite being advised by his lawyer to “drop it”, Kiriakou did just the opposite. During the interview, he revealed that he responded to the “threatening” email and did so in a harsh manner, according to a Hindustan Times report.
“I emailed him and said, ‘Regarding your demand for an apology, I brushed off your demand for an apology.’ And I hit send, so I left it and I never heard back from them,” he said.
Who is John Kiami Ready?
Kiriakou joined the CIA in 1990, first serving as an analyst before becoming a case officer. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, he was appointed chief of counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan.
In this role, he led the raid in 2002 that captured Abu Zubaydah, then considered the third representative of al-Qaeda. He stated that he refused CIA training in “enhanced interrogation techniques” (a euphemism for torture methods such as waterboarding). He retired from the agency in 2004 after 15 years of service.
In a 2007 interview with ABC News, Kiriakou became the first US official to confirm the CIA’s use of waterboarding on detainees, describing it as torture and revealing it as an official policy endorsed by then-President George W. Bush.
(With input from agencies)
