A former CIA officer claims that entrenched intelligence personnel outlast presidents and quietly sideline their directives — a reality he says allows the “deep state” to steer U.S. policy regardless of who’s in office.
John Kiriakou, who worked at the CIA from 1990 to 2004, told Tucker Carlson on “The Tucker Carlson Show” that agency veterans often override elected leadership by waiting for the administration to change.
Their long careers, he said, make it easy to outlast political appointees.
“This is another problem. It’s that presidents come and go every four years, every eight years. But these CIA people, they’re there for 25, 30, 35 years,” Kiriakou said.
“They don’t go anywhere. So if they don’t like a president or if a president orders them to do something that they don’t want to do, they just wait because they know they can wait him out.”
Carlson pointed out the contradiction between official authority and real-world power.
“If you look at the org chart, the president controls the CIA. But you’re describing a situation where the CIA kind of controls the president,” he said.
Kiriakou’s remarks align with actions taken by President Donald Trump early in his second term, The Daily Caller reports.
On day one, Trump signed an executive order to end the “weaponization” of federal agencies, accusing the intelligence community and federal law enforcement of political bias and systemic abuse.
One of Trump’s orders, “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders,” directed agencies to cut off benefits to ineligible illegal aliens.
A second order, “Protecting American Communities From Criminal Aliens,” instructed federal officials to stop enforcing state and local laws that gave illegal immigrants access to taxpayer benefits over U.S. citizens from other states.
Trump also moved to reshape federal leadership.
He appointed former Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) as CIA director and named Kash Patel to head the FBI.
Ratcliffe, who faced opposition from some Democrats, received strong Republican support and pledged to remove politicization within the agency.
In his Senate confirmation, he called the intelligence environment “the most challenging national security environment in our nation’s history.”
By May, reports indicated intelligence officials were already shifting internal structures to comply with Trump’s reform orders.
Kiriakou, who became a whistleblower in 2007 by publicly disclosing the CIA’s use of waterboarding, also highlighted past controversies, according to TDC.
He accused former House Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Jane Harman of falsely claiming she had no knowledge of the agency’s torture program.
“She was lying,” Kiriakou said. “I said, and I remember saying it to the New York Times. I said, ‘she was in the room when it was briefed’.”
When confronted, Kiriakou said Harman changed her story.
“She said, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember that day. But you know what? I got up, and I left early, and I left one of my aides as a notetaker, and he never briefed me,’ which is also a lie.”
Kiriakou was later prosecuted for disclosing the identity of a covert officer and classified information.
He was convicted under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and sentenced to 30 months in prison.
