Viral TikTok Fame Brought an Ex-CIA Officer a New Following — and a Hail Mary Pardon Pitch to Trump
A couple of weeks ago, 61-year-old former CIA officer John Kiriakou got an unexpected early morning call from his 16-year-old niece. “Uncle John, you’re blowing up all over TikTok,” she told him, per Kiriakou’s recollection.
Kiriakou, who served prison time starting in 2013 for disclosing classified details of the CIA’s Middle East torture program, had no idea what she meant. He doesn’t even have a TikTok account; if anything, he only occasionally browses Facebook as a quiet lurker. But snippets from a January podcast interview he recorded with Steven Bartlett — host of Diary of a CEO, which boasts more than 15 million YouTube subscribers — had spread wildly across the internet completely organically, no promotion from Kiriakou required.
For nearly 20 years, Kiriakou has waged a public campaign to secure a presidential pardon. Between 1990 and 2004, he worked as a CIA analyst and counterterrorism operative, leading a 2002 mission to capture Abu Zubaydah, a senior al Qaeda leader who ran militant training camps. After Zubaydah was taken into custody, the CIA subjected him to waterboarding. Kiriakou went public with details of the agency’s torture tactics in a 2007 ABC News interview, then went on to work as an independent terrorism consultant. Five years after that interview, the Department of Justice filed charges against him, and Kiriakou ultimately pleaded guilty to disclosing the name of an undercover CIA interrogator to reporters.
Though Kiriakou completed his full prison sentence back in 2015, a presidential pardon would not only clear his name — it would also let him recover decades of lost pension contributions from his years in government service. “I had 20 years of proud federal service. My pension adds up to $700,000,” Kiriakou says. “Without that pension, I’m going to have to work until the day I die. It was wrong of them to take it from me, and I want it back. I can only get it back with a pardon.”
In recent years, he has applied for clemency through official government channels and even tried to navigate the informal, expensive clemency landscape that marked Donald Trump’s first term. So far, all of his requests have gone unanswered. Now he is testing a new approach: appearing on many of the same big podcasts that Trump headlined throughout the 2024 election. Clips of his conversations with Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and other high-profile hosts keep circulating across social media — and online audiences can’t get enough of them.
When Kiriakou sat down with Bartlett for the January recording, the pair covered his CIA career, his choice to blow the whistle, and his 28 months behind bars in a serious wide-ranging chat. But it is Kiriakou’s unfiltered anecdotes — from gathering intelligence on the ground in Pakistan to breaking down the CIA’s infamous MKUltra mind-control program — that have blown up, after creators cut them into snappy “brainrot”-style edits for TikTok and Instagram Reels, racking up millions of views.
“See you in two scrolls,” one viewer commented on a Kiriakou clip, joking about how often the former spy’s content appears on users’ For You Pages.
A TikTok creator going by the handle @_bamboclat is credited by meme database Know Your Meme with popularizing these viral edits of Kiriakou sharing unheard stories from his time overseas. Clips of Kiriakou on this creator’s account alone have pulled in roughly 50 million total views.
“I first found out about him through podcast clips on TikTok. I think the reason why everyone is in love with him is because he’s a good storyteller,” says @_bamboclat, who declined to share their full name. “He’s been telling it for 20 years. Slowing down and speeding it up, the meme version of him, is pretty popular with Gen Z and the TikTok audience.”
This unexpected virality has turned Kiriakou into a full-blown cultural phenomenon. Following his newfound fame, top talent agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA) signed him, and personalized celebrity video platform Cameo recruited Kiriakou just last month. So far, he has recorded more than 700 custom videos for fans at roughly $150 apiece. In one popular Cameo, Kiriakou gave a shoutout to a fan’s mother’s nail salon, and the clip is now used as a promotional advertisement for the business on TikTok.
“When somebody pointed it out to me, I went on TikTok and looked at them, and I thought it was hilarious,” says Kiriakou. “These young people who have done this have made opportunities available to me that just would never have existed.”
The Diary of a CEO interview was just one of dozens Kiriakou recorded over the past year. He says he never set out to go viral — he only wanted to get his clemency plea in front of Trump. “I was laser-focused on getting to Donald Trump so that I could ask for a pardon,” says Kiriakou. “I know that the guy's tech savvy. I know that he watches podcasts. God knows he's been on a lot of podcasts. Maybe, just maybe, he'll watch one that I'm on.”
His first major high-profile appearance was with Carlson in summer 2024. That interview caught the attention of Patrick Bet-David, another popular conservative podcaster who interviewed Trump ahead of the 2024 election, and Kiriakou recorded a segment with him that July. In October, Kiriakou appeared as a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience. He has also joined shows hosted by popular creators Danny Jones and Dalton Fischer, with his interviews accumulating millions of views total.
Trump administration critics argue that clemency has become a commodity under Trump: pay enough to a well-connected influencer close to the president, and a pardon becomes a real possibility. During Trump’s first term, Kiriakou tried this route. In 2018, he paid former Trump adviser Karen Giorno $50,000 to lobby for his pardon, with a promise of another $50,000 if she succeeded.
“Rudy Giuliani tried to shake me down for $2 million,” says Kiriakou. “I just got up and walked out.” (The New York Times reported in 2021 that a Giuliani associate offered the deal. Giuliani told the Times he did not remember ever meeting Kiriakou, and did not respond to an X direct message request for comment from WIRED.)
It remains unclear whether any of Kiriakou’s efforts have earned him sympathy from Trump. While Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the January 6 attack, some high-profile pardon seekers have still not secured release, even with backing from Trump’s inner circle. For example, Tina Peters, a former election clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, is currently serving a nine-year state prison sentence after facilitating a security breach of her county’s election management system. She has become a hero among election-denying circles, and top Trump allies Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon have pushed for her release. In a December Truth Social post, Trump announced he had granted Peters a “full Pardon,” but she remains behind bars because the president has no jurisdiction over state-level criminal cases like hers.
Kiriakou says he was told by a senior government official that the president is aware of his pardon application. “He said it could happen in six hours. It could happen in six months, or maybe he doesn't like your face. Or maybe he doesn't like your suit, and then it never happens. It's just impossible to tell,” Kiriakou recalls.
The White House declined to comment on Kiriakou’s pardon application when reached by WIRED. “The White House does not comment on potential clemency petitions. The President is the final decider on all pardons or commutations,” a White House spokesperson said.
Daniel Kobil, a Capital University law professor who studies clemency, calls Kiriakou’s new media strategy “a brilliant variation on an old strategy” of building a large base of public support. “The best thing to do is generate broad support with a constituency that Trump cares about,” says Kobil. “It’s obviously a long shot with many decisionmakers. Trump, I think, is more of a wild card.”
Still, Kiriakou plans to keep pushing forward. He says he will return to Carlson’s and Bet-David’s shows in the coming weeks, continuing to feed the social media clip economy that has formed around his incredible stories. Maybe this time, Trump will see them.
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