Former CIA officer John Kiriakou revealed that Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party tried to force him to apologize publicly after he said India would win a conventional military conflict with Pakistan. Kiriakou said he received numerous death threats following the remarks and, against his lawyer’s advice, gave a blunt reply that has since gone viral from his appearance on the Julian Dorey Podcast.
The threats followed an interview with ANI about a month earlier, in which Kiriakou said Pakistan’s repeated conflicts with India were pointless and that nothing good would come from a conventional war, arguing that “the Pakistanis would lose.” After online backlash from Pakistanis, he said he received a letter from PTI condemning his comments “in the strongest possible terms” and demanding “an immediate apology” to former prime minister Imran Khan and the people of Pakistan.
“I wipe my a** with your demands for an apology,” Kiriakou replied, despite his lawyer telling him to ignore the letter. “I hit send … and I haven’t heard back from them,” he added.
Kiriakou, who led counterterrorism operations and was stationed in Pakistan shortly after the 9/11 attacks, spent 15 years with the CIA and is known for blowing the whistle on the agency’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques. He said he will no longer grant interviews to Indian or Pakistani news outlets and described the controversy as overblown, arguing that India and Pakistan hate each other because they are “exactly alike,” and discussed the history of the subcontinent in that context.
