Former Greek-American CIA officer John Kiriakou has retracted his earlier claim that the U.S. paid the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople to grant autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 2022.
In a recent interview, Kiriakou alleged that in 2010 former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the initiative to offer $20 million to persuade Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who reportedly had doubts, to grant autocephaly to the Ukrainian Church.
Kiriakou claimed that the State Department, possibly through USAID, funneled $20 million through a Ukrainian bank. According to him, transactions took place behind closed doors, with $15 million ultimately reaching Patriarch Bartholomew. When he inquired about the missing $5 million, he received no clear answer, while the State Department denied any knowledge of the shortfall.
The controversial remarks start at 16′ in the following video:
Kiriakou retracted the above claims in a statement on Facebook:
“I gave an interview a few weeks ago to my friend Julian Dorey during which we discussed corruption in Ukraine. As part of that discussion, I told him a story I had heard in 2010 when I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“The story was that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had offered Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople $20 million to recognize the autocephalous, or self-governing, nature of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which had been under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church for centuries.
“I learned, however, that the story is false. No such transaction took place. I should have verified the facts before repeating them.”
Kiriakou, whose grandparents had immigrated from Greece, in 2012 became the only CIA officer to be convicted for exposing the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, having passed classified information to a reporter. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
On 27 May 2022, following a church-wide council in Kyiv, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church announced its full independence and autonomy from the Moscow Patriarchate. The council made this decision in protest of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and particularly in response to Russian Orthodox Church head Patriarch Kirill’s support for the invasion.
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church over the Kremlin’s annexation in 2014 of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and the respective support for separatists in the Donbas region.
The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the spiritual headquarters for Orthodoxy, granted the Orthodox Church of Ukraine independence in January 2019 in a move that was adamantly resisted by Moscow.
Since then, Orthodox believers in Ukraine have been divided between two competing church structures—the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Moscow Patriarchate, which remained under the spiritual authority of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow.
The Church of Greece recognized the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in October 2019. It was the first among the Eastern Orthodox churches to take this step.
Related: Ukraine Orthodox Church Cuts All Ties With Russian Church Over War
