One version ran a CIA desk on Iran and lost her career when her husband became a whistleblower. The other runs an American missile plant. Nobody has ever put the two in the same room.
Quick facts
- Full name: Heather Katherine Kiriakou
- Known professionally today as: Heather K. Armentrout
- CIA analyst, 1997 to 2012, focused on Iran and the wider Middle East
- Married to CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou from 2003 to 2018
- Now president and general manager of KONGSBERG US
- Based in Alexandria, Virginia
Heather Kiriakou attended a groundbreaking ceremony in Toano, Virginia, on 16 January 2026, alongside a Norwegian ambassador, a Virginia congressman and the chair of the local county board. It marked the start of construction on a $101 million missile factory that will supply the US Navy and Air Force and is expected to create more than 180 jobs. She now goes by Heather Armentrout and leads the American arm of Kongsberg, the Norwegian defence firm behind it.
She was not always Heather Armentrout. Heather Kiriakou was a senior CIA analyst who resigned from the agency in 2012, one day after her husband, the whistleblower John Kiriakou, was charged with leaking state secrets. Nothing published since 2024, when she reappeared under a different name, connects the two.
Table of Contents
Who is Heather Kiriakou?
She grew up in Oxford, Ohio, where her father was a doctor, and studied foreign service at Georgetown University before joining the CIA in 1997. She spent fifteen years there as an analyst, working mostly on Iran and the wider Middle East. In 2003 she married a fellow intelligence officer, John Kiriakou. The same year, she was named an intelligence fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
In 2007, John Kiriakou became the first CIA officer to confirm publicly that the agency had waterboarded terror suspects. Five years later, he became the sixth person the Obama administration charged under the Espionage Act, accused of disclosing a covert officer’s identity to a journalist.
Is Heather Kiriakou still married to John Kiriakou?
No. He was charged on 23 January 2012. Heather resigned from the CIA the next day, reportedly under pressure from the agency, despite having worked on some of its most sensitive material. He pleaded guilty later that year and was sentenced to thirty months, most of which he served before finishing his term in a halfway house and under home confinement. The family relied on food stamps for several months. Heather later appeared in Silenced, a 2014 documentary about post-9/11 whistleblowers.
The marriage did not survive what came after his release. Heather and John separated in May 2017, and the divorce was finalised in November 2018.
What followed is unusually well documented for a private divorce. According to the Virginia Court of Appeals, John believed the marriage had ended because of an affair. He hired a private investigator to follow his ex-wife, then mailed personal images of her to her workplace, Northrop Grumman, along with accusations against her and her new partner. Heather obtained a protective order against him.
A court-appointed psychologist evaluated both parents ahead of the custody hearing. His report found the children had taken on adult-like responsibility for their father’s emotional state, and that he regularly criticised their mother in front of them, which the psychologist said had “an enormously unhealthy effect” on their recovery from the divorce. A judge awarded Heather sole legal and physical custody. The Court of Appeals upheld that ruling in October 2020.
John separately sued Heather, Northrop Grumman and a police detective in federal court, arguing he had been falsely accused. The case was dismissed, then refiled, appealed and dismissed again. By July 2023, every claim against Heather had been thrown out.
What does Heather Kiriakou do now?
She had already gone back to work by the time that lawsuit ended. Heather joined Northrop Grumman in 2012, the same year she left the CIA, and spent twelve years there in what her own professional profile lists as a “global growth executive” role, covering government relations and international strategy. Northrop Grumman named her one of its highest potential female leaders in January 2015, a few weeks before John transferred to the halfway house.
Kongsberg hired her in February 2024, citing her CIA and Northrop Grumman background. Her son, Max, who studies business at Miami University, told a local paper that year that he had not known his mother worked at the CIA until he was in middle school.
She has said the two jobs have more in common than people might assume. Both come down to what she calls “the ability to consume vast amounts of information, evaluate and condense it,” then acting on the result.
The company she now runs broke ground on the James City County missile plant in January and brought in a projected $150 million in revenue in 2025, roughly double what it made the year before. It also supplies the NASAMS air defence system that protects the White House and the surrounding capital.
What’s next for Heather Kiriakou?
The James City County plant will not produce a missile until 2027 at the earliest, with full production planned for 2028. In October, she is due on stage at a maritime industry summit in Norfolk, Virginia, alongside Navy officials and shipbuilding executives, talking about rebuilding America’s defence manufacturing base.
In none of her public appearances since 2024 has she mentioned the fifteen years in between.
