She spent fifteen years at the CIA before her husband’s prosecution made her name public. Today she goes by a different one, running a defense company almost nobody has connected back to her.
A CIA analyst named Heather Kiriakou resigned from the agency in January 2012, the same week her husband, whistleblower John Kiriakou, was charged with a federal crime. She was never accused of anything herself. Fourteen years later, under her maiden name, Heather Armentrout, she is the president of the American arm of a Norwegian missile manufacturer, overseeing construction of a $101 million weapons factory in Virginia. The two names are almost never mentioned together.
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Fifteen Years at the CIA, Before Any of This Was Public
Growing up in Oxford, Ohio, the daughter of a doctor, Kiriakou got to Georgetown by way of a year at Miami University, graduating in 1995 with a degree meant for the foreign service. The CIA recruited her two years later. She spent the next fifteen years there as an analyst covering the Middle East and Iran, work that put her briefing material in front of three presidents, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
In 2003, the same year she finished a master’s degree at Georgetown in international security, she married John Kiriakou, a fellow CIA officer. He left the agency the following year. In December 2007, he became one of the first CIA officials to publicly confirm the agency’s use of waterboarding, a disclosure that would eventually lead to his prosecution. Kiriakou herself spent part of her career on loan to other parts of government, including a year, from 2009 to 2010, as a Senate intelligence fellow for Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania.
The Prosecution That Cost Her the CIA
In January 2012, John Kiriakou was charged with disclosing classified information, including the identity of a covert CIA officer, to journalists. His wife was home on maternity leave at the time, with a son eight weeks old. Federal agents reached the family’s house in Arlington, Virginia, with a search warrant. She has said they let her step aside long enough to nurse the baby before the search began.
She resigned from the CIA within days. The Washington Post reported at the time that she had come under pressure to leave once her husband’s case became public, though she had done nothing wrong herself.
Her husband pleaded guilty later that year and was sentenced to two and a half years in federal prison. He would serve nearly two of them. Money became a real problem. With his income gone and legal bills mounting, the family relied on public assistance for a period, and the antiwar group CodePink stepped in to help cover the mortgage. Kiriakou later wrote CodePink a letter thanking them, describing how she and her husband were trying to keep their children’s routines as normal as possible while he was in prison.
A New Career, and the End of a Marriage
With her husband still in prison, Kiriakou went back to work. Northrop Grumman, the defense contractor, hired her, and she spent the next twelve years there, working her way up to director of global strategy and business development. In January 2015, shortly before her husband was transferred out of prison to finish his sentence under home confinement, Northrop Grumman recognized her as one of its highest potential female leaders.
The marriage did not survive much longer. Kiriakou and her husband separated in May 2017 and divorced in November 2018, after nearly fifteen years together. The conflict did not end there. According to Virginia court records, in the months after the divorce, John Kiriakou obtained his former wife’s private emails, hired a private investigator, and sent details about her personal life to her employer. A judge granted her a protective order against him. The court later awarded her sole legal and physical custody of their three children, a decision a Virginia appeals court upheld in 2020.
A Different Name at a Much Bigger Company
In February 2024, Kiriakou left Northrop Grumman for a much bigger role. She became president and general manager of the American subsidiary of Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace, the Norwegian company that builds the Joint Strike Missile and supplies weapons systems to the United States military and its allies. Professionally, she now goes by her maiden name, Armentrout.
Under her, the American subsidiary has grown fast. It employs around 270 people now. Projected revenue for 2025 is $150 million, roughly double the year before. In James City County, Virginia, she is overseeing construction of a $101 million missile factory expected to create more than 200 jobs. In 2025, Virginia Business named her to its list of Women in Leadership honorees. She also chairs the Norwegian American Defense Industry Council and sits on a Marine Corps University Foundation advisory panel on emerging military technology.
For a few years in the early 2010s, Kiriakou’s family kept their house because an antiwar group had stepped in to help pay the mortgage. CodePink built its name campaigning to shrink the Pentagon’s budget and pull American troops out of its wars. The woman whose mortgage they once helped cover now runs part of the industry they spent those years trying to shrink.
