← John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
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- [00:00]
John Kiriakou
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- [00:20]
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- [01:20]
John Kiriakou
Get that AMEX Gold Card ready. I'm way too tired to cook tonight.
- [01:24]
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- [01:34]
John Kiriakou
Yes.
- [01:35]
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- [01:52]
John Kiriakou
this podcast It's a Costard and Touchstone production. Have I always been a writer? Yes and no. I suppose I wanted to be a writer from a young age. I wanted to be able to convey an interesting story. During my senior year of college, my best friend from college, Tom Fitzpatrick, and I took a creative writing course. I got a B. He got an A. We had to read our final submissions to the class and his was laugh out loud funny. It was just so well done, so well thought out. And mine wasn't. It was very average. I did write one horror short story that I thought was great. Frankly, the rest of the class thought it was great and the teacher hated it so much he made me redo the entire assignment. So I got to thinking, maybe writing is just not for me. Well, I get hired by the CIA as an analyst and all you do is write. All day, every day, just writing, writing, writing. And you're writing In a way that is so concise and so punchy. I remember my first boss specifically telling me that the President doesn't give a shit about your opinion. The President wants the facts in as few words as you can convey them. And a paragraph on what it means, that's it. And so I very quickly learned the CIA writing style. So everybody in the CIA writes in exactly the same style. So that when the President's Daily Brief is written, it looks like one person wrote it, when in fact 50 people contributed to it on any given night. I have always been told that I was a good storyteller. When I left the CIA, a couple of my friends said that I should write a book and tell these stories. I wrote the first draft of the book that became the Reluctant Spy. My Secret life in the CIA's war on terror. My first book. I gave it to my then wife and I said, I want you to read it and I want you to be brutally honest. So she reads it. A couple of days later, she says, I hated it. What? Really? And she said, honey, I have listened to you tell these stories a thousand times. This reads like a dry government report. You should write it the way you tell it. Just those few sentences made me completely change my entire writing style. In practical terms, that meant that I immediately developed a very light, very conversational tone. I frequently joke that nobody's going to base a PhD dissertation on my writings. That actually has turned out to not be true in one academic database. I've been cited more than 660 times in people's PhD dissertations, which is awesome. I'm very grateful for that. But my books are more geared for the wider community of readers. Well, that first book was published by Random House, which is one of the big five publishers, and it went to number five on the New York Times bestsellers list. I was very, very proud. But really before that book and before my CIA writing, most of which remains classified, a journal. That was it. And it was only for myself. I was never published outside of classified channels until I went to Afghanistan as a private citizen. In 2009, Paramount Studios hired me to rescue three child actors and their families who were under threat because of a movie that Paramount had made. I discreetly, quietly flew to Afghanistan. I arranged for exit visas for all 27 of them, and I got them out and resettled in Dubai. And when I got back home, a friend of mine said, you know, this was such an exciting story. You should write this up for the LA Times. Not just the fact that I got these kids out. It was more interesting that I had gone to Afghanistan as a private citizen and things were not good in Afghanistan for us. This was the summer of 2007. The LA Times immediately took my op ed and entitled it the Other War we're losing. Just that one, 800 word op ed opened doors for me that I had never even fantasized about. This is before my book was published. As soon as the op ed is out, I get calls from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and the Times of London and the Guardian. I guess I'm a writer all of a sudden. This was three and a half years after I left the CIA. I was working at Deloitte at the time. My book had come out and it was a big hit. I had written three op EDS for the LA Times, I had written for the Wall Street Journal, I'd written for the Guardian. I realized, hey, I can actually write for a broader audience. By the time I got to prison, I did know the power of my words and I knew that I had access to the public that other prisoners didn't have. Now I sort of kept that in reserve once I got there. And then a couple of days before I left for prison, Jessalyn Radack, one of my attorneys, said to me that she had a mailing list of about 650 people who were interested in my case. She said, when you feel comfortable, write me a letter. I'll send it to these 650 people so that they can know that you're okay, you're adapting, everything's fine, like a newsletter. I said, okay. It took me, I'm going to say, five or six weeks and I wrote this newsletter. Now, very arrogantly, I modeled it on Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail. I called it Letter from Loretto. In the letter from Loretto, I talked about daily life. But I inadvertently exposed two crimes that had been committed against me by the guards, one of which was a felony. And I just wrote the details and I sent it to Jesselyn. Jesselyn sent it to Jane Hampshire. Jane Hampshire was the proprietor of a now defunct website called Firedoglake.com. fire Dog Lake was an alternative news site slightly left of center. Really terrific writers there. Kevin Gustalla in particular. I didn't know that Jane was friends with Ariana Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post. So I sent the letter to Jesselyn, Jesselyn sent it to Jane, Jane published it on Fire Dog Lake, and then she sent it to Ariana. And Arianna put it as a Banner headline on the Huffington Post. Within 24 hours, it went completely crazy. Viral, we would call it today. Within another 24 hours of it being published in the Huffington Post. I started getting calls at the prison. I mean, not me. The prison was getting calls from cnn, from Fox, ABC news, time magazine, the week magazine, the Atlantic monthly, the New Yorker, even Playboy and the Economist. And they all wanted to interview me and npr. And I thought, you know what? This is gonna be my superpower. I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to what makes a spy tick. This is episode six in our series doing time like a spy. Before I get back to using my words to talk about prison, I want to use one word to express how we feel right now. That word is j. Just wow. Really and truly wow. Our audience keeps growing by leaps and bounds, which is very gratifying. We'd have done all this hard work anyway because we're storytellers doing what we do and what we like to do, that our work has gotten the reaction that it's gotten from so many people. Well, that's just what storytellers live for. If you promise to keep listening, we promise to keep storytelling. Maybe we shouldn't call writing writing, since all good writing is actually the product of lots of rewriting. If we wanted to be accurate, we would cut to the end of the chase and just call it rewriting. Rewriting demands thinking on one's feet. While a prisoner's day is regulated down to the minute, there are still ample situations where thinking on one's feet is essential. As with writing, a prisoner needs to be poised at all times to make changes, Quick changes. That includes knowing when to get the hell out of dodge and live to fight another day. Rule number seven is don't be afraid to make a strategic retreat. There are some fights that you just can't win. So there's no harm in just retreating, regrouping, and then figuring out what plan b is going to be. When I published this letter from Loretto, everything changed for me. The guards emailed the letter to each other. One of the guards pulled me aside. She was one that I had just sort of ignored. She ignored me. I would see her in the hall. We wouldn't even acknowledge each other. She did her thing, I did my thing. She came right up to me and she said, that wasn't me you were talking about. Swearing at you, right? No. You've been perfectly lovely to me. Oh, thank God. Do you mind if I ask you who you were talking about? Sure it was, sarge. There was this Horrible, horrible guard whose surname was S A R G E. Sarge, like the nickname for sergeant. I said in the letter, you've heard that phrase, rode hard and put away wet. That was Sarge. She was an ugly, mean, foul mouthed, tattoo covered. Has been a woman in her late 40s, maybe 50, who had had so many men who used her and abused her and tossed her aside that she just hated the world. And I said in the letter, she was the guard in my housing unit when I first arrived and she just could not say my name. She would say, teriyake, kirakau, kirkulu, whatever. I saw her in the hall one day. I was walking with Dave and she said, hey you. And I turned and I looked at her, are you the motherfucker whose name I can't pronounce? And I said, kyriakou, how about if I just call you fuckface? Dave says, classy. I said, white trash is more like it. She heard me. She raids my cell, throws all my stuff on the floor, pictures of my kids walking all over them. I didn't realize that that was actually a crime for her to swear at me like that. It's not just a violation of Bureau of Prisons regulations. It's a crime. It's a misdemeanor, but it's a crime. The first time you do it, you get a verbal reprimand. The second time you do it, you get two weeks without pay. The third time you do it, you're fired. Well, I didn't report her to the prison authorities. I told everybody in the world what she had done in the letter from Loreto. The other crime that I exposed was one that I've already discussed. It was when the two clowns in the lieutenant's office tried to get me to do harm to this Kurdish prisoner and then tried to get the Kurdish prisoner to do harm. Harm? To me. That's a felony. That is conspiracy to incite violence in a federal facility. I looked it up. That's two to five years in prison for doing something like that. It's impossible to prosecute because you have to convince the U.S. attorney that this is a case worth taking up. And nobody is going to prosecute a federal prison guard. Not unless he's smuggling in cell phones and drugs, because they get prosecuted for that all the time. But for something like this, not a chance.
- [13:52]
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- [14:55]
John Kiriakou
I read last week in the New York Times that there are 15,998 crimes delineated in the U.S. code 15,998 crimes. And we're talking felonies here. If they want to get you, they're going to get you. But if they don't want to bother you or interfere with your career, they just pretend everything's fine. Or if you're someone that they just don't care to go after. Jane Hampshire told me a couple of weeks later that the Letter from Loretto had more than 2 million views. Jake Tapper mentioned it on he was still at ABC at the time. He mentioned it on World News Tonight. It was mentioned on cnn and then Chenk Uyghur at the Young Turks, when that was still a thing, actually devoted an entire episode of the Young Turks to reading the letter, line by line by line. And I realized this, this is what I'm going to do for the next two years. This, it's going to keep me safe. Remember, I wasn't afraid of the prisoners. I can handle these clowns. It was the guards, it was the administrators who meant me harm. And they were the ones who could really put me in a bad position. This role was very important. Don't be afraid to make a strategic retreat because you can't confront the prison administration head on. You can't. You can't win that fight. You go to solitary, they take away your good behavior time. They take away your telephone, they take away your email. They take away your ability to buy anything in the commissary. They, they can really make life difficult. And so I never, ever confronted them head on. If I wanted to say something, I said it. In my new series, Letters Plural from Loretto, for example, the warden pissed me off one day. I don't even remember what it was that he did. I happened to be walking past the bulletin board outside the cafeteria There was a flyer that the warden had put up saying, help us celebrate the united nations day of the child in the visiting room. They're going to have coloring books and crayons and the children can take pictures. This is a prison with fully one third of the prisoners being pedophiles. And you want the fucking pedophiles to celebrate the day of the child? I don't want the pedophiles in the visiting room looking at my children. So I wrote a letter about this. I said, this is the warden that we have, so oblivious to the fact that we have 500 child sex offenders in this prison. He wants them to celebrate the day of the child with my children in the visiting room. So the warden cancelled it. He saw me in the hall and he stopped me, he said, okay, you got me on that one. Warden, with all due respect, what are you, fucking retarded? That's what I said to him. And he says, watch it, you're on a line. Actually, I think you're the one on the line. What if the pittsburgh post gazette gets wind of this? The day of the child in a pedophile prison? Come on, man, you can do better than that. He and I never liked each other. We never respected each other. Later on, after I got out, my friend Mark lanzilotti, just before he was released, was sent to a minimum security camp in new jersey. The warden happened to be the warden there by then. And mark mentioned me to him and he said, that fucking kiriakou, that guy caused me more trouble in two years than I had over the course of my entire career. I brought crimes to light, crimes that his people were committing under color of law. He knew about it and he did nothing to stop it. He told me, if you write one more of these things, you're going straight to solitary. And I said, I fucking dare you. I did not give up my constitutional rights when I walked through these doors and I will not let you take them away from me. Go ahead and put me in solitary. It's going to be on every newscast in America. Go ahead. I have gone nose to nose with al qaeda, with hezbollah, with the iranians, and I'm supposed to be afraid of you? Please show me some respect. And then he just walked away. Pulled out my legal pad. One day I was sitting at my little makeshift desk in my cell. I was just sitting there with the legal pad in front of me. I had not written a single word on it yet. He happened to walk by and he looks at the pad and he says, oh, shit, And I said, just gathering my thoughts, there's nothing he could do to stop me. Nothing. He was convinced I was smuggling these out of the prison. This was actually quite funny to me. One of the friendly guards told me that the warden's gonna lock you up. I said, for what? In solitary, he meant, I said, for what? I haven't done anything. You've got some kind of smuggling pipeline out of the building for these letters. He thinks it's through the Italians. Smuggling pipeline? Don't make me laugh. And he said, how are you getting them out legally? And I meant it literally. They started opening all of my outgoing mail. I was the only prisoner in the prison who had both his incoming and outgoing mail read and inspected and photocopied and sent to the FBI. And I knew that thanks to the freedom of information act, they can't do that with legal mail. So I would write and write and write and write. Not just my book, but the letters from Loretto. I would send them to Jesselyn and I would write, Attorney Jesselyn Radack, Esquire, Government Accountability Project, Washington, D.C. and then I would write legal mail. Legal mail at the bottom and on the back. Legal mail. They can't touch. Legal mail. Like a diplomatic pouch. I would walk to the mailroom, I'd say, I've got some legal mail. I have the stamp on it, and it goes straight into the bag. He's like, how's he getting these out? What are you, stupid? How do you think I'm getting them out legally? And he didn't get the double entendre because he was too stupid. One of my greatest supporters was my cousin Kip. Kip Reese. Kip lives in Pittsburgh. So it was a relatively quick, easy drive. It was about 40, 45 minutes to come to the prison. Kip's one of the sweetest guys you could possibly know, and he's very, very smart, very organized. He was a true believer in my cause. He helped me all the time. Would come to the prison to visit me. One day he came to the prison to visit me. And he gave me, quite accidentally, some of the most important intelligence that I encountered there. He came to visit. I walk into the visiting room, I give him a big hug. We sit down, and he says, hey, I just heard something that I think is very important. What did you hear? He said, when I came in, one of the guards said to the other guard, who's he here to see? And the first guard said, kiriakou. And the second guard said, why is that son of a bitch not in solitary, and the first guard said, I asked the warden that, and the warden said it's because he's never mentioned any of us by name. If you mention one of the guards by name, that's potential targeting, right? Well, I never mentioned any of them by name just because I didn't want to give them the notoriety. And I said, oh Kip, that is very valuable intelligence. I wrote about the blow by blow of every encounter I had with every guard, including one especially hostile lieutenant, and there was nothing they could do about it. Only because just by blind luck, Kip had overheard these two guards talking.
- [22:44]
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- [23:47]
John Kiriakou
if you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the Photographer With David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories. His amazing news photos just came can't what it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job, taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this just the photographer will put you right there on the ground right next to David inside his head. In fact, it's a hell of a podcast and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or@costardandtouchstone.com There's a link in this episode's show Notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costart and Touchstone, like the Donor, a DNA Horror Story, the Hall Closet, Sage, Wellness within and the how not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows your next favorite Podcast might be just a click away. Now back to dead drop. So rule number eight was never underestimate the power of rumor. I should add that all prisons run on rumor. They operate on rumor. I was trained in the use of rumor. You want to set the standard for what the story is going to be. The problem is rumor goes to the extremes in prison. There were some days I just didn't want to go to the cafeteria. I just couldn't bear the thought of sitting for 45 more minutes with these crazy people. There was one guy in particular. I call him Bob Jones in the book because he had an equally common name like Bob Jones, John Smith, that kind of name. And this guy was a rumor monger extraordinaire. He was also a nut, and he was a conspiracy theorist. Everything was a conspiracy. Everything from the tax code to the economy to the moon landing was faked at some Hollywood studio. And the Earth was flat and was surrounded by the ice walls and the Masons and, quote, unquote, the Jews were running everything. I couldn't listen to this anymore. But the guy began focusing on me because I had been in the CIA, and of course the CIA is working with the Jews and the Freemasons and the Bilderberg people and. And the Trilateral Commission and the lizard people and the space aliens doing all these things. I started to think, this is getting dangerous for me. I have enough problems with these Aryans who think I'm an FBI agent. A lot of them did think I was an FBI agent. There was one in particular who was hostile. I've never told anybody this, and I don't know why it still bothers me after all these years. But he didn't want to directly challenge me. He didn't want to fight me, for example. Probably thought I was some kind of kung fu master or something from my CIA days. So what he would do is, as I was walking around the track, he would cut right in front of me and he would fart very loudly, like right at me, a foot and a half away from me. It was just so incredibly disrespectful. If he had done that indoors, it would have been a fight. Now I had to ask myself, is this worth decking this guy over? No, clearly it's not worth it. But it showed such incredible disrespect. The only reason he stopped was he happened to be walking with another Aryan one day. And the other Aryan came up to me and said, is it true that you were a hitman for the CIA? I was ready for the question I was surprised, frankly, that nobody had asked me up to that point. I gave him my very well thought out response. I said, listen, it was wartime and we all did things we weren't proud of. I didn't say yes. I didn't say no. Get scared? The farter, to the point where he just backed off and stayed backed off for the rest of the time that I was there. Bob Jones, this guy, another thing I learned from the Italians, if they ever say, you believe this fucking guy, you're gonna have problems. This every day. It's the Trilateral Commission and the Shangri La Conference and the Bilderbergs and Bob Gates. Or not Bob Gates, Bill Gates, he's a petty annoyance. Yeah, he's a petty annoyance. Yeah, a petty annoyance. He didn't live in my housing unit, so I didn't have to deal with him all the time, just at meals. He was a petty annoyance. If it had been out in the real world, I wouldn't have paid the guy five seconds of thought. But because we're there together all the time, or at least at every meal, I just couldn't stand it anymore. So I thought, okay, how am I going to fuck this guy up? The problem is that he sat at the Aryan table where I sat. So I couldn't accuse him of being a pedophile. Or could I? So I went to the law library. My second year there, I was at the law library. Pretty much every single day I go to the law library and I look him up. Of course, there are 150 people with his name in the law library archives. I find a case from the 1970s, from Ohio, where a guy with the same name beat and raped a male prison guard. So I printed it and then I carefully cut out the paragraphs. And then over the course of the next few days, I created what looked like legitimate court papers saying that it was this Bob Jones, who had done this in Ohio in the 70s, continued to lead a life of crime, turned to meth in the 90s and then got arrested again, and then turned to meth again and got arrested a third time. And this was just a continuation of a life of crime that began when he raped a prison guard, a male prison guard. I went to the shot callers and I said, this fucking guy. I just got a tip that there was more to this guy than meets the eye. So I went and checked it out and look what's on the prison law library computer system. Well, the white shot collars, there were two of them. One is like, no, is he old enough to have done this in the 70s? He would have been like 20 years old. Yeah, he did it. And the other one's like, he fucking did it, man. He's a pedophile. Not a pedophile. He's a homo. We can't have homos at the Aryan table. We'd all be laughing stocks. So they banished him to the pedophile rat table, which was also, I guess, the gay table. Who knows? He had no idea what happened, no idea what had befallen him. But I thought, I gotta silence this guy before he does me some real damage. The power of rumors is very, very strong. One of the things that I learned very early on in prison, like within the first few days, was that information is the most important currency. To know what is really going on bestows upon you power. Oh, yeah. Information was far more important than Macs and stamps. Macs and stamps might get you a seat at the poker table. Macs and stamps might get you an extra set of underwear or socks. But information gave you power that was far more important. In the next episode, you'll hear even more of the words that flowed from me at Loretto. Turns out that the pen is mightier than the sword and a shit ton of corruption. Again, we thank you for listening and for liking, rating, reviewing and commenting on the podcast and on our words. It really means a lot to us. Until next time, I'm John kiriakou. Dead drop is written by John kiriakou and Alan katz. Costart and touchstone productions produces the podcast and John kiriakou, Alan Katz and Nick mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a costard and touchstone production. Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Hey, everybody, I'm Naomi Ekparigan. And I'm Andy Beckerman. We're a real life couple and a real life couple of comedians, and we're the hosts of the podcast couples therapy. 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