S1E25 The Whistleblower

THE BLURB: As John's date with prison looms, he begins prepping - financially and mentally. In the end, John's plea deal would put him inside for 30 months reduceable to 23. At least it would be in a relatively benign, low security work camp setting. That was what the prosecution agreed to! Meanwhile, public opinion about John begins to shift; They go from seeing him as a pariah to a whistleblower - and an American hero. Still, prison is prison and John approaches his sentence more and more like a mission to continue speaking the truth, damn the consequences. SHOW NOTES For more great podcasts like Dead Drop, please visit https://costardandtouchstone.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Speaker 01

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• 1:06Speaker 02

  This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.

• 1:10John Kiriakou?

  The FBI called me. They needed help, they said, with a case similar to one involving a Japanese diplomat who had tried to recruit me. So I went into their offices, happy to be of service. In fact, my exact words were, "Anything for the FBI." The conversation started amicably enough, talking about the Pittsburgh Steelers, people we knew, chit chat. Then the topic turned to my book, The Reluctant Spy, and the questions began to get more pointed, more hostile. I began to realize this wasn't a conversation. This was an interrogation. Neither the good cop FBI agent nor the bad cop giving me a death stare gave a rat's ass about any Japanese diplomats. No, I was their focus, and the fact that I had ratted out

• 1:55John Kiriakou?

  the CIA's torture program to Brian Ross at ABC News, that's what they cared about. When they finally told me out loud that I was the subject of their investigation, I was shocked, but not too shocked to say the one thing that saved my ass and kept them from arresting me right then and there. I said, "I want to see my lawyer."

• 2:23John Kiriakou?

  I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick? This is another episode in our series, What Makes This Spy Tick? And it's the last episode in this part of my story. But not to worry, there's a lot more story to come. And lots more stories, plural. But before we get to any of that, first, we want to say thank you. Thank you for listening and thank you for liking, rating, reviewing, and commenting on the podcast on whatever platform you listen to us. Your kindness has us rubbing elbows with some of the biggest history podcasts in the world. And we owe that honor to you, so thank you again. As I said, the only thing that kept the feds from locking me up that day

• 3:06John Kiriakou?

  was my demanding to see my lawyer, and I mean right now. You see, the FBI had a plan, but me demanding my rights, and imagine that, I demanded my rights. Well, it ruined their plan. The FBI specifically tries to make its arrests on Thursday in Washington, because the federal courts in Washington don't do arraignments on Fridays. And so you spend Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday night in the DC jail, which is known for its violence and for its terrible, decrepit conditions. And it softens you up a little bit. Maybe you'll get beaten up, you'll have your clothing stolen. It's just a nightmare in the DC jail. And thank God I said, "I want to see my attorney",

• 3:51John Kiriakou?

  because they had to stop the interview right then and there, and I hadn't implicated myself in anything. In fact, when I stood up and walked to the door and opened the door, Peter Strzok, who ended up becoming infamous later by making comments about Donald Trump and preventing Donald Trump from becoming president, Peter Strzok was standing right there outside the door, and he says to one of the FBI agents who was interviewing me, "Tell me he implicated himself." And the agent said, "Not really, no." And he says he wants to leave, and Strzok said, "Let him leave." I called my attorney as soon as I got outside the building. He told me to come directly to the office. I was in a panic.

• 4:36John Kiriakou?

  He said, "Tell me what's happening." So I told him as best I could, within that state of panic. And he said, "Okay, they're gonna charge you under US Code 18 dot 53 something." I don't remember the numbers. I said, "What's the charge?" He said, "Most likely it's espionage." I thought I was gonna faint. So he said, "Listen, I'll call the FBI. You go home and try to relax." I called my wife, Catherine. As soon as she picked up the phone, she said, "The FBI is here. They're just ransacking the house." And I said, "I think they're gonna charge me with espionage." She said, "What? Where are you? I'll pick you up." She sped over, and as soon as I got in the car, I burst into tears. I just couldn't believe this was happening.

• 5:20John Kiriakou?

  She was so level-headed and so calm. She kept telling me, "Take it easy. You haven't done anything wrong. We're gonna work through this. Don't worry. You're in good hands. Plato's the best lawyer in Washington." We got home, and computers are all gone. They took her cellphone. They took my laptop. They took my mother's laptop. They took thumb drives. They even took... I had a great big binder of business cards. They took that. They took the calendar right off my desk. They just took everything. I felt very, very violated. She felt violated. These strangers were in our house, ransacking the place. Our son, at the time, was three months old.

• 6:01John Kiriakou?

  One of the female FBI agents told her, "Why don't you just sit on the couch and spend some quality time with that beautiful baby?" It was just so condescending and so mean-spirited. She said, "I prefer to stand, thank you." They were in the house for a good five or six hours. They were just leaving as I was getting back. You say you take things one day at a time? I had to take them one hour at a time. I perceived the charges as trumped up. When Plato called the FBI, they told him that they were charging me with three counts of espionage. I hadn't committed espionage. It was absurd. They were charging me with making a false statement. We were never exactly sure what the false statement was supposed to have been.

• 6:46John Kiriakou?

  And they were charging me with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981. They also threatened to charge me with obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence, which was also absurd. I remember exactly what that was about. I was watching a baseball game one evening. My wife and kids were in Cincinnati, visiting her family. I got an automated email from Apple saying that my disk was almost full and I needed to delete unnecessary programs or emails to free up space on the disk. So I deleted all the emails from the trash and all the emails from the sent folder. And they said that was obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence.

• 7:29John Kiriakou?

  And I said, no, it was freeing up space on my hard drive. They threatened repeatedly to add two felony charges. And I said, go ahead. And then I'll get on the stand and I'll say that I got an automated email from Apple telling me to delete emails because I needed space on my disk. And then they never added charges. One of the business cards that I had was for a former CIA colleague of mine who had resigned from the CIA and had gone to the private sector. Well, the private sector was the company owned by the two contract psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, who were the creators of the torture program. This former colleague of mine had never, ever been undercover.

• 8:14John Kiriakou?

  In fact, on his LinkedIn page, it had his name and it said Central Intelligence Agency. And then I Googled him, just to make sure I wasn't, you know, crazy and seeing things. And here he's giving a speech at his alma mater as CIA targeting analyst, and then his name. So this reporter for the New York Times and- There was another one for ABC News besides Brian Ross. They asked me if I had contact information with this guy. And I said, I haven't talked to him in years, but I think I have his business card. And so I sent them his business card. And they charged me with two counts of espionage for sending the business card. Now, like I said, I hadn't committed espionage. They knew I hadn't committed espionage. And eventually, those charges were dropped.

• 8:59John Kiriakou?

  But one of the things that we found in the 15,000 pages of classified discovery was a memorandum from John Brennan, an old nemesis of mine, who had been the executive director of the CIA, and then, under Barack Obama, the deputy national security adviser, and then CIA director. This memo was from Brennan to Attorney General Eric Holder, saying, "Charge him with espionage." And then Holder wrote back, "My people don't think he committed espionage." Brennan wrote back, "Charge him anyway and make him defend himself." The very definition of lawfare. And so, they did. They charged me with three counts of espionage. Now, mind you, espionage is frequently a death penalty case.

• 9:44John Kiriakou?

  They didn't charge me with the death penalty version of it. Subparagraph D, I think, is the death penalty version. I was subparagraph B. But each one of these charges carried 10 years in prison. And then another 10 years for the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, and five years for making the false statement. And indeed, the Justice Department's first offer to me was a guilty plea under the Espionage Act, and I do 45 years. I told them, "I'm not doing 45 minutes. I'm gonna fight." Of these 15,000 classified pages, we pulled out something like 150 that were relevant to my defense. We made 150 separate motions to have them declassified so that I could defend myself.

• 10:30John Kiriakou?

  We blocked off three days in court for the judge to hear all 150 motions. When we walked into the courtroom, she said, "Let me make this easy for everybody. I'm gonna deny all 150 motions. I'm not declassifying anything." She looks at me and she says, "Mr. Kiriakou, either you did it, or you didn't do it. I think you did it." And she wrapped her gavel, and we started walking out. I said to one of the attorneys, "Bob Trout, what just happened?" "We just lost the case, that's what happened." "What do we do now?" He said, "Now we talk about a plea." And I knew I was screwed. The one issue that they had was a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981.

• 11:15John Kiriakou?

  The IIPA was used only once in American history against a woman named Sharon Scrannidge in the 1980s. Sharon Scrannidge was a secretary in the CIA station in Ghana. She was having an affair with a Ghanaian intelligence officer. In the course of pillow talk, she gave him the names of all of the CIA case officers in the country, all of whom were expelled, and all of the recruited sources, most of whom were killed. And she got nine months in prison. Nine months in prison. So they charged me, only the second person in American history, with violating the IIPA.

• 11:58John Kiriakou?

  So, how did I violate the IIPA? Matthew Cole, who was briefly that journalist from ABC News before being fired, Matthew Cole emailed me and said, "My name is Matthew Cole. I work for ABC News, but I'm not doing this for ABC News. I'm writing a book on the Abu Omar rendition." Abu Omar was an Egyptian cleric in Milan, Italy. CIA kidnapped him and flew him to Egypt. In Egypt, he was tortured mercilessly. And it turned out, he was innocent. He was just the wrong guy. And so the Egyptians let him go. The Italians were embarrassed. We had asked them, "Help us kidnap this guy." They said, "No, and you better not do it." They did it anyway, so they went back and they found all the CIA people, they found

• 12:43John Kiriakou?

  all their aliases, they were able to trace the aliases back to their actual names. A whole bunch of arrest warrants were issued, everybody had to leave. It was a disaster for the CIA. So, he said he was writing a book on the Abu Omar rendition, sent me a mock-up of the cover, and he said, "Here are 12 names, do you know any of these people? Could you introduce me to any of them so I can interview them for my book?" I said, "I don't know any of these 12 people." And then he sent me a second email with 12 more names. "Do you know any of these people?" And I said, "I don't know any of these people either. You know this so much better than I do. All I know about Abu Omar is what I've read in the Washington Post. Kidnapping was not my thing at the agency, I don't know anything about the Abu Omar

• 13:28John Kiriakou?

  rendition." And then he said, "What about the guy that you mentioned on page blah blah blah of your first book?" So finally he emails me and he says, "What about this guy that you mentioned on page XXX? I think his name is John." And I said, "Oh, you're talking about John Doe? I don't know whatever happened to him, he's probably retired and living somewhere in Virginia." But I uttered his last name. That was a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. But, I did not have mens rea when I said it. Mens rea meaning, I did not have criminal intent, I wasn't trying to out him, I just confirmed the last name. That was all they needed.

• 14:08John Kiriakou?

  When we went to court, my attorneys argued that I did not have mens rea, there was no criminal intent, and the name was never made public. The judge said, "I'm not recognizing precedent in the IIPA." There have been other people who have confirmed names, David Petraeus did it, Leon Panetta did it, and none of them were ever charged with any crime. One of my attorneys said, "Your Honor, are you saying that a person can accidentally commit espionage?" That's exactly what I'm saying. The judge was a Ronald Reagan appointee by the name of Leonie Brinkema. She's a hanging judge. Everybody said it. Everybody knew it.

• 14:53John Kiriakou?

  And you know, it's funny, moving forward quickly. I was sitting in court on the day of my sentencing. And because I was such a high-profile case, I went last. She sentenced a good 20 or 25 people before she sentenced me. And she was issuing some draconian sentences, 20, 30, 50 years. Mostly for drugs. After each sentence, she would say, "That sentence is fair and appropriate." After each one of them. They were draconian. She was breaking up families in court. Children are crying. Women are crying. Half of the prisoners are standing there in chains and they're crying. And she's saying, "That sentence is fair and appropriate."

• 15:37John Kiriakou?

  And I remember thinking, "This woman's a monster." A monster. She also had a bad habit of reserving all national security cases for herself. So she did Zacharias Mosawi, the 20th hijacker. She reserved Ed Snowden for herself. She reserved Julian Assange for herself. Any national security case where she could get her name in the paper, she took. Including mine. She even did Daniel Hale. She did Daniel Hale and she did the CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling. Daniel Hale being the drone whistleblower and Jeffrey Sterling being the whistleblower on race discrimination at the CIA. She sent all of us to prison. All of us. The real shame of all this is, there was no book.

• 16:22John Kiriakou?

  Matthew Cole wasn't writing a book. He was secretly working for the John Adams Project. The John Adams Project, on its face, had a goal of strong legal representation for the Guantanamo detainees. They all had military attorneys, as well as civilian attorneys. The John Adams Project was one of the most fucked-up human rights projects I've ever encountered in my life. This was a bunch of people who meant well, apparently, and then broke the law and ruined lives in order to achieve their goals. I agree, everybody should have legal representation, including the Guantanamo Detainees, but why do I have to get thrown under the bus so that they get their day in court? Why am I lied to? Why am I tricked?

• 17:07John Kiriakou?

  So that these guys, these terrorists and murderers can get their day in court? What the John Adams Project did was they were working with Human Rights Watch. They hired investigators to try to identify CIA torturers. Someone had said that the man that I referred to in my first book was one of the torturers. He was not one of the torturers. He was on the rendition flight. He was on the crew of the rendition flight, but he was not a torturer. I never said he was a torturer. They were looking to identify him, which they did because I confirmed his surname. Matthew Cole gave the name to an investigator for Human Rights Watch. The investigator, his name was John Sifton, then gave the name to the Guantanamo defense

• 17:52John Kiriakou?

  attorneys. And the defense attorneys asked the judge in a classified motion to allow them to depose this person. The judge immediately realized that the name was classified and called the FBI. The FBI went to the lawyers, "Where'd you get the name?" They said, "We got it from Human Rights Watch." They went to Human Rights Watch, "Where'd you get the name?" "John Sifton gave it to us." They went to Sifton, "Where'd you get the name?" "Matthew Cole gave it to us." And they went to Matthew Cole, "Where'd you get the name?" "John Kiriakou gave it to me." And so, the story of my arrest began. Matthew Cole ratted me out to the FBI after Matthew Cole was the one who set me up to get the name. Because he was implicated in my case, he was fired from ABC News.

• 18:36John Kiriakou?

  He briefly went to The Intercept where he almost immediately outed at least two other whistleblowers and then left The Intercept. I even tweeted at one point, I tweeted at The Intercept, after he disclosed the identity of Reality Winner from NSA and Terry Albury from the FBI and also Daniel Hale from the US Air Force, I tweeted at The Intercept and I said, "Hey Intercept, serious question. You guys are just an FBI front organization, right? Because everybody who offers you information ends up in prison with felony national security charges. It's because you're really FBI agents, right? Right?" They never bothered to respond.

• 19:19John Kiriakou?

  The Justice Department held steady at 45 years. They offered me 45 years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea to an espionage charge. And this horrible, horrible woman, who later became the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, said to me in that proffer meeting, "Take a guilty plea, Mr. Kiriakou, and you might live to meet your grandchildren." And I just sat there and stared at her. Another monster in this process. They held steady for almost 10 months at 45 years. And then on a Monday, they offered me 10 years. I said, "No." On Wednesday, they offered me 8 years. And I said, "No." And on Friday, they offered me 5 years. I said, "No."

• 20:01John Kiriakou?

  Plato Kucheras, who was the lead attorney, coming out of that meeting, said to me, "I've been a criminal defense attorney in this city for 52 years, and I've never seen them come down in time. Usually, they offer you 10, you say, 'No,' the next offer's 15, then the next offer's 20. They never come down. So why do you think they're coming down now? Because they have a shit case, and they know it's shit, and that's why we're going to trial." And that was the first time I felt hopeful. I knew it was a shit case. I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, and I knew this was about my whistleblowing. So I hunkered down. "We're going to trial." And we started rehearsing my testimony. What my attorneys did was to threaten something called graymail. It's not quite blackmail.

• 20:46John Kiriakou?

  They went to the Justice Department, and they said, "Look, we're gonna go to trial. He's gonna testify on his own behalf. And he might accidentally say something about the hideous crimes against humanity and war crimes that he's witnessed in 15 years at the CIA. And he might accidentally implicate a lot of people, including some household names. So how do you want to work this?" They came back, 3 and 1/2. I said, "I'm not doing it." "Best and final offer, 2 and 1/2. You do 23 months." Now, that's a far cry from 45 years in prison. Catherine and I stayed up all night the night before, doing as much final research as we possibly could. Because I was only the second-

• 21:29John Kiriakou?

  Second person ever to be charged with the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. There was no case law. Sharon Scrannidge had taken a plea, and again, her plea was nine months. What we did find was two Harvard Law Review articles, both of which said, "This law is unconstitutional and it should never have been passed. It's a violation of the First Amendment." DOJ needs an answer by noon, or we go to trial. At six o'clock that morning, I emailed the attorneys. Catherine and I have been up all night. I decided to turn down the offer. I'm going to trial. I should add, that same week, I went bankrupt, under the weight of $1,150,000 in legal fees.

• 22:14John Kiriakou?

  As soon as I went bankrupt, they dropped the three espionage charges and the false statement charge. Just dropped them.

• 22:24Speaker 04

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• 23:04John 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 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

• 23:45John Kiriakou?

  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 at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard 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. One of the attorneys said to me, "The point isn't to incarcerate John Kiriakou. The case is bigger than just John Kiriakou. The point of the case is to terrify any other would-be

• 24:30John Kiriakou?

  whistleblower in government. You see what we did to Kiriakou? You want the same thing to happen to you? Then keep your big mouth shut." That's what the message was. So I sent this email to the attorney saying, "I'm going to trial." At about a quarter to seven, Bob Trout wrote back, "Put on a pot of coffee, we're on our way to your house." Bob Trout arrived with Plato Kucheris, Mark McDougal, and John Hundley, the top four attorneys in the case. All partners, all giants, as I said, The Washington Post called them "legal titans." Money couldn't possibly have bought better attorneys. The first one through the door was Plato. Plato got right in my face. His exact words were, "You stupid son of a bitch, take the fucking deal." I was taken aback. Bob Trout came up

• 25:14John Kiriakou?

  to me, and Bob Trout was one of the loveliest southern gentlemen I've ever met. Beautiful suits, always soft-spoken, just a real gentleman. He came up to me and he said, "Listen, if you were my own brother, I would beg you to take this deal." And then Mark McDougal, the attorney who I liked and trusted the most, for whatever reason, Mark and I had a connection. Mark pulled me aside and was trying hard not to exhibit the anger that he was obviously feeling. He said, "You know what your problem is? Do you think this is about justice? And it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal."

• 25:56John Kiriakou?

  And then John Hundley, who was the youngest of them, says to me, "This can be a blip in your life, or it can be the defining event in your life. Make it the blip." I said to Mark, if I turn it down and I go to trial and I lose, what am I realistically looking at? He said 12 to 18 years. Take the deal. And so I took the deal. The conversation was about 30 minutes, but it was so high impact and so emotional and so angry, frankly, that it felt like 30 hours. But I will admit that by the time they left, I felt an odd sense of relief. And even Catherine commented, I don't know, that day, maybe a day later. She said, you're oddly calm about this.

• 26:40John Kiriakou?

  And I said, because it's finite, it has an end date for the first time. John Hunley, when he said this could be a blip in my life or the defining event in my life, make it the blip. He and Mark McDougal really put things into perspective. We informed the court that we were prepared to take a plea. That became huge news in the Washington Post and Politico and CNN. We went into the courtroom at the Eastern District of Virginia and told the judge we were prepared to change the plea. She set a sentencing date for the end of January and I just kind of waited in this state of the deepest depression that you can even imagine. I was under extraordinarily heavy surveillance by the FBI.

• 27:25John Kiriakou?

  They had four cars completely surrounding our house. I was instructed to turn myself in for booking an arraignment on the following Monday. The meeting at the FBI took place on Thursday. There are no arraignments on Friday, but because I had asked to see my lawyer, I had demanded to see my lawyer. They had to let me go. So I was home all weekend, but they were following us. And I mean like bumper to bumper, they were on us. It was so heavy. Even neighbors called me and said, hey buddy, you know, I got up to pee in the middle of the night and I looked out the window and there are these cars on either end of the block and people are just sitting and I'm just staring at your house. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's the FBI fucking assholes.

• 28:09John Kiriakou?

  I was lucky, literally every one of my neighbors, but one stopped by to express support. They were incredible. The neighbors were absolutely incredible. My friends rallied. Most of my relatives rallied. A couple walked away. Couple of my friends walked away. But you know, in a situation like this, you really do get to see who your friends are. That Thursday night, I had decided I couldn't do 45 years. They were trying to ruin my life and I was gonna, I was gonna take the easy way out. Catherine and I were watching TV. She said, "Come on, let's go to bed." I said, "No, I'm gonna stay up and watch TV. I can't sleep. I'm so upset, so depressed, I just can't sleep." I was going to go down into the garage and turn on the car and just lay across the backseat.

• 28:52John Kiriakou?

  And I think she suspected that that's what I was gonna do. And so she said, "No, I insist. Come up to bed. And even if you just lay there, just lay there." And so I went up to bed, didn't sleep a wink. Dr. Post called me when my arrest was announced. And he said, "Come up and see me," the next morning, Saturday morning. Dr. Post was the grad school advisor who recruited me into the CIA. I dragged an entire caravan of FBI agents in four cars behind me to his office. He gave me a couple of Ambien. He would only give me a prescription for three. I said, "I'm not gonna kill myself, I promise." He said, "Yeah, I don't trust you. You're getting three. Make good use of them." And so I filled my prescription for three Ambien. It was the only sleep I could get.

• 29:37John Kiriakou?

  The next day, there was an article on the front page of the Washington Post about my case. There was an attorney quoted in the article, Jesselyn Radak, who headed the National Security Division of a whistleblower group called the Government Accountability Project. A friend of mine called me about 6 o'clock in the morning and said, "Check out today's Post. There's an article about you, but there's a woman quoted, and she's really complimentary of you. You should call her." I called the office number at like, it had to be 6:30 in the morning, and she answered the phone. "Hi, Jesselyn. You don't know me, but my name is John Kiriakou." "Oh, thank God you called. Please come into the office." And I said, "Oh, thank God. I need a friendly ear."

• 30:20John Kiriakou?

  I went into the office. I sat with her for two hours, with her and with her assistant. Kathleen McClelland, two fantastic attorneys. Jesslyn used to be the head of ethics at the Justice Department. She was driven out because she was a whistleblower in the John Walker Lind case, the American Taliban. She told the FBI, when they captured him, "Read him his Miranda rights." And they never read him his Miranda rights, and then he confessed to everything, and they couldn't use it in court. They wanted to charge him with a death penalty case. He ended up doing, I think it was, what, 20 years? 15 years? Something like that? 17? I don't remember. But then they forced Jesslyn out. They tried to revoke her law license, they put her on the no-fly list. Her career never recovered.

• 31:05John Kiriakou?

  So she went to the Government Accountability Project for no money, just to help other national security whistleblowers. On the way out of that meeting, I was there for about two or three hours on the way out, I said, "Listen, I want to thank you for taking my case. I know that you only represent whistleblowers, and I'm not a whistleblower." She said, "Oh, you're the poster boy for whistleblowers." "No, I'm just a guy who said something." She said, "Let me tell you a couple of important things. Number one, the reason for your whistleblowing is irrelevant. All that's relevant is that you blew the whistle. There's a legal definition of whistleblowing. It is bringing to light any evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety."

• 31:48John Kiriakou?

  She said, "Your picture is in the dictionary next to the word whistleblower." I couldn't thank her enough. Now, she's not a courtroom attorney in this context. I had these legal titans behind me. Her job was to reach out to the media. Now, this was critically important because the Justice Department was leaking like a sieve to make me look like the worst criminal since the Rosenbergs. Every time the Justice Department would say, "He put American lives in danger," Jesslyn would say, "Oh, no, he didn't." And she would give my side of the story. And then, little by little, the media started to turn around and come to my side of the issue.

• 32:31John Kiriakou?

  MSNBC always called me CIA leaker John Kiriakou. Always, because MSNBC was the Obama network and it was the Obama administration that charged me. Fox News always called me CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. CNN switched from leaker to whistleblower, thanks to Christiane Amanpour. She's the one who said, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, this guy's not a leaker. He exposed an illegality that makes him a whistleblower." And so the whole network changed and began to call me CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou. That was thanks to Jocelyn, all of it. And then, funny enough, there was another attorney named Jonathan Weiner.

• 33:13John Kiriakou?

  Jonathan and I met in Indonesia in 2008, where we were both hired to work on a political campaign as consultants. Jonathan was John Kerry's personal attorney, so when I went to the Hill to work for Kerry, I would run into Jonathan all the time. And then Jonathan became, I forget what, the undersecretary of the Treasury, and then during Biden, he became undersecretary of state for something or other. Jonathan called me and said, "Are you free to meet?" And he was working for a lobbying firm at the time, one of these big K Street firms. I went up to his office and he said, "Okay, this conversation is protected by attorney-client privilege. Do you have a dollar?" I gave him a dollar.

• 33:58John Kiriakou?

  He said, "Okay, now you're my client for a dollar. This is all protected, so start at the beginning and tell me the whole story." I told him every detail. He says, "I'm not seeing where the crime is." We went over it ad nauseam, and then he called Plato, Bob, and Mark and said, "Whatever I can do, let me know." They said, "Yeah, you can reach out to some of these political figures. We could certainly use a supportive statement." Kerry wanted nothing to do with me. Kerry was in a panic. But John McCain came through. John McCain was good to me from the day I met him until the day he died. We can disagree over politics, but John McCain was tortured mercilessly at the

• 34:41John Kiriakou?

  Hanoi Hilton in North Vietnam after being shot down. He knew exactly what I was talking about and he was my biggest supporter on Capitol Hill. There were a couple of congressmen too. Congressman Jim Moran, my own congressman from Northern Virginia. Jim could not have been any more generous, making statements on the floor of the House to release John Kiriakou. And another one was Congressman Lloyd Doggett of Texas. I never met Lloyd Doggett and he spoke out repeatedly on my behalf, just because he believed it was the right thing to do. So I have this massive team of lawyers, there were 11 of them altogether, and I just decided let the lawyers do what they do best. They negotiated a deal for 30 months, of which I would do 23, and I finally said okay.

• 35:26John Kiriakou?

  Four days before I left for prison, two things happened. One, I decided to send a heartfelt email to John Kerry, begging for his help. I sent it to his private email and I said, "Mr. Secretary, I'm begging you. You know me. You know I didn't do this. Please ask the President to commute my sentence. DOJ would save face because the conviction would stand, but I would be able to work and provide for my family. I have five children." Two days later, he responded with one sentence. "Please do not ever attempt to contact me again." Four nights before I left, the peace group Code Pink, I used to call them my angels

• 36:09John Kiriakou?

  from Code Pink, held a going away party for me on the roof of the Hay Adams Hotel directly across the street from the White House. It was, it was one of the biggest celebrations that I've ever taken part in, which is ironic because I was so depressed I was practically suicidal. But I gave a speech there that night overlooking the White House.

• 36:33John Kiriakou?

  Good evening and thank you for coming. Last month, I was sentenced to 30 months in a federal correctional institution for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The prosecutors and the judge insisted that my case was about leaking. It was not. I was targeted for prosecution for protesting torture before opposition to torture was kosher. The government's purpose in prosecuting me was to frighten critics into silence. As every American knows, leaking classified information by marquee executive branch officials is as routine as the rising and setting of the sun. If my case was about leaking, we would have seen simultaneous prosecutions of people like former CIA Director David Petraeus, who provided classified information to his

• 37:15John Kiriakou?

  adulterous girlfriend; like Defense Department Undersecretary Michael Vickers, who federal investigators say leaked classified information to the producers of the film Zero Dark Thirty; like the Navy SEALs, who divulged classified information for profit to the makers of a video game; and like SEAL Team Six member Matt Bissonnet, who profited by publishing his classified account of the Osama bin Laden killing without clearance. But none of them uttered a single word critical of the government. My attorneys also found documentary evidence that another former CIA officer provided the names of some 10 covert officers to journalist Matthew Cole and classified information on counterterrorism operations, but the FBI declined to investigate and the Justice Department declined to prosecute. Why?

• 38:00John Kiriakou?

  Because they didn't blow the whistle on torture. A year ago, the Justice Department, at the insistence of the CIA's leadership, charged me with three counts of espionage, in addition to other felonies, despite admitting privately that I had not committed espionage. I became the sixth person charged by President Obama under the Espionage Act, double the number of prosecutions made under all previous presidents combined. So far, every espionage case that has found its way into a courtroom has either been dismissed or has crumbled, but the targets have still been destroyed in their careers and lives by the ordeal and the staggering expense of investigation and accusation. Former Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson warned of cases like

• 38:41John Kiriakou?

  mine more than seven decades ago, when he said, quote, "With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone." In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it. It is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm, in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes, or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies.

• 39:23John Kiriakou?

  Let me be clear: I am a patriotic American. I love our great country. I love the CIA. I always will. I believe that the CIA is largely made up of dedicated men and women, who want nothing more than to protect the country. But a true patriot, as Thomas Paine wrote, saves his country from his government. Certainly Congress has neglected its oversight duties. Where are the voices of outrage, when the new CIA director-designee maintains a kill list with American citizens on it? Where's the outrage when those citizens are denied their Fifth Amendment rights to due process and instead are vaporized by drones without even a formal accusation of a crime? Didn't even the Nuremberg defendants receive a trial? And Adolf Eichmann, in Jerusalem?

• 40:07John Kiriakou?

  At the CIA, we are taught that everything is a shade of gray, that nothing is black or white. But this is wrong. Torture is black and white, and we as Americans should not be involved in it. Torture is a crime, both in the US and according to international law. There is no excuse for it, its use is never appropriate for civilized peoples. But today, I will be the only person to go to prison for any crime related to torture. The torturers are free, the men who conceived of the torture are free, those who implemented the torture policy are free, and those attorneys who justified the torture with warped legal opinions are free. I took a plea to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for five reasons.

• 40:49John Kiriakou?

  Their ages are nineteen, sixteen, eight, six, and one. My wife and children are proud of me, and that is what matters. My whistleblowing also accomplished something very important. Despite the fact that I was prosecuted, my protest against torture is now the law of the land. I'm glad that I had a role in it. I would like to thank my wife and family, my attorneys, my advisors Jessalyn Radak and Bruce Vine, and the dozens of former and current CIA officers, FBI agents, and assistant US attorneys, who both publicly and privately encouraged me to stand up and fight. Thank you for your emails, calls, cards, and donations to my defense fund. My journey has just begun. Thirty months is not a long time. When my sentence passes, I will continue to speak out against torture and in

• 41:33John Kiriakou?

  support of the civil rights and civil liberties that we Americans have fought and died for at Valley Forge, Cemetery Ridge, Omaha Beach, and elsewhere. As President Obama so eloquently said earlier this week, "We the people still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to posterity." Thank you. The response was riotous cheering. My friends at Code Pink, they know how much I love Pete Seeger and folk music. Pete and I had become friendly and he was so important to me. They found a Grammy-winning folk group that came to perform that night, and they took a Peter Paul and Mary song called "Have You Been to Jail for Justice?" from the 1960s, and they changed

• 42:18John Kiriakou?

  the words to "Do you know John Kiriakou? Well, he's a friend of mine. He stood up to the CIA, now he's due in time." And everybody in the room knew the words. It brought tears to my eyes. I couldn't have made it without them. And even more than that, they knew that Catherine was probably gonna lose the house. Not only was I not working, but I was incarcerated. We had a gigantic mortgage and a second mortgage. They approached Roger Waters, the co-founder of the band Pink Floyd, and Roger very generously paid off my second mortgage. He just wrote a check and paid it off. So we were able to keep the house. To go through life with one friend like that is a blessing. To go through life with a hundred friends like that is a miracle.

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• 44:14John Kiriakou?

  I tried to get through as many administrative things as I could. We wrote wills. I had to do a power of attorney. We set up a proto GoFundMe to help Catherine get through the toughest times. But you know what really got me through it? In addition to friends just coming out of the woodwork to visit and, you know, give me a hug and encourage me, I started getting phone calls. Yoko Ono called me one night. She called my cellphone, and I just thought it was a New York cellphone number. And I answered, and this soft voice says, "Is this John Kiriakou?" I said, "Yes, this is Yoko Ono calling." Oh my God. Well, to what do I owe the honor of a call from Yoko Ono? And she says, "Think light, think

• 44:57John Kiriakou?

  love, think peace." And I said, "Okay, thank you." And she hangs up. Catherine says, "Who was that? That was Yoko Ono." "What? What did she say? Think light, think love, think peace." Then I get a call from Oliver Stone. Oliver says, "You've been screwed, my friend. You've been screwed, but the people are with you. Think about all the support you have." I get a call from the actor John Cusack, who took to Twitter and defended me at every opportunity. It was fantastic. Once I got to prison, I happened to be walking around the yard one day with a mob boss. And he said to me, "How much time do you have?" And I said, "30 months feels like 30 years." He said, "Let me give you some advice. When somebody asks you how much time you have, you tell them five years,

• 45:41John Kiriakou?

  because most of these guys are in for long stretches. And if they hear that you only have 30 months, that could be a problem for you." He was right, and it helped to put this whole thing into perspective. That 30 months was really 23, and that was really not that big of a deal in the greater scheme of things. The publisher Jane Hampshire had a private going-away party for me at her house in the Palisades here in Washington. Absolutely stunning house overlooking the Potomac River. She invited friends and famed whistleblowers, whom I had not yet had the honor of meeting. Jesslyn was there with Kathleen. The NSA whistleblower Tom Drake, who is a dear friend, came. The journalist Kevin Gustalla was there.

• 46:22John Kiriakou?

  Dan Cho, who chained himself to the White House fence and single-handedly brought down "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", he was there. And then, much to my great thrill, really the godfather of all whistleblowers, Daniel Ellsberg. I told Dan that night, I knew who he was when I was six years old, because my parents used to always talk about the news during dinner. Even when I was six years old, my brother was four, my sister was a baby, we always talked about the news. And that's why I remember the Martin Luther King assassination, and the Bobby Kennedy assassination, and the George Wallace shooting, because we used to talk about these things. Daniel Ellsberg was a hero in our house. He stood up to the Pentagon.

• 47:06John Kiriakou?

  He stood up to the President of the United States. They tried not just to ruin him. They tried to get him to commit suicide. And not only did he come out stronger on the other end, but he was practically deified. He was the only person with the guts to tell us that we were losing the Vietnam War and that the President and the Pentagon were lying to the American people. So for Dan to have been there, Dan and I became good friends. It was a great gift for me. He had flown all the way out from Oakland, California, just to be at that dinner. There's a funny little cherry to put on top of the story. When I walked out of the house at the end of the evening, I walked out with Tom Drake, and there were two cars sitting there on the block. It had two men in it. And Tom said, "Get a load of this." "Well, one is obviously for me.

• 47:51John Kiriakou?

  I'm assuming the other one's for you." We laughed, and he gave me a hug. I got in the car. He got in his car. And one car followed me all the way home, and the other car followed him all the way home. The day that I went to turn myself in at the prison, I went up with a whole gang of people. Jesslyn and Kathleen, the documentary filmmaker Jim Spione, and a cameraman, my cousin Mark and his son-in-law Matt. I had to turn myself in by 11 o'clock. So we drove up to Loretto, Pennsylvania, this godforsaken little village of 1,200 people, and stopped at a diner. They had breakfast. I was sick to my stomach. I couldn't eat anything. So when we finished breakfast, they drove me to the prison. And I was getting out of the car.

• 48:36John Kiriakou?

  Jesslyn said, "Hey, listen. 645 people have signed up for an email list just wanting to know how you're doing. So when you feel comfortable enough, send me an email." There's a prison email system. "Send me an email, and then I'll send your message to these 645 people." That's what I did after six weeks in prison, having no idea that it was going to be a viral sensation. And it put me on the map as a writer and as a commentator on criminal justice issues. At my sentencing, my formal sentencing in January of 2013, my attorneys asked the judge to recommend that I be sent to a minimum-security work camp. The prosecution had no objection to that, and she said, "All right,

• 49:21John Kiriakou?

  minimum-security work camp. You'll receive a letter from the Bureau of Prisons telling you where to report." Funny thing, just after that, I got a call from The Washington Post, and they said, "We heard you're going to the camp in Butler, North Carolina. Can you comment on it?" I said, "I haven't heard anything, but I have no comment, anyway." Called my lawyers. I finally get my letter from the BOP. They've assigned me to the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania. There's not supposed to be any political consideration whatsoever in the assignment of prisoners to a prison. None. Either you're a security threat, or you're not a security threat. And if you are a security threat, then how much of a threat will guide which level prison you go to? Minimum, low, medium, or maximum?

• 50:06John Kiriakou?

  Okay, well, clearly, I was no security threat to anybody. There was no violent crime or anything. So the judge recommended minimum security. I get a letter to report to Loretto, Pennsylvania. We all drive up there. I go over to the work camp. The work camps have no bars on the windows. The doors are unlocked. There are no fences or walls or anything. You're free to come and go as you please. You're just on your honor not to abscond. Most of the prisoners work in the village. They sweep floors at the university. There's a little Catholic university there called St. Francis. And then you just go back to the camp at night. So I go to the camp, and I literally knock on the door. I said to the guard, "Hi, I'm John Kiriakou. I'm supposed to turn myself in." And the guy says, "Oh, yeah.

• 50:50John Kiriakou?

  You have to go across the street to the prison. They'll process you, and then they'll just walk you back over here." So everybody drives away. My attorneys, the documentarians, my cousins. They're beeping, they're waving. I wave back, blowing me a kiss. I wave. They drive away. There's something strangely peaceful about being resigned to one's fate. As I walked across the street to check myself in, my lawyer's words rang in my ears. That work camp across the street was going to be no more than a blip. It was not going to define me. If the goal of the legal process in my case was to mitigate damage, well, then that damage mitigation needed to extend all the way through the blip.

• 51:30John Kiriakou?

  I knock on the door of the actual prison with the double concertina wire and the fences and the big water tank and, you know, all that stuff. Knock on the door. "Hi, I'm John Kiriakou, I'm here to turn myself in." The guy has me go through a metal detector, he frisks me. I didn't have anything with me, just the clothes that I was wearing, and I was instructed to bring a driver's license. And then he cuffs me, and then he starts taking me around to the back of the prison, and I said, "No, no, I'm supposed to be at the camp across the street." And he kinda chuckles. "Not according to my paperwork, you're not." Not according to his paperwork? What the hell had he been told? The guard walked me around to the back of the prison, to a door marked "R&D," Receiving and Discharge.

• 52:13John Kiriakou?

  There, another guard told me to strip naked. He boxed my clothes for shipping back to Catherine and issued me a prison uniform, some well-used underwear and socks, a second uniform, two threadbare sheets, a ratty nasty bath towel, and a roll of institutional toilet paper. No pillow. "We're out," said the guard. "Tough luck." I bet I'd have a pillow if I was across the street, I thought to myself. My heart and my mind were racing each other. This was just not computing. I stood in that courtroom. I heard what the prosecution said about being fine with me serving my time across the street in the work camp and not here in the actual prison. The Bureau of Prisons isn't supposed to play politics with this assignment, but what else would explain this?

• 52:56John Kiriakou?

  And if that was the case, that this was political, making a scene right now, forever, would just get me thrown into solitary. Suddenly, even 23 months felt like an eternity, like several eternities. Another guard walked me to my cell. When we got there, he gave me some advice. It was the only thing he said to me. He said, "If someone enters your cell uninvited, that is an act of aggression." "Welcome home." And then he just walked away. What?

• 53:26Speaker 01

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• 53:58John Kiriakou?

  The complete and total fuck. Goodbye, John Kiriakou. Hello, prisoner number 79637083.

• 54:10John Kiriakou?

  We hope you enjoyed this first series of podcasts, What Makes This Spy Tick. The next series will pick up right here, and I'll tell you how my training as a spy served me well while I was in prison. Hell, it served me brilliantly. Part two of this story will resume in a couple of episodes. In the meantime, while we catch our breath a little, we've got a few other surprises planned for you. We think you'll enjoy them. So please don't forget to like, rate, review, and/or comment on the podcast on whatever platform you're listening to it. 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.