S2E11 Unfinished Business

IN THIS EPISODE With his out date - the end of his prison sentence - now starting to come into view (albeit still in the distance), John would have been best served by keeping his head down. But there remained unfinished business - with sevveral fellow prisoners and especially with the Soretto Prison authorities. And then there was all the unfinished business - all related to torture - happening outside Loretto. SHOW NOTES If you're enjoying this show, please check out all our other podcasts at Costard & Touchstone costardandtouchstone.com. Your next great podcast obsession is just a click away! 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.

• 0:00Alan Katz?

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

• 0:04John Kiriakou?

  When your days are as measured as a prisoner's are, by which I mean regulated, timed, and tightly controlled, you become intensely aware of time and how exactly it's passing or not passing. All prisoners know when their out date is, their release date. With that in mind, prisoners serving long or life terms have to literally change how they think about time. Understand that even though you're living inside a prison with terrible conditions, terrible food, and terrible everything, you have to find a reason to go on. Little creature comforts become super important and super comforting. Long timers can't think of themselves as doing time when time stretches that far into the distant future.

• 0:49John Kiriakou?

  Instead, they follow strict daily schedules. They secure the best, most stable and trusted jobs. They engage deeply in hobbies, interests, sports, physical fitness, or even religious faith. Really and truly, they teach themselves how to live differently than they lived before in the prison system. More than a few of these guys spent their first few years raising hell, both inside and outside the prison system. By contrast, there were people like me, short timers who were counting the seconds. In fact, there's a condition called short timers disease, or short timers syndrome, a state of heightened anxiety, impatience, and intense focus on the outside world, making the final weeks feel like they're literally taking forever.

• 1:33John Kiriakou?

  In theory, I had a year to go. No time at all to someone doing 30 years or more, a bright beam of sunlight to a lifer. Everything is relative. I had established myself in the Loretto community as a straight shooter, someone other prisoners could trust as much as prisoners could trust other prisoners. The prison authorities, though still determined to silence me, knew they were outclassed, outgunned, and outwitted. On a day-to-day basis, I had my rhythms and routines. But it's prison, right? There were still plenty of ways and plenty of time for everything to go horribly wrong. The easiest, maybe the smartest thing to do would have been to just lay as low as possible.

• 2:14John Kiriakou?

  The problem with being a whistleblower is that once you've seen the light, you just cannot unsee it. A whistleblower's moral outrage is almost beside the point. What's key is that the thing outraging their sense of morality is flat-out illegal, and someone is getting away with it. The whistleblower can change that. He can stop it, maybe not all at once, and in one fell swoop, as awesome as that might be. But in time, with more work, and hopefully with the participation of others equally outraged by what they've learned is happening, this growing outrage will achieve a kind of critical mass. Once that happens, all bets are off. Yeah, sure, I could have laid low, as if. I talked to a woman today.

• 3:00John Kiriakou?

  She's a colleague of mine at Bison Media. She's very close to Susie Miles, the White House Chief of Staff. And she called to tell me today that Susie Miles told her that I'm never getting a pardon. And I'm never getting a pardon because the only person standing in the way of it, it's not a person, it's the organization, the CIA. The CIA said they don't give a shit about me. But pardoning a CIA officer convicted of a crime would set a precedent that they just don't want to see set. What am I gonna do? I have to keep doing things like this, so I don't need the fucking pardon.

• 3:36John Kiriakou?

  Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. I'm John Kiriakou, and this is episode 11 in our series Doing Time Like a Spy. Before we return to FCI Loretto, I want to thank you for listening, subscribing to, rating, reviewing, commenting on and sharing the podcast wherever you listen to it. And if you enjoy the podcast, please check out the other podcasts in the Costard and Touchstone family. That family is about to include a brand-new podcast called A Spy's Guide 2, which we're just putting the finishing touches on. It's travel from a spy's perspective. And fingers crossed, the first episodes will start dropping a few weeks from now. Want to travel like a spy? Check out the podcast.

• 4:21John Kiriakou?

  You'll find a link to it and everything Costard and Touchstone in the show notes to this episode.

• 4:28John Kiriakou?

  Even if I had wanted to lay low that last year at Loretto, I'm fairly sure it would have been impossible. Having seen what lurked on the other side of the looking glass, I was compelled to action, to not let anyone inside get away with anything if I could help it. On the outside, beyond Loretto, moral outrage about America's torture program was beginning to achieve critical mass. More people were talking about it, writing about it, and making movies about it. And the United States Senate was about to enter the conversation. Everything seemed to be approaching that critical mass. And there was me, looking around at it all, keenly aware that where Loretto and I were concerned, I had unfinished business.

• 5:11John Kiriakou?

  I mentioned in an earlier episode how two COs tried to trick me into fighting an Iraqi Kurdish prisoner. That was unethical, and it was entirely illegal. Their names, these two COs, were Yardley and Graham. Outside of their jobs and lives in Loretto, neither added up to much. They weren't going anywhere or doing anything significant outside of Loretto, Pennsylvania. They were both small-town men, living small lives, except neither seems to have known it. Both were certifiably stupid. But Graham was the elder of the two and the more hapless. He'd claim he knew everything that was going on at Loretto, that he had sources all over the place.

• 5:53John Kiriakou?

  The inflatable rat, and that's really what it was, an inflatable rat that Graham kept on his desk, made it hard to believe that any prisoner would risk his personal safety to share information with Graham when he was so clearly contemptuous of them. The truth was Graham knew nothing, including the fact that his wife, also a CO at Loretto, was getting boned regularly by a Puerto Rican prisoner. That is, until she was caught and fired. Yeah, stupid, hapless, and perpetually out of their depth. Finally, one day in the visitation room, things came to a head between us. All inmates are strip-searched after each visit with an outsider, family, friends, whomever.

• 6:37John Kiriakou?

  I had just been visited by my family, and I headed into the strip-search room where Graham was doing the searches that day. As I started to address, I said, "So, you have butthole duty today, huh? Your parents must be so proud." It must have really struck a nerve. "You exhaust me," he said. He literally sighed with exhaustion and said, "I give up." "Truce? Sure thing, Officer Graham. I will if you will." I've told you about a few of the other COs at Loretto too, like Sarge, the CO who called me fuckface and then trashed my room. Sarge was easily the meanest, angriest, unhappiest CO at Loretto. A real honor.

• 7:22John Kiriakou?

  Having a filthy mouth is one thing. Having one with so little creativity, that is something else entirely. Sarge had that kind of a filthy mouth, filthy and lame. She had a collection of poorly-done tattoos and an epic mean streak. To look at her in the right light, you might start to think, you know, I could see how back in the day, Sarge could have, might have been something. But anything attractive had long since faded or abandoned ship. Her life sucked. And now, because you were in the same zip code as her, well, so would yours. I had written about Sarge in one of my first letters from Loretto, about how abusively she spoke to the inmates in her charge.

• 8:06John Kiriakou?

  Well, without even intending to, I'd blown the whistle on Sarge. I had accused her of a regulatory violation that should have resulted in a two-week suspension without pay. I was called to the SIS office and asked to swear out a complaint against Sarge, which I absolutely did. Several days later, the warden transferred Sarge out of my unit and reassigned her to a job where she drove a car around the outside of the prison compound while the yard was open for exercise. She remained in that exile for six months. The word was that she never forgave me, like I gave a rat's ass. But then her exile ended, and she returned as the afternoon shift CO in my housing unit.

• 8:47John Kiriakou?

  She called me immediately into the CO office, which was kind of a glass bubble. People could see us talking. Well, I was talking. She was blustering, quote, "Don't you dare fucking ever speak to me. Turn your head when you see me," unquote. I told her, "You stay the fuck away from me. Mess with me, and you'll regret it for a very long time." Seriously, I knew enough about what Sarge had done to get her completely shitcanned, and she knew it. That's why, in the end, she left me alone, despite the fact that she could have trumped up any charge she wanted, and she could have seen me spend the rest of my sentence in solitary. Instead, she refused to even speak my name.

• 9:29John Kiriakou?

  Not that she could pronounce it correctly anyway, but at mail call, when I received anything at all, she would just toss it aside. I would have to go pick it up off the floor when mail call was finished. Not having her even speak my name made it all worthwhile. Another piece of unfinished business finished. Sarge hated all the prisoners at Loretto. She hated most, if not all, of her coworkers too, especially the CO all the prisoners called Horseface. One time, Sarge and Horseface got into a fistfight, an actual fistfight, in the parking lot over a man. And I'm sure he must have been a real prize too. The whole staff at Loretto behaved like they were living in a soap opera.

• 10:10John Kiriakou?

  One female lieutenant had children by three different COs and was collecting child support from all three. The CO wife of another CO got herself transferred to the satellite work camp so that she could have sex with her CO boyfriend while her husband worked his shift in the main prison. As amusing as the staff's sexual antics were, their jaw-dropping stupidity was even more entertaining to me. Just about anyone, any group, could practice their religious faith in the prison chapel. There were Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, Rastas, Santarians, Mormons, and a whole bunch of smaller faiths that I had never even heard of until I got to Loretto.

• 10:53John Kiriakou?

  Regardless of who they were and what they believed, these faith groups all held their religious feasts in the chapel on whatever appointed day the feast happened to take place. For prisoners, these celebrations were a nice way to reflect, to spend time with friends, and to forget for an hour or two that they were in prison. For Muslims, the most important feast on the calendar is the Eid al-Adha, which marks the end of the Hajj, the yearly Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. The chaplain had made all the arrangements for that year's Eid: tables, chairs, and food, and then he took the rest of the day off. At sunset, 61 Muslims descended on the chapel for their feast.

• 11:34John Kiriakou?

  Ah, but the CO in charge of the chapel that night was a guy we called Big Dummy. Big Dummy, who really was that dumb, said that he hadn't “heard nothing about no Muslims,” and he refused to unlock the chapel. The chapel inmate employee told him that the chaplain had made all the arrangements and that this was the holiest day in Islam. “Fuck the Muslims,” was his response. That night, 61 Muslims filed 61 formal complaints against Big Dummy. The next day, the chaplain was back at work, the feast was back on, and as each Muslim worshiper entered the chapel, they had to pass Big Dummy at the door, who said to each

• 12:18John Kiriakou?

  and every one of them, “Assalamualaikum, I'm sorry.” Probably the biggest asshole in the entire prison was Lieutenant Gramble. And you know what? I shouldn't even use the word “probably.” I knew the instant that I met Gramble that I was gonna have problems with him. He was tall and thin with a shaved head and a perpetual grimace and jutting chin that made him look like the cartoon character Dudley Do-Right. Unlike Dudley Do-Right, Gramble was a bully. He was a provocateur and a foul-mouthed sadist. He had worked in and had been forced out of several other prisons. He had sexually harassed a wide variety of women, both in and out of the prison.

• 13:01John Kiriakou?

  I personally heard him berate an inmate for standing in the hall between moves as “a stupid motherfucking cocksucker.” As I've said repeatedly, that behavior was and is against BOP regulations, but no one was enforcing it, and whenever anyone tried, the cops invariably covered for each other. Laws become useless when the people tasked with enforcing them choose to shit on them instead. The same goes for enforcing them selectively, it's just bad for everyone. Well, on Thanksgiving night 2013, I called my wife to see how the day had gone. During the course of that conversation, I told her about an experience I had had in the commissary earlier in the day. One of the COs had chewed me out for asking for more cup of soups than I was apparently

• 13:45John Kiriakou?

  entitled to. Remember Oliver Twist? “Please, sir, I want some more?” That was me. I asked for one more cup of soup. I told my wife that these COs were all tough guys when a prisoner couldn't respond to them, and when they were sitting behind two inches of glass. As part of this “just chatting with my wife,” I wondered out loud how tough they might be if I ran into them on the street. In that context, I referred to one of those less tough-than-they-thought COs as “a nimrod.” I'll repeat, “a nimrod.” Well, it turned out that Gramble, the biggest jackass in the entire prison, would spend his free time in his tiny office listening to the recordings of my phone calls.

• 14:28John Kiriakou?

  This was not shocking news, it was what I'd agreed when, on my very first day at Loretto, I had to sign a form acknowledging that I would be monitored electronically. Knowing that, and being a spy used to his calls being listened to, I frequently used my calls to plant messages among the idiots on staff. Example: I would tell a friend or my wife, “If CO X doesn't get off my back, I'm gonna write an article about him and humiliate him in print.” Or, an idiot in my room, whom I hate, stole $100 worth of chicken and has it in a cooler under his bed. I sure hope I don't get in trouble for it. Well, the idiot COs think that they're gathering intelligence. In fact, I was just using them.

• 15:11John Kiriakou?

  So on Thanksgiving night, my wife and I hung up at 7:30 PM. I went back to my room. Count time, as always, was at 9:30, and nobody ever missed count for any reason. But, at 9:20 PM, 10 minutes before count, a voice came over the prison PA and barked, “Kiriaku, Lieutenant's office, immediately!” In prison, there are moments when you know that you are fucked, and that's just how it is. My roommates knew I was fucked too. They all looked at me wide-eyed. I stuck up my hand and I said, “Guys, it's been great knowing you, help yourselves to whatever you want from my locker. Dave, call my wife and tell her I'm in solitary.”

• 15:53John Kiriakou?

  As I left the unit, one of the few good COs said to me, “Good luck, buddy.” I walked downstairs to Gramble's office, apprehensive, but ready to counterpunch. I knocked on the door and went in, and said, “You wanted to see me?” “I did,” he said. “Can we talk man-to-man?” As I've told you here, that was prison code for “I'm gonna scream and swear at you and I don't want you to report me.” But it also meant, of course, that I could scream and swear at him, and he couldn't report me either. So now I was intrigued. Where was this going? He asked, “Are you an educated man?” I responded, “I don't answer rhetorical questions, and I'm not gonna play games with you.

• 16:35John Kiriakou?

  Why don't you just say what it is that you wanna say, man-to-man?” Gramble exploded. “Do you think I'm a fucking nimrod? Do you? Who the fuck do you think you are?” So that's why I was here. I shot back, “I actually don't know if you're a nimrod. You might be. I haven't fully formed an opinion yet. I'm surprised that a private conversation with my wife that had nothing whatsoever to do with you has so offended your delicate sensibilities.” That got him going. Now he was shotgunning the bullshit. “Stand at attention,” he shouted. “When a lieutenant is talking to you, you stand!” I didn't. Instead, I told him, “Go fuck himself.”

• 17:18John Kiriakou?

  Piling on, I told him, “He was nothing but nobody. He was, at best, a medium-sized fish in a very small pond.” “You think you're so tough,” he growled at me. “I'm the one who grew up tough. I got my GED in a youth correctional facility in Philadelphia.” “Congratulations,” I said. “Your parents must be so proud.” That was one of my favorite insults. Right on cue, he exploded again. “You're not the only one who served this country. I did a tour in Afghanistan.” “Well, thank you for your service,” I said. Now he was at his wit's end, a terrible place for someone that witless to be. He told me, “I better not hear you criticize another CO on a call to your wife again.” Or what?

• 18:02John Kiriakou?

  Talk about impotent rage. I reminded Gramble that he needed to bone up on the BOP's regulations, and on the US Constitution too. I told him, “When I walked through those prison doors, as I had told other COs, I did not give up my right to freedom of speech. I can tell my wife anything I want so long as it's not a threat, not in furtherance of a crime, and not for the purposes of running a business. I have read the regs, and you should too,” I said calmly. Another explosion. “You need to start acting like a goddamn inmate.” “What's that supposed to mean?” I said. “Should I get a tattoo on my face? Should I steal food from the cafeteria? If you mean that I should wring my hands and say, 'Yes, sir, no, sir,' that is never gonna happen.

• 18:46John Kiriakou?

  Never. You are not going to institutionalize me.” “If I have to follow the rules,” I told Gramble, “you have to follow the rules.” A voice over the prison PA interrupted us. It was count time. The phone on Gramble's desk rang, and it was the unit CO asking if he should count me, or if I would be counted in solitary. “Count him!” Gramble snapped, and he hung up the phone. “Just go back to your fucking unit,” he said from behind clenched teeth. I headed back to my room. The unit CO unlocked the gate for me. He was smiling. “I can't believe you survived Gramble. Nobody survives Gramble.”

• 19:25Alan Katz?

  It's Alan, Dead Drop's producer, and it's time for our October meeting of the Quince Fan Club. John, is there a piece or a couple of items in your closet or chest of drawers that your hand always finds first?

• 19:39John Kiriakou?

  Actually, Alan, there are a couple of Quince pieces in my growing collection. There is a sweater that I absolutely adore. It's actually the first Quince piece that I bought. It's cashmere and it is the softest, yet lightest, cashmere sweater I've ever owned. And I just bought a pair of linen trousers. I'll tell you, when I go to the doctor, I always wear jeans. And then I get on the scale and the doctor's like, oh, you should lose three pounds. Well, my jeans are three pounds. And so I bought these linen trousers. I wore them to the doctor and he says, hey buddy, you lost a pound or two. The truth is, these linen trousers are light, they're beautiful, they're comfortable, and now they are my go-to pants.

• 20:24Alan Katz?

  For me, it's my two 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters. I love how they feel. I love how they make me feel.

• 20:32John Kiriakou?

  And because they go with everything. They make getting dressed easy.

• 20:36Alan Katz?

  And being somewhat lazy that way, I think you and I both love the easy part, don't we?

• 20:41John Kiriakou?

  Quince focuses on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials, like that 100% Mongolian cashmere we were talking about, or organic cotton and merino wool.

• 20:54Alan Katz?

  Everything is timeless and versatile. As we've said here, Quince makes classics, but without all the stodginess that often comes with them. And we haven't even mentioned how reasonable everything at Quince is priced.

• 21:06John Kiriakou?

  Their 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters start at just $60, giving you the softness and the quality you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag.

• 21:17Alan Katz?

  Not to go all Game of Thrones, but winter is coming. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince is the perfect destination to find everyday clothing staples like premium down jackets and classic wool outerwear.

• 21:30John Kiriakou?

  All versatile layers designed to keep us warm and comfortable all season long, and always priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands.

• 21:39Alan Katz?

  Quince does that by working directly with ethical factories that cut out the middlemen, so you're paying for high-quality, not brand markup.

• 21:47John Kiriakou?

  The ethical part is very important.

• 21:50Alan Katz?

  In these here times, it absolutely is.

• 21:53John Kiriakou?

  Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Dead Drop. It's the best way to support the show.

• 22:18John 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 next to David. Inside his head, in fact.

• 23:02John Kiriakou?

  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. Me surviving Gramble was no longer an issue. Ah, but would Gramble survive me? That was the question that they should have been asking. Five months later, I applied for a no-show job as a hallway orderly.

• 23:46John Kiriakou?

  I filled out the form, I bribed the head orderly with three books of stamps, and I waited for the approval. Finally, the head orderly, who was a 75-year-old bank robber, and a shitty one at that, told me that I had been rejected for the job. It turned out that my buddy Gramble was in charge of the hallways. The head orderly returned my bribe to me. See, there is honor among thieves. And he shrugged. Nothing else to be done. Or was there? On March 31st, 2014, I wrote a letter from Loretto ostensibly about life in the prison chapel. I wrote about how nice the chaplains were, how much I enjoyed the quiet there, and how good a job it was, but that I hated how the chapel had become a hangout for pedophiles.

• 24:28John Kiriakou?

  I segued into Gramble's denial of my job request and made a copy of the crumpled job application. I recounted the Thanksgiving conversation I had had with my wife. I hit all the highlights. I knew that SIS had a Google alert on me. Just as I'd suspected that they would, they read my letter the moment it was published, which then prompted them to launch an investigation. I don't know where they stuck Gramble for the next six weeks while they investigated, but it was gloriously peaceful those six weeks. When Gramble did finally return to the unit, he never so much as made eye contact with me. Just a few weeks before my release, I was called into the unit manager's office. He told me to raise my right hand.

• 25:10John Kiriakou?

  Do you swear that the information you're about to give is true and complete to the best of your knowledge and belief? I did. We sat down. He said, tell me about Gramble, wanting me to speak slowly so that he could type every last word. That was the affidavit to my formal complaint against Gramble. Another piece of unfinished business finished. There is another bullying CO on my radar who picked on prisoners just for kicks. That was Officer Hera. Loretto prison wasn't big physically. There was one main hallway and a set of double doors connecting it. With both doors open, the 1,400 prisoners at Loretto could travel quickly and efficiently during scheduled moves. And there's an urgency to get from where you are to where you need to be before the

• 25:55John Kiriakou?

  scheduled move ends. Remember, it's a 10-minute move. But Hera, being stupid, mean, and drunk with power, would deliberately open only one of the double doors. That created an instant traffic jam at the doors with everyone getting angrier by the second. Why do this? Because COs like Hera want fighting to break out. Aside from the entertainment value, fights gave the COs a chance to break up the fight, thus, looking like tough guys, send guys to solitary, and maybe even get a performance bonus for being cruel. Can you imagine that? I remember wanting to take a swing at them every single time I saw them standing at the locked door, laughing at people as they struggled to squeeze through.

• 26:39John Kiriakou?

  One day, my buddy Dave and I were trying to get to the cafeteria for lunch when we got delayed by a locked door manned by Officer Hera. Dave was extremely polite. Do you mind unlocking the door so we're not all jammed up? And that's exactly how he said it. Hera's angry response? Get over here, fella. Fella. I never heard anybody say that since my dad. Well, there went lunch. I decided to wait with Dave in case he needed a witness. After everyone else had finally made it through the door, Hera got right up in Dave's face. Who the fuck do you think you are challenging me? Dave was way nicer than I would have been. He said, I'm not challenging you at all. I'm just saying that it would be easier for everybody if both doors were unlocked.

• 27:23John Kiriakou?

  You're being insolent, said Hera. Now, insolent is another one of those CO code words, in this case, meaning your ass is going to solitary. To his credit, Dave remained calm while I seethed inside. But the fact that I was there as a witness to anything that went on or went down, that's what kept Hera honest in that one moment. Knowing the game had gone as far as it was going to go, Hera relented. Get the fuck out of here. Now, Hera didn't have anything against Dave personally. For better or worse, Hera was an equal opportunity douchebag. He was a shithead to everybody. One night, Hera was working the midnight shift on our unit, while every other CO kept

• 28:06John Kiriakou?

  the gate to the unit unlocked, because why not? Power-mad punk Hera kept the gate locked. At 6:00 AM, the chow hall opened up to serve breakfast. Some inmates arrived expecting to find the gate open, which it wasn't. So one of the Mexican inmates knocked on Hera's door and asked him to open the gate. I don't take my fucking orders from you. That's what Hera said to him. The chow call came. Now he had no reason not to open the gate, except he didn't. Instead, he put his feet up on his desk and laughed while all the other units headed to breakfast. Finally, after about five minutes, he got bored and unlocked the gate. I heard several Mexicans discuss stabbing him, but nothing ever came of it. My own run-in with Hera became inevitable.

• 28:51John Kiriakou?

  In June 2014, just after Dave was sent to the shoe, to solitary, I was paged over the loudspeaker to go to the visiting room to see my attorneys. When you have a visit, you go to a door that leads to the small strip search room and you activate a flashing light to alert the visiting room CO that you've arrived. I activated the light at 10:00 AM. The wait time was usually a few seconds to a few minutes. After standing there for 45 minutes, Hera finally came out. What's the delay? I said, I've been out here for 45 minutes. He looked at me with this contempt on his face. I don't fucking answer to you, he said. I'll let you in when I'm fucking ready. Meanwhile, my attorneys had been waiting for more than an hour. Finally, I had had enough of this 20-something punk who had never accomplished anything

• 29:36John Kiriakou?

  in his life and probably never would. What's your problem, kid? I called him kid, knowing that he would hate it. Insolence, he shouted. That's all I have to say, insolence. And you're going to the shoe. I laughed. You think I'm afraid of your shoe? You think your solitary is worse than Yemen? Worse than Pakistan? Worse than Afghanistan? Don't make me laugh. You send me to solitary, it'll be on CNN tomorrow. You really want to go down that road? Hera was on his heels. This is my house, motherfucker. In my house, you do what I say. I shot back. This may be your house, but it's my neighborhood. To be honest, I don't even know where that metaphor came from. I'm still not 100% sure what I even meant by it.

• 30:19John Kiriakou?

  But you know what they say, in for a penny, in for a pound. So I went for it. You really want to fuck with me, Hera? Really? You know what I can do to you? I'm not some piece of trash doing 20 years. I'm out in seven months, and I know where you live. For the record, I had no idea where he lived. And frankly, I didn't care where he lived. It was probably some single-wide trailer down the street. But it was just enough to make him surrender. He blinked, literally and figuratively, and said, go to your visit. And I never had another problem with him.

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• 31:32John Kiriakou?

  As my outdate approached, I became increasingly aware that I had plenty of unfinished business outside of Loretto's walls, too. My letters from Loretto and their publication on Fire Dog Lake and in The Huffington Post had helped make Americans aware that our country was lying to us about torture. My whistleblowing was beginning to gain traction, and that traction was beginning to get results. On March 9, 2014, I wrote an op-ed that appeared in The Los Angeles Times under the headline, "I Got 30 Months in Prison: Why Does Leon Panetta Get a Pass?" It had been confirmed in December 2013 that former CIA Director Leon Panetta had provided classified information to the filmmakers behind the movie Zero Dark Thirty,

• 32:15John Kiriakou?

  a film that insisted that torture got results and helped American intelligence track down Osama bin Laden. That was a lie. The Obama administration insisted that it enforced the Espionage Act equally and fairly and never against political opponents. But as one of the people charged under the act, I can tell you, others have done what I did, as openly, without similar consequences. Prime example, Leon Panetta giving classified information to Zero Dark Thirty's screenwriter, Mark Bol. Panetta, at the time, as I said, was director of the CIA. In the op-ed, I wrote this, quote, "The Espionage Act, the source of the most serious charges against me, was written and passed during World War

• 33:00John Kiriakou?

  I and was meant to target German saboteurs living in America. It was updated once, in 1950, when Americans got to thinking the country was awash in communist spies. The law is so outdated that it refers only to 'national defense information,' rather than to classified information, because the classification system had not yet been invented. The Act states, quote, 'Whoever lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with information relating to the national defense, which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates the same to any person not entitled to receive

• 33:45John Kiriakou?

  it, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both.'" A transcript obtained by the Organization Judicial Watch shows that, at a CIA awards ceremony attended by Bol, Panetta did exactly that. The CIA seems to acknowledge that Panetta accidentally revealed the name of the Special Forces ground commander who led the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, not knowing that the Hollywood screenwriter was part of the audience cleared to hear him speak. But intent is not relevant to Espionage Act enforcement. U.S. District Court Judge Leanne E. Brinkum ruled in my case that evidence of the accidental release of national defense information was inadmissible, and she added that the government

• 34:29John Kiriakou?

  did not have to prove that a leak of classified information actually caused any harm to the United States. In other words, the act of disclosing the kind of broad information covered by the Espionage Act is prosecutable regardless of outcome or motive. The sensitivity of what Leon Panetta revealed is not in question. The spokesman for the former CIA Director said Panetta assumed that everyone present at the speech had proper clearance for such a discussion. When the transcript of the speech was released, more than 90 lines had been redacted, implying that Panetta disclosed a great deal more classified information than the name of an operative. Even the CIA's Office of Security concluded that, quote,

• 35:11John Kiriakou?

  "The agency's security policy and administrative procedures were not followed in allowing Mr. Bol, a member of the media, access to the classified bin Laden Operation Awards Ceremony." If an intent to undermine U.S. national security, or if identifiable harm to U.S. interests are indeed not relevant to Espionage Act enforcement, then the White House and the Justice Department should be in full froth. Panetta should be having his private life dug into, sifted, and seized as evidence, as happened to me and six other people during the Obama administration. When senior national security official Thomas Drake blew the whistle on waste, fraud, and abuse at the NSA in the form of a bungled project that cost

• 35:56John Kiriakou?

  more than $1 billion, he wound up buried under espionage charges, all of which were eventually dropped, but only after his life was in shreds. When former State Department Intelligence Advisor Steven Jin Woo Kim talked to a Fox News reporter about North Korea, he was charged with espionage, and his prosecutors were absolved by the presiding judge from having to prove that the information he allegedly leaked could damage U.S. national security or benefit a foreign power, even potentially. If Panetta isn't accountable, while Drake, Kim, and I have been crucified for harming U.S. national security, all of us accused of or investigated for the same thing, disclosing classified information to parties not authorized

• 36:38John Kiriakou?

  to know it, then what does that say about justice in America, or about White House hypocrisy? The Espionage Act should be rewritten to deal with the issues of intent, such as accidental disclosures and real harm done. Until then, it is right and just to charge Leon Panetta, at least, with espionage. Accidental though his revelation may have been, it's still a crime. If the CIA had hoped their torture program would go away because I had been put away, they were sadly disappointed. Accountability was coming for them. Things can move at a glacial pace inside our government, especially where oversight is concerned. But more and

• 37:19John Kiriakou?

  more people inside our government were beginning to realize that our words and our actions had stopped matching, and the consequences were now dire.

• 37:30John Kiriakou?

  In our next episode, torture and its implications will move to center stage again. Like a snowball rolling down a mountain, the investigations into the agency's torture program would gain speed and heft, and then the authority of government itself. It's the whole point of whistleblowing. Until then, thanks as always for listening and for rating, reviewing, commenting on, and sharing the podcast. This spy is telling you, please don't keep it a secret. I'm John Kiriakou.

• 38:01John 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.

• 38:30Alan Katz?

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