John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S2E16 Free At Last

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

IN THIS EPISODE John's time at Loretto finally comes to an end - but not without a near hiccup. Though he's free of Loretto, he's not free from the federal Bureau of Prisons; John must report every day to "Hope Village", a halfway house - a situation loaded with ways to trip up and land back at Loretto. John begins the process of shaking off the prison persona he had to adopt in order to survive and relocating his true self.SHOW NOTESIf you are enjoying this project, please check out the rest of our podcast offerings at Costard & Touchstone Productions. Your next podcast obsession is just a click away! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production. Just a couple of weeks before I walked out of Loretto for good, I received a letter from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. They wanted me to testify before a committee investigating whistleblowing. That would be on January 29, 2015. As I was still a prisoner at Loretto, I wasn't allowed to testify in person, of course. But the committee agreed that one of my attorneys, Jesselin Radak, could read my testimony into the official record. This is what I had to say.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for allowing me to address the esteemed legal affairs and Human Rights Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I'm honored by this opportunity and humbled by the notion that I may help you to help American leaders end the abomination that is torture. I address you from my prison cell at the Federal Correctional institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania. I served in the Central Intelligence Agency for more than 14 years, first as an analyst and later as a counterterrorism operations officer. Like all of you, I was appalled and sickened by the events of September 11, 2001, and like most CIA officers that day, I volunteered to go to the Middle East or South Asia to bring the perpetrators of that terrible crime

to justice. The CIA had several very important successes. in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, capturing several senior al-Qaeda leaders and their associates. Most of us thought these terrorists would be returned to the United States and brought to justice. We were wrong. My first inkling that a decision had been made to violate both U.S. and international law was in mid-2002,

when a senior CIA officer asked me if I wanted to be certified in the use of torture techniques. I declined, saying that, I had a moral problem with torture, that it was wrong, and that it was a slippery slope that would lead to disaster. Diane Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, later said that the torture program was, quote, a brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation. It is a stain on our history that must never be allowed to happen again, unquote. She was right. There is precedent for how the U.S. government dealt with torture

in the past. The Washington Post, on January 21st, 1968, published a photo of a U.S. soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. The Defense Department investigated, court-martialed the soldier, and convicted him of committing torture. It was wrong to torture in 1968, and it was wrong in 2002. Many CIA leaders, past and present, will argue that torture led to unique intelligence that saved American lives. That is a lot of. That is. is simply not true. But even if it were true, it would be irrelevant. The question isn't whether torture works. The question is whether it is right, whether it is moral. On my first day at the CIA in January 1990, all newly hired officers were welcomed and briefed by a senior officer. All these years

later, I still remember one thing he told us. He said that as CIA officers, we must always act ethically. We should never do anything that we would be ashamed to see on the front page of the New York Times. Torture is something we should be ashamed of. It is something we must ensure never happens again, whether as a part of official government policy or not. If any American president fails to hold CIA officers accountable when their actions merit it, that failure doesn't strengthen the CIA. It weakens it. The fact is, By holding CIA officers accountable, the government would honor all officers who act lawfully. In December 2007, in a nationally televised interview, I said that the CIA was torturing prisoners

and that torture was an official U.S. government policy approved by the president. I was called a liar and a malcontent. Indeed, one U.S. senator said that I should be tried for treason, a death penalty charge. I was fired from my job, and the Internal Revenue Service began to audit my finances, an annual harassment that continues to this day. The FBI began investigating me, and after four years, they charged me with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, all for talking about torture. Facing 45 years in prison, I took a plea to a lesser charge,

so that I would be out of prison to see my five children grow up. Even still, my wife, a CIA officer, was forced from her job simply for being married to me. The government confiscated my pension at a cost to me of nearly $1 million. And I accrued another $1 million in legal fees. I lost everything, including my freedom for 30 months. But it was worth it.

Somebody had to stand up and say, enough, that is wrong, and the world has the right to know it. I'm proud that I could play that role. There's also a broader bureaucratic problem here. That is, where does a national security whistleblower go when the chain of command, including the CIA director, senior CIA officers, the CIA Inspector General, the CIA General Counsel, the Justice Department, the White House,

and even the congressional oversight committees are all a part of the conspiracy of silence? The short answer is that there is nowhere to go but the media. Indeed, in the United States, the Whistleblower Protection Act does not apply to national security and intelligence whistleblowers, the ones who have revealed torture, secret surveillance, and war crimes. The Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act is little more than a tool of entrapment. There is now an untested presidential policy directive, but it was not in existence when I blew the whistle, and it does not cover contractors like Edward Snowden, from whom you heard testimony last April. April. The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2012 provides millions of federal employees with the rights they need to report government corruption and wrongdoing safely, but federal employees still lack most of the basic rights available to whistleblowers in the private sector, such as a jury

trial. Additionally, it excludes national security whistleblowers. A modest improvement was passed two years ago, but it still excludes contractors and the enforcement mechanism is far inferior than that for other federal employees. Meaningful, effective, and enforceable best practices whistleblower protection is needed in the United States and Europe, especially in national security fields and cultures of deeply rooted secrecy in order to hold governments to account. Otherwise, the whistleblower must be prepared to be ruined personally, professionally, and financially and to face decades in prison. An employee should not have to choose

his conscience over his career and especially his very freedom. Thank you for shedding light on this important issue. Perhaps Congress can learn from your leadership. Spoiler alert, no such thing ever happened. Congress learned little, if anything, from the committee's leadership. I'm John Kiriaku.

Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick? This is episode 16 in our series, Doing Time Like a Spy. As always, we thank you for listening and for liking, rating, reviewing, and commenting on the podcast. I had to force myself to not show any excitement or any emotion leading up to my release. When I first arrived at Loretto, the number three in one of the New York organized crime families invited me to go on a walk with him.

And we were walking around the outdoor basketball court. And he said to me, how much time have you got? 30 months. Feels like 30 years. He stopped walking. Let me give you a bit of advice. When somebody asks you how much time you have, you tell him five years. 30 months, you could do standing on your head.

A lot of these guys are in here, 15, 20, 25 years. if they hear that you're upset because you have two and a half, you're going to get your ass kicked. And I said, okay. And so anytime somebody asked me how much time I had, I said five years. Every day, the COs post one sheet of paper called the callout list. It's prison lingo for an appointment list for the next day. If you have an appointment with the dentist, that's a callout list.

that's a call-out. An appointment in medical, that's a call-out. Well, people who are being released have call-outs to R&D, receiving and discharge. So I didn't tell anybody except the Italians that I was being released. The night before my release at 4 o'clock, as they did every afternoon, they posted the call-out list for the next day, and it said, Kiriaku, R&D. And sure enough, one of the Arians came up to me and said, why the fuck are you on the call-out list for R&D? I said, how the fuck am I supposed to know? And I left it at that. So the next day, I was supposed to be released at 11 o'clock in the morning.

My wife and kids and a friend all drove up to pick me up. At 9 in the morning, I had to go to medical. They'd give you one month's supply of your medication. I had to sign a couple of papers. I had money left over in my commissary account. They had to write me a check. I had a handful of possessions, things like a transistor radio and a little tiny cheap MP3 player and a shaving bag, a shaving kit. Everything else I just gave away. The shaving bag, odd as it may

sound, was kind of nice and I decided I'd keep it. Everything else I just gave away. Everything. All my clothes, my shoes, my watch, I just gave everything away. Well, in the excitement of going through things that last morning. I left my prison ID in my locker. I said to the cop that was ushering me through the process, oh, I left my ID in my locker. I got to go get it. So he unlocks the door into the hallway.

And I go to my housing unit and that door is locked. So I had to stand outside the locked door and wait for the five-minute move at the top of the hour. Well, this horrible, horrible, mousy little bitch that worked in the office, who always had it out for me for whatever reason, she would whisper, traitor, as I was walking past her, for example, in the hall. She said, you're out of bounds. I could put you in solitary right now. And I said, you know what? I don't give a fuck what you want to do with me. Because I'm going home right now, and there's nothing you can do to stop me.

voices raised very quickly between the two of us to the point where the unit manager heard us screaming at each other and she shouted that she wanted me taken to solitary right now he said nobody's going to solitary you go back to your office and then he says to me you just get the fuck out of here

I walked with the other cop to the entrance to the prison We're talking about the central Pennsylvania mountains in February. Two feet of snow. It was very cold. And it didn't even really hit me that I was out outside the confines of the walls of the prison until I started walking toward the car and the kids jumped out of the car and ran and jumped into my arms.

It took all my energy not to just burst into tears. I noticed out of the corner of my eye, the cop just very quietly turned around and walked back into the prison. So I got in the car. My wife said, what do you want to do first? I need an egg McMuffin like right now. And so we drove to the nearest McDonald's in town. It was actually a sausage McMuffin with egg. I can imagine how that must sound. You step into freedom for the first time in years. You can do whatever you want. Eat whatever you want. And I chose Mickey Dease. On the one hand, it's a screaming testament to how bad the institutional food was at Loretto. I can't say I hadn't had a good million years because that wasn't true.

My friends, Mark and Joey, ripped up plenty of good, satisfying, gourmet quality, like seriously, gourmet quality cuisine using that trash can, plastic bag, and boiling water I told you about. But the food that Loretto prison made for its prisoners' consumption was the exact opposite. with the exception maybe of pizza. To tell you the truth, I'll eat anything that calls itself a pizza. Beyond that, the food served up at Loretta was diabolical on the one hand and grossly insufficient on the other. An egg, or in my case, sausage McMuffin with egg, is a very simple thing. It's not fancy, it's not special. It's not exactly cuisine. It's food. But I can tell you that first post-Loreto sausage McMuffin tasted like divinity itself and went down like a seven-core scourmet meal.

Heather, Joe, and I briefly toyed with the idea of stopping for lunch somewhere, but I had five hours to get from Loretto to the halfway house to which I'd been assigned. Just as well we drove straight through. What normally should have taken three hours took nearly five hours, the whole five. And the last thing I wanted to have happened was for me to be late for sign-in. That's one easy way to end up back in prison. The halfway house was called Hope Village. You just know that when they call a halfway house something like Hope Village, that Hope is one of the things in very short supply there.

And so was convenience. The building had been a housing project in the 70s. Now it sat on the worst block in the worst neighborhood in the worst part of Washington, D.C. It was nowhere near a metro station, and even taking a bus to or from the halfway house was a challenge that added an extra hour each way to the journey. The residents called it Hopeless Village. The press called it Abandon All Hope Village. The Washington Post reported that Hope Village's job training services were lacking, and its access to mental health services was anemic. The post further pointed out that there was no money at Hope Village to help residents defray the cost of getting to work via public transportation or even just to get to the job interviews. Being broke is a major disincentive.

Hope Village lacked in other important ways, too. Prison Legal News Magazine, we talked to PLN's editor Paul Wright a few episodes back, reported that Hope Village, quote, lacked the ability to help residents find housing and employment. and hindered them from accessing mental health services, unquote. Residents felt unsafe, but the halfway house hadn't created an effective system to handle grievances of any kind. PLN continued that, quote, the CIC heard on multiple occasions that incarcerated D.C. residents would prefer to stay at secure BOP facilities rather than re-enter D.C. through Hope Village, unquote. the then chairman of the CIC added, quote, I would say that there are some things that are obviously dysfunctional, unquote, at Hope Village. So I was prepared for the worst when I arrived there, around 1145 a.m.

And I went to the office to check in. I may have hoped for this to be quick, but it wasn't going to be. A full schedule awaited me. First, I was told that I had to speak to several different people, a case manager, an employment counselor, a drug counselor, a drug counselor and a social worker. I was told to go to apartment 301 and just wait there. The apartment was sparsely furnished,

but it had everything essential for a halfway house living. It had a bunk bed, a couch, two chairs, and a color TV with broadcast channels. Now, I wasn't going to live at the halfway house. I would live at home, but I was obligated to physically check in at the halfway house every day. There were some good things about Hope Village, For one thing, everyone was friendly.

And I mean everyone. The staff greeted me whenever I walked in the door with a chirpy, Hello, Mr. Kiriaku. Welcome to Hope Village. The food in the halfway house cafeteria, which everyone else complained about, was absolutely delicious to me. White bread with a slice of turkey and a slice of cheese

never tasted so wonderful in my entire life. You have to remember where I had been the last two years. The case manager gave me a list of 14 mandatory classes that I had to complete in the coming weeks. The deal was that I would go to the halfway house every day to check in, go to class, and get drug tested. You see, in addition to visiting the halfway house every day, I was also obligated to work every day. Not working would mean a violation that could send me back to Loretto. But even getting to Hope Village every day took time. As I wasn't allowed to drive, I would have to take public transportation.

That started with walking from my house to the metro, getting on the metro, and taking it to the eastern market station on Capitol Hill, where I would then catch a bus for the Washington-Anacostia neighborhood. There, I would get off at Alabama Avenue and then walk the last quarter mile to Hope Village. If you're enjoying Dead Drop and, of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episode, 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. It's a hell of a podcast and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costard and touchstone.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. No matter how you went at it, the trip would take at least two hours to get there in the middle of the day. Then I would spend another hour or two hours at Hope Village before then making the reverse two hour trip home. It's just math and it adds up to six hours every workday right in the middle of the workday. That wasn't just inconvenient and ridiculously time-consuming. It was jaw-droppingly stupid. Perhaps out of laziness, perhaps it was rebellion. I didn't sign up for a single class the first two weeks that I was home. There was one class on life skills, another class on kicking your drug addiction. Another addressed suicide prevention. Another was prison rape prevention, and still another taught how to write a

resume. The classes and what they aspired to teach were all good for people in prison to hear and learn, but the execution was never quite up to scratch. As for me personally, I didn't think I needed any of them. I had never done a drug in my life. I wasn't even remotely thinking about killing myself, and my life skills were just fine, thank you very much. The CIA didn't want my ass in prison because they were worried about my life skills. The whistleblower inside me couldn't help himself. I told the case manager that the prison rape prevention class should have been given before somebody goes to prison.

Before they've been assaulted and raped, not after they're released from prison, well after they've been assaulted or raped. That seemed a lot like, closing the barn doors after the animals had gotten out. It wasn't solving a problem. More like it was exacerbating the problem. At the end of the second week, my case manager called me in for what he called a team meeting. I had no idea what this meant, though I was pretty sure it wasn't good. So once again, I began the long trek to Anacostia. When I got there, I was ushered into a dilapidated

conference room. Sitting around the table were the director and deputy director of Hope Village, the case manager, the employment counselor, the social worker, and a representative from the Bureau of Prisons Regional Office in Baltimore. I would be playing to a full house and the case manager got right in my face. He said, you haven't signed up for a single class since you got out. And unless I wanted to head back to Loretto, I had better start taking the recording the required life skill classes. I took a deep breath and I asked in complete seriousness if she had ever seen The Simpsons episode where Homer has to take a life skills class. As Homer enters a classroom, the instructor is instructing everybody on how to put a garbage

can lid on the garbage can. And that's what he's saying. Put a garbage can lid on the garbage can people. I can't stress that enough. I said, is that what you want to teach me in your life skills class? To put a garbage can lid on the garbage can? There was a moment of uneasy silence, and the director asked me to step outside. I stood in the hall for half an hour while they talked about me. Finally, they called me back in. Okay, the director said. We're waving all your classes. You don't have to take any of them. I thanked him. But I wasn't done. I wanted permission to drive. I explained how it took me over four hours via public transportation to get back and forth to the office, whereas if I drove from my house,

which was exactly seven miles, I could do it in 15 minutes. So I was proposing that instead of spending all that time traveling, I would spend it working. And wasn't that what I was supposed to be doing anyway? There was another period of silence. Okay, you can drive. Give the employment counselor a copy of your license, insurance, and title, and I'll approve it. So things were getting better and better. I made one more minor complaint to my case manager. I told her that our meetings, by then I was scheduled three times a week, again in the middle

of the day, further interfered with my ability to work. My case manager moved the meetings to Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7 p.m. nobody got inconvenienced and everything got done. That, BOP, is how you treat people. And all the Hope Village employees showed leadership, flexibility, pragmatism, and respect. Their approach understood that some newly released prisoners needed less help and oversight than others. Recognizing this allowed Hope Village to spend its resources more wisely, while for carmic reasons I would have been perfectly happy to waste the Justice Department's time and money as best I could.

I simply did not need the oversight or the hassle. So for 87 days from my release from Loretto on February 3rd until the end of my house arrest on May 1st, this was the deal. I couldn't leave my house except to go to Hope Village or the doctor. The halfway house's officer in charge of quarters called me every morning between 710 and 8 a.m. to make sure I was home. There was a second call every night between 9.15 and 10.15 p.m. to make sure I wasn't out partying. Sometimes they call as late as 11.20 p.m. The employment counselor stopped by the house randomly, usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday, to make sure I was still just sitting at home. If I left the house for any reason whatsoever, even for an emergency, I had to call Hope Village and say, John Kiriaku is leaving the house.

That's even if I was going to Hope Village. I also had to call when I got home to say, John Kiriaku, I arrived home. The only exception to movement was on weekends. On Saturdays and Sundays, I was allowed to leave the house for five hours. I had to return home for at least one hour, and then I could go back out for four more hours. That was for moments of what they called family integration or reintegration. I could go to a movie, to a restaurant, to the park, whatever, with my wife and kids. Every Tuesday, I had to meet with my case manager and give her a copy of my proposed movement for the week,

a list of doctor's appointments, movement to and from Hope Village, meetings with attorneys, and plans for the weekend. I also had to give her receipts from the weekend to prove that I did what I said I had done and a copy of my monthly phone bill as further evidence. I also had to pay what they called rent to Hope Village for the bed that I didn't use. That rent was 25% of my gross pay. You see, like all halfway houses, Hope Village is a for-profit enterprise.

Lip service to job training, mental health, and reintegration are all fine. But the truth is that the goal of Hope Village and every other halfway house is to get released prisoners in and out as quickly as possible. Every single resident has to pay rent. And the only way the halfway house can make any money is to rent out the bed to three, four, even more people at the same time. The goal then is to get people into home confinement quickly. That way they don't cost the halfway house anything in the way of food or other resources,

but they still pay rent. You would think that that would be an incentive for Hope Village to help people find a job. But it's not. Aside from a single bulletin board in the office listing job openings at fast food restaurants, car washes, and motels, there is no program to be. get anybody a job. The philosophy is get a job, any job, on your own, live at home, and pay your rent. For me, that was no big deal. I had a job lined up even before I left prison. This was, however, a temporary job. I set out immediately to find something permanent. I was finally

offered a job as an associate fellow with Washington's preeminent progressive think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies. IPS is one of the oldest and most highly respected independent policy institutions in the city. Its experts appear on network news programs all the time. They publish countless books, magazine articles, and syndicated columns, and they speak around the world on issues

as varied as the Middle East peace process, climate change, gender equality, human rights, civil rights, and the environment. My job would be to write articles, papers and opeds on prison reform, intelligence reform, torture policy, terrorism, and the Middle East. I've always admired IPS and the work that they do, and I was excited at the prospect of working there. So I filled out the relevant paperwork for the halfway house. The employment counselor visited the office to make sure there was such a place as the Institute for Policy Studies

and that they knew that I was a felon. Well, the IPS had approached me. They knew I was a felon. That wasn't a problem. But two weeks later, my case manager showed me a note from the Bureau of Prisons Regional Office in Baltimore. It said, quote, we feel it is inappropriate for inmate Kiriaku to work in a job that would allow him to comment on foreign affairs and prison reform, given the nature of his crime. unquote. The BOP opinion, of course, was nonsensical. First, there's that pesky issue of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Second, it's not up to the Bureau of Prisons to decide where I can and can't work. I could have gone to court to file a motion overturning the BOP's decision, but that would have taken months and it would have cost me a fortune and I didn't have any money.

Instead, I decided to just wait them out. The bottom line was simple. The BOPI, BOP no longer controlled me. And on May 4th, I started my job with IPS. But can you believe it? And of course you can, the BOP still wasn't done fucking with me. When I got home on February 3rd, I tweeted a photo of myself sitting on the couch with my three youngest children. And the caption said, free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last. And below the quote, I attributed Martin Luther King,

Of course, it was his quote, and with tongue in cheek, I attributed myself too, being free at last. That tweet was picked up by the major alternative news websites, Al Jazeera, Russia today, suddenly, and then continuing for the next couple of weeks, I received dozens of interview requests. But before accepting them, I did my due diligence. I visited the BOP's website and read their roles and regulations regarding press interviews. that's probably something that no one at the BOP had ever done or even thought of doing. But I digress. I literally read the regulations themselves and saw clearly that I needed to get BOP approval

for interviews that I conducted while I was incarcerated. So duly noted, I then visited Hope Village's website. There it said the residents of Hope Village had to get the director's permission before speaking to the press. So this was interesting. My focus being on the word resident, not on the word permission. You see, I was neither incarcerated and therefore didn't need the BOP's approval for shit, nor was I a resident of Hope Village, which meant I didn't have to consult with them either. Listen, I didn't write the regs. They did. So I accepted a number of interview requests, including from the PBS show Democracy Now, from RT, and from a whole bunch of print outlets.

How did Chris Christopherson put it? Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, right? That's how I was starting to feel. And that feeling was good. Within days, though, I got a call from some BOP bureaucrat in Baltimore who told me that they were, quote, very concerned, unquote, that I had had unauthorized contact with the media. I told them that they were wrong and I told them where to look in their own regulations to see that they were wrong. The BOP guy said that while I was right technically, I still had to get

approvals. What he meant was I was right legally. I was right, period. But clearly, if I wanted to grant interviews without the BOP's approval, which would have been unlikely, they were going to send me back to prison. Then I would have to file a motion from prison. It would take months just to get a hearing. Sometimes you have to know when to call for a strategic retreat. Live to fight another day, which I absolutely would. Don't get too comfy or smug my BOP pal. I would eventually bury him in paper. And that was the plan. That's literally what I did. I sent him as many as a dozen forms a week. I put him in touch with every blogger, every podcaster, reporter, and photojournalists that I came into contact with.

There were reporters from almost every major American news outlet and a dozen foreign countries. There were radio hosts from the far left, the far right, and everything in between. I even did an entire one-hour radio program on how folk singer Pete Seeger influenced the course of my life. this turned out to be just too much for the BOP guy. He ignored many of the requests when he was too busy, so I would just resubmit them and further bury him in paper.

He told one freelance journalist that they, the journalist, couldn't speak to me because the journalist wasn't a real journalist. On the one hand, how did some dumbass BOP bureaucrat get to decide who was and wasn't a journalist? journalist. On the other hand, okay, let's go with it. Let's say he's not a real journalist. Then the conversation in question is between two private citizens. And I didn't need to ask for anyone's permission to just talk to some other private citizen. If I really, really needed to, I knew I could wait these guys out. The BOP had control over me only until May 1st,

and that was coming at us. Regardless, the BOP guy back. down. I arranged more interviews and slowly began the process of putting my life back together, while putting some pieces of it back together. Other parts of my life I would have to rebuild almost entirely from scratch, albeit using the toolkit of a spy. When I first got out, I'd sometimes tell reporters that the U.S. government had turned me into a dissident. I may have been joking when I said it because I don't really feel like a dissident, but I couldn't escape the very strong feeling that our government saw me as a dissident. The government does up the track record of demonizing people who disagree with the official line. It was true then. It's even more true

today. When I was on a rotation to the State Department in the mid-1990s, I was the human rights officer at the American embassy in Manama Bahrain. The Bahraini government at the time was trying to put down a popular uprising, and they were using force to do it. It was my job to document the Bahraini government's use of force against unarmed civilians, its extrajudicial killings of protesters, and its use of torture and solitary confinement against people who had never been convicted of a crime, and document all of it I did. It all ended up in the human rights report, which was a document mandated by Congress. That document that I helped create was used to pressure the Bahraini government to respect human rights.

Ironically, much of what we called the Bahraini government out on for doing to its people in the 1990s, we Americans were doing to our own prisoners in the so-called war on terror. We tortured prisoners. We murdered people, including at least three American citizens, using drones and without the benefit of any trial. We held people in communicato in secret prisons around the world, and we worked hard to ensure that our prisoners either had no access to an attorney or if they did never saw the inside of a courtroom. That is not the American way. It can't be. Excuse me while I continue to blow the

whistle a little bit here. It's not new, this spying by the American government on ordinary American citizens. The worst transgressions started with the Patriot Act. That's another example of the American government hijacking a word to suit their needs. The Patriot Act, government actions against American citizens that previously had been unthinkable and intolerable. When I first entered government, one hard and fast rule, for example, was that if NSA intercepted the communications of an American citizen, even accidentally, heads would roll. Congress had to be informed, an investigation was launched, and the intercept was purged from the system. We disincentivized bullshit.

We don't seem to do that anymore. When I got out of Loretto, the NSA had an enormous facility in Utah, big enough to save copies of every email and every telephone conversation made by every American for the next 500 years. That was then. Now, with data center-powered AI on the march, the threat of governmental overreach has exploded. Nobody wants their government trampling on their civil liberties.

It isn't healthy for anyone's life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness. People frequently ask me why they should care if the government is reading their emails or listening to their phone calls. Some people think having nothing to hide guarantees them perpetual fair treatment. Their whole attitude sends chills up my spine, in large part because clearly they don't know how the world works. Anybody who has ever spent any amount of time working in the intelligence community will tell you that even if you think you have nothing to hide, that is only from your perspective.

The authorities might think differently about you and about what they think you're hiding. While just the raw information about who you call or what websites you visit might seem innocuous, in the wrong hands, that same information can become damning after it's been twisted and abused. Hell, analysts don't need the actual content of the calls or emails to know what you're up to. Are you calling an abortion provider, a divorce lawyer, a secret girlfriend, or boyfriend, a substance abuse counselor? What kind of porn do you look at? What kind of chat rooms do you go to? What websites do you visit? What organizations do you belong to? Literally, anybody can be made to look like a troublemaker, a suspect. Anybody's life can be twisted to make them look like a threat

or a potential criminal. Inside this space, the truth doesn't matter. Everyone is a suspect, which means the government needs more money to spy in even more sophisticated ways on even more people. Data collection itself is just the tip of this terrifying iceberg. Daniel Ellsberg, who was probably the most important and highly respected American whistleblower

of the past half century, once told me that every dirty trick that the Nixon White House pulled on him in order to convict him of espionage for leaking information about the Vietnam War is now legal under the Patriot Act. The FBI doesn't even need a warrant now. Using what's called a national security letter, a much, much lower bar, the FBI can now get your medical records, treatment notes from your psychiatrist, your phone records, what kind of books you buy, or what you borrow from the library. They can build a case against you whether you've done anything or not. Harvey Silverglade, the co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, also called Fire, and before retiring, an attorney, writer, and journalist, wrote a book.

In his book, Three Felonies a Day, he pointed out that the United States, is so over-legislated, so over-regulated, that the average American, on the average day, going about their normal business, commits three felonies every single day. That means if you're a whistleblower and the government wants to get you in order to stop you, to silence you, they will find a way to get you legally. Though it still may not stop you. That First Amendment to the Constitution, the one guaranteed, freedom of speech can be very tricky for a government afraid of dissent.

The founding fathers saw this coming. When James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment in particular, he argued that the First Amendment must protect the minority from the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, the minority would still have a constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, and to petition elected officials. The Bill of Rights is the only thing standing between us and fascism. No one goes to prison to make friends.

That said, I made some friends at Loretta with whom I am still friends today. Those really are bonds like no other. Frank, the former auditor of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, who became like a big brother to me, remained in poor health and ended up being transferred to the federal prison hospital in Devons, Massachusetts. His family was an 11-hour drive from the facility versus three hours from Loretto, but his family continued to make the trip every single week. Frank cooperated with the authorities in his case, and he eventually received a sentence reduction. He hoped that his judge would reduce his sentence to 10.

years. In the end, it was reduced to 11 and a half years, but then COVID broke out in 2020, and Frank was sent home on a medical furlough. He died in his bed of a heart attack. At least he was home. Art, the cat burglar and Joel Thief, who was a steady source of good advice, was transferred to a low-security prison in Big Spring, Texas after being caught up in the contretemps with Schaefer, the pedophile. A few more transfers landed Art at a low security prison in California. His only brother died in 2015. Having no children of his own, Art got out in 2022 in his early 80s and now lives with his sister. I spoke to Art about two weeks ago and he sounded great and happy. Robert, the arsonist, was the first one of us to get out of prison. He served a few weeks and a

Halfway House in Buffalo, New York, never bothered to make contact with his wife who was living just minutes away, and then absconded to the United Kingdom to avoid the nuisance of probation. Robert actually reached out to me through Facebook and told me that he is living in a small English town with another woman and selling used cars. Dave hated pedophiles more than anything in the world. Ironically, the Bureau of Prisons relocated him to FCI Elkton, the Ohio-based prison that was home to the federal pedophile program. Dave remained in that prison until he was released in 2019. I don't think about people like Dave or Schaefer or Cher anymore.

As for my friend, the prison chef Joey, you met him in our food, glorious food episode, so you know he's settled into a happy, successful life. I spoke to Joey the morning that we recorded this episode. He's doing great. Mark, the other chef in my prison life, was trying to get through a 30-year sentence as a first-time non-violent drug offender. He applied to the Justice Department's clemency project, which allowed convicted felons with appallingly long sentences

to petition for an ease in their sentences. A major Washington law firm, Lathen and Watkins, agreed to take his case pro bono, and they prepared a commutation request for President Obama's consideration. Even better, Mark's prosecutor wrote a letter supporting his commutation request saying that while what Mark did was wrong, he did not deserve the draconian sentence that he received. Indeed, he even wrote that he had dreamt of the injustice of Mark's sentence over the years.

Mark's co-conspirators each got five and a half years. Mark should have gotten 10 years because he went to trial. The prosecutor asked President Obama to send him home, and in August 2016, the White House announced that 111 prisoners would have their sentences commuted and would be released. Mark was one of them. He went home at the end of 2017. Mark and I had a conversation soon after that about what he could do next.

His hands were essentially tied because he had a felony conviction. So I asked him, well, what do you really want to do? And he said, I really want to be a real estate agent. And I told him, Mark, go to the website of the governor of New Jersey. It was Chris Christie at the time and apply for a state pardon. Even though Mark's crime was a federal crime, a state pardon would allow him to apply for a real estate license. So Mark made the application to Governor Chris Christie and to the surprise of both of us, Governor Christie gave it to him. Mark is literally the number one ranked real estate agent on the entire New Jersey shore. Something to really be proud of. You don't know as you leave prison all the ways being in prison has changed you. Just like once you're a spy, at least a part of you

is always a spy. The same goes for being a prisoner. That loss of power and prestige even if you're lucky enough to get some of it back, it stays with you internally. You never quite shake the sounds of the place, the smells, the sense of order that's only just keeping the chaos at bay. As I told you during the second season of the podcast, I knew walking in the door to Loretto that I would have to pack a lot of me into a kind of mental storage while cowing people into respecting you works fine on your unit, doing that kind of thing back in the real world just won't play the same way. Using dirty tricks to neutralize the people opposing you is a great strategy in prison. It can work on the outside, and it does

for some people, but there's a point of diminishing returns. After a while, when enough people hate you and realize they have company in their hatred for you, you're heading for disaster. For me, the challenge of reintegration with the outside world was not behavioral. It was going to be work-related. Now, I had done a fair amount of setup while working at Loretto. I had established myself as a writer with a clear point of view. Good thing I had because being an ex-con means lots of good-paying work was, for now anyway, completely impossible for me.

It's not that a lot of places wouldn't tire me. It's that they couldn't tire me. More than anything, I was going to have to make a go of it based solely on my wits and my abilities as a spy. In season one, we told you what makes this spy tick, me. In season two, I told you how I did time like a spy. In season three, coming up very, very shortly, it's back to the world of spies and spying. We really will dive into the question, what makes a spy tick? I will tell you the story of how I began to reinvent myself and all the bizarre places this part of my life has led. While I may have been out of the spy game, I still knew plenty of people still in the spy game, and those relationships

led to plenty of adventures and misadventures. And knowing so much about spies and spying in a world that can't get enough of either, I began to figure out ways to turn my deep knowledge of spying into ways to make a steady living. In season three, I'll get to tell you some stories I've been aching to tell, not just about me, but about other spies, and people who spies are people who spies pursue, like Carlos the Jackal, the infamous terrorist of the 1970s and 80s. We'll be doing a deep dive into him. We'll also be taking a close-up view of Vladimir Putin, the spy Vladimir Putin. Remember, before even running for mayor of St. Petersburg, he was a colonel in the KGB. We're going to appraise his performance from a more mission-specific perspective. Another part of season three that we're super

excited about is going to be a series of roundtable conversations with other whistleblowers. If ever America needed whistleblowers to blow as many whistles as they possibly can, it is right now. Before season three formally starts up, though, we've got a few treats in store, some very cool episodes that we hope you'll enjoy as we get to work writing and producing season three. Including next week's episode, it's a co-production with another podcast in the Costard and Touchstone family, the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. We got together, our two podcasts, and we talked about how not to make a spy movie. I can tell you, it was a blast having that conversation, remembering all the TV shows and movies I saw as a kid that helped make me want to be a spy

when I grew up, if I ever grew up. As always, we thank you for listening to the podcast and for liking, rating, reviewing, and commenting. Until next time, I'm John. Kirooku. Dead Drop is written by John Kirooku and Alan Kyiakou and Alan Kats and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a Koster and Touchstone production.