The Loretto camp mix-up
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The Loretto camp mix-up is John Kiriakou's account of his arrival to begin his twenty-three-month sentence in 2013.

What the court ordered

At sentencing, Kiriakou's attorneys asked that he be sent to a minimum security work camp, no bars on the windows, no fences, unlocked doors, inmates free to come and go on their honour not to abscond. The prosecutors did not object, and the judge ordered that he be sent to the federal work camp at Loretto, in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. 

The arrival

Kiriakou drove up himself, describing the process of turning oneself in as simply knocking on the door and saying so. He arrived at the camp with a convoy behind him, a documentary film crew, two of his lawyers, his cousin and his cousin's son. He knocked and said he was John Kiriakou and was there to turn himself in. The officer told him to go across the street to the prison, where he would be processed and then walked back over. 

The convoy drove away. At the prison he was patted down and put through the metal detector, and then an officer handcuffed him and began taking him round to the back of the building. Kiriakou objected that he was supposed to be at the camp across the street, and was told that this was not what the paperwork said. 

The decision not to fight

Kiriakou has said he told himself to take it easy, that there was nothing to be done, and that if he put up a fight they would put him in solitary, so he said nothing.  He describes panicking chiefly because nobody knew where he was: everyone thought he was at the camp, working at the university in town. It took five days to get access to a telephone. 

When he reached his lawyers and reported that he had been put in the actual prison, the answer was that a motion could be filed but that it would be two years before a hearing, by which time he would be home. He was told he would have to tough it out. 

What he decided instead

Kiriakou has said he resolved at that moment that he had been trained for this, that he had lived in far worse places than Loretto, Pennsylvania, and that he would use his CIA training to stay safe and at the top of the prison social order.  That resolution became the subject of his second book, which opens with twenty life lessons he says the agency taught him, some tongue in cheek, such as "admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations", and some serious, such as letting others do your dirty work. 

See also

- FCI Loretto
- The Sentencing Remark
- Doing Time Like a Spy
- The Italians at Loretto
- Passing time at Loretto
