Doing Time Like a Spy
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Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison is a memoir by John Kiriakou about his incarceration at FCI Loretto in Loretto, Pennsylvania. It won two literary awards and was reissued in a second edition by Simon and Schuster.

Premise

The book is organized around 20 life lessons Kiriakou derived from his CIA career and applied to surviving and navigating federal prison. His first-day self-instruction: "You're trained for this. You've lived in far worse places than Loretto, Pennsylvania. You're going to end up running the prison."

Arrival at Loretto

The sentencing error

At sentencing, Kiriakou's attorneys asked the judge to send him to a minimum-security work camp, no bars, no locked doors, no fences, and the judge agreed over no Justice Department objection. He was processed into the higher-security main prison next door instead, a guard telling him, "Huh. Not according to my paperwork you're not," when he tried to correct the mistake. Kiriakou has told the story two different ways in different interviews: in most tellings it is a clerical mix-up, campers being housed across the street from the main facility they clean and cook for; in at least one account he says the CIA was "furious" with the judge's order and had him "secretly" upgraded to the prison with the concertina wire and armed guards.

The first year

It took him four to five days to get access to a telephone to call his attorney, who told him a motion to fix the error would take two years to be heard, "You'll be home by then", and that he would simply have to tough it out; that conversation, he says, was what made him decide to rely on his CIA training to survive. He says he struggled badly with depression during that first year, at one point requiring people to actively work to keep him from suicide, even though he calls prison itself, where he read voraciously and wrote the book, "the easy part."

Writing the book

Two manuscripts

The book began as two separate manuscripts: a serious political-science treatise on prison reform, which Kiriakou found "incredibly boring" to write, and a lighter memoir built out of the letters and blog posts he'd sent from Loretto. He sent both to publishers, who rejected the pairing and told him to strip out the political-science material and fold everything into the one funnier book that became Doing Time Like a Spy.

Writing publicly from prison

John Kiriakou has described Doing Time Like a Spy as growing directly out of his practice of writing publicly from prison about conditions at FCI Loretto. He says he made a point of never turning down a media request while incarcerated, partly, he admits, to needle the warden, giving interviews to NPR, Time, and the New York Times, while Jake Tapper drove up to the prison in person to interview him.

Five hundred words a day, mailed out as legal mail

Kiriakou described deciding very early in his time at Loretto that the experience was worth a book. He set a daily writing target of five hundred words, and would not get up until he had hit it and sent the pages to his attorney as legal mail, the one category of prison correspondence guards cannot open.

Prison staff periodically raided his cell and confiscated his writing. Because pages already sent out as legal mail were safe, he lost only current drafts. The consequence was that he wrote significant portions of the book twice, uncertain whether a given passage existed on paper or only in his memory. He wrote the entire manuscript in longhand, a process he calls "freaking hard", which took a year and a half to complete. When guards began slitting open his outgoing legal mail to read it before resealing the envelopes, Kiriakou confronted a prison lieutenant, mocking their technique and explaining, uninvited, how to covertly open an envelope with a paperclip instead.

7,000 letters

Kiriakou says the worst part of prison was the "Groundhog Day" monotony, which he beat by resolving to answer every letter, eventually 7,000 letters from 675 people, and reading more than 100 books alongside the writing. The letter-writing habit began on his very first day, when he received an unprompted postcard of support from a stranger in Ringgold, Georgia; he decided that if people were going to take time to write to him, he'd write back, and on some days received 60 to 70 letters, which he says drove the guards processing them crazy. He has repeated the figures elsewhere, over 100 books read and 7,000 letters answered across his 23 months of incarceration, saying the book "started off as a joke" before becoming the finished memoir.

Publication and awards

Upon release, Kiriakou hired a Georgetown student to transcribe the accumulated envelopes, then edited the manuscript, delivered it to his agent, and sold it to Rare Bird Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The finished book, released on Tuesday, May 30, 2017, won two literary awards, the PEN First Amendment Award and Foreword Reviews' memoir of the year. When a prison guard mocked him, "everybody in prison writes a book", Kiriakou pointed out that his first book had reached number five on the New York Times bestseller list.

The twenty lessons

The list

The book's twenty lessons include, among others: make strategic alliances; let others do your dirty work; admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations; seek and utilize available cover; recruit spies to steal secrets and use those secrets to improve your position; cultivate relationships; know that everybody is working for somebody; adapt to your current environment; listening is always a better strategy than talking; never outshine the boss; be the power behind the throne; if stability is not to your benefit, chaos is your friend; find out what the target wants and use it to your advantage; hide in plain sight; use the subtle art of misdirection; trust no one; never underestimate the power of rumor; always maintain a plausible cover for action; know your enemy. He explains the practical logic behind "seek and utilize available cover": at the first sign of trouble, get off the X, because everyone standing nearby when a fight breaks out gets swept into solitary while guards investigate, whether or not they were involved.

Applied against the guards

Kiriakou says he applied the tongue-in-cheek CIA rules, "admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations", against prison guards he describes as barely literate, having prisoners run mail call because the guards "couldn't read." He says he used the rules more than once to deliberately intimidate other prisoners, being "nasty," "aggressive," and "difficult" until he got what he wanted, though the one time he nearly lost his own temper, it was the Italians who stepped in, reminded him of the rules, and handled the problem themselves.

Strategic alliances

One of the book's central lessons is the formation of strategic alliances across otherwise hostile factions. At FCI Loretto, Kiriakou made alliances with the neo-Nazis, the Italians, the Mexican drug cartels, and the Nation of Islam: "Every one of them." He operated as an "independent operator" who did not belong to any faction, a status that made him untouchable rather than vulnerable.

The factions

Kiriakou calls prison "a combination of seventh grade, Lord of the Flies, and a mental institution." He describes its social life as gang-based: Aryans, Italians, Black inmates split between Crips and Bloods, various Hispanic groups, and even the child molesters, each with its own "shot caller" who negotiates disputes with rival shot callers to keep the peace and hold down violence. The book recounts how each alliance formed.

The Aryans and the Nation of Islam

The only advice a guard gave him on intake was that anyone entering his cell uninvited was committing an act of aggression requiring self-defense, advice that prepared him for the Aryan prisoners who arrived at his cell shortly after he did. Within hours two neo-Nazis, one with a swastika tattoo covering his neck, walked in unannounced to vet him, asked whether he was gay, a "rat," or a "chomo" (prison slang for child molester), and, satisfied by his answers, told him he could sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria. One Aryan inmate separately asked him point-blank if he was "a hitman for the CIA" who killed Muslims; Kiriakou's deliberately evasive answer, "it was wartime and we all did things we weren't proud of", satisfied the man and ended the rumor.

Days later, two Nation of Islam members visited his cell to tell him, on Louis Farrakhan's authority, "Reverend Farrakhan says you're a hero of the Muslim people", assurance he'd have no trouble from them, after a Nation of Islam newspaper item on his case ran the day he arrived.

The cartels

Four of his five cellmates were members of Mexican cartels, including the Bachos and Norteños; he wrote a free legal appeal for one of them (denied, but it earned him a reputation among the Mexican gangs as a "stand-up guy" who couldn't be bought and wouldn't charge a fellow inmate).

The Italians

It was, in the end, the Italians who "adopted" him and became his closest prison friends, he ate, exercised, and partied with them after a senior Bonanno family captain, tired of watching him eat lunch with the Aryans, stopped him in the hall to ask why he sat with "those Nazi retards," then declared, "From today you're with the Italians." A well-connected Italian inmate from Philadelphia, who had read about Kiriakou's case in the New York Times before his arrival, vouched for him with the prison's "made men", including the boss of the Gambino family, the underboss of the DeCavalcante family, and the boss of the Genovese family's Port of Newark operation, explaining that a CIA officer, unlike an FBI agent, has no arrest powers and works overseas fighting terrorists; once they grasped that Kiriakou hated the FBI as much as they did, they welcomed him in. He attended church every Sunday with one devout Genovese family captain, and once word got out he was aligned with the Italians, no one dared move against him, an alliance he says he maintains today, having had dinner recently with two men from the group, one of whom now bosses one of the Five Families.

About a month into his sentence, the boss of one of the Five Families summoned him mid-toenail-clipping, after cuffing awake a bunkmate to make him clean up his spit, to ask whether he was "the CIA guy" who'd written a book, then announced, "You're going to write my book." Kiriakou talked him out of it, observing that books "of this genre" are usually written by "rats" who spend the first half bragging about their crimes and the second half justifying why they turned informant; the boss went quiet, said "hadn't thought of that, never mind," and from that day forward Kiriakou was invited to every Italian dinner and party in the yard. About a month in, in the visiting room, he and his wife watched the same boss receive brief, coded status updates from three elderly visitors before they all embraced and left; his wife asked him what they'd just witnessed, and Kiriakou told her he thought it was a Mafia "sitdown."

He credits Mark Lanzotti's prison Italian cooking, boiled with a live wire in a garbage-can, with the 35 pounds he gained inside. In another telling, he attributes the same 35 pounds to a crooked guard on the Italians' payroll who smuggled in pork loin, wine for the marsala sauce, fresh tomatoes, mushrooms, pasta, and chicken for nightly restaurant-quality banquets.

Honour, and the code of silence

The Italians prized personal honor above all else, which Kiriakou identifies as the real basis of the closeness he felt with them. When a junior inmate broke into a child molester's locker and returned to the cell handing out stolen snacks, a senior captain ordered him to put everything back and confront the man to his face instead: "If you want to take the Chomo's stuff, you look him in the eye ... You don't do it behind his back." Kiriakou also learned that the Italians' code of silence applied even when he was the one filing a complaint: when an abusive guard swore at him and threw an object at him, he was told he couldn't formally report her, "We consider that to be ratting ... that makes you a rat", even though he wasn't informing on a fellow inmate. He refused, despite pressure, to get a prison tattoo, telling inmates he didn't want a souvenir of the place and wanted to forget he was ever there.

Prison culture and pedophiles

Prison culture, in Kiriakou's account, was uniformly hostile to pedophiles. When an attorney convicted of molesting a child offered other inmates $500 to beat Kiriakou to a pulp after Kiriakou refused to let him move into his cell, the men who were offered the money instead warned him; Kiriakou used his CIA recruiting skills to get another prisoner to plant a shank in the man's locker, then had an anonymous tip passed to guards, who found it, charged the man with possessing contraband, and transferred him to a higher-security prison. He also recounts one inmate pouring a bowl of olive oil, heated in the communal microwave, onto a sleeping pedophile's face, retaliation for the man having broken the day room's no-pedophiles seating rule the day before.

'Always let others do your dirty work'

Truck and Cat in the Hat

Kiriakou illustrates the lesson with the account of a serial killer in his housing unit, referred to as "Truck" because he murdered prostitutes along his long-haul trucking route, who had formed an unsolicited attachment to Kiriakou and sought his approval. Kiriakou describes Truck as large and violent, roughly 6'4" and 350 pounds, with blackened, rotten teeth, imprisoned for strangling a string of victims during what the FBI called the "Golden Age of Serial Killers," roughly 1970 to 1990; his final, surviving victim, a 16-year-old prostitute he strangled but who lived and identified him, got him a 40-year sentence rather than a trip to death row, technically making him what other prisoners called a "chomo" rather than a killer alone. Truck also tried to bond with Kiriakou by falsely claiming his own CIA past, saying he'd once used a shrimp boat to smuggle weapons to Angolan rebels. Truck's persistent bids for Kiriakou's approval extended to once beating another prisoner simply to vacate a seat so Kiriakou could watch a Steelers game.

A separate inmate nicknamed "Cat in the Hat," for an oddly elongated, birth-defect-shaped head, had tried to move into Kiriakou's cell, which ran a "no pedophiles" rule; when Cat in the Hat admitted his own crime was "murder for hire", he'd hired a hitman to kill his business partner over a $100,000 debt to the mob, then informed on the hitman to cut his own sentence, Kiriakou turned him down on both counts: "No pedophiles, no rats." When Cat in the Hat later saw Kiriakou summoned to the lieutenant's office, in fact to sit for an interview with Jake Tapper, and publicly called him a rat for it, Kiriakou told Truck that Cat in the Hat had called Truck a pedophile, a fabrication. Without another word from Kiriakou, Truck attacked Cat in the Hat and put him in the hospital, a helicopter had to medevac him to Pittsburgh for six weeks of intensive care, while Truck received five additional years on his sentence, and Kiriakou stayed clear. When Cat in the Hat returned and apologized, Kiriakou delivered a single warning: "If I ever hear my name cross your lips ever again, you're dead."

The Wallace prank

Wallace, well-read, multilingual, and, in Kiriakou's telling, an "accomplished con man" who learned the trade from his own con-man father, was serving 38 months for fraud; he claimed to have fathered a child with an A-list Hollywood star, bragged about yachts and mansions he intended to buy on release, and would pretend to faint or burst into tears whenever he felt stressed or disrespected. Kiriakou's signature "trickery" story: to be rid of the loudmouth, he borrowed a cellmate's own release form, a "merry-go-round" sheet listing every office an outgoing inmate must visit for a signature, whited out the name and prisoner number and made a clean photocopy, then planted it, along with a duffel bag he had a fellow inmate steal from the prison laundry (the kind issued to indigent prisoners on release), on Wallace's bunk on a Friday, and let Wallace give away his possessions and throw himself a going-away party, only to be turned around and cuffed at Receiving and Discharge on report day and told he was under arrest for attempted escape. He spent two weeks in solitary and was transferred to another prison, though, since officials could never prove the form had been doctored, he was never formally charged. Kiriakou frames the prank, done deliberately to Wallace's face rather than behind his back, as doing it "the CIA way."

Recruiting "Robert"

Among the fellow inmates Kiriakou describes is a British-born pathological liar he calls Robert, who held citizenship in the UK, Canada, and the US through marriages but never in Australia, and who, on his felony conviction, was banned for life from the Five Eyes countries (the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and expelled to the UK on release. Robert claimed a long list of fabricated careers, nightclub owner, DJ, border guard, bush pilot, owner of the largest video store chain in three countries, used car dealer, radio host, and voiceover artist, and falsely claimed to have dated tennis champion Evonne Goolagong, insisting she had also been Miss Universe. He also admitted to abandoning two adopted five-year-old Romanian twins, who exhibited violent behavior, at the gate of the Romanian embassy in Washington, DC, before driving away.

In an earlier telling, Kiriakou described a cellmate also named Robert quite differently, as an Australian arsonist and former Buffalo, New York used-car salesman who, enraged after the Department of Motor Vehicles denied him new license plates over unpaid taxes on Christmas Eve, went back that night and burned the DMV office to the ground, and was arrested within minutes. In the book, Kiriakou frames recruiting fellow inmates to act on his behalf around four typical motivations, revenge, greed, ideology, and excitement, arguing ideology is the most useful because a target can be convinced he's a "kindred spirit" even without genuinely shared interests; this Robert, by contrast, checked every box on Dr. Robert Hare's Psychopathy Checklist,Revised and was, in Kiriakou's telling, driven by none of the four except excitement, an "excitement junkie" easy to manipulate with simple attention and flattery. Kiriakou used that trait against him: after the prison's kitchen staff spent a week stealing the meat ration, leaving inmates with vegetable pot pie and vegetable fried rice, Kiriakou needled Robert about being "ripped off" until Robert anonymously reported the thieves to the administration, getting almost the entire kitchen staff fired and replaced.

Guards, medicine and the institution

Guard culture

The book covers, among other subjects, guard culture in federal prisons, including Kiriakou's observation that correctional officers are often people who washed out of the military or failed police academy entry, and whom he described as using authority over prisoners as an outlet for unresolved personal grievances. Guard reactions to him were split: one whispered "traitor" as he walked past on his first day, while another quietly confided that he thought what Kiriakou did was brave and asked how to apply to the CIA.

Prison medicine

He describes federal prison medicine as neglectful bordering on lethal. Insulin-dependent diabetics lined up for medication at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., while inmates on sedating psychiatric drugs lined up separately at 7 p.m., in what inmates called the "zombie pill line." A man in solitary confinement, desperate to get out, smashed his cell window and ate the glass, then called for help; guards told him "tough luck," and he bled to death after the glass shredded his stomach. An elderly Italian inmate's weeks of severe back pain were dismissed with Tylenol until he needed first a walker, then a wheelchair; only after the prison chaplain intervened was he sent for an X-ray, which found stage-four spinal cancer. When he applied for compassionate release, the warden offered to let him go only if he signed a statement that medical staff had treated him appropriately; he refused, so his family could sue over his care, and died in his bunk.

Small indignities, and the institution's logic

Kiriakou converted to Judaism while incarcerated in order to receive kosher meals, a workaround inmates envied, and one the Bureau of Prisons denied to Muslim inmates, who were not given halal meals because the bureau said it was too expensive. Despite holding a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies and having completed PhD coursework in international affairs, when he offered to teach a GED class, his case manager instead made him a chapel janitor. He broke a finger on his third day inside and, offered outside medical treatment only if he signed a form acknowledging he could be shot if he tried to escape and agreed to address guards as "sir," refused on both counts and ultimately got the treatment anyway.

Kiriakou also describes the institution's own logic of violence. Inmates known from the checkout sheet to be leaving the next day were frequently beaten by others, he says, simply out of jealousy, a danger a senior Bonanno-family captain warned him about directly, advising him to lie and tell people he had a five-year sentence rather than his actual two, since a short sentence would mark him as a target; by the time anyone realized he was actually leaving, he was already gone.

Where the danger actually was

Asked whether being a former intelligence officer in federal prison brought extra danger from other inmates, Kiriakou inverted the premise: "I'll tell you the truth, the only threats that I ever faced in prison were from the guards, not from other prisoners. It was the guards that were corrupt and violent." He has made the same point about the rules themselves, that they were less about protecting him from other prisoners than from the guards, whom he considered far more dangerous. He describes the strategy he adopted on the day he arrived as a deliberate application of his agency training, to keep himself safe "and at the top of the social heap", and says he began by forging strategic alliances.

His summary of the compound's social order is a single comparison: "Going to prison is like going back into 1950s America. All the blacks sit together, all the Hispanics sit together, all the whites sit together ... and never the two shall meet." He says he refused to observe it, and kept friends among Black, Hispanic and Asian prisoners. Looking back on the whole sentence, the challenge he names is not the population but the institution: "the only real challenge I had was dealing with the guards and the administration."

Doing time as a subject

Kiriakou describes prison as making a person intensely aware of time and of exactly how it is passing, because the days are regulated, timed and tightly controlled. Every prisoner knows his out-date.

Long-timers and short-timers

Prisoners serving long or life terms, he says, have to change how they think about time altogether, and to find a reason to go on: small creature comforts become disproportionately important, and men who cannot conceive of themselves as doing time at that scale instead follow strict daily schedules, secure the most stable and trusted jobs, and engage deeply in hobbies, sport, physical fitness or religion, teaching themselves, in his phrase, to live differently than they lived before.

Against that he sets his own category, the short-timers, counting the seconds, and names the condition: short-timers' disease, a state of heightened anxiety, impatience and intense focus on the outside world that makes the final weeks feel as though they are taking forever. He had a year to go, which he notes is no time at all to a man serving thirty and a bright beam of sunlight to a lifer. By that stage he had established himself in the Loretto community as a straight shooter whom other prisoners could trust as far as prisoners trust anyone, and considered the prison authorities, though still determined to silence him, to be outclassed and outwitted.

Why he did not keep his head down

His explanation for why he did not simply keep his head down is that a whistleblower cannot unsee what he has seen. The moral outrage, he argues, is almost beside the point; what matters is that the thing causing it is illegal and someone is getting away with it, and that the whistleblower can stop it, not in one stroke, but over time and with others, until the outrage reaches a critical mass.

Release and its aftermath

It took six months after his release for recurring PTSD dreams to stop, the same dream every night, that his release had been a mistake and he had to sneak back into prison before the next count. Because he had angered the warden by writing and smuggling out a blog from inside, Kiriakou received zero halfway-house credit and served his full sentence; he was then assigned to a halfway house called Hope Village, inmates called it "Hopeless Village" or "Abandon All Hope Village", which housed 140 men and had a single job posted on its job board, for a car wash. A progressive Washington think tank hired him at minimum wage; after six months he had to crowdfund his own salary on GoFundMe, and he later took a job as a radio host, but the income wasn't enough, and his marriage ended.

Years later, the newly appointed Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons called Kiriakou out of the blue, saying the president had mandated a complete overhaul of the bureau, and, after a decade of Kiriakou publicly criticizing the agency, asked him to join a reform advisory committee; Kiriakou accepted immediately and recommended a fellow ex-prisoner, one who had served 17 years for what Kiriakou says should not have drawn 17 days, to serve alongside him.

A sequel on everyday application

Kiriakou also authored an earlier memoir, The Reluctant Spy, about his CIA career and the war on terror.

Asked in 2026 how much of his field training he still uses, Kiriakou answered "All of them", and placed the two books on a continuum. Doing Time Like a Spy is "about how I used those skills in prison"; the follow-up generalises the same material to ordinary life. He described it as "something like the ultimate guide to CIA tactics, techniques, and something", due out on 11 August, covering "Surveillance, surveillance detection, counter surveillance, lying, lie detection, and disappearing and living off the grid."

In progress, February 2015

The earliest reference to the book in the corpus dates it as unfinished. Interviewed days after his release to home confinement, Kiriakou was described by the interviewer as "currently writing a book about the conditions you encountered in prison," and asked what those conditions had been. The two he reached for first are the two the finished book dwells on: the food and the medical care.

What he says about each in that interview is compressed to a sentence apiece. On the food: "American prisoners aren't even fed human grade food." On the medical care: "the medical care was even worse." Both are expanded at prison food economy and prison medical care.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- FCI Loretto
