Kiriakou's writing process
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Kiriakou's writing process is something John Kiriakou says he had never been asked about until a listener put the question to him in 2026, "nobody's ever asked me that before."

Books, in waves

His normal pace for a book is about nine months, worked in bursts rather than daily quotas. A representative session: thinking about a particular mafia figure, finding "a little angle I wanted to get down on paper," then sitting and writing for an hour, about 600 words, before moving on.

The exception was Remains of the Day, his guide to Washington's historic cemeteries, written "in 6 weeks during COVID" because the subject held him. He would come home from his radio show, make dinner, sit down at seven, "and then I look at the clock again, it's 2:00 in the morning. I'm like, oh my god, what happened?" His conclusion about that state: "sometimes you get on a roll and you just can't stop."

Op-eds, in one sitting

The op-ed process is deliberately slower at the front and faster at the end. He lets an idea "develop over the course of a couple days," sometimes opening a Word document to put down a couple of sentences and then leaving it "for a day or two just to let my brain process it."

Then it comes out in one go. An op-ed "is supposed to be between 700 and 1200 words, and I can usually do that in an hour or 45 minutes if I feel strongly about it."

He writes them a couple of times a week, mostly for Consortium News and CovertAction Magazine, sometimes Prison Legal News. Past outlets he lists include the Washington Post, the LA Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Guardian.

The two a.m. habit

Asked on Facebook whether he ever sleeps, his answer was that he does not much, "I don't know if it's stress or anxiety or whatever, but no."

What he does with the hours is work: "it's not uncommon for me to get up at 2:00 in the morning and say, 'Well, I'm up. I might as well make $400 and write an op-ed.' So I'll just write an op-ed and just send it to somebody. See if they pay me $400."

A worked example: the gerrymandering piece

The op-ed he was planning that day concerned Republican efforts to redraw districts in Texas to take five Democratic seats, and his objection was that nobody was reporting the actual history. "I have no idea why none of the big outlets have said what I'm going to say."

His argument is that the plan is a reversion, not an innovation: it returns to how districts were divided in the 1980s. Gerrymandering as practised since the 1990s was designed to protect incumbents, a Republican who used to win with 54 or 55% would now take 90%, "but the Democrat also gets 90%." Redistributing those safe Democratic votes to try to flip seats only works one way: "sure, in a Republican year, but in a Democratic year, the Republicans lose."

Hence his reading of the panic: "everybody's losing their minds over the fact that the Republicans might pick up five seats. Yeah, the Democrats might pick up 10 seats. The Republicans are playing with fire here."

He also rejects the framing of a New York Times op-ed that day arguing the real story was Democrats gerrymandering too: "That's not the story. Of course the Democrats are going to gerrymander. The story is this has already been tried." The evidence he points to is wave size, where recent cycles moved about two House seats, 1974 moved roughly 64 and 1994 roughly 68. "We're going to start seeing these big waves again."

Reach

Asked to account for his own audience, Kiriakou credits a short run of podcast appearances rather than any of the writing. About eighteen months before November 2025 he recorded, "one right after the other over the course of maybe two months," three long-form interviews, with Julian Dorey, Dalton Fischer and Danny Jones, and "for whatever reason, the three of you together talking about these issues just allowed me to hit the YouTube algorithm sweet spot." The effect he cites is not statistical: "I was pumping gas yesterday and two guys at different pumps asked me for selfies."

The reading his interviewer offers, that the full-length format let audiences see the analysis rather than only the grievance, is one Kiriakou accepts, and it is consistent with what he says he tries to do: lay out the reasoning step by step rather than inject anger at the people who prosecuted him.

The Greek editions

Kiriakou has contrasted the American and Greek afterlives of his first two books. Both were translated into Spanish and Greek, and both reached number one on the Athens bestseller list; as recently as two weeks before speaking he had received another cheque from the Greek publisher for a second printing. "So, they're still buying it in Greek. I don't know why nobody cares in the United States."

The contrast he draws is with The Reluctant Spy, which reached number five on the New York Times bestseller list and is now out of print. He says he does not know why Random House will not do a second run, notes that readers tell him it is hard to get, and that copies run to one or two hundred dollars, "You can't even find it on eBay anymore."

The cemetery series

On the later work, Kiriakou describes a deliberate turn from commissioned books to books written for himself, beginning with The Remains of the Day, a guide to Washington's historic cemeteries. The editorial board liked it enough to commission four more: Whispers in the Dirt on New York City's mob graves, then volumes on the historic cemeteries of Chicago, the country-western graves of Nashville, and the graves of America's most notorious serial killers.

On his rate of production he is blunt about the mechanism: "I don't sleep very much. So, I bang these things out."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Remains of the Day
- Consortium News
- CovertAction Magazine
