The open letter to Edward Snowden
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John Kiriakou had been at FCI Loretto roughly four months when Edward Snowden went public. He wrote him a letter.

How it was sent

It went out privately, routed through an attorney the two men had in common, and was written "just from the benefit of my own experience." Kiriakou expected it to reach the lawyer, perhaps a couple of hundred other people, and eventually Snowden himself.

The three pieces of advice

The first was to find the best national-security attorneys money could buy, "essentially my insurance", advice Snowden took, engaging Kiriakou's own lawyers.

The second was to cultivate his natural bases of support, especially on Capitol Hill. Kiriakou says this took time but was also done, and attaches to it his view that the political spectrum "is not a straight line, it's a circle", that the far left and the far right meet at the point where they care about civil liberties, and that it was civil libertarians on both sides who came out for Snowden. He credits that coalition with the fact that elements of the Patriot Act had begun falling away.

The third he calls the most important: "don't ever, ever, under any circumstances talk to the FBI." The reasoning is institutional rather than moral, "they will lie, they will cheat, they will twist your words, they'll wiretap you and then take your statements out of context to use against you in court. Remember they get promoted if you go to prison. That's the only way for them to get ahead in their careers is for you to go to prison."

How it travelled

The letter was not meant to be a publication. What made it one was Arianna Huffington, who had already given Kiriakou's first prison letter, his letter from Loretto, a million readers, and who did the same again. The Snowden letter went past two million hits.

The attention that followed came to the prison. CNN drove out to interview him; the American programme 60 Minutes came; the letter was covered in outlets ranging from Time to Playboy to The Economist to The Atlantic Monthly. "And thanks to Arianna we got it immediately back to" Snowden.

Kiriakou draws a lesson from that which he applies generally to activists: ideas make no difference if nobody knows about them. "If we have access to the press, that's how we win."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Edward Snowden
- Arianna Huffington
- Letter from Loretto
- FCI Loretto
