Jake Tapper
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Jake Tapper is the CNN anchor who became, improbably, part of John Kiriakou's prison survival strategy.

How the press found him

The chain began with a letter. Jesselyn Radack had told Kiriakou to write to her once he was inside and she would forward it to a mailing list of some six hundred people; what he wrote described two crimes committed against him by guards, naming staff malfeasance, which is not something prisoners do. Unknown to him, Radack was a friend of Arianna Huffington, who ran it as a banner headline on the Huffington Post. It drew two million hits in the first week. The precipitating incident was that within four days of arriving he had been solicited into what the law library told him was a class D felony, conspiracy to promote violence in a federal facility, an approach he read as an attempt to get him to kill a prisoner, or get one to kill him, apparently for sport.

Tapper drove to FCI Loretto to interview him for CNN, at the head of a wave that ran to NPR several times, Playboy, The Economist, the Atlantic Monthly, Time, the back cover of The Nation, ABC News, all four broadcast networks, CNN, Fox and MSNBC, and a steady stream of Greek newspapers, Kiriakou being a dual citizen and, in Greece, a star for having stood up to the American government. Arianna Huffington came too, with two young journalists.

Saying yes to every request was a deliberate position rather than vanity. Kiriakou had been ordered by the judge to a minimum-security work camp, no fences, no bars, doors never locked, and the Justice Department, furious at the ruling, sent him instead to the regular prison across the street on the grounds that a trained CIA officer was a national security threat. Having been put there, he used the access as a soapbox on prison conditions, medical facilities and violence encouraged by guards and the administration. It drove the warden crazy, and it became his second book. Alongside it he answered more than seven thousand of the sixty to eighty letters a day that arrived, and wrote op-eds longhand on a legal pad for the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Armor

That access became protection. When guards threatened him, Kiriakou's standing reply was: "Yeah? Well, let's see what Jake Tapper has to say about it. How about that, why don't we give him a call and see what he has to say?" And they would back off.

The clearest measure of it reached him secondhand. A guard with a reputation as a psychopath, a man who enjoyed hurting people, never once touched Kiriakou. Assigned to Central One unit, he mentioned it to an Italian prisoner, who said his friend John was in that unit. "The CIA guy?" the guard asked, and explained why he left him alone: "that's all I need. I work an eight-hour day and then I go out to the parking lot and CNN is next to my car."

It did not stop the warden trying. Called in and told "I'm going to put you in solitary and we're going to forget where you are and throw away the key," Kiriakou decided he had nothing to lose and answered that he had gone nose to nose with al-Qaeda, with Hezbollah and with the Iranians, and had lived in a great deal worse than Loretto's solitary.

"Jake was different"

Kiriakou generally files CNN under the go-along-to-get-along mainstream. But Tapper, he says, was different: Tapper asked President Obama at a press conference why he had insisted on prosecuting Kiriakou when Kiriakou had exposed a crime, "and Obama just walked away from the podium." The two have stayed in touch since Kiriakou came home.

The prison interview, and the friendship

Asked in 2026 to name journalists he respects, Kiriakou reached first for independent reporters, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, Kevin Gosztola, and Jason Leopold, whom he notes "we might call mainstream. He's with Bloomberg", before conceding that his mind "doesn't even go to the mainstream outlets."

Tapper is the exception, and Kiriakou discloses the reason: "As mainstream as I'm going to get, and I'm biased cuz I like him and he's a good guy, is Jake Tapper." The acquaintance dates from his imprisonment, "he came to the prison to interview me in 2013, and we've been friends ever since", and Kiriakou lets stand, without dissent, his co-host's qualification that Tapper "doesn't have full freedom of movement" at a network and would be different with a show of his own.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- Barack Obama
- Letter from Loretto
- Doing Time Like a Spy
- Arianna Huffington
