Whistleblower psychology
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Whistleblower psychology is John Kiriakou's recurring attempt to explain why a very small number of people inside an institution act on what everyone in it can see.

The trait

He credits Daniel Ellsberg with teaching him the framing, "one of the things that dan uh taught me uh early on was that uh there's a greater good uh there's a greater good with whistleblowing", and then points to research: "one of the things that i learned from a recent study on whistleblowers is that there that whistleblowers have a much more highly defined sense of right and wrong than the general population this is something borne out in psychological uh studies."

The practical consequence is a calculation. When a whistleblower is weighing disclosure of "waste fraud abuse or illegality or threats to the public health or public safety," the greater good enters the reckoning, as does the expectation of vindication on a long horizon: "eventually history is going to catch up with the issue and with everybody else uh you may be vilified the way dan was vilified the way julian assange is being vilified right now but eventually the rest of the world will catch up we've seen this happen throughout history."

The cost

Against that Kiriakou sets an unqualified claim about the aftermath. Asked whether there is a feeling of loneliness, isolation and hopelessness, he answered: "i would defy you to to name one whistleblower who hasn't considered suicide uh in in his or her darkest days after going public and realizing just how little public support there is out there."

His own experience of that absence was specific. A retired deputy director of the CIA wrote to him privately, "you've chosen a difficult road but i'm glad somebody did i just wish i had had the courage to do it myself", a message Kiriakou says he saved, and which "translated into nothing for me no support at all no public support." He was ostracized by his former colleagues "even if they were whispering very quietly among themselves that i had done the right thing."

He attributes part of the isolation to structural conditions in the press rather than to public indifference alone: when the media is owned by large corporations and the big newspapers no longer fund investigative reporting, they rely on press releases and on friendly relations with the agencies' public affairs offices, "a whistleblower doesn't have a chance you don't have a chance because you don't have the same kind of access to this corporate media that the rest of them do you're on your own."

The first weeks

Kiriakou treats suicidal ideation as the ordinary opening phase of a whistleblower's prosecution rather than an exceptional response to it. "I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that every whistleblower who's facing prison considers suicide. It's just a natural thing. I've spoken to 50 different whistleblowers, and to a man and woman every one of them considered committing suicide in the very beginning. It's that terrible, it's that difficult. You really feel that isolated."

What he credits with turning his own case was his wife's assessment two days after the arraignment, "they have consistently underestimated your strength, you can take them; you have to fight them", together with her instruction to own the disclosure rather than apologise for it, on the reasoning that "if I kept talking about it, eventually my side of the story would become the side of record, and the government's story would disappear after a while, because they would move on to their next victim." The next victim, he notes, was Edward Snowden.

He applies the same mechanism to prolonged isolation, using the agency's own vocabulary: "at the CIA they called it learned helplessness, and that's exactly what it is. You just accept the fact that you're helpless and there's nothing you can do that's going to help you, and so you just fall apart. I think that's what they're counting on."

The profile of four

Kiriakou credits the two-part characterisation to a specific piece of research. Years before the 2019 interview he spoke with an Israeli journalist who had written a book, a psychological profile of four twentieth-century whistleblowers, and who came to two conclusions Kiriakou calls fascinating.

The first is the trait: "whistleblowers have a far more highly developed sense of right and wrong than the general population, a very clearly defined sense of right and wrong." The second is the cost: "whistleblowers never make a financial comeback. They believe in their hearts they do the right thing, but then they're ruined financially and they never recover from it."

He attaches one qualification of his own, prompted by the host: the finding holds for government whistleblowers. Corporate whistleblowers can in some cases collect a percentage of the damages recovered, which is a different economic position entirely.

"They can't stop themselves"

Kiriakou attributes the formulation to a journalist who also happens to be a psychologist, and who told him after his own disclosure that in his studies "whistleblowers have an unusually highly defined sense of right and wrong. It's far more highly defined than it is in the general populace."

> "And he said, 'It's almost like whistleblowers can't stop themselves.' And I said, 'That's how I felt.' I couldn't stop myself. I couldn't sleep at night knowing that this was happening in our name. That the government was carrying out these crimes in our name. So, I had to say something."

He offers it as description rather than as justification, and it sits directly against his answer to the question of why he did not use internal channels.

See also

- Daniel Ellsberg
- Julian Assange
- CIA media relations
- Death threats against Kiriakou
