Martin Luther King Jr.
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Martin Luther King Jr. is the figure John Kiriakou reached for at the two hardest points of his story, naming his prison writing, and deciding not to be bitter.

Letter from Birmingham Jail, Letter from Loretto

Kiriakou wrote his first prison dispatch "to honor Martin Luther King and his Letter from Birmingham Jail." King, he says, is "such a giant and a beacon in my life... I'm not comparing myself to Martin Luther King, I could never shine Martin Luther King's shoes, but Letter from Birmingham Jail was an inspiration for me." The Letters from Loretto became the vehicle of his prison years.

The forgiveness model

Kiriakou's refusal of bitterness runs through King: Mandela did it, King did it, Gandhi did it, "these guys were all giants, and I thought when they said that they weren't bitter and that they forgave, they were telling the truth." People like King were wronged far worse than he was, assassinated for what he believed, "and so if they could forgive the people who wronged them, I could forgive the people who wronged me. I only lost two years of my life, not 35."

Politics and inheritance

Kiriakou's parents marched against Vietnam and marched for civil rights with Martin Luther King, the politically active left-wing household he measures today's Democratic Party against. He quotes King's hardest line as his own: "How do I preach non-violence to young kids in a ghetto when my government is the major purveyor of violence in the world today?" And he places King's assassination in his catalogue of what the unelected security state has been implicated in, alongside the breakup of the Black Panthers and the surveillance of Occupy.

That is not a passing suspicion. Kiriakou has set out his reasoning on the killing at length, the implausibility of James Earl Ray as lone gunman, and the FBI's documented attempt two years earlier to push King into suicide, in a case he treats as the weakest of the three covered by the 1992 assassination-records statute. See MLK assassination.

Two hundred agents, and a bug in the receiver

Discussing the documentary MLK/FBI in January 2023, Kiriakou set out what surveillance meant before the Vault 7 era. Agents had to enter homes physically "and unscrew the receiver on their phones and put a bug into the phone, screw it back up, and say, 'thank you, we just improved your phone service.' And then they leave."

One of King's deputies told him he thought they were under surveillance and their phones were tapped. "And Martin Luther King responded: the FBI has far more important things to worry about than what we're saying." In fact he was under round-the-clock coverage, with two hundred agents assigned to destroying him.

The effort travelled with him: "when Martin Luther King would travel to different cities, all of the FBI agents in each of those cities would literally drop everything they were doing and spy on Martin Luther King. Every city that he travelled to."

Kiriakou identifies the Nobel Prize as an aggravating factor rather than a protection: "they were particularly upset because he won the Nobel Prize. They did not want him to be a role model. They didn't want him to be a hero, and they didn't support the civil rights movement."

See also

- MLK assassination
- Letter from Loretto
- FCI Loretto
- John Kiriakou
