Letter from Loretto
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Letter from Loretto is a prison newsletter John Kiriakou wrote from FCI Loretto, consciously modeled, "very arrogantly," by his own description, on Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." The newsletter documented daily life inside the prison and, in doing so, inadvertently exposed two crimes committed against him by guards, one of them a felony.

Origins and viral spread

Before Kiriakou left for prison, attorney Jesselyn Radack set up a mailing list of roughly 600 supporters who wanted news of his case, telling him to send a letter once he felt settled. Radack and Daniel Ellsberg, who became Kiriakou's regular prison pen pal (see below), encouraged him to write an open letter to his supporters once the initial shock of incarceration had worn off. Kiriakou sent the letter to Radack, who forwarded it to Jane Hamsher of the site Firedoglake.com; Hamsher published it and sent it on to Arianna Huffington, who ran it as a banner headline on the Huffington Post, drawing more than a million hits, by one later account as many as two million, in its first week. Within 48 hours of the Huffington Post publication, FCI Loretto was fielding press calls from CNN, Fox, ABC News, Time, The Week, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Playboy, The Economist, and NPR, all seeking to interview Kiriakou; CNN and 60 Minutes both came to the prison in person, and the internal investigation the warden opened afterward targeted how Kiriakou had gotten the letter published rather than the guard conduct it described. Celebrities including Susan Sarandon, Yoko Ono, John Cusack, and Oliver Stone tweeted in his support, and the peace group Code Pink logged 1,600 calls to the director of the Bureau of Prisons demanding he be left alone.

Guard retaliation

After publication, a guard Kiriakou had publicly nicknamed "Sarge", who mispronounced his name, prompting him to call her "fuckface" in the letter, retaliated with a cell shakedown, throwing his belongings on the floor and asking if she was the guard he had described. Kiriakou notes that a guard swearing at an inmate by name is technically a crime (a misdemeanor with escalating penalties), while the felony he separately exposed in the letter, two officers attempting to incite him and a Kurdish prisoner to attack each other, amounted to conspiracy to incite violence in a federal facility, carrying a 2-to-5-year sentence. Kiriakou has described how that second episode began: after he chatted briefly with an Iraqi Kurd inmate and shook his hand, he was summoned to the lieutenant's office, where officers showed him a photo of the man on a screen and told him that "when you walked away, he made a call to Pakistan and he was told to kill you", advising him to stay away. Kiriakou dismissed it ("I could kill this guy with my thumb") and quickly concluded the story was a clumsy fabrication: the man was an Iraqi Kurd, so why would he phone Pakistan, where no one speaks Arabic or Kurdish? Administrators also tried to retaliate materially: after the letters went public, guards attempted to rip his desk off the cell wall, but Kiriakou, having heard a rumor of the plan in advance, paid a fellow inmate a bag of tuna fish to strip the mounting screws beforehand, so the desk would not come free.

Legal mail as a shield

To keep his writing beyond the reach of prison censors, Kiriakou addressed his letters "Attorney Jesselyn Radack, Esquire, Government Accountability Project, Washington, DC" and marked them "legal mail," a category guards could not open, read, or photocopy for the FBI, protection he compared to a diplomatic pouch. His cousin, Kip Reese, who lived roughly 40-45 minutes away in Pittsburgh, was one of his greatest supporters and visited him regularly during his sentence.

Later letters and the PEN Award

The series continued across Kiriakou's 23-month sentence; his final letter listed nineteen things he would not miss about prison, and all but one of them, the pedophiles, involved staff rather than fellow inmates. The collected letters became part of his book Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison, for which Kiriakou won the 2016 PEN First Amendment Award, one of PEN's "big four" literary prizes, alongside the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award.

Daniel Ellsberg's support

Daniel Ellsberg served as Kiriakou's pen pal throughout his sentence: he called Kiriakou's wife to check on the children, and every letter he sent included a book, usually one he had written himself, signed "love Dan." Guards at Loretto, with whom Kiriakou otherwise had a difficult relationship, once pulled him aside to tell him, accurately, as it turned out, that Ellsberg was giving a talk that night at the small Catholic college in the town of Loretto, population roughly 1,200, whose prison had itself formerly been a Catholic monastery before the Bureau of Prisons bought it and added two wings.

Currency of information

Kiriakou says he learned early in his incarceration that information, not physical prison currency like mackerel packets ("mack") or stamps, was the most valuable commodity at FCI Loretto, a currency that gave him power beyond what material goods could provide. He put this to use fabricating fake court records, splicing a real 1970s Ohio case involving a different man of the same name who had raped a male prison guard with fictional details, to get a disliked Aryan-table cellmate falsely accused and banished to the "pedophile/rat table."

The Cenk Uygur misattribution

Kiriakou has described the letter as the second thing he did that got wide press coverage after blowing the whistle, and the occasion for Jake Tapper coming to the prison to interview him. The response, he said, was universally positive and interested, with one exception he named repeatedly over the years: a thirty-minute on-air attack by the Young Turks host Cenk Uygur, which he never understood, since he agreed with him on perhaps 95 per cent of issues.

Appearing on the programme in July 2026, Kiriakou was told that no such segment exists, the host had searched the archives after seeing the clip. Kiriakou accepted the correction and apologised: "I think I must have been temporarily insane or something." The episode was written off on both sides as mistaken identity.

How the letters got out

The distribution chain ran through Kiriakou's attorney Jesselyn Radack, who sent the letters to Jane Hamsher at the progressive news website Firedoglake. Hamsher, who was friendly with Arianna Huffington, published each letter first; the Huffington Post picked them up within about an hour, after which they spread through the independent and progressive media and then the mainstream press.

Kiriakou distinguishes sharply within that readership. The transparency proponents and opponents of the Espionage Act were, he says, entirely supportive; what he calls the pretend progressive media, naming MSNBC and Rachel Maddow, treated him as a troublemaker, a reaction he connects to the fact that it was the Obama administration that prosecuted him and John Brennan who insisted he be sent to prison.

His operational security around the letters was deliberate. Warned by the unit manager that the warden, assistant warden and several unit managers were gunning for him, he stopped leaving drafts in his locker: each letter went straight into an envelope marked legal mail on front and back and was walked to the mailroom immediately, so that it could not be intercepted.

He also had intelligence about the limits of the prison's power. His cousin Kip told him during a visit that the reason he had not been placed in solitary was that he had never named a member of staff, from which Kiriakou concluded that he could say anything he wanted and there was nothing they could do.

The halfway-house bargain

Asked repeatedly to stop writing, Kiriakou eventually named a price: he would stop if the prison put him in for the maximum halfway-house time for which he was eligible, six months. His reasoning was that because he was educated, had a support system and could easily get a job, he would spend a day or two in the halfway house before being converted to home confinement. The unit manager agreed, and Kiriakou stopped writing for several months, withdrew two formal complaints against staff and turned down all press interviews.

The deal collapsed in the cafeteria, where the unit manager told him it was not going to happen. Kiriakou ate as fast as he could, went to the phone and told his wife the staff were "degenerate liars." The unit manager, who had been listening to the call, summoned him and pointed out the insult; Kiriakou repeated it to his face. Threatened with solitary, he answered that he was not afraid of it and that it would be worse for the prison than for him. The unit manager backed off.

He resumed writing that day, intending the next letter as both a thank-you note and a direct challenge to the warden. Dated 20 January 2014, it set out the bargain publicly: stop writing, and be put in for nine months of halfway house, which would have seen him leave on 1 August 2014. He had been given six months instead, with a warning that six could be reduced to three or to nothing, and had decided to start writing again, a decision he closed with "God bless the Constitution and its First Amendment."

He notes as an aside that he ultimately received no halfway-house time at all, not a single day.

Congressional support

Kiriakou appended a postscript thanking Representative Jim Moran, Democrat of Virginia, who had sent a second letter to the Bureau of Prisons director Charles Samuels. Moran wrote that he had asked the previous September for at least nine months of halfway-house time, that twelve months was well within Bureau guidelines, and that he was disappointed to learn Kiriakou's return to society might be unnecessarily delayed, so that he could be a father to his five children. Kiriakou notes that Moran was a twelve-term congressman and a member of the House Appropriations Committee, which controls the Bureau's budget.

Reception

Not all of the response was favourable, and Kiriakou records his surprise at the volume of negative feedback to the letter dealing with sex offenders at the prison, a number of readers telling him that as a progressive he should be ashamed of himself.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- FCI Loretto
- Doing Time Like a Spy
