Truck and Cat in the Hat
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Truck and Cat in the Hat were the prison nicknames of two men in John Kiriakou's housing unit at FCI Loretto. Kiriakou tells the story of the fight between them as an illustration of two operating rules he carried from the CIA into prison, and is candid that it does not reflect well on him: "you're going to think less of me, and I don't care."

The two men

Truck was a serial killer serving life, so called because he had driven long-haul routes between the east and west coasts, picking up women working at truck stops, raping and murdering them and dumping the bodies hundreds of miles further on. Police estimated fourteen victims, in Kiriakou's account probably more; he was caught in the 1970s, before DNA testing, when a woman he strangled survived and gave police his licence number.

Kiriakou describes Truck as persistently seeking his approval, saving him a seat for Pittsburgh Steelers games, recommending a classic rock station, a dynamic that began, he thinks, when he unknowingly dismissed the man's boast of having run a shrimp boat full of weapons to Angola for the CIA. Not knowing who he was talking to, Kiriakou told him to get lost and walked away; bystanders were astonished. Truck was, Kiriakou notes, extremely sensitive about the term chomo, prison slang for a child molester, because one of the women he had killed was sixteen.

Cat in the Hat was so named for an elongated skull Kiriakou attributes to a birth defect. He had asked to move into Kiriakou's cell; Kiriakou, applying the unit's stated rules against housing sex offenders or informants, asked what he was in for. The answer was murder for hire, he had owed the mob $100,000 in gambling debts, taken out a life insurance policy on his business partner, and hired a hitman who was caught. Kiriakou checked the case in the prison law library and found the account true but incomplete: the man had informed on the hitman to avoid the federal death penalty, taking twenty years instead. Kiriakou refused him the cell on that basis, "no rats in the room", and made an enemy.

The incident

Kiriakou had been called to the lieutenants' office to sign a waiver permitting an interview with Jake Tapper. Inside a prison, he notes, being summoned there and returning generally reads as having informed on someone. Sitting in the TV room beside Truck, he overheard Cat in the Hat, with his back turned, unaware Kiriakou was eighteen inches away, tell another prisoner that Kiriakou had gone down to rat them out.

Truck relayed the insult. Kiriakou's response was a fabrication he knew the effect of: he said that an hour earlier he had heard Cat in the Hat call Truck a chomo. "Which was a total lie. I just made it up. He didn't say a single word." Truck stood up, crossed the room and beat the man nearly to death; a helicopter landed in the yard to airlift him to Pittsburgh. Truck received five additional years.

Kiriakou's own framing is explicit: "one of my rules that I learned at the CIA, let others do your dirty work."

The aftermath

Six weeks later Cat in the Hat was released from hospital, still visibly injured, and apologised for having called Kiriakou a rat. With the unit watching to see what he would do, Kiriakou answered: "so help me God, if I ever hear my name cross your lips ever again, you're dead, and they won't even find you."

Summoned again by the lieutenants, who told him they had four camera angles of him saying something to Truck immediately before the assault, Kiriakou denied everything, said he had been watching the Steelers game, and then suggested the lieutenant might himself have put the two men up to fighting, adding that he was considering filing a complaint. He was told to get out of the office. He gives this as the second rule: "admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations."

The 'half an hour ago I heard him call you a pedophile' set-up

On Covert Strategies Revealed in May 2026, John Kiriakou returned to the Truck-and-Cat-in-the-Hat episode with additional detail. He had been called down to the lieutenant's office earlier that day, usually a sign either of solitary or of being pressed to inform, because Jake Tapper had driven up from CNN to interview him and he had to sign a waiver. Cat in the Hat, standing two feet in front of him in the day room and not realising Kiriakou was behind him, told the man next to him: "Did you hear Kiriakou got called down to the lieutenant's office? That guy's a rat. He got called down to rat us out." Truck, the serial killer sitting next to Kiriakou watching a Steelers game, heard it and said "did you hear that guy? He just said you're a rat." Kiriakou, using what he calls his CIA training, answered: "half an hour ago I heard him call you a pedophile." Truck, without saying a word, got up and beat Cat in the Hat "almost to death." A helicopter landed in the yard to life-flight him to Pittsburgh; Truck was given five more years and sent to a medium-security prison. Cat in the Hat returned six weeks later, unable to meet Kiriakou's eye, and apologised: "I should never have said that, it wasn't true." Kiriakou answered: "As God is my witness, if I ever hear my name cross your lips ever again, you're dead. And you'll never see it coming."

See also

- FCI Loretto
- Italians at Loretto
- Aryan Brotherhood
- John Kiriakou
