Prison phone monitoring
=======================

On his first day at FCI Loretto, Kiriakou signed a form acknowledging that he would be monitored electronically. He treats this as unremarkable, and, being a spy accustomed to having his calls listened to, turned it to use.

Planting messages

Kiriakou describes frequently using his calls to plant messages among staff he knew were listening. Examples he gives include telling a friend or his wife that if a particular officer did not get off his back he would write an article about him and humiliate him in print, and claiming that a prisoner in his room whom he disliked had stolen a hundred dollars' worth of chicken and had it in a cooler under his bed. His summary of the arrangement is that the officers believed they were gathering intelligence when in fact he was using them.

The Nimrod confrontation

On Thanksgiving night 2013 Kiriakou called his wife and described being chewed out in the commissary earlier that day for asking for more cup-a-soups than he was entitled to, a scene he compared to Oliver Twist. He told her the officers were tough only when a prisoner could not answer back and when they sat behind two inches of glass, and wondered aloud how tough they would be if he met them on the street. In that context he referred to one of them as a Nimrod.

A lieutenant, whom Kiriakou describes as spending his free time listening to recordings of those calls, heard it. Kiriakou and his wife hung up at 7:30 p.m.; count was at 9:30, which nobody ever missed for any reason. At 9:20 the prison public-address system ordered him to the lieutenant's office. Reading the summons as certain solitary confinement, he told his roommates it had been great knowing them and to help themselves to his locker, and asked a fellow prisoner to call his wife and tell her where he was.

The lieutenant opened by asking whether they could talk "man to man", which Kiriakou identifies as prison code meaning the officer intends to scream and swear without being reported, and which by the same logic freed Kiriakou to do likewise. Asked whether he was an educated man, Kiriakou refused the rhetorical question. The lieutenant then demanded to know whether Kiriakou thought he was a Nimrod, and Kiriakou answered that he had not fully formed an opinion yet, and that he was surprised a private conversation with his wife had offended him.

Ordered to stand at attention, Kiriakou refused and told the lieutenant to go and fornicate himself, adding that he was at best a medium-sized fish in a very small pond. The lieutenant countered with his own biography, a GED earned in a youth correctional facility in Philadelphia, and a tour in Afghanistan, to each of which Kiriakou returned a flat courtesy that Kiriakou identifies as among his favourite insults.

Told he had better not be heard criticising another officer on a call to his wife, Kiriakou replied that walking through the prison doors had not surrendered his right to freedom of speech, and that he could tell his wife anything he wanted so long as it was not a threat, not in furtherance of a crime, and not for the purpose of running a business, advising the lieutenant to read the regulations, as he had.

The exchange ended with the lieutenant demanding that Kiriakou start acting like an inmate, and Kiriakou asking whether that meant getting a facial tattoo or stealing food from the cafeteria, and stating that he would never wring his hands and say yes sir or no sir: "You are not going to institutionalize me." Count time interrupted; the unit officer telephoned to ask whether Kiriakou should be counted in the unit or in solitary. The lieutenant said to count him, and hung up.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- Solitary confinement
- Correctional officers at FCI Loretto
- Doing Time Like a Spy
