The job in the medical practice
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Asked what he came out of prison to, John Kiriakou answered: "literally nothing." The government had taken his pension, his money and his housing.

The invented job

What there was came from a friend's family. "The parents of a friend of mine, both physicians, offered me a job in their medical practice. They just sort of made up a job just so I had something."

Kiriakou does not name them and does not describe the work. The point of the telling is that the position did not exist until it was needed.

The think tank

From there he went to a progressive think tank in Washington, the Institute for Policy Studies. It lasted a year, and ended in a mass layoff: "they had a massive layoff after a year because, you know, liberal groups, they don't have any money. And so they laid off fourteen of us."

Patching it together

What replaced steady employment was an assembly of part-time work: books, lecturing mostly at American universities and increasingly in Europe, two syndicated newspaper columns, a radio show. "But it's hard. You have to patch things together little by little", and the hardest part, he says, is keeping the cash flow coming.

He is careful to say the difficulty was not what he expected. "You think that you can just come out and step back into your life again and you can't. Your life is never going to be the same." He found release harder than he had anticipated, and says he still has prison dreams, a variation of the same dream almost every night.

The end of the marriage

The other thing that arrived once he was steady was the end of his second marriage. He describes his wife through that period as "just rock solid, the greatest supporter I could ever hope for", and then, once he was back on his feet and had said so, she told him she wanted a divorce. He was left with custody of five children.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- FCI Loretto
- "Whistleblowers die broke"
- The halfway house
- The legal bills
