Sam Adams Award
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The Sam Adams Award for integrity in intelligence is the whistleblower community's highest honor, and came to John Kiriakou in 2016, after prison.

The namesake

Kiriakou tells the story behind the name: this Sam Adams, not the founding father, was a senior CIA analyst of the 1960s and early 1970s, the first and effectively only person to challenge the official count of communist forces in South Vietnam. When Adams's friends retired and formed Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, they established the award in his memory. It has been given out roughly a dozen times: Kiriakou won in 2016, Sy Hersh the next year, and Edward Snowden a couple of years before.

At the Sam Adams Associates events Kiriakou attends, Ray McGovern, who entered the agency the same day as Adams, recounts the underlying scandal: Adams's numbers put enemy strength at 500,000 to 600,000, while General Westmoreland decreed it could not be more than 299,000.

Kiriakou's award

The Sam Adams community gathered at American University to add Kiriakou's name to a list of recipients that includes Snowden and Julian Assange, the honor arriving nearly ten years after the ABC interview and two years of prison. The Associates, as the presenters noted, double as a support group for whistleblowers.

In Kiriakou's own description the body behind it is a group of retired intelligence officers drawn from the CIA, the NSA, the Defense Department and the FBI, who give the integrity award once a year; his came as soon as he got out of prison.

It was not the only one. The prison memoir he wrote inside won the PEN Center First Amendment award, one of what Kiriakou calls the big four American book prizes, alongside the PEN/Faulkner, the Pulitzer and the Edgar Allan Poe. He also holds the Blueprint for Free Speech award for courage and integrity in whistleblowing, and an annual award for honesty and integrity in rule of law from the Committee for the Republic, a conservative Republican group in Washington. The whole sequence, he notes, made him famous in the United States as a champion of civil rights, civil liberties, human rights and the rule of law, a role he never expected and did not seek.

The "Sam Adams project" warning

A separate matter shares the name and is worth distinguishing. While Kiriakou was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a reporter from the conservative paper in Washington, a man with a bad reputation whose lunch invitations Kiriakou kept deleting until his boss authorized the meeting, lowered his voice at the end of the lunch and said he had a source at the FBI who reported Kiriakou was under surveillance. The suspicion was that he was the source of the "Sam Adams project," which the reporter described as an ACLU effort to defend the Guantánamo detainees. Kiriakou had never heard of it and had never spoken to anyone at the ACLU. Having been a surveillance instructor at the CIA and having seen no surveillance at all, he dismissed the whole thing as a mistake, which, he says, was stupid: a normal person would have appreciated being told. (The project name is given here as the auto-captions render it; it is unrelated to the Sam Adams Award or the Associates.)

Awarded to Hale

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity gave the award to Daniel Hale while he was imprisoned, an occasion Kiriakou put to his guest as the natural close of the programme.

See also

- Ray McGovern
- Edward Snowden
- Julian Assange
- Vietnam War
