"There is almost no upside"
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"There is almost no upside" is John Kiriakou's summary of the whistleblower's balance sheet, delivered to a former New York police sergeant who had lost an eighteen-year pension for the same reasons.

The moment

Kiriakou dates the change in his life to a single realisation, and offers it as something he recognises in others. "I got to tell you, I've I've been there. I remember like the instant that I realized, 'Wait a minute, they're investigating me.' And things were never the same after that."

The losses

The accounting is given as a list, ordered so that the worst comes last. "You know, you and I are in the same We're in the same boat here. I lost my pension. Um my friends walked away from me. Lost my freedom. In the end, I lost my family."

The conclusion follows immediately: "there's almost no upside. I mean, I And I know you'll agree with me on this. There's almost no upside."

What is left

Kiriakou does not claim there is nothing on the other side of the ledger, only that there is very little. "The upside is you know you did the right thing. You know in your heart that you're the good guy. They're the bad guys. It's the system that's corrupt."

And he refuses to sentimentalise the recovery: "But there's no there's no getting around the fact that it could take decades to rebuild what you lost."

The timeline

Against that he sets his own chronology, offered as an argument that the wait can end. "But you know, I blew the whistle Yeah I blew the whistle in 2007. I got arrested in 2012. I went to prison in 2013. Got out in 2015. My life was in shambles."

The turn comes at the end of the sentence: "But here we are 11 years later and the bad guys now are facing grand juries and facing felony charges. And now it's going to be their turn. So there really is such a thing as karma."

The five-year gap between the 2007 interview and the 2012 arrest is the part of the timeline Kiriakou elsewhere explains by the intervention of John Brennan and the secret reopening of a case the FBI had already declined to bring.

See also

- Frank Serpico
- The legal definition of whistleblowing
- "Whistleblowers die broke"
- Whistleblower psychology
