Kiriakou's television pilots
============================

Kiriakou's television pilots are, in his own framing, a hobby rather than a second career: "I as a hobby I like to write television pilots. And I've been, knock on wood, I've been very successful in the last 15 years. I've sold eight of them."

The first he sold was Bomb Squad, a procedural following a day in the life of the New York City bomb squad. He wrote it because of something a friend assigned to the squad told him, which he equates with the lesson of surveillance: fewer than one in a hundred bomb threats called in to the police has anything to do with terrorism, maybe one in a thousand. Almost every bomb threat, bomb scare or actual device is a jilted spouse or lover, an insurance scammer, or a mafia hit.

The conclusion John Kiriakou draws from that is the same one he draws about situational awareness generally: it means the victims are ordinary people going about their normal daily business, so everybody has to be aware of their surroundings and personally responsible for their own safety.

The pilots sit alongside his nine published books and a tenth commissioned as his first novel.

The other side of the credit

Alongside the pilots he has sold runs a second line of work, advising other people's productions. Kiriakou lists himself as script adviser on The Bourne Ultimatum, on From Paris with Love and on Kill the Messenger, as security adviser on another production, and, having just finished its first season when he described it, as script adviser on the CBS series True Lies, based on the James Cameron film of the same title. The point of listing them is not vanity but standing: it is the basis on which he says he is "acquainted with the way these things play out in Hollywood" before making his argument that the CIA learned from the FBI, decades late, that the thing to control is the narrative.

The one written in prison

He dates the hobby to 2007 and by 2019 had sold seven. The idea he rates highest came to him while he was incarcerated, "my best idea ever", and he sold it to MGM, which ordered a pilot. It was the first time one of his scripts had made it to pilot stage; he described finishing a fifth draft and preparing to fly to Los Angeles to pitch it to the networks.

A second project began the moment he was released. Oliver Stone telephoned as soon as Kiriakou got home and proposed working together; Kiriakou went to Los Angeles, and the two took the idea to the History Channel, which optioned a single chapter of his first book, the chapter about life inside the CIA immediately before, during and after 9/11, and how an organisation of thousands of smart, patriotic people became what it became.

Not every pitch went as far. One idea, unusually for him, was for a news programme; a friend named Rich, who had gone to high school with the man who was by then president of NBC News, offered to pitch it to him directly.

Representation, and the point of it

By 2026 the hobby had acquired an agent and a schedule. Kiriakou described meetings booked over the following weeks with household names, "multiple Oscar winners", and was direct about why it mattered to him: "I'm not ashamed to finally, for the first time in my life, make a couple of bucks. I'm tired of being poor. I'm tired of renting."

See also

- Situational awareness
- John Kiriakou
- Oliver Stone
- Burn Notice
