The play the CIA killed
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In a December 2019 conversation recorded for a Dutch podcast, John Kiriakou was asked, half in jest, whether anyone had ever made a play out of his story. He answered that one had been written and then stopped.

The commission

The play was written in 2015 for the National Theater in New York. Its author was Scott Burns, whom Kiriakou describes as an old friend and identifies as the writer and director of the Amazon film The Report, the dramatisation of the Senate investigation into the CIA's enhanced interrogation programme. In Kiriakou's account Burns had been interested in his case for some time.

The pressure

It was never staged. Kiriakou says that in the end the CIA "put so much pressure on the theater owner that it was never performed." Asked to be more specific, he narrows the mechanism to the agency's clearance authority: "they just said that they wouldn't clear the information and I was saying how important it is for people like you to do plays on people like reality." He does not claim the theatre was threatened, and he does not name the owner.

The remark about "people like reality" is the context in which the story was told. Kiriakou was speaking alongside the director of Is This a Room, the verbatim stage treatment of the FBI interrogation of Reality Winner, which was then running in New York and about to tour. Asked whether any comparable pressure had been applied to her, the director said none had: "we've heard nothing from them. We just keep doing the play and no one has said anything."

Why it mattered to him

Kiriakou's interest in the episode is less the loss of the play than what he takes theatre to be capable of. Whistleblowers, he argues, cannot reach a country all at once and must "educate people one at a time," which is hard work; the power of theatre is that its reach is broader, because an audience leaves the room and starts searching, telling other people, posting about it, and eventually the press writes about it. He calls that power "immense."

He adds that whistleblowers are easily forgotten, and that the American public needs to be informed and educated about the national service national-security whistleblowers perform.

One project about his case did reach an audience. Kiriakou notes that he, Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack were the subjects of the documentary Silenced, made by Jim Spione, which had a long run on Netflix and Amazon and was nominated for an Emmy. He says he will be forever grateful to Spione for coming into his home that year and telling the story, and calls it a brave thing to have done, because at the time there were many people who did not want to touch either his story or Drake's.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Reality Winner
- Thomas Drake
- Jesselyn Radack
- CIA Torture Program Whistleblowing
