PTSD
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Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a recurring thread in John Kiriakou's account of his own life, from Athens to Pakistan to prison, and in his indictment of the institutions he writes about.

Greece and Pakistan

Kiriakou says he has had PTSD "a couple of times." The first came out of Greece, where Revolutionary Organization 17 November nearly got him, the attack fell instead on his next-door neighbor, British defense attaché Stephen Saunders. He also came back from Pakistan with PTSD, a fact he kept to himself at the time, shaped partly by his surprise at how willing his colleagues were to kill people. Yet he is struck by what didn't cause it: not the two assassination attempts, not breaking down doors in Pakistan, not even a human head on the ground at a bombing rescue.

Put to him in 2026 that commenters had concluded from the way he tells his stories that what he has is not PTSD but nostalgia, he agreed, "Yeah, I do", and explained it as having thoroughly enjoyed his career, which he separates sharply from what the career became: "9/11 turned everybody into stone-cold murderers." He measures the change against the ordinary world by inverting a friend's remark about having met a murderer, a brother-in-law just out of prison after twenty years: "Try working at the CIA for 15 years when you're the only person who's not a murderer."

The prison dream

Nobody prepared him for what came after release: depression, anger, PTSD. For six months he had the same dream every night, he was out of prison, but it was a mistake; it was almost midnight, count time was coming, and he had to figure out how to get back inside before they sent him to solitary. The dreams only stopped six months into writing his prison book, getting it out of his mind, he says, is what ended them. Years later he still described variations of the dream, and still took the medication that controls it: a failed blood-pressure drug with the odd side effect of making patients forget what they dreamt, now used, quite effectively, for PTSD.

The delayed reaction had a cost. Through the arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment his wife was fully supportive, but when he came home and the PTSD set in, the pressure became too much, and the marriage ended.

PTSD and the torture program

Kiriakou notes that the CIA's legal architecture for enhanced interrogation was explicitly built around PTSD: psychological torture was permitted so long as it stopped short of permanent damage, which is why one CIA document showed a psychologist present at every instance of waterboarding, essentially to say stop before the harm became permanent. The harm ran both directions: he remembers colleagues coming back from the secret sites crying, suffering from PTSD, taking time off, going on anti-anxiety medication. Washington, he adds, even has psychiatrists who specialize in "screwed up former CIA officer PTSD", an actual cottage industry.

He initially scoffed at drone operators claiming PTSD "like they're the infantry on the ground", then corrected himself: people act like tough guys and they're really just human beings who spend all day killing people like a video game. The Daniel Hale case, he says, is shot through with PTSD and what psychiatrists now call moral injury.

Prisoners

Kiriakou extends the same lens to ordinary prisoners: released straight back to the neighborhood they came from, no better off, "but now you have PTSD and you're pissed off", and the only thing you know how to do is sell drugs again. More broadly, he argues nobody responsible for many deaths escapes without PTSD or some psychological malady, "unless you're a true sociopath."

See also

- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Waterboarding
- Moral injury
- Daniel Hale
- Stephen Saunders
- FCI Loretto
