The Ai Weiwei Lego portrait
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The Ai Weiwei Lego portrait is John Kiriakou's account of his inclusion in an installation by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, given on the DeProgram programme in September 2025 as the coda to a longer complaint about the organisations that declined to support him during his prosecution.

The refusal that preceded it

Kiriakou first restates the grievance. Amnesty International "refused to say a single word in support of me in my darkest days of 2012", a decision he attributes to its London headquarters.

He separates the American office from that. Its head, "a guy named Zeke, I think his last name was Johnson. Awesome guy", "wrote me a letter when I was in prison apologising for his bosses in London", and "bought me a subscription to The New Yorker to kind of dull the pain, I guess."

The commission

The organisation's position surfaced again in a context Kiriakou had nothing to do with. "It was only later, when I was getting out of prison, that Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist, wanted to do my portrait for this show at Alcatraz."

The scale of the work he gives precisely: "He made 178 portraits out of Legos of 178 political prisoners around the world."

The artist's process included an external check: "he wanted to clear the names with Amnesty International first."

The objection, and the reversal

Amnesty's answer was to deny the premise. "And Amnesty said, 'Oh, we don't believe Kiriakou is a political prisoner.'"

Ai Weiwei, in Kiriakou's telling, insisted on personal knowledge: "And he said, 'Oh, I know Kiriakou. I'm telling you, he is a political prisoner.'"

The organisation gave way, and the timing is the point of the story: "And so they finally agreed. And it was the week that I got out of prison that Amnesty International finally said, 'Okay, okay, you were a political prisoner.'"

Kiriakou's summary of how the concession was extracted is unflattering: "But they had to be, you know, pulled kicking and screaming to that point of view."

The wider pattern

He places the episode alongside other institutional refusals he encountered, and closes the subject with a remark about a prominent Washington attorney who reportedly still does not consider him a whistleblower: "But isn't it wonderful to be at a point in my life where I don't give a fuck what he thinks about me?"

See also

- Ai Weiwei
- Amnesty International
- Espionage Act
- John Kiriakou
