Robert the arsonist
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Robert the arsonist is the prisoner John Kiriakou uses to illustrate the fourth of the recruitment motivations in his rules for prison survival: excitement.

Robert was Australian, and had been convicted of burning down a Department of Motor Vehicles office in Buffalo, New York, over a sales tax dispute. He and Kiriakou became friendly at FCI Loretto and later roommates. Kiriakou describes him as extremely gregarious, always joking, always wanting to be involved in everything.

It also became clear to him quite quickly, he says, that Robert was a clinical sociopath who would have checked every single box on Robert Hare's revised psychopathy checklist, among them pathological lying, which Kiriakou says Robert exhibited fully.

Why that mattered

The assessment was operational rather than diagnostic. Kiriakou's framework holds that a man like Robert would rarely be motivated by greed or ideology, and, given the personality, rarely by revenge either. What Robert was, above all, was an excitement junkie, "and that made it easy to manipulate him. I just had to make him feel, well, involved."

The caution Kiriakou attaches to the type applies to Robert too: impulsive thrill-seekers are the trickiest to control, and they are the ones who get caught.

The judgement also connects to Kiriakou's long-running argument about who ends up in the CIA: that the agency seeks people with sociopathic tendencies rather than sociopaths, because the latter are impossible to manage, a distinction he applies with the same vocabulary inside prison as outside it.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- John's rules for prison survival
- The Italians at Loretto
- The polygraph
