[00:01] [Music] i see you as a very unique source for a couple of reasons because i see you as someone who has experience with obviously whistleblowing and what's going on with um our cia in the military but also a real inside um side view of what it's like to be incarcerated in this country and see from inside what the criminal justice system is here and i can't help but see parallels between when you talk about like torture
[00:31] that we do to um people across the globe i can't help but draw parallels to how we treat our inmates that are incarcerated in a lot of cases and so i i was i was wondering if you could talk about um examples of that you might have seen or that you know of where our system here in this country is what we would consider to be acting amorally in how we treat our incarcerated citizens we don't have time for that conversation no okay
[01:02] i'll give you a couple examples um what i'm right is that if there is a parallel like it's the same thing you are 100 right so listen the united nations has declared our use of solitary confinement to be a form of torture right international standards are that someone can't be held in solitary confinement confinement for more than 14 days we have prisoners who have been in solitary confinement and i mean solitary
[01:32] no contact with another human being for more than 40 years 40 years you lose your mind after a couple of months yeah i think to me when you say 14 days i think that you know to me two or three days would feel like 14 days if you're you're sleeping on a on a steal slab with a small sink and a toilet uh your room is six by ten feet and all you can do is walk in circles you know they say that you are allowed one hour of exercise every
[02:04] day that it's 23 hours of solitary that's nonsense what that one hour of exercise is that there's a steel door at the back of your of your cell and it leads out into a cage that's another six by ten feet and so you can walk in a little circle outside for one hour and that's it it's still solitary so you have people losing their minds constantly and don't forget that that psychological studies that have been published as recently as as a year and a half ago have found
[02:36] that 85 percent of incarcerated americans suffer from some sort of mental illness most commonly antisocial personality disorder so you're already kind of on the edge besides the fact that everybody in prison is depressed lots of people are bipolar some are schizophrenic we used to have this thing called zombie pill line where you know if you need if you need insulin you get in line at six am and six pm and
[03:08] they give you your insulin but if you're insane you get in line at seven pm and you get your pills that turn you into a zombie and so we called it zombie pill line there was a guy in solitary confinement in my prison who had been in for so long and was so desperate to get out that he smashed the window of the cell and ate the broken glass and then he called for help and he said i ate broken glass and they told him tough luck well the glass shredded his
[03:38] stomach and he ended up bleeding to death and that kind of thing happens all the time i'll give you another example um when i first got to prison i went to my case manager and i said listen i've got a master's degree in middle eastern studies policy analysis i i did my phd coursework in international affairs i'd be happy to teach a ged class uh if if you want me to can i swear on this show absolutely and he looked at me and he said kiriakou
[04:10] if i want you to teach a [ __ ] class i'll ask you to teach a [ __ ] class and they made me a janitor in the chapel that was my job i think a lot of this a lot of this also goes to the privatization and the profit motive um in private prisons this was a federal prison so this was government but you're right the private far worse because of the profit motive the only way they can make a profit is to cut back on food
[04:40] and on medicine remind me of that i'm going to come back to that in a moment so um i was in the um in the chapel and every day i would walk past this one guy's cell he was an older italian guy and i liked him i liked all the italians so he was kind of doubled over one day and i said hey man what's wrong he said man my back is killing me like really killing me i can't sleep or anything and i said oh
[05:11] you should go to the uh you should go to the the medical unit he goes down there and they did what they do for everybody no matter what your complaint is they gave him tylenol and then i saw him i don't know a couple weeks later and he had a walker and i said is your back that bad and he said i feel like i'm paralyzed and he said every time i go to medical they give me a they give me tylenol so a couple of more weeks pass and i see him in a wheelchair so i went to
[05:44] the chaplain and i said chaplin you've got to do something about this they're not paying any attention to him at medical and something is clearly wrong with him so the chaplain to his credit weighed in the chaplain was the only decent human being i met in in the entire system and um so he went and he said something to medical and finally after like six weeks medical took him out to a hospital for an x-ray and he had stage four spinal cancer and
[06:17] he applied for a compassionate release so that he could die at home the warden went to his cell and told him that if he would sign a paper saying that um that they treated him appropriately in medical they would let him go well he knew he was a dead man he only had a couple of days left and he wanted his wife and his children to be able to sue the system for killing him which is what they did and he refused to sign and they wouldn't let him go he died in
[06:48] his bunk and then that's typical of what's going on there yeah i think and and a lot of it is um racially motivated in our criminal justice system from start to finish i mean um most obviously we have higher amounts of incarcerated people of color than percentage of people of color so it's very disproportionate and that's something i think that i i see it at every level um is that something that you experienced when you were without a doubt my prison was typical of
[07:19] the demographic breakdown in the federal prison system it was it was roughly 50 percent black uh 30 percent hispanic and 20 percent white and most of the whites were pedophiles so that that was that was absolutely typical of of the entire system you there how how does someone like you get on there i mean clearly you're not a typical you're not the typical inmate although with the amount of whistleblowers that do get i mean you you might start to have more company in there but
[07:49] yeah i'm unlike you you're very nice you're pretty you know you're you're not you don't strike me as uh prison material so how that's 23 months is a long time it's a long time for a long time i said to one of the italians before i answer your question we were we were on a walk together and he was a senior captain in the banana crime family and had been in prison much of his adult life so we're walking around the track and he asked me how much time i had and i said
[08:21] i said two years feels like 20 years and he said two years you could do that standing on your head and i said i don't know man i don't know how i'm gonna get through this i had only been in about six weeks and he said let me give you some advice if anybody asks you how much time you have you tell them five years because if they hear that your sentence is so short they're going to kick your ass and so i began telling everybody that i had five years and then when it came time to leave i was gone what happens is when people see on the checkout sheet that you're
[08:51] leaving the next day a gang of people will come into your cell and just beat the [ __ ] out of you just be jealous that it's not them yeah yeah well ask me how i got into that prison there's a story there so when i agreed to take the plea and was sentenced my lawyers asked the judge if she would send me to a minimum security work camp well minimum security camps are always across the street from a higher security prison because when there's a riot it's the the campers
[09:21] who then go across the street to the main prison and they do the cooking and the laundry and the sweeping and scrubbing the floors and stuff like that so uh the judge uh asked the prosecutors any objection they said no no objection well the thing about the camp is there are there are no bars on the windows the doors are unlocked there are no fences you're free to come and go as you please you're on your honor not to abscond and frankly most of the prisoners work in town at the local college you know as
[09:52] janitors or whatever so it's like a work release like you get papers yeah you sleep in the prison but you work outside okay so uh the prosecution had no objection and she said you know so ordered so i i'd go prison is the oddest thing you just drive up to the prison and knock on the door and turn yourself in so that's what i did i uh a documentary film crew one of my lawyers um and uh my cousin and his son all drove me up there and uh
[10:25] i went to the camp and they said you have to go across the street to the main prison first and check in and then come back over here i said okay so i went over to the prison and uh said i'm john kiriakou i'm here to turn myself in and they put me through the metal detector and frisked me and then the cop starts to lead me around to the back of the prison and i said no no i said i'm supposed to be over here at the uh at the camp and he laughed at me and he said not according to my paperwork you're not
[10:55] and i told myself take it easy there's nothing you can do if you raise a fuss they're going to put you in solitary so i didn't say a word it took me five days before i got access to a telephone and i called my lawyer one of my 11 lawyers the one who i liked and trusted the most and i said hey they put me in the actual prison with the the mafia dons and the drug kingpins and the and the perverts i said what do i do and he said oh my
[11:26] gosh well we could file a motion but it'll be two years before we get a court hearing you'll be home by then he said i'm sorry buddy you're gonna have to tough it out and so i decided you know what you're trained for this you've lived in far worse places than this far more dangerous places than this i said i'm gonna fall back on my cia training and i'm gonna make sure that i remain at the top of the heap i actually wrote a book about it that won one of the country's most prestigious literary awards it's called
[11:57] doing time like a spy how the cia taught me to survive and thrive in prison and i use these these 20 life lessons that the cia taught us in training to make sure that i was safe and i was at the top of the social heap and nobody messed with me and i'll tell you in 23 months nobody messed with me so getting out when you come out of there i mean now you have obviously a felony on your record which is a big deal
[12:27] um especially for someone who's coming from an academic and professional background that's not the kind of thing that you normally would have to deal with so where do you where do what do you do with that whoa that's a really great question and it it was a very difficult thing you know people don't realize that when you have a felony there's no such thing as having paid your debt to society you're always a felon you you can't vote you can't hold a professional license like how that has anything to do with
[12:58] professional licenses i have no idea you can't ever own a gun again i don't know what it has to do with voting to be honest i've never nor did i although i had i had kind of a good experience with that i can tell you about in a minute but um you get out they put me they they didn't put me in but they assigned me to a halfway house i i so angered the the warden by writing a blog and smuggling it out of prison that uh that i didn't get any halfway house time not a single day i
[13:29] had to do my entire sentence not a single day off so they assigned me to this halfway house called hope village which has since been closed we used to call it either hopeless village or abandon all hope village 140 men they had one job posted on the job board and it was to work at a car wash for 140 men so you get out and they say you have 90 days to find a job and if you can't you go back in back in for the next
[14:02] seven months and you can't find a job because how can you possibly find a job you're a felon how are you going to find a job so i was lucky i was luckier than the other 139 guys in there because i was kind of famous and so i had a uh a think tank a progressive think tank that reached out to me and said um we can't pay you much we can only pay you minimum wage but it's a job so i took that and then after six months i had to raise
[14:33] the money for my own salary so i was doing like gofundme and all this silly stuff just to make minimum wage well minimum wage didn't put food on my table you know and so i sort of bounced around from job to job i ended up getting a job as a radio host which was a good fit for me and gave me the best health insurance i ever had in my life but it wasn't enough money to really make a living and then finally my wife said screw this i'm out of here
[15:03] and she took off so you know i i here i am i'm fi i'm in my mid-50s and i had to start all over again what really saved me and this is unique to me this is not i'm far luckier than than any other oh yeah i'm far lucky yeah that i am i'm a national hero in greece when i when i first got in trouble the greek uh ambassador approached me and he said what can we do to be helpful and i said you could give me greek citizenship and he did so here i'm this guy
[15:37] this you know this the greeks are fascinated by the cia they always have been so here's this greek american cia guy who made good and blew the whistle and took it on the chin because he wanted to do the right thing and tell the truth and so um the greek government hired me to write a new whistleblower protection law for them so i went to greece five times in 2015 we came up with the whistleblower protection law and we presented it to
[16:07] the european parliament in brussels so i testified twice in brussels before the parliament and they passed it into law and then the greek parliament passed it into law and now it's the law of the land for the entire european union well this was covered in the news in greece oh here's john kiriakou again i'll tell you a funny story i arrived i arrived at the airport and i hadn't shaven and my hair was like this because i was flying coach and i get off and i come out of the doors from
[16:38] customs and they're all these camera crews with their cameras right and i turned to look to see oh there must have been famous on my plane and then they run up to me and i i actually started to laugh like you were like what is this yeah i look terrible and why would you guys want to talk to me well they wanted to talk about this whistleblower protection law because there was a big scandal a whistleblower blew the whistle on the minister of defense he had taken bribes from siemens and and it was the first time that the law
[17:08] was actually being used in court so um after that i i got so much press coverage from that that a consortium of greece's four wealthiest families um put together a a private equity fund like a hedge fund and they asked me to run it and so i've been doing that since august and i finally like made it in life and uh you know made my big comeback but i'm still a convicted felon here yeah you know i still get happy you're
[17:39] greek it's a good thing you're greek huh good thing i'm greek because if i wasn't greek i'd still be making minimum wage someplace right so the greeks they saved you yeah they did they saved me