“Embrace it and keep telling it” is the advice John Kiriakou says he was given in the days after his arrest in January 2012, and which he credits with shaping how he handled everything that followed.
The advice
Kiriakou attributes it to a person with whom he was once very close and with whom he shares three children, and whom he says he is forbidden by court order from mentioning. Her advice, as he recounts it, was that he had to embrace this and could not hide from it; and that he had to keep telling his side of the story over and over, because eventually they would move on to their next victim. If he kept telling his story, his side would become the side of record. [1] [2]
In the earlier telling he adds a second element: that he had done nothing to be ashamed of and something instead to be proud of, and that he had to own his whistleblowing. [2] He pairs it with a related piece of encouragement from the same conversation — that they had consistently underestimated his strength, and that he could take them. [3]
The prediction
The government did move on. Kiriakou names the next target: Edward Snowden. His verdict on the advice is that she was right. [4] [2]
How he acted on it
Kiriakou has said that he kept talking, and that the point at which he understood he was not alone came in stages. Six weeks into his sentence he wrote an open letter to his attorneys describing what prison had been like; his attorney sent it to Arianna Huffington, who published it, and it drew more than a million readers. He says he had not even realised he was blowing the whistle on corruption among the prison guards, and that it led to an inspector general investigation at the Department of Justice. [5]
About six weeks after that, Snowden went public and Kiriakou wrote him an open letter, which he says also drew many millions of readers. He has said it took him a good six months to realise that there were a great many like-minded people out there. [6]
His brother’s version
Kiriakou has also recalled his brother telling him, days after the arrest, that he could not see it then but that this was going to turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to him — an assessment Kiriakou said in 2026 was finally coming to pass. [4]