John Kiriakou has described using tradecraft learned in CIA training to navigate and control his environment during his federal prison sentence. He frames it around a set of “20 life lessons” from CIA training — originally something of an in-house joke, printed on coffee mugs and t-shirts at the agency — that he says he applied in earnest as an inmate. One example: “admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations,” which he says he used directly against prison guards.[1]
The forged release-paperwork prank
Kiriakou describes deliberately tormenting a fellow inmate he disliked — a man who had defrauded a Hollywood celebrity and others, and who cried constantly and bragged about his brief tabloid fame — by forging the man’s release paperwork. Using a departing cellmate’s genuine “merry-go-round” release form as a template, Kiriakou made a doctored photocopy in the disliked inmate’s name, stole a duffel bag of the kind issued to indigent prisoners on release day, and planted both on the man’s bed on a Friday afternoon, letting him believe — with no way to confirm or deny it, since prison offices close for the weekend — that he was being released. Kiriakou describes the act, calculated to be maximally cruel and impossible to unwind before Monday, as doing it “the CIA way.”[2]
Turning a serial killer into a weapon
Kiriakou also describes manipulating a violent inmate — a long-haul trucker known in prison as “Truck,” who the other inmates believed had murdered multiple prostitutes along his driving route and was serving decades on related charges — into savagely beating another inmate. That second man, a convicted murderer-for-hire, had been spreading a rumor that Kiriakou was a prison informant. Overhearing Truck being told (falsely, by someone else) that the same man had called Truck a rat, Kiriakou seized the moment and quietly told Truck the man had instead called him a child molester. Truck, without a word, walked over and beat the man to within an inch of his life.[3]
Manufactured feuds and real bloodshed
Kiriakou has described a manipulation running the other way — one nobody in the prison authored, and which produced violence anyway. A tabloid magazine circulated among inmates, which he recalls as Hip Hop Weekly, carried what he took to be entirely invented celebrity feuds: someone throwing money in someone else’s face in a club over something that had happened in Atlanta. He got a kick out of it. “But it these articles sometimes led to bloodshed.”[4]
The example he gives is two men beating each other nearly to death over which of Kanye West or Jay-Z had more money — an argument that cost both of them solitary confinement. He also recalls a fistfight over which television programme to watch. His explanation is not psychological: “there’s not a lot to do in prison.”[5][6] He raises the story in the context of manufactured conflict in general, as the prison version of a point he makes about political media: “a divided society is a compliant society.”[7]