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. Examples include “if calm is not to your benefit, then chaos is your friend” and “admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations,” which he says he used directly against prison guards.[1][2] The core of the approach, he says, was to manipulate people into doing his dirty work for him, so that his own hands stayed clean.[3]
He has also modeled his general conduct in prison on an independent character from HBO’s Oz, a show about a fictional maximum-security penitentiary that grouped rival gangs together and forced them to coexist: one character in it stood apart, allied loosely with the Italians but affiliated with no gang, and stayed out of the resulting chaos and violence. “That was me,” Kiriakou says.[4]
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.”[5]
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. Without saying another word, Truck got up, walked over, and beat the man to within an inch of his life — a direct application, Kiriakou says, of the CIA rule of letting others do the dirty work.[6][7][8]
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.”[9]
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.”[10][11] 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.”[12]