Letter from Loretto is a prison newsletter John Kiriakou wrote from FCI Loretto, consciously modeled — “very arrogantly,” by his own description — on Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The newsletter documented daily life inside the prison and, in doing so, inadvertently exposed two crimes committed against him by guards, one of them a felony.[1]
Origins and viral spread
Before Kiriakou left for prison, attorney Jesselyn Radack set up a mailing list of roughly 600 supporters who wanted news of his case, telling him to send a letter once he felt settled.[2] Radack and Daniel Ellsberg — who became Kiriakou’s regular prison pen pal (see below) — encouraged him to write an open letter to his supporters once the initial shock of incarceration had worn off.[3] Kiriakou sent the letter to Radack, who forwarded it to Jane Hamsher of the site Firedoglake.com; Hamsher published it and sent it on to Arianna Huffington, who ran it as a banner headline on the Huffington Post, drawing more than a million hits — by one later account as many as two million — in its first week.[4][5][6] Within 48 hours of the Huffington Post publication, FCI Loretto was fielding press calls from CNN, Fox, ABC News, Time, The Week, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Playboy, The Economist, and NPR, all seeking to interview Kiriakou; CNN and 60 Minutes both came to the prison in person, and the internal investigation the warden opened afterward targeted how Kiriakou had gotten the letter published rather than the guard conduct it described.[7][8] Celebrities including Susan Sarandon, Yoko Ono, John Cusack, and Oliver Stone tweeted in his support, and the peace group Code Pink logged 1,600 calls to the director of the Bureau of Prisons demanding he be left alone.[9]
Guard retaliation
After publication, a guard Kiriakou had publicly nicknamed “Sarge” — who mispronounced his name, prompting him to call her “fuckface” in the letter — retaliated with a cell shakedown, throwing his belongings on the floor and asking if she was the guard he had described.[10] Kiriakou notes that a guard swearing at an inmate by name is technically a crime (a misdemeanor with escalating penalties), while the felony he separately exposed in the letter — two officers attempting to incite him and a Kurdish prisoner to attack each other — amounted to conspiracy to incite violence in a federal facility, carrying a 2-to-5-year sentence.[11] Administrators also tried to retaliate materially: after the letters went public, guards attempted to rip his desk off the cell wall, but Kiriakou — having heard a rumor of the plan in advance — paid a fellow inmate a bag of tuna fish to strip the mounting screws beforehand, so the desk would not come free.[12]
Legal mail as a shield
To keep his writing beyond the reach of prison censors, Kiriakou addressed his letters “Attorney Jesselyn Radack, Esquire, Government Accountability Project, Washington, DC” and marked them “legal mail,” a category guards could not open, read, or photocopy for the FBI — protection he compared to a diplomatic pouch.[13] His cousin, Kip Reese, who lived roughly 40-45 minutes away in Pittsburgh, was one of his greatest supporters and visited him regularly during his sentence.[14]
Later letters and the PEN Award
The series continued across Kiriakou’s 23-month sentence; his final letter listed nineteen things he would not miss about prison, and all but one of them — the pedophiles — involved staff rather than fellow inmates.[15] The collected letters became part of his book Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison, for which Kiriakou won the 2016 PEN First Amendment Award — one of PEN’s “big four” literary prizes, alongside the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award.[16]
Daniel Ellsberg’s support
Daniel Ellsberg served as Kiriakou’s pen pal throughout his sentence: he called Kiriakou’s wife to check on the children, and every letter he sent included a book — usually one he had written himself — signed “love Dan.”[17] Guards at Loretto, with whom Kiriakou otherwise had a difficult relationship, once pulled him aside to tell him — accurately, as it turned out — that Ellsberg was giving a talk that night at the small Catholic college in the town of Loretto, population roughly 1,200, whose prison had itself formerly been a Catholic monastery before the Bureau of Prisons bought it and added two wings.[18]
Currency of information
Kiriakou says he learned early in his incarceration that information, not physical prison currency like mackerel packets (“mack”) or stamps, was the most valuable commodity at FCI Loretto — a currency that gave him power beyond what material goods could provide.[19] He put this to use fabricating fake court records — splicing a real 1970s Ohio case involving a different man of the same name who had raped a male prison guard with fictional details — to get a disliked Aryan-table cellmate falsely accused and banished to the “pedophile/rat table.”[20]