Louis Farrakhan is the leader of the Nation of Islam. Per John Kiriakou, while Kiriakou was imprisoned at FCI Loretto Farrakhan issued “this perfectly timed statement … saying that I was a hero of the Muslim people for standing up for human rights. It saved me from the Muslims.”[1]
Kiriakou’s prison-yard arithmetic at the time: the Italians had adopted him on the basis that he was CIA rather than FBI (“FBI are cops and rats. The CIA protected us from the Muslims”); the Aryans had adopted him on the basis of a rumor that he had been a CIA “Muslim hunter,” an assassin; Farrakhan’s statement secured him with the Muslims; and a Mexican cartel prisoner whose appeal Kiriakou wrote pro bono secured him with the Latin population.[2][1][3]
Statement on Kiriakou’s arrival at FCI Loretto
On the day John Kiriakou arrived at FCI Loretto, the Nation of Islam newspaper carried a statement from Louis Farrakhan declaring Kiriakou a hero of the Muslim people for having stood up for Muslim human rights. The timing was, as Kiriakou described it, fortunate: it ensured that the Muslim inmate population at Loretto had no grievance against him.[4]
‘Hero of the Muslim people’
John Kiriakou recounts that in prison a Nation of Islam member gingerly handed him a newspaper: Louis Farrakhan had declared, because of Kiriakou’s stand against torture, that he was “a hero of the Muslim people.” The man told him he would “not have any problems with us,” then never spoke to him again — “they don’t talk to the white devil.”[5][6] In a separate telling of the same delivery, Kiriakou describes the messenger as “200 pounds of knotted muscle, this perfect human specimen,” who gingerly handed him the newspaper carrying Farrakhan’s statement.[7]
Separately, when a neo-Nazi inmate asked Kiriakou point-blank whether he had been a CIA hitman killing Muslims, Kiriakou — having prepared for the question — deliberately gave an ambiguous answer: “it was war time and we all did things we weren’t proud of.”[8]
The handshake
A May 2026 account adds the gesture that closed the exchange. The Nation of Islam prisoner who brought the newspaper into Kiriakou’s room on his first day at FCI Loretto — one of the “big ripped guys”, and, Kiriakou is careful to note when the interviewer assumes otherwise, a man who read it perfectly well himself — delivered the substance of Farrakhan’s statement: that Kiriakou was “the hero of the Muslim people.”[9]
Kiriakou then put his hand out. The reply was “I don’t shake hands with the white devil,” to which his own response was “that’s cool.” He treats the refusal as entirely compatible with the protection the statement conferred: he had no trouble from the Muslim population at Loretto thereafter.[10]