Oliver Stone is an American film director who became a friend and collaborator of John Kiriakou after Kiriakou’s release from FCI Loretto.
The collaboration
Stone contacted Kiriakou as soon as he got home and proposed working together, and Kiriakou travelled to Los Angeles to develop the idea.[1] Stone bought the rights to one chapter of Kiriakou’s first book, and the two sold a show idea to the History Channel that was never made.[2] Kiriakou described the series as in development with the History Channel through 2017.[3][4] It was one of three television projects he sold after prison, alongside one with Alec Baldwin and one with the director Simon West.[5] Stone also supplied a jacket blurb for Kiriakou’s book on Abu Zubaydah, alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a number of professors of international affairs.[6]
The blog campaign
When Kiriakou’s prison blog went viral and the authorities moved against it, Stone was among the public figures — with Susan Sarandon, Yoko Ono and John Cusack — who began tweeting “hands off John Kiriakou”, while the peace group Code Pink mounted a sustained campaign of calls to the prison director.[7][8]
The Kennedy disagreement
The two men do not agree about the Kennedy assassination. Stone put Kiriakou on the spot in his office one day, asking whether he was one of those people who did not believe the CIA killed Kennedy. Kiriakou answered that he thought elements of the CIA were probably involved, but that he had never believed it was a CIA operation to kill Kennedy. Stone told him he was “so full of shit”, and pressed him on who he thought did it; Kiriakou named a rogue CIA officer stationed in Miami who was close to the Cubans, and said the mob angle had never been fully investigated. By Kiriakou’s account Stone became genuinely angry that he would not simply agree.[9][10][11]
Stone has separately told Kiriakou that President Kennedy said he wanted to abolish the CIA and “ended up with two bullets in his head” — a remark Kiriakou has repeated when discussing whether a president could in practice abolish the agency.[12]
Assange
Kiriakou has cited Stone as one of the figures in the Hollywood world who came out strongly in favour of Julian Assange.[13]