Seven thousand letters is the figure John Kiriakou gives for the correspondence he conducted during his 23 months at FCI Loretto: about 7,000 letters to 675 different people.[1][2]
The postcard
Kiriakou dates the decision precisely. He had been in prison about four hours when mail call came, and a woman from Ringgold, Georgia sent him a postcard of a rose with a very nice note on the back.[3][1]
His reaction was that he did not even know the person and that it was a thoughtful gesture, and he made a decision at that moment that he would respond to every piece of mail he received — with no idea, he says, that this would come to 7,000 letters to 675 people over the next 23 months.[1]
What it produced
Kiriakou says the correspondents became friends and have remained so ever since 2013, in constant touch. His summary of the experience is simply that it was wonderful.[1]
It also solved the central problem of the sentence. Where most prisoners passed the time by working out and watching television — the prison, he says, is Groundhog Day, every day just like every other — Kiriakou was busy answering mail, and it kept him very busy.[4][5]
He places it alongside reading and writing as his defence against depression in prison, and says he read well over a hundred books in the same 23 months.[2]
The book
The same habit produced Doing Time Like a Spy. Kiriakou says the book started off as a joke and that he did not even intend it to be a book — he simply thought he would write down some of the more ridiculous and more absurd things that happened.[5] He wrote it in longhand on legal pads, one word at a time, and it won two literary awards.[6]
Separately from the personal correspondence, Kiriakou’s public newsletter from inside became the Letters from Loretto, which he sent out through his attorney Jesselyn Radack as legal mail.[7]