# The "Soylent Green is people" cable easter egg

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
>
> Cite as: "The "Soylent Green is people" cable easter egg," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/soylent-green-cable-easter-egg/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*A long-running CIA case-officer in-joke in which the line "Soylent Green is people" is hidden inside classified operational cables as a sequence of incongruously lowercase letters*

- **Practice:** Hiding the line 'Soylent Green is people' inside CIA cables using sequences of lowercase letters
- **Why it works:** CIA cables are written exclusively in capital letters — any lowercase letter is anomalous
- **Detection:** Routinely overlooked by reviewers; spotted only occasionally by attentive cable readers
- **Reference:** *Soylent Green* (1973), starring Charlton Heston

The **"Soylent Green is people" cable easter egg** is a long-running [Central Intelligence Agency](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia) case-officer in-joke in which the line *"Soylent Green is people"* is hidden inside operational cables as an arrangement of incongruously lowercase letters.[1]

## Mechanism

CIA cables are, by convention, written exclusively in capital letters — a typographic norm carried forward from the agency's 1950s teletype-era infrastructure that has never been updated. *"It's like some thing from the 50s. They just never changed it."*[1]

This convention makes any lowercase letter visually anomalous. Case officers writing the obligatory blow-by-blow, minute-by-minute account of an operational meeting would scatter individual lowercase letters through the otherwise all-caps text such that the lowercase letters, in sequence, spelled *"Soylent Green is people."*[1]

## Detection

The cable easter egg almost always made it through the CIA's review and distribution system without remark. *"It would always make its way through the system. Nobody would pay any attention, until like the one guy is reading it and he's like, 'Oh, they did it again.'"*[2]

## Cultural reference

The hidden line refers to the climactic revelation of *Soylent Green*, the 1973 American science-fiction film starring Charlton Heston. In the film, set in an overpopulated near-future where most of the public subsists on government-issued nutritional wafers, Heston's character discovers that the green-colored wafer is manufactured from the bodies of citizens scooped up at protests and at suicide centers. His final, screamed line — *"Soylent Green is people!"* — is the source quoted by the cable easter egg.[3][1]

## Why the film stays with him

Kiriakou returns to *Soylent Green* repeatedly as a portrait of a world on the brink rather than as a joke, and treats the single thing it got wrong as instructive about the limits of foresight: in a future imagined complete with floating cars, the policeman at the centre of the story still has to pull over and step into a phone booth to make a call. *"I guess there are just some things people don't see."*[4][5]

He pairs the observation with an episode from his own service. On temporary duty at a Middle East station for a week or so, he watched a technical team from headquarters install the station's first email programme, gathering everyone around a single computer to demonstrate that one could type a colleague's name, hit refresh, and write to them. The station chief's reaction was to grasp the implication and reject it: *"Wait a minute. Are you saying that my people can have access to anybody they want? … I don't like it. I don't like it one bit"* — and he decreed there would be no email in his station.[6][7] Kiriakou offers it not as stupidity but as the same blindness the film displays: *"Sometimes you just don't see it. Your brain can't comprehend it."*[7]

## See also

- [Central Intelligence Agency](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia)
- Charlton Heston

## Sources

1. CIA Spy: French Intelligence Was Basically Serial Killers (2026-01-16), at 17:35. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxndFp3NmTM&t=1055s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-01-16-julian-dorey-french-intelligence/
2. CIA Spy: French Intelligence Was Basically Serial Killers (2026-01-16), at 18:05. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxndFp3NmTM&t=1085s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-01-16-julian-dorey-french-intelligence/
3. CIA Spy: French Intelligence Was Basically Serial Killers (2026-01-16), at 17:03. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxndFp3NmTM&t=1023s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-01-16-julian-dorey-french-intelligence/
4. #388 — "Epstein LIES!" Satanic Elite, Mossad (2026-02-23), at 2:33:18. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmDn8YzxVeQ&t=9198s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-02-23-epstein-lies-satanic-elite-mossad/
5. #388 — "Epstein LIES!" Satanic Elite, Mossad (2026-02-23), at 2:33:49. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmDn8YzxVeQ&t=9229s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-02-23-epstein-lies-satanic-elite-mossad/
6. #388 — "Epstein LIES!" Satanic Elite, Mossad (2026-02-23), at 2:34:19. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmDn8YzxVeQ&t=9259s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-02-23-epstein-lies-satanic-elite-mossad/
7. #388 — "Epstein LIES!" Satanic Elite, Mossad (2026-02-23), at 2:34:49. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmDn8YzxVeQ&t=9289s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-02-23-epstein-lies-satanic-elite-mossad/

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