The question was whether it frightened Kiriakou that he might be entering the same ranks as Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake, or whether he embraced it. He said it was funny, and answered with a story instead of a position: “we’re all friends now.”[1]
The check-in
Two or three weeks earlier he had taken part in an event in Berlin — an event he had done two or three times before. He went to the hotel to check in and the clerk said she could not see him on the computer, and asked whether he was on the list for the conference.[1]
She handed him a list of about a dozen people. Every single one of them, he found, was a friend of his.[2]
The names he recalled were Thomas Drake, Jesselyn Radack, Terry Albury and Lisa Ling. Everybody on the list, he said, was a whistleblower — and an outspoken whistleblower at that. His verdict on the discovery was that it was fantastic, and that he loved it.[2]
What the anecdote is answering
The story is Kiriakou’s standard reply to a question that assumes isolation. The premise of the question — that joining the ranks of the best-known national security defendants would be frightening — treats those ranks as a fate. His answer treats them as a professional community with a conference circuit, a hotel block and a guest list.
He has described the same group in more functional terms elsewhere: a set of Obama-era whistleblowers who banded together after his release, alongside attorneys such as Jesselyn Radack, and who now spend their time advising would-be whistleblowers so that they do not repeat the mistakes he and his colleagues made.
The Berlin list is the compressed version of that claim. Kiriakou did not have to assemble the network or seek it out; by 2026 it was simply the list of people staying in the hotel.