The Cat in the Hat and Truck is John Kiriakou’s canonical demonstration of how he applied CIA counter-accusation tradecraft in general population at FCI Loretto. Every principal has a nickname; the mechanics are simple; the outcome, one man airlifted to Pittsburgh, another moved out of Kiriakou’s cellblock, carries the argument that his prison survival was not luck.
The characters
Truck was a long-haul trucker who “in the days before DNA testing” would pick up prostitutes at truck stops, “have sex with them and then he would strangle them so he didn’t have to pay them,” then throw the bodies from the truck an hour or two later. He was caught after one victim survived and gave police the license plate. He was serving forty years and had done thirty-five by the time Kiriakou met him. For reasons Kiriakou never understood, “he constantly sought my approval.”[1][2][3]
Cat in the Hat, so-called “cuz his head was oddly elongated, like a birth defect”, wanted an open bunk in Kiriakou’s four-man cell. Kiriakou’s rule was “no pedophiles and no rats.” Cat in the Hat volunteered he was in for murder-for-hire; Kiriakou looked the case up in the law library. The concealed fact was that he had ratted out his own hitman to reduce his sentence. “So I said, ‘No rats are allowed in the cell.’”[3][4][5]
The Jake Tapper visit
The trigger was a Jake Tapper visit. Kiriakou was called to the lieutenant’s office to sign a waiver for a CNN interview. “Usually when you get called to the lieutenant’s office, it’s because either you’re going to solitary or they want you to rat somebody out.” Cat in the Hat saw him leave, and later, standing “two feet away” from Kiriakou in the day room during a Steelers game and not realising it, told the inmate next to him: “Kiriakou got called down to the lieutenant’s office. That guy’s a fucking rat. He got called down to rat us out.”[5][6]
The counter-accusation
Truck heard Cat in the Hat. Kiriakou did too. “I didn’t react at all. And Truck said, ‘Did you hear that guy? He just said you’re a fucking rat.’” Kiriakou answered with a single sentence: “Half an hour ago, I heard him call you a pedophile.”[6][7]
“Without saying a word, Truck got up and beat him almost to death. They had to land a helicopter in the yard to lifelight this guy to Pittsburgh. Truck got five years added to his sentence and he got sent back to a medium security prison.”[7]
The apology
Six weeks later Cat in the Hat returned to Loretto. “People had told him what I had done. So he came back, he wouldn’t make eye contact with me. He’s like this. He’s like, ‘I’m sorry I called you a rat. I should never have said that. It wasn’t true.’” Kiriakou’s reply: “Look at me. As God is my witness, if I ever hear my name cross your lips ever again, you’re dead and you’ll never see it coming.” Cat in the Hat: “I understand. I understand.”[8][9]
The point Kiriakou draws
He offers the sequence as the concrete answer to Doug Bopst’s question about whether he ever had to use his CIA skills in prison. “You bet. … I very much used my CIA skills every single day in prison. Sometimes it was as simple as playing these moronic guards off of each other, but usually it was more serious. It was to keep myself safe.” The book he wrote about it, Doing Time Like a Spy, is organised around twenty CIA lessons, starting with “make strategic alliances, let others do your dirty work, admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations.”[10][11][9]