Asked what had gone through his mind in the week between Brian Ross’s telephone call and the ABC News interview, John Kiriakou said he had never wanted to go public and that it was forced on him. What he thought about, he said, were the generations that would look back — his own family, children not yet born to him, grandchildren he had not met — and his wish that they would be able to say he had done the right thing. If they were going to out him like that and make it a public spectacle, he decided, then he was going to be on the right side of it. [1]
Before the charges
The cost began at once, and not in a courtroom. At first, he says, it was difficult in that the bare statement that the CIA was torturing prisoners was so controversial and so polarising that even before he encountered any legal trouble, friends and even family members began walking away from him. You really get to see, he said, who your true friends are and who your real supporters are. [2] When charges were filed against him roughly three years later, that put things further into perspective. [3]
The culling
What he made of it afterwards is the part he considers worth passing on. As odd as it might sound, he said, it was almost a culling exercise, in which he was able to dispatch fake people, phonies, from his life and focus on the people who really loved and supported him. [3]
He then flagged, twice, that he was going to be careful with his language because of the wording of his divorce decree — and, within that limit, said only that there are some people committed to the long run, some people who take the words for better or for worse seriously, and others who do not. As difficult as the experience became, he said, he feels he is a better and stronger person because of it. [4] Asked about it, he grounded his expectations in his parents’ marriage of forty-two years, ended by his father’s death, and said he had grown up assuming everybody was like that: when life throws you a curve you band together and deal with it. Not everybody, he found, is like that; some head for the hills and go into self-preservation mode at the expense of everyone and everything else. [5]