# The fifteen-dollar maintenance fee

> **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 fifteen-dollar maintenance fee," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-fifteen-dollar-maintenance-fee/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*An appointment John Kiriakou made at his bank on the morning of a broadcast to ask for the return of a $15 monthly maintenance fee that had taken his account to minus fifteen dollars, a story he told on air as a plain statement of what his finances looked like after prison.*

The anecdote arrives in the middle of an appeal for viewers to move to a platform that pays the show more. Kiriakou interrupts it to explain, without euphemism, why the appeal matters to him. [1]

## The appointment

He had been to the bank that morning, he says, on an appointment made "because I'm so broke." The bank had taken a $15 monthly maintenance fee, and the fee had put the account at negative fifteen dollars. [1]

Kiriakou describes what he did about it in the terms of an ordinary customer with no leverage: "So, I had to go back and say, 'Guys, come on. Can you just give me back my $15?'" [2]

The bank did. "Thank goodness," Kiriakou says. "So, I'm back up to zero." [2]

## Context

The story sits inside a broader account Kiriakou gives of his post-conviction finances. In the same broadcast he and his co-host discuss the fact that the programme does not cover their bills, Rall introduces the platform pitch as a way to "help John and I be able to pay our bills, something that we currently cannot do." [1]

Kiriakou has made the general claim elsewhere that whistleblowers die broke. The maintenance-fee story is that claim reduced to a single arithmetic fact, told against himself: a former CIA counterterrorism officer and published author negotiating with a teller over fifteen dollars in order to return his balance to nothing. [2]

He does not dramatise it. The account is delivered as an aside, is over in a few sentences, and ends with him back at zero rather than ahead. [2]

## See also

- ["Whistleblowers die broke"](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/whistleblowers-die-broke)
- [Bankruptcy and the dropped charges](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/bankruptcy-and-the-dropped-charges)
- [The book the publisher sat on](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-book-the-publisher-sat-on)

## Sources

1. DeProgram Show with Ted Ra (2025-08-06), at 30:18. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnuGCFlPKaI&t=1818s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-08-06-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-LnuGCF/
2. DeProgram Show with Ted Ra (2025-08-06), at 30:50. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnuGCFlPKaI&t=1850s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-08-06-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-LnuGCF/

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