Told by an interviewer in January 2024 that his stories were vivid enough to be filmed, Kiriakou answered that the attempt had already been made and abandoned three times over.[1]
He has sold the rights to his story three separate times — to Universal, to 20th Century Fox and to Paramount — and all three let the option lapse. The reason he was given each time was the same: there was so much detail, and there were so many stories, that they simply could not cram it into two hours. His own comment on the outcome is one line: what a tough industry.[1]
The suggestion he was offered
The interviewer’s proposed remedy was a streaming series of six, eight or ten episodes rather than a feature. That suggestion belongs to the host; Kiriakou thanked him for it and moved on without adopting it as a plan of his own.[2]
The material
The stories in question were the ones he had just told in the same hour — a mission at twenty-five to a government in exile, an evacuation from Athens after a killing meant for him, and a takedown of a double agent in a hotel room, of which the interviewer said he could see it in his mind’s eye.[1]
He pointed listeners instead to the book that already exists, telling them that he holds the only surviving hardback copies of his first book, which reached number five on the New York Times bestseller list, and that a lot of the great stories are in there.[2]
Asked at the close whether, like a veteran he knew, he missed the thrill of the work, Kiriakou said that he does: he resigned from the CIA fifteen years earlier and still thinks about it every single day.[3]