Kiriakou’s host told him she knew personally of a whistleblower who had not been in good shape, and whom Kiriakou had kept from slipping down — noting that some whistleblowers handle things better than others and that the majority are, in her phrase, beaten to death by the experience.[1]
Refusing the credit
Kiriakou’s response was to decline the framing. It was the least he could do, he said, and it is not worthy of thanks. The reason he gives is a debt: so many people offered him a helping hand when he was at his lowest, and reached out to him proactively.[1]
What the help consists of
His description of the man he helped is specific about the mechanism of collapse. He knew the man was struggling mentally and emotionally; the pressure, he said, is all-consuming, and it was swallowing him up.[1]
Against that, the remedy he describes is deliberately unglamorous. If you can help somebody just by getting him out of the house for three or four hours, or going to dinner, then that is the least you can do.[2]
The referral network
The conversation then turned practical in a way that illustrates how the work actually reaches him. He had received an email from an attorney that same morning asking whether he could help another whistleblower — he said he had it in front of him — and he had answered yes. He had brought up his host’s name in reply, along with Jesselyn Radack’s, Thomas Drake’s, and a handful of other people, and he said he would put everybody in touch that day.[2]
That is the shape of the thing he has described elsewhere as the surviving benefit of the whole experience: a loose standing network of people who have been through national security prosecutions, who now function as a referral service for the next person, and whose principal offer is company rather than counsel.