The night the Snowden story broke is John Kiriakou’s account of learning, from inside FCI Loretto, that someone else had gone public.
Being woken
He had been in prison three months and a few days when a cellmate he calls Dave woke him in the middle of the night, whispering excitedly that someone had gone public with explosive information about the CIA and NSA spying on Americans.[1]
Dave had been unable to sleep and was listening to the national AM programme Coast to Coast AM — usually, Kiriakou notes, a show about conspiracies and UFOs — on the night the story broke.[1]
Following it by radio
Kiriakou turned on his own radio for updates, and the detail he lingers on is the physics of it. At night many AM stations go to fifty thousand watts, so even in central Pennsylvania he could pick up news stations from New York, Chicago, Toronto and Dallas — KRLD in Dallas among them.[2]
At first nobody knew who the whistleblower was, only that he had released a great deal of material. Within a few hours it became clear that he was a contractor who had been a CIA employee and was then working for Booz Allen at the NSA: Edward Snowden.[3]
What came of it
It was Dave who suggested that Kiriakou write to him — publicly through Firedoglake and the Huffington Post, but privately as well, since the two men clearly moved in the same circles. Kiriakou judged the advice sound, though he later determined that Dave, who was then claiming to be a CIA employee or former employee, had in fact very briefly been a CIA contractor.[4]
The correspondence had a sequel inside the prison. Snowden later told the New York Times that Kiriakou’s case and that of Thomas Drake had inspired him to go public — and Snowden’s father came to Loretto to meet Kiriakou, a visit he describes as quite controversial, over which the guards took sides.[5]