Asked what he had actually done to keep himself safe and at the top of the social heap in prison, John Kiriakou first pointed to his book Doing Time Like a Spy, in which he takes twenty lessons from CIA training and shows how he applied each to prison life — including some that had been half-jokes in training, like admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations, which he says turned out to be a real thing in prison, alongside let others do your dirty work, never draw attention to yourself, and seek and utilise available cover. [1]
The show
Then he reached for a television comparison, checking first whether his interviewer might be too young to remember it. There was an HBO show that started in 2000 called Oz, he said, about a maximum security penitentiary — he thought in Illinois — with a unit inside it, also called Oz, where three mob guys, three Nazis, three black nationalists and all these different gangs were brought together and more or less forced to get along with each other. Of course they did not, he said: it was chaos and murder and mayhem. [2]
But there was one character in it, Irish, who was independent and in no gang. That, Kiriakou said, was me. [3]
What it meant in practice
His explanation of the position is tactical rather than sentimental. He had to play them one off the other, he said, and make sure that he never got wrapped up in the fighting and the bickering and the shanks and all the craziness they were constantly plotting against each other. In the end he was allied with the Italians, who adopted him — but he was mostly independent and just looked out for himself. [3] [4]
The method’s clearest application is his account of manipulating a convicted serial killer into beating a cellblock rival — a story he ends by observing that it could have gone badly for him in a couple of ways, but that he had zeroed out his problem and nobody was ever able to point the finger at him. That, he said, is what the CIA taught me to do. [5]