It took Kiriakou five days at FCI Loretto to reach a telephone. When he did, he called his attorney to report that he had been put in the actual prison rather than the camp across the street — with, as he put it, the murderers and the pedophiles and the drug kingpins — and to ask what could be done. The answer was that they could file a motion, but it would be two years before they got a hearing, and he would be home by then. He would have to tough it out.[1]
It was that day, day five, that he decided he was trained for this: he had lived in worse places with more dangerous people, and he was going to have to fall back on his training.[2]
The reasoning
Kiriakou’s description of the environment explains the choice. Prison, he has said, is a combination of seventh grade, Lord of the Flies and a mental institution.[3] If you show even an inkling of weakness, the predators will be on you; you will never be able to regain respect, you will always be in danger, and it will make the time that much longer.[3]
He says he watched this happen to other men while he was there, and that for them there was only one way out: checking yourself into solitary confinement for your own protection.[4]
The inversion
His response was to invert that outcome deliberately. As he put it: if he had anything to do with it, it would be other people who were checking themselves into solitary confinement — to protect themselves from him. And that, he says, is how he went about it.[4]
The posture is one he has never dressed up. He admits in the opening pages of Doing Time Like a Spy that if you had met him at Loretto you would have thought him thoroughly unpleasant, and agrees that he was: you do have to put up a fairly aggressive defensive exterior in order to prevent predations, major or minor.[5]
What makes the episode a piece of tradecraft rather than mere bravado, in his telling, is its timing. The decision was made in the first week, before anything had happened to him, on an assessment of the environment rather than a reaction to it — which is precisely the sequence the agency had trained him to follow.