# The professor in the visiting room > **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou. > > Cite as: "The professor in the visiting room," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-professor-in-the-visiting-room/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia. *John Kiriakou has credited the idea for his prison memoir to a university professor who visited him at FCI Loretto, listened to him tell stories across a visiting-room table, and told him that although the whole thing was by its nature depressing, the stories were good and there were lessons in them, and that he should write a book.* - **Where:** The visitors' room, FCI Loretto - **Who:** A friend of Kiriakou's, a university professor - **Result:** Doing Time Like a Spy - **Told to:** Peter B. Collins, 19 May 2017 Kiriakou has said that he never really thought about how much of his prison survival was CIA training until he had been at FCI Loretto five days.[1] The book that came out of it began in the visitors' room. ## The conversation He was visiting one day with a friend of his who is a university professor, and was telling him some of the stories he had accumulated inside. The professor's response was the origin of the memoir. As Kiriakou recalled it: *"you know, I know that by its nature this whole thing is very depressing, but these stories are really fun and there are some lessons to be learned here, you should write a book about this."*[2] So he did. The result was *Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison*, which he wrote by hand on 550 legal pages, because there are no computers in prison and no typewriters either, he simply sat down with a legal pad and started writing.[3] ## Two letters to the same friend The professor was not a one-off visitor but a standing correspondent, and the same friendship produced the other formal opinion Kiriakou sought while inside. Confronted with the number of child molesters at Loretto and unsure how to deal with them, he wrote a letter to a professor friend, he had himself been an adjunct at a university in Washington, laying the whole situation out and asking what to do.[4][5] That letter went to the chairman of the university's psychology department, and the reply came back to Kiriakou in his cell. Both exchanges point the same way. Kiriakou's account of Loretto is not a solitary one: the framing that turned a sentence into a book, and the professional opinion that shaped his view of a quarter of the prison population, both arrived from outside the fence, through a visiting-room table and the mail. ## See also - [Doing Time Like a Spy](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/doing-time-like-a-spy) - [FCI Loretto](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/fci-loretto) - [The Psychology Chairmans Letter](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-psychology-chairmans-letter) ## Sources 1. In-Depth Interview - Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou Talks About His Prison Experience (2017-05-19), at 11:20. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auddfe68a43b&t=680s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2017-05-19-peter-b-collins-show-in-depth-interview-former-cia-officer-john-ki/ 2. In-Depth Interview - Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou Talks About His Prison Experience (2017-05-19), at 14:08. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auddfe68a43b&t=848s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2017-05-19-peter-b-collins-show-in-depth-interview-former-cia-officer-john-ki/ 3. In-Depth Interview - Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou Talks About His Prison Experience (2017-05-19), at 14:41. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auddfe68a43b&t=881s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2017-05-19-peter-b-collins-show-in-depth-interview-former-cia-officer-john-ki/ 4. In-Depth Interview - Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou Talks About His Prison Experience (2017-05-19), at 27:43. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auddfe68a43b&t=1663s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2017-05-19-peter-b-collins-show-in-depth-interview-former-cia-officer-john-ki/ 5. In-Depth Interview - Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou Talks About His Prison Experience (2017-05-19), at 28:15. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auddfe68a43b&t=1695s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2017-05-19-peter-b-collins-show-in-depth-interview-former-cia-officer-john-ki/ --- From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-professor-in-the-visiting-room/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt