The sixty-five-cent arrangement is the informal deal John Kiriakou made with the chaplain at FCI Loretto that freed him to write his prison memoir.
The job
Kiriakou had offered on his first full day to teach — he had a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern studies, a master’s in policy analysis and completed doctoral coursework at Virginia — and was screamed at for the suggestion. He was made a janitor in the chapel instead, at about sixty-five cents an hour.[1][2]
The chapel job had one incidental advantage: the chaplain liked him, because he was the only person working there who was not a sex offender. But the chaplain’s budget was tight and the prison was badly overcrowded — built for around 680 people and holding 1,425, with men in bunks in the hallways.[2]
The deal
Kiriakou proposed a trade that cost the chaplain nothing and helped somebody else. He did not want the work and did not need the sixty-five cents an hour; if the chaplain would keep him on the books and pass the money to the next man in line, he would simply stop coming in.[2]
The chaplain agreed, and Kiriakou used the recovered hours to write. He is clear that he had not gone in intending to write anything: “they made it so easy, like they gave me so much material that I couldn’t not write the book.”[3] The result was Doing Time Like a Spy, written longhand because he had no access to a computer.