Asked about his future, Kiriakou described the arc that got him there by way of its lowest point, and prefaced it with the line he attributes to his brother: it took him twelve years to become an overnight success.[1]
No work
When he got out of prison, he says, he literally could not find a job anywhere. The list of employers he names is deliberately mundane: Target, Safeway, McDonald’s, Uber. The answer in each case was the same — “we don’t hire felons.”[1]
The felony in question was the one he had pleaded to under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act; the employers were not being asked to weigh it, and did not.
The crumb
Eventually he got what he calls a crumb from a think tank in Washington, the Institute for Policy Studies. The offer was a job paying minimum wage — with the additional condition that he would have to run an ongoing GoFundMe campaign to raise the money for his own salary.[2]
He did that for a year. At the end of it the institute told him that the arrangement was untenable and wished him the best of luck, and he left.[2]
What came next
It was that situation, and not any political sympathy, that produced his next job. He had twice turned down an offer of a radio show at Sputnik Radio, a network owned by the Russian government. By then his marriage had ended, and the choice as he describes it was to take the job or go on food stamps — quite literally.[2][3]
He took it on a written condition of his own: that he would have the freedom to criticise anybody he wanted, including Vladimir Putin. He asked for it in the contract, and says they put it there.[3]
The sequence is the substance of the argument Kiriakou makes about what a national security prosecution actually costs. The sentence was twenty-three months. The disqualification from ordinary employment, on his account, had no end date at all.