One of the weird things about entering the world of whistleblowers, John Kiriakou has said, is that they have something of a club, and that all of them have become friends. [1]
Who is in it
He names Daniel Ellsberg first, as the granddaddy of all modern national security whistleblowers and an icon to all of them, and then Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis, Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack, among many others. [1] Those who live in the Washington area, he says, get together frequently and socially. [2] Kevin Shipp was brought into the circle after Kiriakou read about his case and telephoned him. [3] The group also has a formal expression in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which produces policy recommendations for the president. [4]
Why it exists
Kiriakou is explicit that this is not a professional association but a survival mechanism. You really need that support network, he says, because when you blow the whistle on something relating to national security there is nothing in the world that makes you feel more alone, more isolated and more endangered — and without that support you could not get through it. You literally could not get through it. [2] He says he is surprised, frankly, that more people charged with national security crimes do not kill themselves than the handful already seen. [2]
The support ran the other way as well. Inside the CIA, Kiriakou says, his backing at the working level was fantastic: seventy of his former colleagues signed a letter to President Barack Obama asking him to pardon Kiriakou, and all seventy signed a second letter, this one to President Donald Trump, asking the same thing. [5] The torture program, he told the same interviewer, had been a blaspheming against what the agency was supposed to stand for; when he had raised his right hand and sworn to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic he had meant it, and sometimes the enemy is ourselves. [5]
The calls he takes
Kiriakou describes the advisory role as routine and unsought: “I get calls from people with some frequency asking for advice.”[6]
The framing he puts around those conversations is not encouragement but disclosure of the cost: “it’s not a secret that the entire weight of the US government will fall on their heads if they go public with their information.”[6]
The change he noticed from inside
Asked in February 2015 whether the government’s treatment of whistleblowers had altered public opinion, Kiriakou answered that the public had moved rather than the government: “I think that Americans are more aware of the role of whistleblowers, whereas as recently as three or four years ago nobody gave whistleblowers a second thought.”[7]
He dates the shift to his own sentence and measures it in correspondence: “I have to say, really since I went to prison, that I’ve been overwhelmed by the support I’ve received from average Americans across the country — and I think that just a few years ago, that wouldn’t have been the case.”[7]