Stay ConnectedJoin ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou on a very personal deep dive into what makes a spy tick. One of the most famous spies in the whole world, John – a spy with a conscience – blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program after the war on terror and spent 23 months in federal prison for it. As John explains, no spy is ever an “ex-spy”. Why is that so? Listen to the podcast and you’ll understand why.
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IN THIS EPISODE, meet Joey Casolo. These days, Joey owns a great pizzaria in South Carolina. But, back in the day, Joey was one of the greatest prison chefs ever at Loretto. If you remember from the movie Goodfellas, the Italians weren't interested in the prison chow. Instead they cooked their own food - gourmet Italian meals - all prepared using a rudimentary (and incredibly dangerous) cooking system: a bucket of water and a live electrical wire that makes the water boil immediately.
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IN THIS EPISODE: How do you fight corruption when most of the corrupt deck is stacked against you? In John's case, he used his words - and the fact that becoming a federal prisoner does not mean you surrender your rights - like the one to free speech. The prison authorities genuinely feared John's power to expose them and their corruption and plotted endlessly to find ways to silence John and cut him off from the outside world and cut the outside world's access to him.
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THE BLURB: While John was serving his sentence, the American government faced the consequences of other whistleblowers speaking their truths about the corruption they'd encountered inside the government. One of the more prominent was Edward Snowden who blew the whistle on the NSA - the National Security Agency - and the fact that it was breaking the law, violating its charter and spying on American citizens by scooping up data on their phone calls. Snowden claimed that he'd been inspired in part by John's whistleblowing. In this episode, we'll tell Ed Snowden's story and how the two whistleblowers found common ground.
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THE BLURB: In this bonus episode, John tells the story of a legal case in which he testified as an expert witness - against the FBI in a case against an accused terrorist. As John learned from personal experience, democracy and secrecy don't always play well together. The people holding the secrets tend to disregard democracy in order to protect their secrets. In this instance, the FBI went after a homeless man, determined - despite a complete lack of actual evidence - that he was a dangerous terrorist. Did John's expert testimony save the day? You'll have to listen to find out!
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IN THIS EPISODE John arrived at Loretto Federal Prison having promised to write about his experiences for various independent news media outlets. He had no idea just how powerful that connection - John's prison experiences and the news media - would prove. In this episode, John tells the story of how his prison blog - "Letters From Loretto" - became a national sensation and an ever-more-damning indictment of the corruption inside our prisons and prison system.
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THE BLURB: Already a succesful, best-selling author when the CIA put John in prison, he quickly realized that his writing - his words - were going to be his super power. John wasn't worried about his fellow prisoners; his training as a spy gave him advantages over them. But the prison authorities - corrupt to their marrow - did pose problems to John. Until they realized just how much of a super power John's writing was. Turns out, the pen is mightier than the sword and the corrupt federal prison system.
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THE BLURB: Frederich Nietsche warned us about staring into the abyss and becoming the monster we most feared. He could have been talking about being in prison. Or being a spy. In this episode, John tells how he increasingly relied on the rules of spying to navitage prison life. But, in becoming a monster in order to survive, the question becomes: when John's sentence ends, will he be able to separate himself from the monster - or will the monster he had to become follow him into the outside worldl?
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THE BLURB: While, on the one hand prison is NOT the place you go to make friends, once you're there, you need to have (and be able to rely on) a tight circle of friends just to survive. In the last episode, John introduced you to some of that tight circle. In this episode, John dives a little deeper into those relationships plus a few others that were essential parts of his prison experience. But, you can't befriend killers, conmen and pathological liars without having your own humanity ding-ed. John begins to grow oblivious of how dead-eyed he's becoming.
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THE BLURB: In prison, nobody helps anybody. Except their friends. In this episode, John will introduce you to his circle of friends, some of whom remained his friend long after they all got out of prison. Relationships that would probably never have happened except for prison can become some of the most profound, satisfying relationships one has. As you'lll hear...
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THE BLURB: One thing about prison, there are rules upon rules. Upon rules. In this episode, John realizes that he's going to have to live by his own rules in order to survive. Those rules will be entirely based on the rules John learned - and had to live by - as a spy. As John keeps learning, there's an amazing amount of similarity between living life as a federal prisoner and living life as a spy.
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