Doing Time Like A Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison Hardcover – May 15, 2017

John Kiriakou and I are quite different. He is a trained CIA analyst and counter terrorism officer who has earned his stripes behind the desk and in the field. He’s proud of his work, despite the persecution he has suffered at the hands of our government. After he confirmed that the CIA was engaging in torture, and that the orders came from the top, he was subjected to a four-year investigation and ultimately charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage. I don’t much like the CIA and can’t really think of a time they did me a favor. Probably they’d tell me they’d done me many favors, but they’d have to kill me if they told me. However, I would support any and all whistleblowers, and I bought this book to support John Kiriakou. I’m glad I did. He convinced me that I do not ever want to go to prison: A place where one is “surrounded by idiots, dangerous criminals, crooked cops, and corrupt administrators.” It’s a place where “prison officials can do virtually anything they want to you, and there is no recourse.” It’s a place where no adequate medical care is given to inmates and no one cares if you die. “Prison is a combination of seventh grade, Lord of the Flies, and a mental institution.” I’m certainly not about to pass judgement on what Kiriakou did to survive in prison, and book provides some detailed accounts of how he struggled to come out on top. It is a well written and hard-hitting critique of our system of “justice” while it also contains passages that made me chuckle. But, of course, prison is no laughing matter; I’m glad Kiriakou is out and I’m glad that he wrote this book.

John Kiriakou's Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison paints a disturbing portrait of a U.S. prison in which Kiriakou spent time as retribution for having admitted that the CIA used torture. His ongoing whistleblowing on the state of U.S. prisons, as well as on the ways in which the U.S. government has gone after him, is as valuable as his opposition to CIA torture.

The prison as described in the book is largely unaccountable to the rule of law. Prisoners in need of medical attention are simply allowed to die, or hastened along toward death by sadistic or incompetent malpractice. Education for prisoners is nonexistent. Rehabilitation efforts are nonexistent. Slave labor is universal. Those who leave, leave having acquired additional skills and attitudes of criminals. This prison system serves not to protect, not to rehabilitate, not to compensate or make restitution, and not to reduce crime.

Kiriakou also paints what I find a disturbing portrait of himself. In his view, prison requires vicious and manipulative behavior to survive. Perhaps it does. And perhaps it is an act of significantly brave honesty for Kiriakou to show himself to us degraded by such behavior. Perhaps it is all the more so to the extent that he depicts himself enjoying it. Yet he describes his prison-survival techniques as having come straight out of his CIA work, which he engaged in for years and about which he claims unmitigated pride. In addition, Kiriakou describes his approach to writing and publishing as self-serving and manipulative, and repeatedly urges us to never trust anyone, all of which leaves one wondering.

Kiriakou is proud of having volunteered to fight in the War on Terror. His view of foreign policy, as his view of prison conduct, seems to condone killing, but not torturing. His prison skills include threatening various people with murder, but never torture. That neither murder nor torture is legal or moral, and that neither "works" on its own terms, is a blind spot in U.S. culture, not something unique to John Kiriakou.

Kiriakou claims that threatening to kill one fellow prisoner scared him into ceasing to slander Kiriakou, except for on one occasion when Kiriakou was present and the other prisoner unaware of it. But it could be the man was scared into slandering Kiriakou only when he wasn't around, which was exactly what he'd been doing to begin with.

Anyway, it's hard to find morality in the killing / torturing distinction. Maybe that's the point. All is gray. Kiriakou writes that in his CIA work he didn't mind "bending some rules," just not the one on torture. And his prison conduct continually echoes the behavior of the government he is trying to reform.

When Kiriakou asked Senator John Kerry, for whom he had worked, to ask President Obama to commute his sentence, Kerry's reply was "Do not ever attempt to contact me again." When a fellow prisoner revealed to Kiriakou that he was a pedophile, Kiriakou's reply was "Don't ever try to speak to me again. Never. Understand?"

When the CIA proposed to in-source and escalate the use of torture, Cofer Black described what happened as "the gloves came off." When Kiriakou wanted to escalate his attacks on a fellow prisoner, he says "it was time to take the gloves off."

Kiriakou describes Middle Eastern countries he "served" in as "dumps." He describes prisoners as "the scum of society," "filthy pig," "white trash," "filthy midget rat," and similar dehumanizing terms. But when Kiriakou explains why his CIA background came in so handy in prison, he refers to conflict among CIA employees, not between the CIA and foreign "enemies":

"The CIA is full of aggressive alpha personalities. So is prison. The CIA is full of people constantly plotting against each other. So is prison. The CIA is full of people who are always jockeying for some better situation than the one they are currently in. So is prison. I'm the first to admit that in prison I was a serious jerk. I was arrogant, manipulative, and opinionated. But I was also adaptable to changing situations. I could think quickly, and I possessed a certain degree of ruthlessness necessary for self-preservation."

That may very well be true. But was it always true in each of the examples related in the book? When Kiriakou frames a fellow prisoner for a charge of attempted escape, it's because the prisoner is seriously annoying. "Desperate times call for desperate measures," Kiriakou writes, but desperation is an emotion, not an analysis of the seriousness of a threat. The punishment Kiriakou earns the man he frames is solitary confinement for months -- something that much of the world considers torture. Likewise, when Kiriakou writes that he loathed all child molesters in prison, that's an emotion, not a survival technique.

One of the survival rules that Kiriakou borrows straight from U.S. foreign policy is: "If stability is not to your benefit, chaos is your friend." This is working out oh so well in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, et cetera. Kiriakou seems to model the same approach in prison. He confronts a prisoner named Schaeffer over his having lied about not being a child molester. When Schaeffer responds by spreading lies about Kiriakou, Kiriakou acts as if this were the first sign of trouble, as if he'd previously been uninvolved. This is the same worldview that must dominate CIA thinking in which presumably blowback does not exist. "Afghanistan? Where's that? Saddam, who? Never met the man!" Later, as things escalate between Kiriakou and Schaeffer, the "time to take the gloves off" arrives, framed as defense against irrational and inexplicable aggression. "Why do they hate us?"

Maybe it was inexplicable. One could hardly get through a prison sentence without encountering irrational aggression -- short of doing time in a civilized prison in Norway or someplace. But is it always unavoidable? It seems in Kiriakou's account to often be enjoyable. Kiriakou writes: "Sometimes there is real satisfaction in passive-aggression." "Sweet revenge." "I just wanted to see the guy lying in a pool of his own blood." Etc.

Torture is different: "At the CIA, employees are trained to believe that nearly every moral issue is a shade of gray. But this is simply not true. Some issues are black and white -- and torture is one of them," writes Kiriakou. Under great pressure in prison, of a sort I've never faced, Kiriakou never writes that he had to repress any urge to torture anyone, only to murder them.

What are we to make of an account of the brutality of prison by someone who claims to have survived it by mastering its brutality, yet seems to have taken pride in that and to have learned his brutality working on secret operations we aren't supposed to know about for a government that is supposed to somehow represent us? It's very hard to say.

One technique Kiriakou recommends for eliciting information is stating something false in order to be corrected. Yet he notes that in prison this often fails, because you can say the craziest things and people will simply nod. Kiriakou's next paragraph includes this:

"Near the end of my sentence, Russia sent troops into Ukraine and captured the Crimean Peninsula."

Is the author trying his techniques on us in print? I don't know, but I do know that most readers in the United States will simply nod.

A very true and insightful telling of one federal whistleblower’s fate for shining light on this nation’s unforgivable, illegal torture policies. Retaliation against whistleblowers is a common occurrence but this time it was taken to a whole new level and the retaliation didn’t stop at sentencing. One has to wonder who was pulling the strings behind the curtain to cause John Kiriakou to be sent to the main prison rather than the work camp as recommended by John’s attorneys, the prosecutors AND the judge. Who was pulling the strings to deny a request by Kiriakou and supported by countless elected officials, prominent citizens, friends and family to serve at least nine months halfway house time. A request that was well within the Bureau of Prison (BOP) guidelines. No doubt these decisions originated far outside and above the BOP hierarchy. A good example of someone “having six ways from Sunday at getting back at you”.

Kiriakou did not sit idle in prison. As this book shows he turned his troubled fate into something good by shining light on everyday prison life which operates its own level of retaliation toward all prisoners often simply because staff can. Shocking beyond the details of overcrowding, non-existent education programs and substandard meals is the intentional, and I would say, criminal withholding of medical care. Clearly something needs to change. BOP accountability would be a start.

And finally, John Kiriakou offers some life skills all could benefit from knowing.

Good book, but it becomes repetitive toward the last quarter of the book making it hard to get through at that point. It is a quick and easy read.
The descriptions of the BOP Guards is spot on! I know some of those guys and he's right, they are oftentimes good ole boys from the back country who's education is minimal at best. His descriptions of life in prison are entertaining and insightful. Like I said, a good book, but not a great one.
I enjoyed his first book more than this one.