Doing Time Like A Spy, John Kiriakou
Doing Time Like A Spy, John Kiriakou
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Doing Time Like A Spy
How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison

Author: John Kiriakou

Narrator: Jonathan Yen

Unabridged: 11 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/14/2019

Synopsis

On February 28, 2013, after pleading guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, John Kiriakou began serving a thirty month prison sentence. His crime: blowing the whistle on the CIA's use of torture on al Qaeda prisoners.

Doing Time Like a Spy is Kiriakou's memoir of his twenty-three months in prison. Using twenty life skills he learned in CIA operational training, he was able to keep himself safe and at the top of the prison social heap. Including his award-winning blog series "Letters from Loretto," Doing Time Like a Spy is at once a searing journal of daily prison life and an alternately funny and heartbreaking commentary on the federal prison system.

About John Kiriakou

John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News. He was responsible for the capture in Pakistan in 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, then believed to be the third-ranking official in al Qaeda. In 2007, Kiriakou blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program, telling ABC News that the CIA tortured prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that the policy had been approved by then-President George W. Bush. He became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act-a law designed to punish spies. He served twenty-three months in prison as a result of the revelation.

In 2012, Kiriakou was honored with the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage, an award given to individuals who "advance truth and justice despite the personal risk it creates," and by the inclusion of his portrait in artist Robert Shetterly's series Americans Who Tell the Truth, which features notable truth-tellers throughout American history. He won the PEN Center USA's prestigious First Amendment Award in 2015, the first Blueprint International Whistleblowing Prize for Bravery and Integrity in the Public Interest in 2016, and the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, also in 2016.

Kiriakou is the author of The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror and The Convenient Terrorist: Abu Zubaydah and the Weird Wonderland of America's Secret Wars.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Randal on January 17, 2022

I enjoyed reading the author's experiences of serving time in a Federal prison. As a retired Federal Bureau of Prison's employee, I recognized much of what the author experienced. The poor health care available, the abysmal education programs, the drama between inmates, and between staff. The author......more

Goodreads review by Alexander on January 01, 2018

The book explains his experience leading from criminal investigation for espionage into incarceration. He explains how his cia training helped him adapt. It also provides an inside look at the prison system. John spends a portion of the book defending his stance on torture and how he was wronged by......more

Goodreads review by James R Ellison on November 23, 2017

Very well written Very well written and from an unusual perspective. The author was and is adamantly opposed to torture, his superiors weren't, and talking to the press about what his employer was up to sent him to prison.......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on July 02, 2021

I didn't expect to find this book nearly as interesting as it ended up being. John Kiriakou was employed by the CIA in the 1990s and early 2000s, but he ended up on the wrong side of a federal investigation after speaking to the press about the CIA torture program. In the end, Kiriakoou pled guilty......more

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