John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
John Kiriakou's Dead Drop

S2E11 Unfinished Business

July 27, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

John Kiriakou spent his final year at FCI Loreto refusing to lay low. A former CIA officer convicted under the Espionage Act for exposing the agency’s torture program, Kiriakou had roughly twelve months left on his sentence when he decided that the easiest path—keeping his head down, serving out his time quietly—was not an option. “The problem with being a whistleblower,” he says in this episode of Dead Drop, “is that once you’ve seen the light, you just cannot unsee it.” What follows is a series of confrontations with prison staff, each one a small act of defiance that Kiriakou calls “unfinished business.”

The Rules of Engagement

Kiriakou explains that prisoners serving long or life terms learn to think about time differently—they build routines, find stable jobs, and teach themselves to live inside the system. Short-timers like him suffer from “short timer syndrome”: a state of heightened anxiety and impatience where the final weeks feel endless. But Kiriakou’s problem was not just impatience. He had already established himself as a whistleblower, and the prison authorities, he says, “knew they were outclassed, outgunned, and outwitted.” He could have laid low. Instead, he kept pushing.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (03:00) **Time & Survival in Prison** - Kiriakou explains how long-term prisoners must fundamentally change their relationship with time to survive, contrasting this with "short-timer syndrome" experienced by those nearing release.
  • 2 (05:42) **The Pardon Block and Unfinished Business** - Kiriakou reveals the CIA is blocking his pardon and explains why he must keep fighting despite his approaching release.
  • 3 (07:55) **Confronting CO Graham** - Kiriakou recounts his ongoing feud with Correctional Officer Graham, a hapless CO who tried to trick him into fighting another prisoner.
  • 4 (09:58) **Taking Down CO "Sarge"** - Kiriakou details how he filed a formal complaint against the abusive CO Sarge, resulting in her six-month exile from his unit.
  • 5 (12:31) **Staff Soap Opera and Stupidity** - Kiriakou describes the chaotic personal lives and jaw-dropping incompetence of the Loreto staff.
  • 6 (15:09) **The Thanksgiving Confrontation with Lieutenant Gramble** - Kiriakou is summoned to Lieutenant Gramble's office after Gramble monitors a phone call where Kiriakou called a CO a "nimrod."
  • 7 (25:04) **Getting Revenge on Gramble** - Kiriakou outmaneuvers Gramble by writing a letter detailing the Thanksgiving confrontation, knowing the prison's SIS unit monitors his publications.

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Show Notes

IN THIS EPISODE With his out date - the end of his prison sentence - now starting to come into view (albeit still in the distance), John would have been best served by keeping his head down. But there remained unfinished business - with sevveral fellow prisoners and especially with the Soretto Prison authorities. And then there was all the unfinished business - all related to torture - happening outside Loretto.


SHOW NOTES

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