AI Summary
5 min readIn the federal prison at Loretto, Pennsylvania, John Kiriakou watched a fellow inmate named Wallace — a compulsive liar and degenerate gambler who would not stop talking — and decided he had to go. Wallace had never threatened Kiriakou. He was just exhausting: crying over everything, begging for mackerel pouches to pay off loan sharks, bragging about a yacht he did not own. So Kiriakou, a former CIA officer serving 30 months for leaking the name of a covert officer, ran a classic intelligence operation against him. He forged a release form, planted a laundry bag on Wallace’s bunk, and let the man talk himself into believing he had won his appeal. Wallace gave away everything he owned, threw himself a going-away party, and walked into Receiving and Discharge — where he was immediately cuffed for attempted escape and shipped to solitary. “That was cold even by our standards,” one of the Italian mafia inmates told him. Kiriakou’s reply: “Sometimes it’s best to use dirty tricks, especially when it’s to save your own sanity.”
The rules that kept him from becoming a monster
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction & Sponsors** - Host John Kiriakou begins the episode with sponsor messages and introduces the theme of adapting to the "abyss" of prison.
- 2 (05:08) **Rule #5: Eliminate Potential Problems Using Dirty Tricks** - Kiriakou introduces the CIA rule of using dirty tricks to neutralize threats, adapting it to prison life.
- 3 (18:33) **Rule #6: The Human Body Can Endure Much More Than the Brain Says It Can** - Kiriakou adapts a CIA rule about physical pain to include the psychological endurance required for prison.
- 4 (29:17) **Revisiting Rule #5: The Ken Schaefer Problem** - Kiriakou returns to the concept of "dirty tricks" to confront a new, serious threat in prison.
- 5 (44:22) **The War with Schaefer Escalates** - Schaefer's attempts to hire others to harm Kiriakou fail, but the situation intensifies as Kiriakou's friend, Dave, takes matters into his own hands.
- 6 (50:14) **Outro & Next Episode Preview** - Kiriakou wraps up the episode and teases the next installment.
- 7 Standout Quotes
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
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?
SHOW NOTES
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