John Kiriakou, from a decorated high-ranking CIA counter-terrorism chief who led the 2002 capture of al-Qaeda’s Abu Zubaydah, to a federal inmate, John Kiriakou’s life is a masterclass in the high cost of speaking truth to power. In 2007, he became the first CIA official to publicly confirm the agency’s use of waterboarding, explicitly calling it torture—an act of whistleblowing that eventually led to him being the only person imprisoned in connection with the torture program. After serving 23 months, he reinvented himself as a sharp-witted author and commentator, hosting the Deep Focus podcast and penning books like The Reluctant Spy, and the gritty survival manual Doing Time Like a Spy, effectively using his intelligence background to critique the very systems he once served.
