Your life as every level of a CIA whistleblower. You are a CIA officer. You have spent 14 years serving your country. You have recruited foreign spies. You have led counter-terrorism operations. You have helped capture one of the most wanted terrorists on the planet. You have risked your life in countries where Americans are not supposed to be. And one day, you discover that the agency you devoted your life to is doing something that violates everything you swore to protect. They are torturing people. Not interrogating them. Torturing them. Strapping men to boards and pouring water over their faces until they drown, and then bringing them back to life and doing it again. 83 times. And nobody is talking about it. Nobody in Congress knows. Nobody in the media knows. Nobody in the American public has any idea what is being done in their name. You have a choice. You can stay quiet, keep your job, keep your pension, keep your security clearance, and spend the rest of your life knowing what you know and saying nothing. Or you can tell the truth. And if you tell the truth, the full weight of the United States government will come down on you like a hammer. Not on the people who did the torturing. On you. The person who talked about it. This is your life as every level of a CIA whistleblower. And at the end of this story, only one person goes to prison. And it is not the torturer. Level one. The believer. You join the CIA because you believe in something. You believe in America. You believe in the Constitution. You believe that the United States is a force for good in the world, and you want to be part of the machinery that keeps it safe. You are 25 years old, idealistic, patriotic, and willing to sacrifice everything for your country. You walk through the doors of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and you feel like you have arrived at the center of the universe. Your first years are spent as an analyst. You sit at a desk. You read intelligence reports from around the world, and you learn how the agency operates. You learn the culture. You learn the language, the acronyms, the jargon, the unwritten rules that govern how things work inside the most secretive organization on Earth. You learn that loyalty is everything. That the agency protects its own. That what happens inside Langley stays inside Langley. You learn that there are things you will see and hear that you can never discuss with anyone outside the building. Not your spouse. Not your parents. Not your closest friend. This is the deal. And you accept it gladly because you believe in the mission. After a few years of analytical work, you are selected for operations. You become a case officer. This is the front line of intelligence work. You are sent overseas to recruit foreign nationals as spies for the United States. You learn to manipulate people. You learn to identify their weaknesses, their debts, their grievances, their egos, their secrets, and exploit them until they agree to betray their own governments. You learn to lie convincingly, to build trust with people you intend to use, and to disappear from a country overnight if your cover is blown. You are good at this. You are very good at this. And the agency rewards you for it. You serve in multiple countries over the course of a decade. You work in the Middle East, where you recruit military officers who pass you classified information about weapons programs. You work in South Asia, where you develop sources inside terrorist organizations. You work in Europe, where you run operations against foreign intelligence services that are trying to steal American secrets. Every operation is dangerous. Every asset you recruit could be a double agent. Every country you operate in has a security service that would arrest you, interrogate you, and imprison you if they discovered what you were doing. But you accept the risk because you believe in the mission. You believe that the intelligence you are gathering is protecting American lives. And the agency rewards you for it. You are promoted. You receive commendations that you can never show to anyone outside the building. You are trusted with the most sensitive operations the agency runs. And then, on September 11th, 2001, two planes fly into the World Trade Center, a third hits the Pentagon, and a fourth crashes into a field in Pennsylvania. 3,000 people die in a single morning. And everything you thought you knew about your job, your agency, and your country changes overnight. Level two, the warrior. The twin towers fall. 3,000 people die. And overnight, the CIA transforms from an intelligence-gathering organization into a weapon of war. The gloves come off. That is the actual phrase used by senior officials. The gloves are off. Every rule that once governed how the agency operates is loosened, rewritten, or thrown out entirely. The mission is no longer just to gather intelligence. The mission is to find the people responsible for By any means necessary. You are sent to Pakistan as chief of counterterrorist operations. Your job is to find Al-Qaeda's leadership and bring them in. In March of 2002, you lead the team that captures Abu Zubaydah, a man described at the time as the third highest-ranking member of Al-Qaeda. The raid is dangerous, chaotic, and violent. Abu Zubaydah is shot three times during the operation. You sit with him for days afterward as he recovers under medical treatment. You talk to him. He talks to you. And then the CIA takes over his interrogation, and you are told that you are no longer needed. What you do not know, what you will not learn until years later, is what happens to Abu Zubaydah after you leave. The CIA transfers him to a secret prison, a black site, a facility that officially does not exist in a country that will never acknowledge it was there. And inside that black site, CIA contractors begin using a set of techniques they call enhanced interrogation. They strip him naked. They blast him with music at deafening volume for days without allowing him to sleep. They slam his head into walls. They lock him in a coffin-sized box for hours. And they waterboard him. They strap him to a board, cover his face with a cloth, and pour water over his mouth and nose until his lungs fill and his body convulses. And he believes with absolute certainty that he is drowning. They do this 83 times. Not once, not twice, 83 times. Each time bringing him to the edge of death and then pulling him back. And when it is over, the intelligence he provides under torture turns out to be unreliable, fabricated, or information the CIA already had. The agency offers to train you in these enhanced interrogation techniques. They present it as a professional development opportunity, an additional skill set, a way to contribute more effectively to the war on terror. You look at the training materials. You read the descriptions of what these techniques involve. Waterboarding. Sleep deprivation lasting up to 180 hours. That is 7 and 1/2 days without sleep. Stress positions that force a human body into contortions that cause excruciating pain. Confinement in a box the size of a coffin. Slamming a man's head into a wall with a rolled towel around his neck so it does not leave visible bruising. You recognize what they are describing. It is not enhanced interrogation. It is torture. The same techniques that the United States prosecuted Japanese soldiers for using against American prisoners of war in World War II. The same techniques that the Geneva Conventions were designed to prohibit. And you say no. You refuse the training. You walk out of the room. You are one of the very few officers who does. And by refusing, you mark yourself as someone who is not fully on board with the program. Someone who might become a problem. Level three. The doubt you leave the CIA in 2004. You have served for 14 years. You are exhausted, disillusioned, and haunted by what you have learned about the interrogation program. You know that the United States of America, the country you swore to protect, the country whose Constitution you memorized, the country you believed was fundamentally different from every authoritarian regime you spent your career fighting against, has been systematically torturing prisoners in secret prisons around the world. And the people who authorized it, the people who designed it, the people who carried it out, the lawyers who wrote the memos justifying it, none of them will ever face consequences. Because the program is classified, and classified means it never happened. You try to move on. You get a job in the private sector. You work as a consultant. You try to live a normal life with your wife and five children. But the knowledge eats at you. You cannot stop thinking about it. You read the news reports that begin to trickle out. Fragmentary accounts of secret prisons, leaked photographs from Abu Ghraib showing prisoners being humiliated and abused by American soldiers, growing rumors about a classified interrogation program that goes far beyond anything the public has been told. And you realize that nobody in a position of authority, not the CIA, not the White House, not the Department of Justice, is going to tell the truth about what happened. If the truth is going to come out, someone inside the system has to speak. You know what happens to people who speak. You have watched other whistleblowers be prosecuted, discredited, and destroyed. Thomas Drake, a senior executive at the NSA, blew the whistle on a billion-dollar surveillance program that was wasting taxpayer money and violating constitutional rights. The government charged him under the Espionage Act. He faced 35 years in prison. The charges were eventually dropped, but his career was destroyed, his savings were wiped out, and he ended up working at an Apple store to pay his bills. Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers and was charged with espionage. Chelsea Manning leaked classified military documents and spent 7 years in prison. Edward Snowden revealed mass surveillance by the NSA and had to flee to Russia to avoid prosecution. The pattern is unmistakable. The people who reveal government wrongdoing are treated as criminals. The people who committed the wrongdoing are promoted. Level four, the interview. In December 2007, you make a decision that will define the rest of your life. You sit down in front of a camera for an interview with ABC News. And you say something that no American government official has ever said publicly before. You confirm that the CIA waterboarded prisoners. You confirm that it happened at black sites. Secret prisons in countries whose governments cooperated in exchange for cash payments. You use the word torture. You say that what the CIA did was torture and that it was wrong. And that the American people deserve to know about it. The interview airs on national television. Millions of Americans watch it. It is a bombshell, a seismic event in the national security world. You are the first CIA officer in history to publicly confirm the existence of the waterboarding program. The first person with direct knowledge of the program to look into a camera and say the word torture. The agency is furious. The White House is furious. The intelligence community closes ranks against you. Your former colleagues call you a traitor. People you worked beside for a decade stop returning your calls. Your name becomes synonymous with betrayal inside the walls of Langley. But outside those walls, the interview changes the national conversation about torture. Congressional inquiries are launched. Journalists begin investigating the full scope of the program. The Senate Intelligence Committee begins what will eventually become a 6,000 page report documenting the CIA's use of torture in detail that the agency spent years trying to suppress. You told the truth. You went on national television and told the American people what their government was doing in secret, behind closed doors, in countries they had never heard of. And the reaction from the intelligence community is exactly what you expected. The CIA does not launch an internal investigation into the torture program. It does not investigate the officers who carried out the waterboarding. It does not investigate the supervisors who authorized it. It does not investigate the psychologists who designed the techniques and were paid $81 million for their expertise in human suffering. It does not investigate the lawyers at the Department of Justice who wrote the legal memos that redefined drowning a man as something other than torture. Instead, the CIA investigates you. Within weeks of your interview airing on ABC News, the Federal Bureau of Investigation opens a criminal investigation into John Kiriakou. Not into the torture program. Into you. They do not ask who waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times. They do not ask who approved it. They do not ask who paid for it. They ask one question and one question only. Who told the public about it? Level five. The prosecution. The investigation takes five years. Five years of FBI agents reviewing your phone records, your emails, your bank accounts, your travel history. Five years of federal prosecutors building a case against a man whose crime was confirming what the government was doing in secret. In 2012, the Obama administration charges you with five felonies. Three counts under the Espionage Act of 1917, a law designed to prosecute spies who sell secrets to foreign governments, not intelligence officers who talk to journalists about government wrongdoing. And one count under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for confirming the name of a covert officer involved in the torture program to a freelance reporter who never published it. You face 45 years in federal prison. 45 years. You are a father of five children. Your youngest is 2 years old. Your lawyers tell you that if you go to trial and lose, you will not see your children grow up. You will die in prison. The government offers you a deal. Plead guilty to a single count of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, not the Espionage Act, and accept a sentence of 30 months. 2 and 1/2 years. You take the deal. Not because you believe you are guilty, but because you cannot risk spending the rest of your life behind bars. On February 28th, 2013, you kiss your wife and your five children goodbye on the front porch of your home in Arlington, Virginia. You get into a car. You drive 4 hours west through the mountains of Pennsylvania, and you walk through the gates of the Federal Correctional Institution in Loretto, Pennsylvania. You are 50 years old. You are a decorated CIA officer with 14 years of service to the United States of America. You once held one of the highest security clearances in the federal government. You helped capture one of the most wanted terrorists in the world. You were offered a position briefing the Director of Central Intelligence on the war in Iraq, and you are now federal prisoner number 79637-083. They take your belt. They take your watch. They take your wallet. They hand you a khaki uniform and assign you a bunk number. The irony is suffocating. The people who waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times were never investigated. The lawyers who wrote the legal memos authorizing torture were never charged. The CIA directors who oversaw the program were never held accountable. The psychologists who designed the torture techniques, James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, were paid $81 million by the CIA for their work. $81 million. And you, the person who told the American people what was being done in their name, are the only person connected to the CIA torture program who will ever see the inside of a prison cell. Level six, the prisoner. You spend 23 months in federal prison at the Federal Correctional Institution in Loretto, Pennsylvania. A low-security facility surrounded by farmland in rural Appalachia. You are assigned a bunk in an open dormitory with 60 other men. You are surrounded by drug dealers, fraud artists, tax cheats, and white-collar criminals. You are a former CIA officer who once led counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, who held a top-secret SCI security clearance, who briefed the director of Central Intelligence on Iraq, and who helped capture one of the most dangerous men in the world. And now you are mopping floors at 6:00 in the morning and eating meals in a cafeteria with 200 other inmates for $3.36 a day, the federal prison wage. Your wife visits when she can, but the prison is 4 hours from your home in Arlington, Virginia. She brings the children when the schedule allows. Your older children understand or try to. Your 2-year-old does not understand why his father cannot come home. He cries when visiting time is over, and you stand behind the glass watching him leave, unable to follow. You use the skills the CIA taught you to survive. You read people. You identify the power structures inside the prison. You know who to talk to and who to avoid. You keep a low profile. You do not complain. You write. You write letters. You write articles. You write a book called Doing Time Like a Spy about how CIA operational training helped you navigate the federal prison system. The book wins three awards, including the PEN First Amendment Award. And while you sit in your cell, the Senate Intelligence Committee releases a summary of its 6,000-page report on the CIA torture program. The report confirms everything you said. It confirms that the CIA waterboarded prisoners. It confirms that the enhanced interrogation techniques produced no actionable intelligence that could not have been obtained through conventional means. It confirms that the CIA misled Congress, the White House, and the public about the effectiveness and the scope of the program. Every word you said in that ABC News interview 7 years earlier is validated by the United States Senate. And you read about it from a prison cell. Level seven. The aftermath. You are released on February 3rd, 2015, after 23 months behind bars. You serve three additional months of house arrest at your home in Arlington, Virginia, wearing a GPS ankle monitor that tracks your every movement. You step outside your front door for the first time in nearly 2 years, and the world looks different. The trees on your street seem taller than you remember. Your neighborhood has new houses. Your children have new friends you have never met. Your children are older. Your savings are gone. Your career is destroyed. Your security clearance has been revoked permanently. You are a convicted felon. You cannot vote in some states. You cannot own a firearm. Your pension, $700,000 that you earned over 14 years of serving your country, has been stripped from you. And the government that prosecuted you still insists that you are not a whistleblower. You are a leaker, a criminal, a man who broke the law. But outside the intelligence community, the world sees you differently. Human rights organizations celebrate you. The American Civil Liberties Union defends you. Amnesty International calls you a courageous whistleblower. You receive the Sam Adams Award for integrity in intelligence, the same award given to other whistleblowers who sacrificed their careers to tell the truth. You win the PEN First Amendment Award. You win the Blueprint International Whistleblowing Prize for bravery and integrity. And slowly, something unexpected begins to happen. People want to hear your story. Not just journalists, not just human rights activists, everyone. Level eight, the public figure. You start a YouTube channel. You launch a podcast called Deep Focus with John Kiriakou. You begin writing columns for independent news outlets. You speak at universities, at conferences, at events around the world. And then the podcast start calling. The big ones, the ones with audiences in the tens of millions. You sit down with Joe Rogan and tell your story to an audience larger than most cable news networks. You appear on the Dr. Phil podcast in an episode titled Pardon Him Already. Clips from your interviews go viral on TikTok and YouTube. Millions of people who had never heard of the CIA torture program, who were too young to remember the debates about waterboarding and black sites are hearing about it for the first time. Through you, through a 60-year-old former CIA officer sitting in front of a microphone telling the truth the same way he told it in 2007. And the truth has not changed. The CIA waterboarded prisoners. It was torture. It produced no actionable intelligence. And the only person who went to prison for it was the man who told the public. That story, the absurd, infuriating injustice of it, resonates with a new generation. They share the clips. They tag politicians. They sign petitions. A moveon.org petition calling for your pardon circulates online. Your name trends on social media. And suddenly, the same story that destroyed your career is the story that makes you famous. But fame is not what you want. What you want is a pardon. A presidential pardon would not just clear your name. It would restore your pension. It would give you back the $700,000 the government took from you. It would officially recognize that what you did was not a crime, but an act of conscience. And so, you do something that no intelligence whistleblower has ever done before. You take your case directly to the public. You go on every podcast, every interview, every platform that will have you, and you make a simple argument. I served my country for 14 years. I helped capture one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world. I refused to participate in torture. I told the American people the truth. And I went to prison for it. Pardon me. As of right now, John Kiriakou is still waiting. He has not received his pardon. He has not received his pension. But he has something the CIA never expected him to have. A platform. A voice. And an audience of millions who know his name and know his story. The agency tried to silence him. They prosecuted him, imprisoned him, and took everything he had. And he came out the other side louder than he went in. Because that is what happens when you try to bury the truth. It does not stay buried. It finds a microphone. John Kiriakou is the only person in the history of the CIA torture program to be convicted and imprisoned. The people who authorized the program, the people who carried it out, the psychologists who designed the techniques, the lawyers who wrote the legal justifications, none of them spent a single day behind bars. The psychologists were paid $81 million. Kiriakou lost everything. And today, he sits in front of a camera, tells his story to millions of people, and waits for a phone call from the White House that may never come. If you made it this far, subscribe and drop a comment telling me what you would have done. Would you have stayed quiet, or would you have talked? And check out our video on every level of a CIA double agent. I'll see you in the next one.