S2E1 Welcome To Loretto
John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
Costard & Touchstone Productions
4.9 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
THE BLURB: In season one, we told the story of how CIA counter terrorism officer John Kiriakou chose to tell ABC journalist Jonathan Ross the truth - that the CIA had tortured and waterboarded detainees like Abu Zubaydah. The CIA went on the warpath against John, finally forcing him to accept a plea deal of thirty months reducible to 23 months in federal prison. In season two, John arrives at Loretto Federal Prison and enters a world unlike anything he'd ever encountered before. Though John had expected to serve his sentence at a "Club Fed" style work camp, the Bureau of Prisons chose instead to put John in a more prison-like prison with drug dealers, mafiosi and child molesters. Every bit of John's training as a spy would serve him well as a prisoner.
SHOW NOTES
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production. |
| 0:04.2 | There are moments in life where you think you know what's happening. |
| 0:08.8 | The scales have fallen from your eyes and as you gaze ahead into the future, |
| 0:13.6 | you do so with a remarkable amount of confidence and faith that the future will be exactly |
| 0:19.0 | how you expect it to be. |
| 0:23.0 | And then reality flattens your expectations. We ended season one of this podcast story with my arrival at Loretto, the federal |
| 0:29.8 | prison I had been assigned to following my conviction, a punitive punishment for ratting out |
| 0:35.1 | the CIA's torture program, I believe. I'd gone from being a |
| 0:39.1 | villain in the public's eyes to being, well, a hero for a lot of people, for doing the right thing. |
| 0:45.5 | Consequences be damned. If you remember in the days leading up to me turning myself in, |
| 0:50.6 | I'd been feted by friends, journalists, publishers, and other whistleblowers, all very |
| 0:55.8 | heady stuff. A few of those friends, along with my lawyers, had made the drive with me from D.C. to |
| 1:01.5 | FCI Loretto, about 90 miles east of Pittsburgh. At the work camp, where I expected to be housed |
| 1:07.5 | and incarcerated, they told me to check in across the street at the main prison. |
| 1:11.7 | Someone would then walk me back to the work camp. My friends and lawyers, they all waived. |
| 1:16.6 | Then they got into their cars and drove off. In a weird way, it was kind of nice. I headed across |
| 1:22.2 | the street, resigned to my fate, thinking I had a pretty good idea of what my near-term fate |
| 1:27.1 | was going to be. In spying, |
| 1:30.1 | the thing that always scares you the most is whatever you don't know. That's the thing lurking |
| 1:35.5 | beneath the surface, just waiting to devour you. I was utterly convinced that whatever the next |
| 1:41.2 | 30 months reducible to 23 was about to throw at me, I was ready for it. |
| 1:46.0 | What's that old joke? How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans? |
... |
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