Article content continued

It’s a rare peek into discussions within the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency — whose role in the 2002-03 events has never been publicly examined, having remained off-limits in Canada’s inquiry.

Read more …

[/np_storybar]

He was never a normal inmate.

Kiriakou arrived in prison with countless state secrets, had participated in the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, led post-9-11 counterterrorism arrests in Pakistan, and had learned Arabic for his old job.

His old job was being a spy.

He was jailed for telling journalists a bit too much about his former employer: the CIA. He insists he was punished for blowing the whistle on the use of torture in 2007, not because he tipped off journalists to the identity of a couple of former spy colleagues, which is why he was charged.

“I’m 100 per cent positive,” Kiriakou says in an interview at home, where he’s completing his sentence under house arrest after two years in jail.

He’s adamant that he’s being singled out. Lots of names leak out of the agency without consequences, he says. Also, he accuses the FBI of trying to entrap him several times and failing.

To avoid a return trip to prison, there are limits to what he’ll say in interviews.

He will describe how former CIA colleagues protested the arrest, transfer, and torture in Syria of Canadian Maher Arar — but he absolutely won’t reveal the name of a woman in CIA middle-management who he says insisted on Arar’s arrest.

He’ll gladly discuss his latest book. He’d already published one about his CIA career. This forthcoming one was written by hand, in prison.