The Reluctant Spy

by John Kiriakou

  I started Arabic school the next day. There were only six of us. The two instructors sat us down, spent a few hours seeing what we knew in Arabic—the alphabet (yes), sounding out words (not really), the symbols above words (no). With two others, I was put in the beginners’ class. The other three, who seemed to know a bit more, were in a slightly advanced class; they included a guy from South Carolina who knew the Arabic word for hello (marhaba) and began each day with a hearty, “Marhaba, bubba.” It was funny for the first week or two; after that, he got polite, tight-lipped smiles from the rest of us, not least because he was having a hell of a time learning anything else in Arabic.

  The main instructor was Ibrahim, a wonderful Egyptian guy, no longer with the agency. It was an eight-and-a-half-hour day of work, including an hour for lunch, and after the first two weeks, it was conducted entirely in Arabic. At the beginning, Ibrahim stood before us and said, “I’m going to write thirty-five three-letter verbs on this board. I need you to memorize all of them and all ten cases for each one. If you can do that by the end of the year, you’re going to speak Arabic. Because everything else is going to come to you. All the other words that you’re going to need to form sentences and to carry on conversations, it’s all going to come to you.” And he was right.

  My gang of three included a fairly senior woman and a new agency hire, and we were good, all three of us. We made flash cards to test one another and read everything we could get our hands on. The instructional day began at 8 a.m., but I was so eager that I asked Ibrahim whether I could come in an hour early for a one-on-one tutorial. Sure, he said, come by at seven. I got there at 5 a.m. instead, made a pot of coffee, had a quick bite to eat, and studied until Ibrahim showed up. In effect, I was studying from 5 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. each day. In the evenings, JoAnne taught in a dance studio until 10 p.m. So I’d feed and bathe our infant, Chris, put him to bed, and study some more. Arabic newspapers. Tapes of Voice of America in Arabic. Arabic language newscasts. I’d watch Sesame Street in Arabic; it’s an incredible tool for learning any language. My classmates were doing the same things.

  There were classes in other languages at the school, of course, each one on its own timeline. By December, the people studying Spanish were already taking their final exams to test for fluency; we were just finishing the alphabet. How were we ever going to do this? They’re having conversations in Spanish with university professors and we’re still working on letters. There were only the two Arabic sections, of three people each, which limited interaction. This may well have slowed us down. But then we were a low-budget item on the government’s shopping list for foreign-language study. Total immersion for Spanish students was a week in Mexico City; for students of German, a week in Berlin. We spent five days in Dearborn, Michigan, just west of Detroit, hanging out in its heavily Arab neighborhoods and going to a mosque where the imam lectured us on Islam in Arabic.

  Our country may have had several wake-up calls in the seventies, eighties, and early nineties—an Arab oil embargo, a couple Arab-Israeli wars, intervention in Lebanon, the first Iraq war. But attention spans were limited, and apparently no one thought Arabic language study should be much of a priority—at least no one with the stroke to make it happen. We were still in a cultural Stone Age, the pre-9/11 era, when understanding Arab societies, radical Islam, and the tensions within Muslim communities didn’t seem so important.

  But my classmates and I were lucky: Our instructors were terrific, and Ibrahim in particular was wildly creative. He announced that it was time for a field trip—a visit to the National Zoo, where he’d teach us the names of the animals in Arabic. The next field trip was a visit to his house, where we helped him move some furniture to a rental property he’d just bought, all the time speaking nothing but Arabic. Then there were the poker games, again completely in Arabic, including one with one of the senior agency officers for Near East operations.

  We were taught not merely to respond to questions with one-word answers—for example, saying “drugs” if asked to name an important problem facing the United States today. “You can’t just blurt out the answer in a word,” Ibrahim said. “Give the question back as part of your answer. Draw it out.” Check: “In my opinion, one of the most important issues facing the United States today is the problem of illegal drug use.” In these drills, Ibrahim was expanding our range in Arabic and preparing us for the forty-five-minute verbal examination that would measure our fluency—or the lack of it—at the end of our school year.

  Ibrahim explained that we’d be tested at four levels of fluency. I wasn’t going to make level four, but he thought that I would make level three by my exam deadline.

  Level one was pretty basic. Question: “How are you today?” Answer: “I am fine, thank you.”

  Level two was a small step up. Question: “What’s the weather like today?” Answer: “The weather today is good; it’s sunny. But tomorrow will be cloudy and we may have rain.”

  Level two-plus represented basic conversational fluency. Question: “What’s your car like?” Answer: “My car is a 1989 Volkswagen Fox. The color’s red, and it’s a four-door with a radio. When I get in the car, I turn on the radio and listen to the news. The car has headlights in front and yellow and red lights in the back.”

  Ibrahim recommended that we stretch out the answers to questions at levels one and two, demonstrating our verbal dexterity and, not coincidentally, shortening the time available for a battery of level three questions. As it turned out, I got several level three questions, but Ibrahim’s preparation paid rich dividends and I handled them well, or so I thought. The two examiners, from the U.S. State Department, seemed to think so, too. Or maybe they congratulated everyone, just to hurry the process along. But about a half hour later, back in the small classroom where I’d studied for a year, Ibrahim arrived with the good news.

  “Hanna,” he said, using the Arabic translation of my given name before switching to the English idiom: “You sonofabitch.” Then it was back to Arabic: “Thalatha, thalatha, thalatha,” or three, three, three—my scores for speaking, reading, and comprehension.

  OUR TIME IN Bahrain wasn’t an idyll, but it wasn’t hard duty either. English was widely spoken in professional circles; still, I had plenty of opportunities to work on my Arabic when talking with drivers and others who provided services to the diplomatic crowd. Early on, a Bahraini driver made it painfully clear that I wouldn’t be translating for the U.S. ambassador anytime soon. “You speak Shakespeare Arabic,” he said with a laugh. “Nobody speaks Arabic like that.” What he meant was that I had no serious training in idiomatic Arabic and, of course, no real feel for the local dialect. Even so, my basic Arabic was good, and over time, I picked up what I needed to make it better than good.

  The work was interesting, and it gave me an opportunity to get a better sense of the regional economy, the oil industry and petro-politics, and the pressure points in the Islamic world. JoAnne thoroughly enjoyed the experience and left Bahrain, reluctantly, in the late spring of 1996 so that our second son, Costa, could be delivered at home. That accident of timing proved a blessing because on June 25, our eighth anniversary, all hell broke loose.

  It was nearly 10 p.m., local time, about 2 p.m. in the States, and I was in our bedroom on the phone with JoAnne, wishing her a happy anniversary, saying how much I missed her and Chris, and otherwise making small talk when the front of our Bahrain house seemed to explode with a huge boom. I instinctively rolled off the bed and onto the floor, said, “I gotta go,” and waited for my nerves to settle down. When I got up and moved to the front of the house, my living-room window was a mass of glass shards on the carpet. Outside, my neighbors—Americans, Brits, Germans, Swedes, and other Westerners—all thought we were under attack, but there were no craters from bombs or missiles or other signs of violence except for the massive damage to the front of our houses. I called the embassy, but at that moment, no one knew what had happened.

  By morning, everyone knew. The explosion had c
ome from Saudi Arabia, sixteen miles away. Islamic militants, taking violent exception to the continuing presence of American forces on Islam’s holy ground, had blown up an eight-story building housing U.S. Air Force personnel at al-Khobar, killing nineteen. I knew exactly where al-Khobar was: From my front yard, you could see its lights across the waters of the Persian Gulf. I wasn’t surprised when my superior in Bahrain told me to report to Ambassador David Ransom. Ransom, a former U.S. marine who died in 2003, was a fine man, but I wasn’t thrilled with the message that morning.

  “Do you have a Saudi visa?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you think you can go over there and help them with this Khobar Towers bombing?”

  “Yes, sir.” Oh, brother, Saudi Arabia is the last frigging place I want to be today.

  “Can you leave in twenty minutes?” Ransom asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Two of us from the embassy in Bahrain jumped into a car and drove across the causeway as quickly as we could. The scene at al-Khobar was horrific. The bomb must have been massive because it left a crater thirty feet deep, and water was seeping into it from the Gulf. The façade of the building was sheared off, and the furniture had either been vaporized or blown to bits. But there were mattresses everywhere, and when you looked up into this shell of a building, you could see huge bloodstains streaking the apartment ceilings. People had been blown out of their beds, and the force of the blast crushed them against the next surface they encountered. It was a miracle the death count wasn’t much higher.

  By coincidence, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and State’s chief spokesman, Nicholas Burns, were in Cairo on a diplomatic trip, accompanied by a CNN crew. After the bombing, they immediately flew to Saudi Arabia. My job was to make sure that Christopher, Burns, and CNN got to a certain palace to meet Prince Muhammad al-Saud, the governor of the Saudi Eastern Province. Then I had to get them to the TV station in Dhahran so they could do their interviews. It was my first encounter with Burns, who would rise to become undersecretary of state for political affairs during George W. Bush’s second term. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be my last.

  I LEFT BAHRAIN at the end of July 1996, my two-year temporary assignment over. It had ended with a vivid and tragic reminder of why the Middle East fascinated me. Our scholars in academia and our analysts in government knew so much—and yet most of them had failed to appreciate fully the strength of a new and dangerous force growing and metastasizing in certain parts of the Arab and Muslim world. Two months earlier, having been booted from Sudan, Osama bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, where he had fought to expel the Soviets in the 1980s and where he now made common cause with Mullah Omar and his Taliban thugs. We would hear more from these lunatics soon enough.

  Back at Langley, I began work as a political analyst, supposedly specializing in Iraq. But not quite yet, the bosses said; we’re short-handed and we need you to fill in for three months on a familiar account: Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. What the hell, I was a good soldier. I saluted and said yes. But three months became six months, then nine months, with no winks or nods hinting at an end in sight. The bosses liked my work, and there weren’t a bunch of eager beavers gnawing trees to replace me. It was clear, to me at least, that I could grow very old in this particular job unless I made them live up to their earlier promise. Enough, I said. Either put me on Iraq or I’ll have to start looking for work outside the office. It took another couple of months, but they finally delivered.

  I started working on Iraq in July 1997 and was told early on that I’d have to write an important analytical paper if I wanted to be promoted. Fair enough, I said, what do you have in mind? Nothing less than a National Intelligence Estimate, my boss said. Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, President Clinton’s national security adviser, wanted an NIE that would examine Saddam’s likely intentions over the next year.

  An NIE is a big deal; it’s supposed to represent the collective wisdom of the so-called intelligence community—not only the CIA, but the intelligence arms of the military services, the National Security Agency, and others. This was an opportunity to make a real name for myself, and I felt fairly confident going in, figuring I knew as much about Iraq as anybody in the intelligence community. So I wrote a paper that said Iraq could violate the no-fly zone, threaten the Shiites, threaten the Kurds, threaten Kuwait, continue to provoke us militarily, and continue to violate sanctions. But when I was done and reread my work, I thought, This is the worst analytical paper I’ve ever written. This is exactly what we’ve said every year for the past five years. There’s absolutely nothing new here.

  By that time, however, there was no turning back. Ben Bonk, the national intelligence officer covering the Middle East at the time, had already told the sixteen different services of the intelligence community that the document was coming. Ben convened a meeting, and it took four hours for this Gang of Sixteen to agree on my language. Afterward, Ben congratulated me.

  “That was the fastest NIE coordination meeting I’ve ever been through.”

  “Ben, I’m embarrassed by this paper. We didn’t say anything new at all. There are no bold predictions, nothing. It’s like we just took last year’s paper and changed the date.” They’re going to see this crap in the White House and wonder about the idiot at Langley who produced it. So ends the short happy career of the Greek kid from New Castle, Pennsylvania.

  Off it went to Berger. Two weeks later, the word came down: Berger loved the paper. It was exactly what he was looking for.

  Fine, but did it take this formal duty dance to make the point that Saddam was a continuing source of instability in the region? From my perspective, it looked like a classic cover-your-ass exercise. Chalk one up for my learning curve.

  4

  “THIS IRAQ THING is just plain boring,” I told my wife in late 1997. “Nothing’s changed since we left for Bahrain three years ago. I want to do something different. I want to go overseas again.”

  There it was, out on the table. Even if the Iraq account had stimulated every intellectual neuron in my brain pan, I hankered for an assignment abroad. Bahrain, a tame posting until the end, had planted a seed. I spoke a couple of difficult foreign languages; I had studied the Middle East, and I thought I understood the issues and threats confronting my country in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of the world. It was where I could make a bigger contribution and, not coincidentally, test myself in employing skills I’d only read about in books.

  JoAnne was even more skeptical than she was before Bahrain, which struck me as odd, given the happy days she had spent there even by her own admission. I guess it was because she didn’t think lightning could strike twice. “The only place I’d go is Athens,” she said. Well, of course: She was a good Greek American girl with extended family ties in the old country—in effect, a ready-made support system of relatives and friends of relatives who would embrace her and make her feel as if she’d never left Warren, Ohio. Amazingly, Athens wasn’t out of the question. The agency was seeking an officer for a special counterterrorism program; the right candidate would take specific assignments in Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, and elsewhere in southern and eastern Europe, focusing on militant leftist and Arab terrorist groups in the region. If possible, the pooh-bahs wanted someone who spoke Arabic as well as Greek. It was almost as if they were designing the assignment with me in mind, except for one rather important omission on my résumé.

  I went to see Dan Praig, the official in the Counterterrorist Center responsible for filling the post, and introduced myself.

  “Look, I’ve got to tell you up front, I don’t have any operational experience at all.” I told Praig what I had done as an analyst, but that I had never been in the field as a covert operative.

  Praig paused, frowning slightly, and I jumped back in. “But listen, I speak Greek and Arabic fluently.”

  “You what? Greek and Arabic? You willing to be tested?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

 
It turned out Praig’s secretary was a Greek immigrant whose brother lived on Rhodes, the island my grandparents came from. A nod from Praig, and she immediately started talking to me in rapid-fire Greek; in no time, the two of us got right into a conversation, complete with Rhodian accents. After two or three minutes, she stopped, smiled, looked at her boss, and gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Are you willing to take an Arabic exam?” Praig asked.

  I had just retested in Arabic and my scores showed that I was still completely conversant in the language; that was enough for Praig.

  “Okay, I’m going to have to convince some of the Ops people that sending an analyst is the smart thing to do. But, believe me, it’s a lot easier and a lot cheaper for me to train a linguist in operations than it is to take an operations guy and make him fluent in Greek and Arabic.”

  Praig managed to sell me to the skeptics in Operations based mainly on my language skills, but there was a lot more I needed to bring to the table. One essential was a deep understanding of contemporary Greek politics. After my transfer to the Directorate of Operations in April 1998, I began to “read in” to all things Greek—that is, read and digest all the available files in the agency’s archives on a country where I’d be spending time on special assignment.

  Terrorism was a fact of life in Greece, dating back to the 1960s, when the military, led by a group of colonels, hijacked the national government and imposed a junta that lasted seven violent and repressive years, until 1974. Once, reading a file in the Counterterrorist Center, I responded to one awful episode with a reflexive “Oh, my God.”

  “Are you reading the Greece files?” The question came from an adjacent cubicle.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “That’s what everyone says when they read the Greece files,” he said. Some of the episodes in the Greece files had been reported in the national and international media. And luckily, I was getting some informal help from one of the legends in the CIA’s clandestine service. Gust Avrakotos had worked in Greece during the 1960s and beyond and probably knew as much about terrorism in the country as anyone around. His biggest coup, however, wasn’t in Greece; it was in Afghanistan. After the Soviet Union invaded in 1979, Gust was one of the CIA’s principal officers responsible for getting weapons to the mujahideen resistance, including shoulder-held Stinger missiles. Stung Soviet helicopters fell from the skies, Afghan fighters sliced and diced Soviet ground troops, and a defeated Soviet army marched out of the country a decade later, certainly one of the final nails in the coffin of the Evil Empire. Gust’s exploits were featured in a book, Charlie Wilson’s War, by the late George Crile, which focused on the efforts of the Texas congressman in the title to trump the godless Commies in Afghanistan. Both men grew thirty feet tall when they were played in the 2007 movie starring Tom Hanks as Wilson and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Gust.