The Reluctant Spy

by John Kiriakou

  After college and graduate school, it wasn’t as easy to steal away for an afternoon or a day at the cemetery. But I managed, inconveniencing myself and those close to me along the way. In South America for our honeymoon, I dragged my second wife to Eva Perón’s grave in Buenos Aires, where we spent the better part of the day. Katherine has a huge heart, big enough to smile indulgently when I once drove two hours out of our way on a California trip to find an isolated village about fifty miles from Santa Barbara, where Edie Sedgwick, one of Andy Warhol’s hangers-on during the 1960s, was buried after a fatal drug overdose.

  CIA assignments overseas allowed me to satisfy my own peculiar addiction in more exotic locales—and none was as heady as the First Cemetery of Athens. It’s a fantastical place, an urban island of life and death encircled by twelve-foot walls that embrace the late greats of Greek politics, society, science, and culture. The well-tended grounds and gardens of the Athens First offered moments of solace and respite amid all the chaos.

  I was particularly interested in the grave of Alekos Panagoulis, who, as a college student, tried to assassinate one of the colonels while the junta was still in power in the early seventies. He was arrested, tortured, tried, and sentenced to death. But the junta collapsed before the sentence was carried out, and Panagoulis was released to become an instant national hero. He was elected to Parliament as a member of the PASOK, the Socialist party, and wound up in Athens’s cemetery of the stars after he died in 1976 in a traffic accident. But here’s the thing: Even though he hit an oil slick and collided with a taxi, resulting in his fatal injuries, the rumor was that the CIA had somehow assassinated him. How? No one could quite figure that out. But to this day, there are people on the left in Greece who believe the agency killed him.

  MY BOSS IN Athens, Burt Hopper, was a terrific guy who would wind up bailing me out of major-league trouble during my final days in the Greek capital. When I got to the office that first day in town, wearing my best suit, I introduced myself around, expecting to have at least a few hours to settle in and learn where the coffeepot and men’s room were. It wasn’t to be. “Don’t get too comfortable,” Burt said. “We got a guy downstairs you need to see. He only speaks Arabic. No English, no Greek.”

  I was in Athens on special assignment principally to work against Greek terrorists who continued to harass and target U.S. interests. But beyond the Greek terrorists, the city also seemed populated by all sorts of groups and people who didn’t exactly hold the United States, NATO, or Greece, for that matter, in very high regard. All of America’s antagonists from the Middle East and North Africa were amply represented, as were most of the terrorist groups these states supported either directly or indirectly. Making matters worse, there was a widespread sense that local law enforcement turned a blind eye to the activities of foreign-born terrorists or at least put up with them so long as they didn’t kill Greeks. That single proscription wasn’t much of an impediment, since the Arab and Muslim terrorists were in Greece mainly because of its friendly relations with the United States and other members of the Western alliance. Greece was an American ally and a member of NATO. For the bad guys, it was a target-rich environment.

  The guy downstairs underscored the point. He was a volunteer, who represented himself as an agent of a big-time terrorist group sent to Athens to do harm to the United States and its friends. His story was that he’d had a change of heart, that he had become something of a believer in truth, justice, and the American way, and that he now wanted to tell the Americans all about it. As I learned later, this wasn’t all that uncommon, either in Athens or elsewhere around the world. The bad guys would send someone to a U.S. government office as a probe, hoping the Americans would bring him in for interviews and interrogation. That way, he could try to puzzle out where the office’s security and defenses were positioned. That was information that might prove useful at a later date, if his masters decided to launch an attack.

  I wasn’t about to play it that way; instead, I told the volunteer to walk out and that he’d be picked up on a certain street corner at a specified time—in this case, at 5 a.m., before first light. If he wasn’t there, I added, he needn’t show up the next morning because the Americans wouldn’t. But he did show at five o’clock sharp. I was in the backseat, joined by two others up front—a driver and a more senior officer—and we drove around for ten minutes, just to see if the volunteer would stick it out. This guy hung in there, which told us that his eagerness to talk was either a ruse or shoddy tradecraft.

  The home team worked him for three straight days. We would pick him up on a different street corner and at a different time, then drive to an out-of-the-way location—a park on the outskirts of town, for instance, or an abandoned construction site. The idea was to make everyone comfortable so talk would come easily. The guy’s story line changed each day. First, he was sent to Athens to connect with locals, make bombs, and attack the U.S. Embassy. Then it wasn’t about bombs at all; he was there to track the movements of certain members of the diplomatic corps—from America and several EU countries—and pass along the information to others in his terrorist cell. And finally he claimed to have information of such value that he couldn’t pass it along to mere underlings; he wanted to be escorted to the United States, where he would talk to top people in the American intelligence establishment, perhaps even DCI George Tenet himself.

  Nothing added up, I thought. He said he was from country X, but his Arabic accent suggested country Y or Z. There was always another car nearby when we picked him up, and it always seemed to be somewhere in our wake. His vacant expression and slight smile when we talked among ourselves in English seemed too practiced. On the other hand, the half grin might have been a response to the fake mustache I’d pasted on for the occasion, a disguise that kept slipping on one side. We knew we had reached a point of diminishing returns. On the third afternoon, in a distant, deserted park, the senior officer turned a few degrees and reached as if to scratch his lower back; his hand returned front and center with a gun in it, quickly pointed at our Arabic-speaking friend’s nose. “We’re tired of playing games with you,” he said in English. “What do you want with us?”

  I started to translate into Arabic but was interrupted by our guest: “I guess this is the end of our relationship,” he said in perfect English. What he wanted, he confessed in language everyone understood, was the Americans’ acceptance of him as a defector from radical Islam and our forbearance while he ingratiated himself by giving us information on his own government. In fact, with the gun pointed at his face, he acknowledged that he’d been sent our way as a potential double agent to spy for his masters.

  We left him there on the park bench. I was a bit stunned, not because of the episode itself, but because of the way it had ended. The rules are that CIA case officers are not supposed to draw their weapons except under specific circumstances that cannot be detailed here. But it’s safe to say that pulling a gun on an unarmed spy wannabe is not on the list. Besides, anytime an officer draws a weapon, permissible or not, the paperwork involved is enormous. When the team got back to the office, the senior officer addressed the problem.

  “Ah, you probably don’t want to write that up in the cable,” he said to me, referring to our report on the affair to Langley.

  Right, no way, I managed to stammer back. Not writing it up was a breach of the rules. Still, this was a man I deeply respected, and his infraction, it seemed, was pretty minor. But the drawn weapon, coming as it did on my third day on the job, had a significant impact on me—a symbol in my mind of the potential dangers in this new assignment.

  IN SHORT, I was on edge from day one. I knew Americans were potential targets for Greek assassins, Arab terrorists, or just some idiot with a grudge or an urge to make a buck without working for it.

  My wife JoAnne and I learned that lesson together one sunny Sunday afternoon not long after we had arrived in Greece. We’d been living in an apartment because a house was not immediately available for sh
ort-term rental. Now we were ready to move to new digs. We piled as much as we could into two cars—an older vehicle driven by JoAnne, who had the kids with her, and the brand-new BMW 540 that I just got. The Beemer was bulging, with a couple of suitcases and a giant flat-screen TV filling the backseat and visible to anyone paying attention. Our plan was to convoy to the new house. As I turned into Kifissias Boulevard, a major road in Athens, I noticed a motorcycle moving in and out of my blind spot on the right side. Every time I turned my head to look, the bike backed off, only to accelerate when my eyes returned to the traffic ahead.

  My cell rang and JoAnne asked, “Do you see that motorcycle on you?” She was getting as twitchy as I was about the risks to Americans in Athens, especially a CIA operative and his family.

  “Yeah, I can’t shake him,” I replied. “Look, why don’t you drop back and let me try to get rid of him? I don’t know who this guy is.” I worried that it was some sort of preattack surveillance and that an assault against me or JoAnne and the kids or all of us could come around the next corner or just down the road. How long had he been on our trail? Ever since we left the apartment? Oh, my God, this is how they do it. They’re going to nail me.

  I slowed down, then sped up; he slowed down, then sped up. JoAnne had calmly made a U-turn and headed back into town. I was in the northern suburbs by now, with the traffic thinning as I vainly tried to shake this headache. When I couldn’t, I tried to hit the motorcyclist, slamming on the brakes and swerving the big BMW to the right. But the guy had terrific reflexes and managed to slow down every time I went for him. By now, we were attracting the attention of other drivers, who could do nothing except keep out of our erratic flight path.

  Somewhere along the way, I had unzipped the fanny pack where I’d put my gun for what I had expected to be a leisurely drive to our rented house. I could grab the gun quickly if I needed it. Finally, I hit a stoplight. I was in the far left lane; there were cars in front of me, cars behind me, cars to the right of me, and traffic to my left, moving in the opposite direction. I was completely boxed in. The motorcycle pulled up between the BMW and the car in front of me; the driver got off the bike and began moving toward my side of the BMW as he shouted in Greek, “Get out of the car! Get out of the car!”

  “No,” I shouted back as my hand went to the fanny pack. I grabbed the gun, lowered my window with the other, and trained the weapon on my antagonist. Big deal: The guy looked at my gun and laughed. Laughed! “I’m not afraid of you,” he said. Then, he reached back into his waistband, pulled out his own gun, and began to raise it to eye level.

  Case officers in training are taught to fight or flee: Make a choice and go for it. But flight is the preferred option if the odds favor an officer’s escape. My car was still in drive and the light had turned green; the cars in front of me were beginning to move off. I stepped on the gas as hard I could, hitting the motorcycle and cartwheeling it along the road, and pulled away into the moving traffic before banking right and turning onto another street. I arrived at our lovely temporary house about fifteen minutes later, as shaken as I’d ever been in my life.

  JoAnne had already called for help. Before the day was out, we both made sworn statements to my superiors and to the local cops. The motorcycle driver was roughly thirty years old and had a beard and a mustache, dark brown hair, an olive complexion, and a medium build. Right. This was Greece and the authorities could arrest maybe two million young men based on that description. Nobody ever found the guy and the motorcycle; they simply vanished. Sometime later, a witness to part of this little drama reported the license plate of the bike; the plate turned out to be stolen. In the end, everyone concluded that it must have been an attempted carjacking. Here was this fancy new BMW, worth more than five times an average Greek’s annual income, and it’s jammed with electronics to boot. I was nothing more or less than a convenient target of opportunity.

  In the end, no harm, no foul. Well, not exactly. All through training, I was taught to expect the worst—especially, everyone said, in this particular national capital. Now, I’d had a taste of what could come at any moment of the day or night. It was a defining event for me. Henry Kissinger once said that even a paranoid has some real enemies. From that day forward, I always felt only a couple yards short of paranoia’s fault line; every day, in my mind, the bad guys were out to get me, and they would, if I wasn’t as careful as I could possibly be. I got into six car accidents during my assignments in Greece, all of them my fault; I was so worried about surveillance that I was constantly scanning my side-and rearview mirrors and not paying attention to what was in front of me. I was forever rear-ending cars; it got to the point where I didn’t even bother reporting the accidents to the insurance people. I just got out, gave the aggrieved driver my card, and said I’d be happy to pay for the repairs out of my own pocket. Unfailingly, the Greeks were delighted to oblige.

  AS I MENTIONED earlier, the value of a clandestine operative’s currency rises and falls with his or her relative success in recruiting and running agents—that is, people who are paid by America to deliver information considered important, directly or indirectly, to U.S. national security. I did pretty well while I was in Greece, recruiting several agents, including a man from a well-known Middle Eastern group who admitted carrying out an anti-American terrorist attack in Athens. Was there a risk of signing up a double agent? Sure. But case officers usually had their agents polygraphed, vetted them as best they could, and watched them to ensure they were playing it straight.

  It obviously helped that I spoke fluent Arabic, and it was useful that my style was to avoid threats and especially violent confrontation when I pitched a potential agent. A cold pitch is hard enough when a case officer is meeting a target for the first time. I thought the best cold pitch needed to be smart and soft. There was one occasion, for example, when I learned from one of our agents that a new intelligence chief from a Mideast country was coming to town. “I think he’s not a big fan of [his country’s leader],” the agent said. “I think he may be somebody you can work with.” Meanwhile, we were getting information from elsewhere in the U.S. intelligence community that the new intel guy was actually a big supporter of his country’s leader—in fact, a true believer. Despite the disagreement, we quickly learned that there was no question about the quality of his tradecraft.

  His cover was diplomatic, a commercial officer for his country. Early on, he had recruited an American teaching in Athens. One day, the teacher volunteered that he knew the military officer who had just been named the new head of a U.S. military group in Greece. In advance of his formal move, the U.S. officer would be visiting Athens to familiarize himself with the setup and meet members of the military community. The professor wanted to throw a party for him. Would his Arab friend come and meet the American colonel? The Mideast intelligence chief arrived and fell all over the new attaché: Our people—your people and mine—have grown apart over the years. Such a shame. Perhaps we can be friends again. Let me give you something as a token of my goodwill.

  The token, which the colonel accepted a couple of days later, was an expensive carpet—a serious gift in the Middle East. I was listening to our agent explain all this and couldn’t help myself: “Get out of here. No American military officer in the world would take a gift from a diplomat from [that country].” Over the years, there had been a fair amount of tension between Washington and this particular country, enough so that an exchange of gifts even in seemingly benign circumstances would have been a serious breach of security.

  “No, no, I’m serious,” the agent said. “I heard him [the intel chief] boasting about it.”

  I asked again, and the agent insisted the story was true. If so, it meant that an American defense attaché was in moral debt to a potentially hostile adversary, a compromising position indeed. This was explosive stuff.

  The next morning, I went to Burt, my boss, and asked him what we should do. Burt didn’t hesitate: We had to report it, but in an eyes-only cable for t
he DDO—the deputy director for operations. I wrote it up, had Burt vet it and sign off, then sent it to headquarters. Langley called Pentagon security officials, and they called the colonel on the carpet. He acknowledged his mistake and, as we heard later, told his Pentagon betters, “I guess I’m not going to Athens now.” Or anywhere else, it turned out. They asked for and got his resignation from the military. Because of one huge lapse of judgment, he went from a full colonel with a shot at a general’s star to an early pension and a blemish in his file that would last a lifetime.

  His misfortune, however, delivered some good news to our people: We at least knew now that the intelligence chief was a good, professional officer—talented enough to shoot down a U.S. military rising star. I gave my agent a bonus for the valuable information and began to puzzle out how we could shut down this intel chief or maybe even bring him around to our side. I cabled headquarters and requested permission to make an approach to him. Absolutely not, headquarters cabled back, stand down immediately. Burt, to his credit, was having none of it. “Screw that,” he said when I told him. “I run our operations here. I decide who gets approached in this country, not headquarters. Come up with an operational plan that makes sense and I’ll sign it.”

  I needed to be creative: Unlike the U.S. defense attaché, I wasn’t likely to run into the Mideast intelligence chief at a cocktail party. Then I remembered something I’d heard from Gust Avrakotos. Gust recalled an approach he’d made to a Soviet intelligence official in an Arab country three decades earlier. With some variations, I thought, it might work here.

  My agent got the intelligence chief’s home address in Athens as well as the make and model of his car. I dressed like a college kid—I wasn’t graying at the temples then—and filled a backpack with textbooks, notepads, pencils, and pens. When I got to the right street, I found the intel guy’s car and broke off the side-view mirror with my backpack. With the mirror in hand, I knocked on his neighbor’s door, excused myself, and asked the Greek woman who answered whether that—I pointed at the car—belonged to her. No, she said, it’s his car, pointing to the adjacent house. That was part of my calculation: If the intel officer happened to ask her whether she’d seen anybody break a mirror off his car, she’d give me a little protective cover. No, but the young man who did break it came here because he thought it was my car.