The Reluctant Spy

by John Kiriakou

  The folks in the U.S. Information Service office, who monitor the Greek press, said there were no reports of an American losing it in the middle of the previous afternoon and beating the shit out of a poor baker. Burt told his excited subordinate to calm down. “Let’s wait one more day,” he counseled. “If there’s nothing, we’ll take the ambassador’s temperature and see where we go from there. Maybe it’ll blow over.” And it did: The papers never did run a story, and the ambassador gave me a stay of execution. I’d earned a reputation as something of a nut, but the diplomatic imbroglio everyone anticipated hadn’t happened. I was free to return to my duties—a case officer on temporary assignment in Greece and other ports of call in southern and eastern Europe.

  My domestic situation needed attention. JoAnne had always vehemently denied being involved with anyone else and said marriage counseling was unnecessary. Although she finally agreed to give it a try, it was a joke almost from the very beginning. She got stuck in traffic going to the first appointment—with an Anglican priest who’d agreed to talk to us—and eventually turned around and went home rather than show up late. A guy at the U.S. Embassy who ran some sort of religious study group said he’d give it a try. At the first session, she wouldn’t speak—nothing in response to his invitation to talk about her view of our marriage. Then, at his suggestion, I left the room and they talked for forty-five minutes. But she wouldn’t tell me what they had discussed.

  At the second session, our counselor suggested a half hour with each of us privately in an adjoining room. I went first, laying out my view of what had gone wrong—the absence of communication, the silences, her suspicions, and, of course, my belief that she had betrayed our marriage vows. Then it was JoAnne’s turn; after a half hour, the door opened and she walked right by me without even making eye contact; as I learned later, she left the embassy and drove home.

  “What gives?” I knew the answer but had to ask him anyway.

  “Look, I’m sorry, but she doesn’t want to be married to you anymore,” he said.

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “She’s unwilling to try to work this out,” the counselor said, repeating what he’d said about her not wanting to be married to me. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

  That was in mid-May 2000. Within three months, the two of us separated and she and the boys left for New York.

  IN EARLY 2000, Stephen Saunders arrived in Athens as the new defense attaché at the British Embassy. Stephen was an engaging guy, popular within the diplomatic community and among Western military and intelligence figures. One night at a party, we got to talking about security precautions; Saunders was gently needling me about my car, the BMW 540, which was fully armored, and about the two handguns I always carried. And the body armor the Brits’ American cousins sometimes wore. “You Americans, you’re so obsessed with security,” Saunders said. “Nothing’s going to happen to you here. This is Greece! This is an EU country. This is a NATO country.”

  Saunders was a fifty-three-year-old brigadier, the equivalent of an American one-star general, a worldly man who should have had a keen appreciation of the risks to Brits and Americans in Greece. Maybe he was joking, but I didn’t think so at the time. “You guys, you live in a dream world,” I told him. “If you think just because it’s EU and NATO and pretty here that they’re not going to kill you, you’re crazier than I am.” We laughed and turned to another subject.

  A few weeks later, having returned to Athens from an assignment elsewhere in the region, I was driving down Kifissias Avenue, a straight, ten-mile shot down the hillside from my house to my office. Traffic was always heavy, but on this day, it seemed as bad as anything I’d seen. The radio station was reporting a traffic incident of some sort and urging drivers to take alternative routes. But any alternative would have required a huge detour, so I kept moving forward as best I could. The next radio report described the scene ahead as a “criminal incident” that had closed two of the three lanes on my side of the road. As I inched along, wondering what was happening ahead, I finally spotted a car in one of the closed lanes. A bit further and the scene resembled a war zone, with shattered glass everywhere and blood all over the interior of the car. Oh my God, somebody was killed. This has got to be a terrorist attack. Those bastards hit someone again.

  It was too risky for official Americans and “guests” from a few other countries to have diplomatic plates, so the Greeks in their infinite wisdom had assigned three letters—YHB for Americans—followed by a number. My plate was YHB1442. The British were YBH and a number. As I drew closer, I could see the plate was YBH. For a moment, though, I forgot that the letters designated a British car; instead, I assumed a terrorist saw the transposed letters, mistakenly thought it was an American, and popped some innocent Greek instead of his imagined target. A second later, it dawned on me that it was a British car, a white Rover, and that it belonged to Stephen Saunders.

  Saunders had been driving to work alone on Kifissias Avenue at eight in the morning when two masked gunmen on a motorcycle opened fire after Stephen stopped in heavy traffic. One of the weapons of choice was a .45 pistol, the Welch .45, and the gunmen got away by snaking their motorcycle through traffic. Saunders died at a nearby hospital later that morning. A few weeks passed before 17 November claimed responsibility for the assassination—payback, the group said in a letter to a newspaper, for Saunders’s work helping to coordinate the NATO bombing of Serbia the previous year.

  Saunders’s wife, Heather, was quite a woman, somehow managing to maintain her composure throughout the ordeal. She did more than that: She also appeared on Greek television and said all the right things—that the killing of her husband was a crime against the Greek people and against all of Greek society, and that only barbarians act with such callous disregard for human life.

  The murder of the parliamentary deputy Pavlos Bakoyannis more than a decade earlier had begun to raise questions about 17 November in the minds of many Greeks. Even so, the killings had continued, and nothing much had been done by Greek law enforcement to stop them. Now, the death of Stephen Saunders, followed by a campaign launched by his widow against the terrorist group that killed him, was finally reshaping public opinion for good. Greece had been picked to host the summer Olympics of 2004, and worries about the country’s public image were spreading. Popular revulsion against 17 November combined with increased official pressure to shut down the group’s activities. The Saunders hit was its last.

  Two years later, the police got lucky when a bomb held by 17 November member Savvas Xeros accidentally exploded, seriously injuring him. Xeros had names, plenty of names, and a safe house. Thinking he was going to die, Xeros confessed to everything. Before long, the police had a long list of 17 November suspects. In December 2003, a Greek court handed down a guilty verdict against fifteen members of the group for crimes stretching back to the mid-1970s. The group’s leader, Alexandros Yiotopoulos, and its leading hit man, Dimitris Koufodinas, called “Poison Hand,” allegedly because everything he touched died, were each convicted on 956 separate counts; they both received sentences of life without parole.

  NICK BURNS, THE ambassador, had no reason to end my temporary assignment and ship me home when the Greek press, either through ignorance or benign neglect, hadn’t reported my street brawl. But my time in the region was drawing to an end. After the Saunders assassination, everyone waited for the inevitable communiqué from 17 November, which always delivered a long diatribe, sometimes twenty-five or thirty pages long, listing the usual Marxist-Leninist claptrap that supposedly led to its decision to kill. Think of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski’s 1995 manifesto, all thirty-five thousand words of it, and you’d get some idea of the tone and substance of these 17 November jeremiads.

  The group stayed true to form and took its grievances public in early August 2000. It was the usual stuff, except for a passage that snapped my head back and caught the attention of my bosses. Finally getting to the killing itself, th
e communiqué said in part: “We saw the big spy, but he was in an armored car and we knew that he was armed. So we elected to carry out the sentence on the war criminal Saunders.” I had always been so careful. I never took the same route two days in a row. I always left the office at a different time, always reported suspicious vehicles. How the hell did they find me?

  Burt made it plain that I had no choice: He expected me to clear out of Dodge as quickly as I could. The bad guys knew who I was. They knew where I lived, which was only two blocks from Saunders. They knew the particulars of my automobile. They knew I carried guns at all times. Burt complimented me on my work during this assignment. I had recruited five people in eighteen months, including Arabs; that compared with Burt’s own record of nine recruits in twenty-five years abroad. “But it’s over for you here,” my boss told me. “They know too much about you. You’ve got to go.” I was on a flight to New York the next day.

  I was entitled to five weeks of home leave—a good time, I figured, to see whether the private sector could use someone with my particular skills at risk analysis and to file for divorce now that JoAnne and I were formally separated. Using my brother’s New York apartment as a base, I interviewed with a bunch of banks and investment houses and found some interest, including one offer with a caveat: We’re about to be acquired, the word was, and there’s a high risk of major layoffs once the deal is closed. With two young kids and child-support payments, it seemed pointless: I thanked them for their honesty and moved on.

  In late September, having been assigned to a branch of the CIA that was training officials and military officers of certain foreign countries in counterterror operations, I reported to my new boss at headquarters. He obviously knew what had happened in Athens, and he was sympathetic. He and others said I had made some enemies at Langley, chief among them the director of European operations, one Mary Margaret Graham. She thought I used a heavy hand in my work, or so went the story, citing my brash recruitment of an eastern European general, the business of breaking off a side-view mirror, and, of course, the cherry-red frosting I had detailed on an Athens baker’s face. My new boss told me that I’d have to sit in the penalty box for a year or so. “Keep your head down, do your job, and don’t fuck up,” he said. “Don’t beat anybody up. And you’re going to be okay.” The advice was much appreciated. I intended to do exactly what he suggested.

  A short time later, I got an e-mail from the American who took my temporary house after JoAnne and I left. The guy wanted to know whether I had ever noticed a red Toyota watching the house. I had seen a black Citroën and reported it to U.S. security officers, who could always check the license plates; it turned out the Citroën’s owner had some houses in the area and was just checking on his properties.

  “Well, I’ve got a red Toyota on my house and the license plates are stolen.” His bosses weren’t taking any chances: The guy decamped and shipped out of Athens.

  Not long after my evacuation, I was developing some film I had shot when my parents visited Athens in late June 2000, just a few weeks before my departure. One picture stood out from the rest, a shocking reminder of a determined enemy and, in this case, my own inattention to what could have been a life-and-death matter. The image was of my mom and my two sons in front of our rented house. In the background was a red Toyota, with a guy sitting in it, watching his oblivious subject taking family photos on a sunny Athens afternoon.

  8

  PUTTING IN LONG and often irregular hours never bothered me much, so long as the work was challenging and I thought I could do the job. But my schedule back home carried an additional burden, imposed not by the agency but by my suddenly bifurcated family situation. My new position, training foreign intelligence and military officials, required me to travel abroad on a frequent and fairly regular basis. At the same time, I had vowed to see my two boys, Chris and Costa, every other weekend as was my right and obligation under my separation agreement with JoAnne. This particular labor of love wasn’t easy. JoAnne had returned to her hometown of Warren, Ohio, where she and the kids were staying with her parents. So my routine became an exhausting high-wire act. On a given Monday, I’d fly overseas to tend to my job and remain abroad for ten days. On the second Thursday, I’d fly back to Dulles International Airport, get some sleep overnight, go to work Friday morning, leave work Friday afternoon, and drive five hours to New Castle, Pennsylvania, where my parents lived. By then, my folks had made the one-hour run to Warren, picked up Chris and Costa, and returned to their house across the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. I’d spend the weekend with the boys and drive back to my apartment in suburban Virginia late on Sunday. The next morning, it was time for the next flight overseas. This routine got very old very fast, but there was no other way if I wanted to keep my children in my life and still do justice to my job.

  The job itself was not without its excitements and triumphs. One day, for example, I got a call from our senior officer in a Middle Eastern country. “Listen, I’ve got an odd request,” he said.

  Let’s call him Leo. Beyond this point in this particular story, I’ve had to change names, obscure or fictionalize countries, and alter certain facts; otherwise, it would not pass muster in the agency’s publications review. But the tale still represents the kind of casework CIA officers abroad encounter all the time and the victories they record, which are rarely chronicled in newspaper articles or critical books.

  Leo’s request was odd. He said his people were running an agent, Abdul-Azim, whose real allegiance was to an unfriendly foreign government but who didn’t know we were aware of his true loyalties. This double agent, growing suspicious, kept asking to see the head CIA man on scene, but Leo thought it was getting too dicey to meet with him. He asked me to fly out and represent myself as the new case officer in charge—the chief of our office in said country. That’s what his real masters were pushing: They wanted their guy to meet with the agency’s top man in the country, ostensibly to secure his direct imprimatur on the relationship.

  I secured the appropriate approvals at Langley and contacted Abdul-Azim on my next trip to the region. The book on him at headquarters was that he was a local affiliate of a major terrorist group with roots elsewhere in the greater Middle East. To make matters worse, the guy worked as an engineer for a major U.S. defense contractor. Think about it: Here’s a man who apparently wanted to do our country harm, and he’s getting a paycheck from a major American company. You’d think those outfits could do a better job with their employee background checks. But I had to admit that we’d had some problems in that area ourselves.

  The objective of our doubling him was to find a weapons cache that his terrorist group had stashed in this particular country and to identify others working with him. We arranged to meet at a hotel, and he seemed to believe that I was the new CIA officer in charge. He was an amiable, almost backslapping kind of guy, but he’d been very stingy about providing useful information since he’d been working for us.

  I began by giving him little assignments—rent a post office box, get a phone number, identify a certain banker. His tradecraft skills were practically nonexistent. After every meeting, he’d immediately drive to meet his master’s contacts and ask what to do. The assignments were harmless, so they always gave him the green light to give me what I’d asked for.

  This went on for months. Abdul-Azim was increasingly comfortable with me, but it wasn’t going anywhere. My frustration was beginning to show. “Look, it’s time to fish or cut bait with this guy,” I finally told Leo. “I don’t mind flying out here, and you guys are all lovely people, but we need to come to some closure on this.” Leo agreed. We needed to increase the stress level on Abdul-Azim, break him down a bit. I started to give him instructions on anti-surveillance techniques for his travel to and from meetings with me, emphasizing how important personal security was for both of us. “If you get caught,” I told him, “you’ll go to jail for espionage.” But when it came to tradecraft, he was all thumbs, a real chucklehead. He’d
get in his car at home and drive directly to his meeting with me; afterward, he’d get in his car and drive either straight home or straight to the foreign embassy that hosted his masters to report on our talk.

  Meanwhile, his masters were whispering in his ear that I wasn’t the CIA’s senior officer after all. That started to make him nervous. Abdul-Azim was slipping into panic mode, looking for constant reassurance that I was who I said I was. Which, of course, I wasn’t. We had another meeting, and he began to probe. “So you’re the chief officer, right? You’re not the deputy chief?”

  “I’m the chief, Duke, the top guy.”

  “Okay, I just wanted to make sure, just wanted to know where I stand.”

  “You’re very important to us,” I told him. “You’re dealing with the chief, the person you wanted to deal with.”

  He was still having misgivings. At our next meeting, he showed up early—fortunately spotted by our surveillance team as he walked into the hotel lobby. Before he got to the elevators, I’d reached him on his cell phone.

  “Meet me on the sixth floor,” I said.

  “What room?”

  “Just go to the sixth floor.” Given the growing distrust between us, the last thing I wanted him to know was my hotel room number.

  When he came out of the elevator on six, I greeted him with a bear hug that also served as a pat-down for weapons. He wasn’t carrying. After a minute of pleasantries, I told him to wait ten minutes, then take the elevator to the thirtieth floor, just below the big penthouse suites. I went down the stairs to the third floor, waited five minutes, then took an elevator to thirty. He showed up a couple minutes later. “Why are you doing this?” he wanted to know. “What’s going on?”