“I don’t know who’s following you; you don’t know who’s following me,” I said. “This is for the safety of both of us.” He wasn’t happy, but he was on a mission and wanted to see it through.
My next order turned his eyes into small saucers: “Come on, let’s take the stairs up to the roof. We can talk there.”
“No, no,” he said. “I don’t want to go up there.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t like being in enclosed spaces. And I’m afraid of heights.”
“Come on, man, what do you think’s going to happen to you? We’re wasting time.”
We went back and forth for another twenty seconds before I grabbed him by the front of his jacket and shoved him into the stairwell and ordered him to start climbing.
“Please, please don’t hurt me,” he said with alarm in his voice. He went up six or eight steps, then paused.
I went at him again: “What’s the matter with you? I thought we were friends. What the hell do you think I’m going to do up there?”
“You’re scaring me,” he said. “What are you going to do?”
“Look, do you have some kind of guilty conscience or something? You think I’m going to throw you off the roof?”
He was in an emotional bad place and it was time to back off. “Okay, let’s go back down to the room. We’re in room 3004.”
The meeting didn’t last long, given Abdul-Azim’s unsettled state. All he wanted was out. He was barely out of the hotel before our techs picked up his call to one of his masters.
“Something’s wrong,” he said. “They’re on to me.” There were two or three minutes of excited chatter, with Abdul-Azim reiterating that his days as a double agent were over and the other guy on the line signaling his agreement. It turned out that they’d taken a picture of me as I left the hotel on a previous trip and were fairly certain I wasn’t who I said I was. Abdul-Azim’s handler wanted him to arrange one more meeting. At that meeting, he said, the agent would have only one thing on his agenda: His orders were to shoot me dead with a weapon they would supply.
I was scheduled to fly back to headquarters the next day. When I got to the office that Friday morning, the message from the Counterterrorist Center was loud and clear: There was no way Kiriakou was going back to that country for that meeting.
Of course I had to go back. This wasn’t some heroic hot-dog play on my part: We were working with our host-country counterparts, and there was a fairly simple way to dodge a bullet, as it were, and still grab the guy. My plan was to post our host-country partners in the hotel room. I’d be in the bathroom, which was always right next to the door. Abdul-Azim would knock, I’d say “Come in” from the bathroom, he’d open the door, and the good guys would grab him. An easy plan, it seemed to me, unless he came through the door blasting away. But we knew he wouldn’t; he was afraid of his own shadow.
Our partners pulled him into the room, took his weapon, and sat him down on the bed. He wasn’t so much upset as he was angry. He actually took umbrage at this assault on his dignity and spectacularly lame tradecraft.
“You set me up,” he said. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“You stupid fool, do you think we don’t know what game you’ve been playing all this time? I thought we were friends. You treat me like a friend and then you come here to kill me? What kind of friend is that?” Yeah, I was laying it on thick.
“What do you want?”
“We want to know where the weapons are,” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Where are the weapons? We want all your group’s weapons.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, insisting that he wasn’t a part of any terrorist group.
We were getting nowhere, so our host-country partners took him away and locked him up.
A few hours later, we reconnoitered with our host-country guys, who were all upset because they thought we’d failed. We don’t have the weapons, they said. We don’t have enough to charge him, they said. Nice guys, but they weren’t thinking clearly.
“You’ve been telling me since I got here that you think the weapons are at his house because he has a maid who never leaves the place,” I said. We had to get into the house unnoticed, but how?
“Let’s say there’s a gas leak and we have to evacuate the neighborhood,” I suggested.
“We don’t have gas pipes here. We use propane tanks,” one of our hosts said.
“Fine, let’s drive an eighteen-wheel propane tanker truck down the street, leak some of the stuff on the ground, and you guys declare an environmental emergency. Then we evacuate the whole neighborhood to the shopping center down the road.”
Which is what we did. The house was empty, of course—no maid and, it seemed, no weapons. But there was a safe, and we had a lock picker with us. Inside, Abdul-Azim had stashed a map, leading to an X-marks-the-spot location in an unpopulated area thirty miles away. We drove, we dug, we found—several boxes of AK-47 assault rifles and enough grenades to murder a small army. (Note: End of sanitized story.)
It wasn’t the biggest score in agency history, not by a long shot, but it was regarded as a classy, successful operation, and it was strong enough in Langley’s eyes to liberate me from the penalty box. The Athens thing? Ah, just one of those anomalies. John’s fine. Let’s reassign him and move on.
They asked whether I wanted to do “Greek stuff” again, this time from a base in the Counterterrorist Center at headquarters, and I said yes. Terrorism was abating in Greece, but there were still operations to do. I could reconnect with Radomir in that unnamed eastern European country, and I could work a Palestinian in London, a guy who treated me as a father-confessor. He had served time in a British prison and told me he had converted to Christianity while he was inside. “Seriously? You’re a Muslim.”
“You can’t ever tell anybody,” he said. “I’m a Christian now.” Then he started to cry.
“I’ve done many, many bad things in my life,” he said.
“I know, I’ve read the files on you. You killed what? Three or four guys?”
“I’ve killed thirty,” he said. “Thirty men. Please, I must talk to a priest.”
Through contacts in Britain, I set him up with someone who could really hear his confessions and offer him the absolution he sought. He wasn’t going to get it from us.
MEANWHILE, THE GRAND Canyon between my professional life and my personal life was taking on new contours. The former was reborn in the spring of 2001; the latter was a continuing soap opera with plot twists absurd enough to win a daytime Emmy. JoAnne was the protagonist in this pathetic tale of revenge and bizarre behavior.
On June 8, 2001, I arrived at Dulles airport on a flight from the Middle East, skipped the office, and rushed to my apartment in Arlington, Virginia. I planned to shower and shave, pack a fresh bag for the weekend, and head for my parents’ place in Pennsylvania to see the kids. My parents were going to pick them up around 6 p.m., and I figured to get over there later that night. This trip was special: I was supposed to have the kids for half the summer, not just the weekend; we had all sorts of things planned, including a visit to Disney World.
The phone was ringing as I got out of the shower. It was my mother, calling from JoAnne’s parents’ place in Warren. That is, she was calling on a cell phone outside the Tsimpinos house. “We’re at the house,” Mom said. “I don’t want to alarm you, but nobody’s here, and it looks like nobody’s been here in weeks.”
“Oh, my God, she stole the kids.” It had just popped into my head, along with a vision of her returning to Greece and picking up with her secret life there.
I called my Ohio attorney, Mary Jane Stephens, who suggested there might be a logical explanation but that I’d best get to my folks’ place in New Castle as soon as possible. “If you don’t get the kids over the weekend, we’ll go to court on Monday,” she said. The road trip was a nightmare. Nothing I�
�d encountered as a CIA operative had ever frightened me as much as the prospect of losing my children; twice during the drive, I got so sick to my stomach that I pulled over to throw up at the side of the road. I kept calling JoAnne’s cell phone and kept getting her voice mail. When I got to New Castle around 11 p.m., I tried to get some sleep but nothing worked. At 4 a.m., my dad came down to the basement family room, where I was trying to distract myself with TV, and asked after my state of mind. State of mind? I was a complete wreck and told him so.
“Look, why don’t we get in the car and go over there, see what’s going on,” he said. So we did.
We arrived around 5 a.m. The grass was unkempt, reinforcing my mother’s view that the house had been unoccupied for a while. But we saw a light on in the kitchen. JoAnne’s dad always had trouble sleeping, so I wasn’t all that surprised to see his face peering through the curtain on the kitchen door after I knocked. His expression telegraphed a certain absence of enthusiasm at the sight of his son-in-law standing in the shadows. Still, he opened the door a crack.
“Where are my children?” My tone was not friendly.
“They’re safe and they’re happy and they don’t want you to be their father anymore,” he said.
It took me a second to catch my breath. “That’s not up to you to decide when they can see me and when they can’t.” Then: “How could you do this to me? I loved you like my own father.”
He said something about how it wasn’t easy living with my mother-in-law and his daughter. I was with him on that one, but it was beside the point.
“You’re a party to the kidnapping of my children,” I said. “If you don’t turn them over right now or tell me where they are, I’m going to the police and report you.” He lowered his head just a bit, said nothing, closed the door, and turned off the light.
At 5:20 a.m., the Warren, Ohio, police station appeared to be locked tight, but banging on a door roused a city cop, who opened up and asked whether he could help me.
I explained what had just happened.
“Do you have a separation agreement or a divorce decree?”
“No, we haven’t been to court yet,” I said.
“Well, then she hasn’t committed any crime.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re telling me that if I find them and kidnap them back, I haven’t committed a crime?”
“As long as there’s nothing in writing, a parent is allowed to take her children. Or his children.”
“Well, I want to report them missing.” At least a missing persons report would put something on the official police record, complete with a file number I could cite in the future if necessary. The police officer asked for the details and said that his department would be back in touch if anything—or anyone—turned up. Good move, I thought. Now what? I know, I’ll make maps of where all JoAnne’s friends and relatives live and do surveillance. That way, I’ll be using some of my CIA skills to track down where she’s got my kids stashed.
That bright idea got me exactly nowhere, although it did serve one useful purpose: It occupied my mind and got me out of my folks’ house most of that Saturday. Then I had a real inspiration. My priest once told me that it’s common for people with a guilty conscience about something to turn to religion. It was my impression that JoAnne had taken her faith especially to heart over the past two years, a period of time that included her relationship with “Uncle Stelios.” By my reckoning, she almost certainly would be at her Greek Orthodox church in Warren the following day. Would she even consider going to church without the boys? The odds were a thousand to one against it: She’d be there, dressed to kill, with Chris and Costa on either side of her.
Saturday night, I called Pete Moniodes, an acquaintance of my brother from high school days—a big, burly guy who’d been a high school football star. I might need bulk and possibly intimidation for what I had in mind. My plan, as I explained it to Pete, was simple: “We go to their church on Sunday. We arrive late, while the service is under way, to avoid being spotted. Then we grab my kids and take off.” Pete signed on and even agreed to drive.
We sat in the last pew and, sure enough, I spotted Chris in the second pew, standing with his grandmother. Alongside them was a man I didn’t recognize; I learned later that he was Warren’s chief of police, John Mandopoulos. JoAnne and Costa were nowhere to be seen. He had been fidgety, I found out, and JoAnne had taken him up to the choir loft in an effort to quiet him down.
I just stared at Chris, wishing him to turn around, and he did: He looked straight at me as I gave him a small, discreet wave. He didn’t react and turned back to the front of the church. But every few minutes, he’d turn again and look at me. He was expressionless, which said everything: He clearly was not happy to see his father.
At a point in the Greek Orthodox liturgy where everyone kneels in prayer, I walked fast down the center aisle and said, as calmly as I could, “Chris, come with me.” As I said it, I was reaching down to sweep him up in my arms. With that, he started screaming bloody murder: “Help me! He’s trying to take me! Help me! Help me!” I took off at a run, not very graceful, given my eight-year-old son in my arms fighting to free himself. Several people in the church shouted at me to put him down and leave, but nobody tried to stop me. It’s not wise to intervene when temporary insanity possesses a healthy Greek male.
Pete had headed for the car as I headed down the aisle, and he had it fired up and ready at the church door when Chris and I burst through. We piled in, just as JoAnne ran out, her face a mask of sheer terror. “Go, just go,” I shouted at Pete, and we took off, heading back to New Castle on a crazy-quilt route of back roads I had plotted.
Chris was no longer struggling, but he was upset and breathing quickly. “Honey, I have to explain to you what I just did,” I said. “Your mother was keeping you from me illegally. You’re supposed to be with me for this part of the summer, and she wouldn’t let me have you. And I came to pick up you and Costa.” It came out in a rush. “Chris, why did you scream at me like that? And why wouldn’t you wave at me when I waved at you? What’s wrong?”
He said he thought I was a ghost. He said that his mother had told both boys that their father had been killed in a car accident. He thought I was a ghost.
Chris had calmed down; I was boiling inside, as livid in that moment as I had been when this same child had stared up at me while I was shaving more than a year earlier and recounted his admonition to his mother about “Uncle Stelios.” What could she have been thinking? It was absolutely nuts. What would she do? Move back to Greece? Go to southern Virginia where her brother lived? Did she really think she could have a life with the children without my being a part of their lives?
My angry and puzzled reverie was broken by the ringing of my cell phone. “John, this is Chief Mandopoulos of the Warren Police Department. I want you to return that child immediately.”
“How dare you call me? I came to you yesterday, and yesterday your people told me no crime had been committed. Well, now I’m telling you no crime has been committed. This is my half of the summer. The children belong with me, not her. If you want anybody returning anybody, you tell her to return Costa to me.”
“Now, I want you to turn around before this gets completely out of hand,” Mandopoulos said. “You know, we’re talking about some possible charges here.”
“Forget it, Chief, forget it. You’re the chief of police, you know the law. No crime’s been committed here. There’s no divorce decree, no separation agreement.”
My former mother-in-law filed charges against me the next day—a class D felony for “aggravated menacing.” Really, the statute is on Ohio’s books, with conviction punishable by up to five years in prison. She alleged in her sworn statement that I had walked up the center aisle of the church, turned to face the congregation, and shouted, “I’m from the CIA and if anybody tries to stop me, it’s going to be a bloodbath in here.”
It was a family affair because JoAnne also got into
the act on Monday, June 11, 2001, by filing a request for an emergency hearing on summer custody of the kids. My lawyer promptly filed one on my behalf. A hearing was ordered, to be held in a few days. Mary Jane, my lawyer, called me with some carefully chosen words of guidance: “John, as an officer of the court, I am not permitted to tell you not to show up at a hearing. What I am permitted to tell you is you don’t have to show up at the hearing. And I’m also permitted to tell you that a court clerk called me and said that there’s an ambush set for you and that as soon as you walk into the courthouse, they’re going to arrest you and charge you with that felony.”
I skipped the hearing. But word got around that there would be quite a show at the courthouse, and more than fifty people showed up. I paid twenty dollars to have the whole thing videotaped, which is a service the courts offer in Ohio, so my attorney had a visual record of the proceedings. Good thing, too: When my attorney announced that I wasn’t going to show up for the hearing, a Greek woman slapped Mary Jane right in the face.
The judge verbally clobbered both sides for letting things go this far. Then he lit into JoAnne because it was plain to one and all that we had agreed to my having the kids for half the summer. She said she was deeply upset by my snatching of Chris. Could she have the children for one more day? The judge said yes, but one day only. “Then you turn them over to your husband.” And with that, he dismissed the felony charge against me.
When my parents brought the boys to me forty-eight hours later, Costa rushed into my arms and cried, “Why didn’t you take me, too?”
I was tearing up, too. “Honey, I looked so hard and I couldn’t find you. But that’s why I brought my big friend, because we wanted to take both of you.”
We never did get to Disney World. Instead, my folks and the kids all came down to Washington with me and stayed for a while. I went back to work a couple of weeks later.
I’d been in a funk for more than a year, ever since “Uncle Stelios,” the baker, and my informal probation—my time in the penalty box. Even rejoining the game at work hadn’t snapped me out of it.
The Reluctant Spy Page 11