The Reluctant Spy by John Kiriakou Page A

room.
    â€œJust a minute,” he said, and he left the room to get a glass of water. As he did, I let myself in. His daughter, four years old or so, was in the living room, sitting on the floor and playing with some toys. I bent down and began to talk to her in Arabic: “What’s your name, how old are you, how do you like Athens?”
    My reluctant host had reentered the room and, having heard me speaking Arabic to his daughter, knew without question that this encounter was no accident. I had used Arabic with the child because I wanted to get her father’s attention focused on what I might have to say. He was riveted: “What exactly do you want from me?”
    â€œLook, I’m not going to insult you,” I said. “I’m from the CIA in Washington. We’ve heard some nice things about you. We believe we can work with you. The bottom line is, we’re the good guys. Your leader’s the bad guy, and someone’s bound to take him down. This is your opportunity to be on the side of the good guys.” He said nothing, so I pulled out a business card, one with my real name on it, and gave it to him. “This is to prove my bona fides,” I said. “It’s my true name. Call this number tomorrow, ask for John Kiriakou, and I’ll answer the phone. I’ll be happy to meet you anywhere you want, in Greece or another country.”
    He put the card down on the table. “I admire your courage in approaching me,” he said. “But I’m offended that you would do it in my own home.”
    I apologized and reiterated my interest in hearing from him.
    â€œYou have a good day,” he said, showing his unwelcome visitor the door.
    â€œYou have a good day, too, sir,” I said, and left.
    The next day, I waited for the phone to ring, but the only call was from the agent I was running, asking for an emergency meeting. We met at 2 a.m. at an amusement park south of the city.
    â€œDid you approach him?” the agent asked.
    â€œYes. What’s going on?”
    â€œHe’s hunkered down. He was behind a locked door all day.”
    â€œThat’s good,” I said. “He’s not going to report the approach to his bosses because, if he does, they’re going to call him back and they may very well execute him. And he knows it.”
    â€œWell, I don’t know what’s happening, but he’s panic-stricken,” my agent said. “There’s no way he’s going to say anything to the folks back home. You scared the hell out of him.”
    Sure enough, no one said a word. Three years later, the intel guy called my old number and got another CIA officer doing temporary duty in Athens; he knew the whole story of my approach. “I need to talk to John Kiriakou,” the Mideast officer said. Now, when it was long past too late, he wanted to talk. But the case officer in Athens asked him for something—something sensitive—to test his willingness to help.
    â€œI am a patriot, loyal to my country,” he said. “I cannot give you such a thing.” That was the end of it—and the end of agency contact with him, at least so far as I knew.
    So was this pitch a failure? Yes and no. Yes, because I did not succeed in recruiting him to work for the United States. No, because the approach effectively shut down his operations in Athens. He’d been penetrated. He knew the Americans knew about him, and that constrained his freedom of movement. He couldn’t raise a warning flag at home because it would risk his life to reveal that his leader’s adversaries had approached him. The outcome wasn’t as good as opening a pipeline of information from his country’s embassy, but rendering that embassy deaf, dumb, and blind in Athens was a damn fine second prize.

6

    GREEK TERRORISM WASN’T confined just to Greece, and that was the beauty of the job. If there was a Greek Communist in Italy I needed to