The Reluctant Spy

by John Kiriakou

  THROUGHOUT HIGH SCHOOL, I had never dated a Greek girl. This shouldn’t have been a big deal, but our Greek American family was typical of most in America: There was incredible pressure to marry a Greek girl, and the pressure started early. By the time I was a sophomore in college, nineteen years old, Greek relatives and friends were looking for any excuse or opportunity to pair me up with this person’s sister or that person’s cousin. In May 1984, a friend of our family was getting married in Warren, Ohio, and naturally, we were all invited to the wedding. It was a huge affair, maybe five hundred people, Greek band, lots of liquor. Yes, just like the movie. One guy at the wedding, Victor Tsimpinos, called his younger sister and invited her to crash the party; no one would know. I knew Victor but I had no idea he had a sister until my brother, Emanuel, tapped me on the shoulder and made the introduction: “John, have you met JoAnne Tsimpinos?”

  She was attractive, and we chatted for a few minutes before wandering off to talk to other people. But one of my aunts had spotted us, which was all she needed to push me to dance with my new acquaintance. JoAnne and I danced a couple of times, and I said after the last dance, “I’ll give you a call sometime.” Does that sound like a rock-solid commitment? Four or five days later, I got a call from a cousin, who immediately got on my case. “She’s been waiting for you to call her,” my cousin said. “If you tell a girl you’re going to call, you should call.” So I did. We dated casually until I left in January 1985 for the InterFuture scholarship, and we corresponded on a fairly regular basis while I was gone.

  When I returned in July 1985, something was clearly bothering JoAnne, but I couldn’t get her to say what. Instead, what I got were long, awkward silences over dinners or drinks or both. She would go silent for days or even weeks at a time, and I would have absolutely no idea what I’d done. It culminated with a scene on August 9, 1985, my twenty-first birthday, when we went out to dinner. This time, she wouldn’t even make eye contact. We went to a bar afterward and it continued. Finally, I’d had enough.

  “You know what? I’m taking you home. Let’s go.” I got up and left; she followed me out and I drove her to her house.

  “Call me when you feel like saying something,” I said.

  “Call me when you feel like apologizing,” she said. Apologize? For what? I haven’t done anything wrong. This girl has some serious issues, but they’re a complete mystery to me.

  Later, I learned what the problem was. A cousin of mine said that a friend of JoAnne’s was telling her that I was probably cheating on her in London because that’s what all American college boys do when they go overseas. JoAnne apparently was a true believer in this breathtaking theory of social behavior. There were only two things wrong with it: First, I had made absolutely no commitment to JoAnne—no expressions of love, no physical intimacy beyond the hugs and kisses permitted by Greek dating conventions. And second, I hadn’t fooled around in London anyway.

  I returned to school later that August. We had no contact until the following March, when I called to wish her a happy birthday. We ended up having a couple of dates, then no contact at all until the summer of 1987, when I visited her in Warren in June. Afterward, I invited her to come to Washington over the July 4 weekend. We had a great time, taking in a concert, seeing the sights, eating at some good restaurants. Just before she was to head back, I blurted out a proposal. Just crazy. And she accepted. Even crazier.

  My buddies thought I’d gone off the deep end. A close friend, Gary Senko, reminded me of the repeated fights JoAnne and I had had and how, after the big one on my twenty-first birthday, I’d asked him to stop me—“physically, if necessary”—if I ever said I wanted to get back together with her.

  “No, it’s okay now, she’s terrific,” I told him. He remained skeptical. And with good reason: We married on June 25, 1988, as I was applying to the CIA, and almost immediately started to have problems. It was the silent treatment again, punishment for imagined slights that were never explained, much less addressed. Sometimes, it would last a day or two; occasionally, a week or two would pass without our speaking more than a sentence or two to each other.

  SO, A HARDSHIP post, the CIA interviewer asked. Bullshit was not an option here. I had married a Greek American princess; our marriage, if not already in trouble just four months after the exchange of vows, had more warning signs than a runaway-truck lane on a mountain pass. Making this union work would be hard enough, I sensed, even in friendly confines. Her idea of comfortable living did not include Pittsburgh or Cleveland, let alone Khartoum.

  “Honestly, she wouldn’t do it,” I said. “I know my wife. She’d hate it.”

  There were a few pleasantries to follow, but not many: The interview was over.

  A second interview, this one with the Directorate of Intelligence, seemed a success; they liked my academic background and the fact that Dr. Post had recommended me. But I learned later that they were oversubscribed with junior analysts and didn’t feel they could take on another one.

  The final interview was also in the Directorate of Intelligence, where I was asked about my favorite graduate school course. “The Psychology of Leadership,” I said. That was Dr. Post’s course. I must have sounded so naïve to these people; they were all Post protégés, and here I was, a Post wannabe who knew nothing of their history. I stumbled blindly on.

  “This guy did a lecture on Stalin’s mind-set during the Yalta Conference that I’ll never forget.”

  “What did he say?” one of them asked. “What was it that really grabbed you?”

  Dr. Post had described how Stalin had a much better understanding of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s states of mind than they did of his. They underestimated Stalin, and he used that to his advantage to drive a harder bargain. Roosevelt was very ill by this time, and Stalin’s insistence on meeting at Yalta, along the Black Sea, required FDR to make a long, arduous trip. Stalin also strung out the meetings, I said, parroting Dr. Post, tiring the ailing Roosevelt and the aging Churchill and making them more vulnerable to his demands. In the end, FDR may well have agreed to things he otherwise might have rejected simply to get out of the room and get some rest.

  They liked what they heard, but there was one more hurdle I had to clear. They gave me a fat folder of unclassified material, most of it newspaper clips, about Benjamin Netanyahu, who had just completed a tour as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. Take two hours, I was told, read everything, and write a two-page analytical profile that makes a prediction about Netanyahu’s political future in Israel.

  My prediction was that based on his political support in the Likud Party and the respect he commands among Labor Party leaders, Netanyahu almost certainly would be a leading candidate for prime minister by the mid-1990s. Netanyahu did become prime minister, a position he held from 1996 to 1999. (As of this writing, he is Israel’s prime minster once again.)

  My extended Greek family, in America and in Greece itself, and my travel to a few Eastern European countries after my InterFuture scholarship in London, effectively held up all my clearances as the agency checked my bona fides. Meanwhile, I labored on at OPM, patiently checking clearances for other potential federal employees and waiting to hear whether I’d made the final cut. Finally, fourteen months after the interviews at CIA headquarters, I got my offer letter from the agency.

  On January 8, 1990, I walked into the building at Langley as an employee and joined the other new hires for orientation in “the Bubble,” the agency’s dome-shaped auditorium. We took the oath to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States, a memorable moment that made my heart swell with love of country and pride in the government service I had chosen. A parade of speakers talked about the agency and its culture, administrative details crucial to doing our jobs, and classification rules and the proper way to lock our “vaults,” the secure doors on our offices. The speaker who made the biggest impression on me, however, was the director of the Office of Security. He began by telling us how fortunate we were t
o be there; we were the cream of the crop, representing a mere 1 percent of all applicants. Then he said something that has stayed with me all these years later: “The greatest threat facing America today is the threat of Soviet Communism.”

  This was January 1990. The Berlin Wall had fallen the previous November. The Soviet empire was in collapse, with Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania having broken away. Germany would reunite in a matter of months, and the Soviet Union itself would be history in less than two years. Yet here was a CIA official warning us of, what? The death throes of an unlamented ideological scourge? This was something to be applauded and embraced.

  It was an odd, discordant note in an otherwise thrilling day. I was about to begin work in the Directorate of Intelligence as a leadership analyst, and I was fixated on the Middle East, not the threat from an imploding empire. My first assignment: Iraq and Kuwait.

  3

  I SENT A bottle of scotch to Dr. Post as an expression of my gratitude, which seemed to embarrass him. “Nonsense,” he said when we talked. “I didn’t get you in, you got yourself in. I introduced you to one person. That was nothing.” You could have fooled me.

  A couple of years later, Dr. Post came to the agency to give a speech. Afterward, I rushed to the podium to thank him again for pointing me in the right direction. But I wasn’t alone. Several other people, a few of them my contemporaries, had the same idea. We all owed our budding careers to this wonderful man and wanted to say so one more time. All the bad press notwithstanding, the CIA is filled with good men and women doing fine work on behalf of their country.

  There are exceptions, of course, and one of them was my first boss when I went to work at the agency. I cannot name him here, so let’s call him Jim. I was assigned to Iraq and Kuwait, Jim said, because Iraq was the perfect training account: Nothing much happened, its leadership and cabinet hadn’t changed in two decades, and it was a steady state.

  But what about the eight-year war Iraq had started and fought with Iran? That was a military analysis issue, Jim said. We’re leadership analysis. It struck me as a distinction without a difference, especially when we were talking about Saddam Hussein, but I was a twenty-five-year-old rookie. What did I know? I figured you had to listen to the veterans if you wanted to learn more about the game. We all know what happened seven months later: Iraq invaded Kuwait, kicking off Operation Desert Shield in early August 1990 and the Desert Storm war to remove Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait.

  Kuwait itself was a different story, Jim said. There was an active pro-democracy movement in the emirate led in part by people who had been educated in the United States or in American universities abroad. Iraq might be quiet, but the activists in Kuwait could make trouble, Jim speculated. Could I handle both? Sure, I said, no problem.

  In the spring and early summer of 1990, Kuwait was going through some internal turmoil amid efforts to bring back the National Assembly that the emir had dissolved four years earlier. A former member of that assembly was Dr. Ahmed al-Shehi. He was a real thorn in the side of Kuwait’s royal family. His mother was a Sudanese slave owned by the royal family; she and his father, a Palestinian, both worked in the royal household, where young Ahmed had grown up.

  Kuwait, after the discovery of oil, had more money than Croesus, so the royal family set up a scholarship fund to send Kuwaiti citizens abroad to study. Ahmed al-Shehi was the first recipient. He enrolled at the American University of Beirut, completed his undergraduate work, and entered medical school. His roommate, also studying medicine, was none other than George Habash, a firebrand who later founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. To the extent al-Shehi needed guidance on radical politics in the region, Habash was more than happy to provide it.

  I decided to write an analytical paper on al-Shehi, who had been arrested and released in May 1990. It argued that the Iraqis—by then eyeing Kuwait for a possible invasion—wanted to co-opt the Kuwaiti opposition and set up a puppet regime headed by al-Shehi. In the process, I made a modest name for myself as the go-to guy on Kuwait. And after Iraq invaded Kuwait, I became a key player in supplying analysis to policy makers in the first Bush White House straight through Operation Desert Storm. Our forces didn’t go all the way to Baghdad: Taking down the regime wasn’t part of the United Nations or coalition mandate, and the first President Bush wasn’t about to violate it. But I figured it was only a matter of time before someone would overthrow Saddam. I wanted to be at my desk for that one; then, I’d think about moving on to something else. But Saddam hung on, even crushing uprisings among Kurds in northern Iraq and Shiites in southern Iraq. The 1992 U.S. presidential election came and went. Saddam was still in power; George H. W. Bush wasn’t. With the change in administrations, I was getting antsy to try something new.

  During this period, I traveled to the Middle East on business a couple of times, but only for short visits. Now, I thought I might have a shot at something more substantial. In early 1993, I applied for a position at the U.S. Embassy in Manama, Bahrain, the tiny island nation in the Persian Gulf. I got the job, as an economic officer, marking the start of a decade of work so foreign to my previous experience that I wouldn’t have believed Jerrold Post himself had he been prescient enough to predict it.

  Before taking the assignment, however, I had to do two things: Learn Arabic and persuade JoAnne to go to Bahrain with me. The latter may have been every bit as difficult as the former—and believe me, Arabic is not an easy language to learn. At first, JoAnne was adamant: There was no way she could do this. She had visions of being trapped in this foreign land with her young son and ambitious diplomat-husband, only worse. She was imagining scenes right out of the Sally Field movie Not Without My Daughter. They were going to make her wear a hijab. The religious police were going to smack her legs with sticks if she went out. She’d be under the equivalent of house arrest. I’d have my colleagues at the embassy, meet all sorts of interesting people in the diplomatic community, and develop a network of friends and acquaintances among the Westerners living in Bahrain. I’d do all of that and more, she said. Meanwhile, she wouldn’t have any friends.

  It almost broke up our marriage then and there until I effectively capitulated and gave her an out.

  “Look, it won’t be like that at all,” I said. I had been to Bahrain once before, and I knew enough by reading what the agency had on the place to tell her that her concerns were way off base. Bahrain was a geographically small country, perhaps three or four times the size of Washington, D.C., with a population of around seven hundred thousand. It was off the coast of Saudi Arabia, connected by a four-lane causeway, but it was nothing like its huge neighbor. Bahrain, with no oil production to speak of, had turned itself into a specialist in oil services, including huge refining operations. What’s more, it had become something of an international banking center. Bahrain was a Muslim country, but it was positively liberal compared with the strict Islam practiced by the Saudis. Riyadh, the Saudi capital and its largest city, was an easy drive, and Dubai and Abu Dhabi, prosperous and increasingly progressive emirates, were puddle-jumping flights away. Walking around in skintight workout clothes might be problematic, but if JoAnne dressed conservatively, she could move about freely. And she’d mix and mingle with many of the same people in my circles; she’d make friends as she saw fit. Let me put it this way: Trying to sell her on the idea, I was dancing as fast as I could.

  I explained all of it to JoAnne, but she remained skeptical. “Let’s make a deal here,” I finally said. “At least give it a chance. If you go with me and you truly hate it, I’ll send you back. Give it six weeks.”

  A SUCCESSFUL YEAR of Arabic study was the sine qua non of my Bahrain assignment: If I refused to commit to the language, if I washed out along the way or if I completed the year but came up short during the final testing, I’d be going nowhere. I welcomed the challenge. I’d taken a six-week Arabic course when I first joined the agency, before my first trip to the Middle East; at a minimum,
I thought, a CIA guy should be able to read a street sign or a menu or even a picture caption, especially a guy with a degree in Middle Eastern studies. But I didn’t speak any Arabic, except for a few words.

  So on a hot summer day in early August 1993, I began Arabic language training at a government facility in northern Virginia. Day one, however, gathered students studying all languages—scores of us—for a two-hour briefing in a language that didn’t even exist in nature. This was genuine foolishness—an English-based nonsensical gibberish made up at the U.S. Defense Department’s language school in Monterey, California, as a way to get some sense of our aptitude for foreign tongues. After the briefing, we were tested in a drill that reminded me of the math part of an SAT test: If you have A and B and C and D, what would come next? Verb, noun, adjective, whatever.

  This was a complete waste of time. My office had mandated that I take a year of Arabic, which was the only reason for my being there, and it wasn’t up to this visiting instructor from Monterey to decide whether I could cut it. Besides, I spoke fluent Greek, another language that wasn’t easy to learn. I suppose I could have walked out, but I didn’t; instead, I essentially blew off the test, filling in the dots at random just to finish. At the end of the day, the instructor pulled me aside with the head of the language school and said I’d done so poorly in Gibberish 101 that she was recommending that I not begin Arabic training the next morning.

  “No offense, but that decision isn’t yours,” I said as calmly as I could. “And it’s not the language school’s either. My office sent me here to learn Arabic. They paid thousands of dollars for me to learn Arabic. They think I can learn Arabic. What you’ve done is flunk me in gibberish, which means you flunked me in nothing because I didn’t even bother with this nonsense.”