The Warren, Ohio tail
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The Warren, Ohio tail is John Kiriakou's account of a weekend of physical surveillance in January 2012 that he misread completely at the time.

Why he was there

His mother's sister had died in western Pennsylvania. He rented a car and drove to the funeral, and because he also had a child-support hearing at family court in Warren, Ohio, he drove on from the funeral to Warren and checked into a hotel to wait for the Monday afternoon hearing.

The morning

With the Monday morning free, he decided to go and look at his grandparents' old house, which he had not seen in fifteen years, and to drive through the neighbourhood.

Crawling past the house at two miles an hour, he noticed a Toyota behind him, waved an apology and pulled over to let it by. It did not pass. He drove to the intersection and made a wide U-turn; the car made the same U-turn. His conclusion at the time was that the driver was either a carjacker or a private investigator hired by his ex-wife.

Knowing the neighbourhood, he cut through it on what he calls a surveillance detection route, then drove to the cemetery where his grandparents are buried and stopped near their graves. He got out. The car passed him, parked about a hundred feet away, turned around, and simply watched him.

He telephoned his wife: "this is going to sound crazy, but I'm under surveillance." She agreed with him that it was probably a private investigator, though to catch him doing what, neither of them could say.

From there he drove to the Packard Museum, noting that the car had been built in that town and that the museum stands next to the Packard Music Hall. He turned in the car park; so did the tail. He waited for a red light, ran it, and left the car caught in traffic, then made his way back to the motel, concluding that some local private investigator had simply got too close and not known what to do while Kiriakou was driving erratically.

What it was

Four days later, in a meeting he had been invited to under the pretext of helping with a case, he understood. The FBI had followed him the whole way from Virginia, and he attributes the surveillance to the Bureau's own phone call having alarmed them: "they probably thought I was running to Canada or something, because their call had tipped me off. I didn't know."

The meeting

The pretext had been a telephone call in January 2012 from the FBI's Washington field office, asking whether he remembered the case he had helped them with about a year earlier, the approach by a supposed Japanese diplomat, and saying they had a similar case and really needed his help. Kiriakou's answer was "anything for the FBI," and he agreed to come in on the Thursday.

He met two agents in a vaulted conference room. It took him an hour, he says, to realise that the case was against him.

At the end of the meeting the agents told him that as they spoke a search warrant was being executed at his home. He asked whether he was under arrest. The answer was "not yet." He said he wanted to talk to his attorney.

See also

- Japanese diplomat FBI sting
- The John Kiriakou Task Force
- Surveillance detection route
- Espionage Act
- The Greek community of Warren, Ohio
