The botched pitch
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Asked whether he had ever had an operation fail, John Kiriakou answers "Yes, one time", and immediately adds "It was not my fault."

The development

The target was a terrorist suspect who worked as a journalist for a leftist newspaper, journalism serving as his cover. Kiriakou heard from a source that the man badly needed money: his daughter was sick and he could not afford medical care. Kiriakou telephoned him cold under the name Joe Blow, presenting himself as the editor of a new magazine that wanted to offer him a column on the strength of his standing in the leftist community, at a thousand or two thousand dollars a month. The man was delighted and agreed to meet for coffee.

The station chief takes the meeting

Kiriakou brought the news to the station chief, who was equally excited, and then announced he would make the pitch himself. "I'm like, 'What? I've been working on this guy for 2 years.'" The chief was unmoved, asked what cover Kiriakou was using, and assigned himself the role of publisher: "You be the editor, I'll be the publisher."

The target then demonstrated the tradecraft Kiriakou had underestimated. Offered two restaurants, he declined both and chose an outdoor cafe in the centre of town that was surrounded on four sides by high hedges, so that nobody outside could see who was sitting in it, "very smart from a cover perspective." The Americans arrived half an hour early; every other table in the place was CIA security, the standard arrangement for what they called a high-threat meeting.

The collapse

Kiriakou made the introductions. His boss took the target's hand to shake it, would not release it, and said: "We know who you are, mother, We know who you are. We're going to break you." Kiriakou's own verdict on the method is flat: "The soft touch is always the way to go." The target became frightened and began screaming for the police; the two officers bolted in opposite directions and the security men in others.

Back at the embassy the station chief pronounced the meeting a success on the grounds that the man had been driven underground and would run no more operations. Kiriakou's reply was that he had wanted to recruit him, not drive him underground. The ambassador then summoned them both: the host country's deputy prime minister had already telephoned to lodge a complaint.

The epilogue

The target subsequently volunteered to another intelligence service, whose officers raised the matter with Kiriakou while he was visiting their capital. Asked how they could possibly know about the approach, the officer explained that during the man's polygraph he had been asked whether he had ever been approached by another intelligence officer, and answered that he had been approached by "two caricatures of CIA men." Kiriakou's summary: "It was a disaster from the word go."

See also

- Recruitment attempts on Kiriakou
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Cover position
