Kiriakou on wine
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Wine is one of the few private enthusiasms John Kiriakou discusses in any detail. He has subscribed to Wine Spectator for around twenty-five years, and he and his wife built a climate-controlled cellar into their house when it was built. It is also, across his accounts, one of the few subjects that runs through every phase of his life, the tradecraft, the recruitment work, the prison sentence and the public career that followed.

A detector of pretension

The knowledge has mostly surfaced in his accounts as a detector of pretension. The Christmas 2009 present John Kerry gave his Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff was a bottle of wine Kiriakou did not recognise; he looked it up and found it cost ten dollars, from a man he describes as worth close to a billion. On another occasion a host thanked for the wine at his own table claimed it was his favourite and that he kept it in his own cellar, which Kiriakou did not believe for a moment.

The same instinct works in reverse when the government is paying. Reprimanded once for filing a five-dollar expense claim, he had forgotten his wallet and had only a five-dollar bill, he was told not to try to save the government money. Overnighting in Dubai on the next trip he found a Lebanese nightclub in his hotel lobby that would sell him only the full package, show and shisha pipe included, for $195; he took it, ate a fattoush salad and nothing else, and filed the claim. His superior's assumption on seeing the figure, "You probably had what? A nice bottle of wine. You had a steak", was wrong on both counts.

Wine as cover

Wine also did operational work. Travelling to the west coast on business where nobody knew him, Kiriakou would make a weekend of it and use the vineyards as his cover story: a tour, a tasting, a fancy restaurant and more wine, then a case bought and carried home.

In the surveillance-detection route as he teaches it, the wine shop is the classic second stop, a specific bottle you are looking for is a reason to leave the main road, cut through a residential neighbourhood and see who follows, while you note the make, model, colour and plate of any car you may see again. Surveillance, in his definition, is multiple sightings at time and distance; only after the bottle is bought does the route turn provocative, stair-stepping a block right and a block left in a pattern no ordinary driver would follow.

The banality is the point, and Kiriakou illustrates it with a colleague who got it wrong. A hostile service concluded that a woman who worked very hard to shake her surveillance must be the CIA officer, and covered her accordingly; Kiriakou, driving to the wine store and the fabric store and then home, was never surveilled at all.

Wine as recruitment currency

In the recruitment cycle, wine is one of the instruments of the pitch. The officer is expected to show the target the finer things until the arithmetic does the work, the target earns five hundred dollars a month, the officer is ordering two-hundred-dollar bottles of wine, paying for holidays and handing over a Rolex, and says yes. Kiriakou's teaching case is the one where it does not work: six months and a great deal of money into a developmental, the target is plainly not recruitable, headquarters still wants the intelligence, and a trainee proposes doubling down and wining and dining him for another six months.

The most expensive bottle in his accounts is one nobody drank for pleasure. A first-tour officer took a diplomat from an allied country's foreign ministry to lunch in the 1990s and ordered a $2,000 bottle of wine; the diplomat reported it immediately to his own service, expulsions followed, and Kiriakou says the relationship took more than a decade to recover. The lesson he draws is about pace rather than money: the officer had overstepped, and had done it right off the bat.

Wine where it is not supposed to be

Working in the Muslim world made wine a political object as much as a drink. Kiriakou notes that the Saudi king's title is not simply king but custodian of the two holy mosques, and that King Fahd took it on the chin at home when Associated Press photographs showed him toasting Ronald Reagan with a glass of wine on a visit to Washington, "You're not supposed to drink wine", with parts of the establishment angry enough to talk about overthrowing the government. Of the Gulf officers he worked alongside, pious Muslims and good company, he allows that one might have a glass of wine once in a while, "probably not".

Wine reappears in his explanation of why recognising Palestine is more than symbolism. A recognising state has to audit every trading agreement it holds with Israel for anything that has become illegal, and the wine Israel produces in the occupied Golan Heights is his worked example: a country that recognises Syria as an independent state cannot import it. He has drunk it, "this treason wine, it's really good", and treats the small frictions as the substance of recognition, a million little things that add up.

In prison

Wine even followed him inside. The Italian inmates at Loretto kept a guard on the payroll who smuggled in pork loin, crusty bread, mushrooms, tomatoes and white wine for the marsala sauce; the nightly result was restaurant-quality food, and Kiriakou put on thirty-five pounds in prison.

See also

- John Kerry
- Surveillance detection route
- Cover position
- Kiriakou on Greek and Cypriot food
- Kiriakou on diet and nutrition
- John Kiriakou
