Kiriakou's titanium knee
========================

Kiriakou's titanium knee is the lasting physical consequence of his CIA training.

During the roadblock element of counterterrorist driving, John Kiriakou was given one of the junkyard beaters and told to crash through. About a hundred feet out he saw the roadblock and men dressed as irregular militia, one with his hand up telling him to halt. He accelerated straight at him; the man jumped clear; Kiriakou struck the rear of the blocking car and got through. But because the car was, in his words, a beater piece of junk, his seat detached from the floor and he smashed his knees into the dashboard. He went to the emergency room and wore a knee brace for months.

Sixteen years later

The injury led to a condition called spontaneous osteonecrosis, the death of the bone in the joint. On an MRI, Kiriakou says, his knee looked like "a sponge with a thousand little holes in it." The doctor told him he must have been in a serious car accident; Kiriakou said he had been, a long time ago. Told that such a thing takes ten or twenty years to develop, he answered that it had been sixteen. The surgeon's verdict: "that knee's gotta come out right now."

He has a titanium knee now, he says, "and a nasty wicked scar to prove it." His assessment of the course that cost it him is nonetheless unambiguous: "other than that, this was the best training course I ever had in my life."

How the knees were broken

Kiriakou has given the mechanism directly. Operational training after his 1997 move into operations was, he says, extensive, "everything from how to recruit a spy to steal a secret to weapons and explosives and surveillance and crashing through roadblocks." The knees went in the roadblock exercise, and the cause was the equipment: "they don't give you nice cars to crash. They give you trash cars to crash. And so, when you crash through the roadblock, the seat comes detached, and I broke both of my knees on the dashboard." The lasting note he adds is institutional rather than medical: "nobody have even said, 'Hey, sorry about your knees.' Nothing."

See also

- Counterterrorist driving
- The Farm
- John Kiriakou
