The custody standoff
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The custody standoff is John Kiriakou's account of the summer his ex-wife disappeared with their two sons in breach of a court order, and of using his own agency training to find them.

The divorce decree gave each parent six weeks with the boys over the summer; Kiriakou had given a month's notice of a trip with his parents to Disney World. Driving west from Washington on the Friday afternoon, he got a call from his mother saying the boys were missing, and so was their mother. He was upset enough on the drive, he says, that he had to pull over twice to be sick.

His parents talked him down, he describes himself as a hothead, but at midnight he drove to the house in Warren, Ohio and sat down the street doing his own surveillance. It was empty.

The search

He took a week's leave, his boss told him to go and come back when he was ready, and applied the tradecraft directly: "if I were Joanne and I wanted to hide from me, where would I hide?" He drew up a list of four or five relatives, semi-distant relatives and family friends, and ran surveillance on every one of them each day. On the fifth day he saw her car at the house of her mother's best friend, an elderly woman with a basement apartment.

The church

His lawyer told him to wait for Monday and go to court. Instead he reasoned that his ex-wife was, in his phrase, irrationally religious and would go to church on Sunday. He waited until ten and sat in the back pew of the Greek Orthodox church where his parents had married, his mother had been baptised, his children had been baptised and he had been married.

At the point in the liturgy where the congregation kneels for the consecration, he walked up the centre aisle, said only "Chris, come with me", picked up his eight-year-old and walked out to a waiting friend's car. His son stared at him as though he had seen a ghost, the boy had been told his father was dead in a car accident. Anticipating a call to the state police, he had the driver take back roads rather than the interstate.

The aftermath

The local police chief, a family friend of his ex-wife's, and, Kiriakou says, dating her, telephoned within five minutes asking him to bring the boy back to the church. He refused, told them it was his custody time, and sent a message back: deliver his second son to his parents' house within the hour.

A felony charge of aggravated menacing was filed, on an allegation that he had shouted to the congregation that it would be a bloodbath if anyone tried to stop him, something he says never happened; the charge was dropped before it reached court. At the emergency hearing the judge held nobody in contempt, restated the order "as if they are written in stone", and deducted a week from the mother's time and gave it to the father.

They never went to Disney World that summer, Kiriakou was out four thousand non-refundable dollars, which the judge called a civil matter, and went the following year instead. The younger son was handed over the same day at the Stateline Diner on the Pennsylvania,Ohio border. "It was a hostage exchange. It was like the Bridge of Spies."

See also

- The Greek Orthodox Church
- Surveillance detection route
- John Kiriakou
