Running into former sources
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Running into former sources is something John Kiriakou says has happened to him twice, and he raises it immediately after describing the vetting that once governed those relationships, with the aside that his prize source might not have survived the surveillance detection route he ran across an eight-lane highway.

The encounters

"I've actually run into sources twice. uh once at at an airport and uh and once on the street."

The intervals were long and very different. "In one case it was it was four years after I left the agency in the other case it was you know, 20 years after I left the agency."

Who moved first

Asked on the programme whether the correct response was a nod or a greeting, Kiriakou's answer described a situation in which he had no say. "They came up to me. I wasn't really paying attention and they came up to me and it was big bear hugs and oh my god how are you doing?"

The relationship, in other words, outlasted the operational reason for it, and the former agents felt no need for the discretion that had once been the condition of their survival.

The line he remembers

The detail Kiriakou singles out is one that reveals how much of the original relationship had been managed. "And one guy said I can't believe YOU SPEAK ENGLISH. I can't believe it."

The source had run for years without ever learning that his case officer had a language in common with him, the meetings having been conducted, presumably, in the source's own. The concealment held so completely that its exposure came as a shock in an airport decades later.

The wider point

The anecdotes sit directly against the question Kiriakou had just answered about whether officers regarded their agents as traitors. His position was that they did not, that a recruited source became "one of the good guys" and part of "one big happy family", and that seven of the nine people he recruited were people he would gladly be friends with. The bear hugs are offered as evidence that the feeling was mutual.

See also

- Sources are not traitors
- The operational test
- Kiriakou's first recruitment
- Cover position
