The code room and the buried weapons
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The morning after the broken side-view mirror pitch, the target telephoned John Kiriakou and asked what he proposed.

The meeting

Kiriakou told him to meet him in the lobby coffee shop of the Hilton hotel in two hours, alone and unarmed.

The venue was chosen for exposure rather than privacy, "I wanted it to be in as public a place as possible so that if all hell were to break loose I might have a little bit of safety, safety in numbers." Six security officers were placed at tables around the café; Kiriakou says CIA people were at every table, all of them armed, and that he wore a bulletproof vest under his suit.

That, he says, was itself part of the pressure: the target was a professional, "so he knew that every one of these white guys that's sitting at every table around him is armed to the teeth and is working with me."

The demand

The man asked how it would play out. Kiriakou named two things: "I want access to your code room and I want all your weapons."

The target answered that he had no idea how hard that was. Kiriakou's reply turned the difficulty into the argument for asking him specifically: "yes, I also know how important you are, and I know that of anybody in the embassy besides the ambassador, you have the access."

The terms

Asked what he would get in return, Kiriakou answered in order: "number one, you get to live. Number two, I can make you rich beyond your wildest dreams."

In the English-language telling he is blunter about the balance of the negotiation: the target made a demand, Kiriakou made a counter-offer, and then told him, "you're not in a position of strength to negotiate here. I'm telling you what it is that you're going to do." Money could be discussed later; first he had to prove his bona fides.

What was taken

They negotiated a deal and made a plan. The codes were taken. The weapons were buried in an underground bunker outside the embassy; six men went in the middle of the night with shovels and took all of them.

Then the agent disappeared, into resettlement, and eventually into seven restaurants.

Kiriakou's summary of the outcome is that the man "did literally everything that we wanted him to do," and that the operation shut down what he says would have been a real threat to Americans from that embassy.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- The broken side-view mirror
- The Restaurants In Witness Protection
- Gust Avrakotos
- Agent payment mechanics
