Arabic and Greek
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Arabic and Greek refers to the language combination John Kiriakou credits with making possible his transfer from the analytic side of the CIA to operations in the late 1990s.

The move

Kiriakou has said the transition from analysis to operations was very unusual at the time, "it's called a gateway in the CIA, a very unusual gateway change." His hook, in his own word, was that he was literally the only person in the CIA fluent in both Arabic and Greek. A position had opened in Athens working counterterrorism, handling, as he lists them, Libyan, Iraqi and Palestinian cases, and he went down to the Counterterrorism Center and got the job.

The vacancy itself asked for less than he had. The advertisement specified Greek or Arabic, and Kiriakou is careful to note the wording, "preferred, not mandatory", so that having both was not a requirement he met but a surplus he arrived with.

He does not always claim to have been unique. In one telling the figure is two: "as it turned out I was one of only two people in the entire CIA who had those two languages, and the other one was a language teacher." The date shifts too, between a move to the Directorate of Operations in 1997 and one made in 1998; he was posted in Greece from 1998 to 2000.

Why they took him

The reasoning was the agency's, not his, and Kiriakou quotes it in nearly identical words across fifteen years of interviews. He went to the Counterterrorism Center admitting he had no operational experience whatsoever, and was told: "it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper to take a linguist and teach him operations than to take an operations person and teach him how to speak Greek and Arabic." He got the job and started the operations course.

Where the languages came from

The Greek is a family inheritance: he has described himself as the grandson of four grandparents who emigrated to the United States from Greece, in a household where the family's debt to the country was a settled matter and public service the expected repayment.

The Arabic was deliberate, and acquired later. His undergraduate focus was Islamic theology, "I really wanted to have an understanding of what we were up against", and he came to the agency willing to learn the language. He learned it on an overseas analytic tour in the Middle East before returning to headquarters in 1997. At the time, he says, very few officers spoke Arabic at all.

The motive

The reason he gives for wanting the move is boredom. Iraq consumed him entirely and it became clear the United States was not serious about acting against Saddam Hussein, at least through the Clinton administration, so he decided to do something else. The formulation he returns to is about the writing: he was "bored writing papers that I knew nobody would ever read," and wanted something more rewarding, "I'm a linguist. I spoke both Arabic and Greek." Asked what he told his analytic supervisor, Kiriakou has recounted saying that he was so bored he just sat and drank coffee all day.

The warning

His supervisor's reaction, in Kiriakou's telling, was to ask whether he was sure he knew what he was getting into, and then to say that they were going to train him to kill people. Kiriakou has said he laughed and told the man he watched too many films, and that two weeks later he was at the CIA's training facility being trained to kill people.

The languages in use

The Arabic did the work he was hired for. He describes lunches with a senior Egyptian officer, later, in his account, destined to be number two in Cairo, conducted entirely in Arabic because the man's English was so bad and "because he was an Arabist."

It also functioned as a detector. Kiriakou returns repeatedly to the point that Arabic is not spoken in Pakistan, the languages there are Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi and Punjabi, so a story about travelling to Pakistan to take Arabic classes is not a thin cover but an impossible one. He makes the same observation from the other direction about the Saudi National Guard, where the soldier he greeted daily turned out to be speaking Urdu rather than Arabic, the guardsmen, he found, were Pakistanis.

See also

- Training To Kill
- Counterterrorism Center
- Iraq, the training account
- The Farm
- Kiriakou's Greek citizenship
