The rooftop double agent
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Kiriakou gave this account to explain a clip of himself circulating without context, in which he insists a frightened man accompany him to a hotel roof. His summary of it is exact about the distinction: "I wasn't going to throw him off the roof. I wanted him to think I was going to throw him off the roof."

The arrangement

In 2001, having been evacuated from Athens for his own safety and put on a job training Middle Eastern intelligence services that left him bored, he took a call from a friend who was a station chief in the Middle East. The friend had recruited a double agent and could not safely meet him: "the guy's insisting on meeting only with the chief. Can you fly out here every month and pretend to be me?" Kiriakou agreed on the spot.

The agent was working for "one of our gravest enemies in the world" and did not know that Kiriakou knew it. After each meeting he went directly to that country's embassy and reported what had been said.

The order to kill

The hostile service eventually instructed the agent to kill Kiriakou at their final meeting. "Headquarters freaked out and I was like, 'Relax.' I said, 'The guy's afraid of his own shadow. He's not going to kill me. He should be worried that I'm going to kill him, frankly.'"

What followed was, by his own description, largely mischief on top of a plan: "I just kind of wanted to scare him a little bit." He took the man into the stairwell and told him the meeting would happen on the hotel roof rather than in a room; the agent was "genuinely petrified", and when Kiriakou finally laughed and told him "I'm just pulling your leg. You don't really think I'm going to throw you off the roof", "He started crying."

He closes the account without elaborating on what came between: "one thing led to the other to the other. And he's been in prison since the spring of 2001, and he's going to die there."

See also

- The Jerusalem bluff
- John Kiriakou
