The Milan–Sofia flight
======================

The trip, in Kiriakou's account, was a deliberately awkward one. He was running a sensitive operation and therefore could not travel directly from Athens to Sofia; he had to obtain a different passport, board a plane elsewhere, and go in from Milan. 

The seatmate

Kiriakou prefaces the story with his own standing practice: "I never talked to people on planes." The man in the next seat, whom he describes as a large and voluble Italian, did not reciprocate. The questions came "question after question after question," and Kiriakou's monosyllabic replies were not taken as the hint they were intended to be. 

Eventually the man asked what he did. Kiriakou gave the standard line, he was involved in import-export. This is the answer that, by his own admission moments earlier, is the least durable part of his cover, and it failed immediately: the Italian said he was in import-export too, and wanted to know what Kiriakou imported and exported. Kiriakou's deflection, "whatever makes the most money", did not stop him. 

The exit

With boredom exhausted as a technique, Kiriakou abandoned it for its opposite. "Look," he says he told the man, "I smuggle women and cigarettes from Eastern Europe. Okay? Are you happy?" 

The Italian's reply was that he did not think he approved. Kiriakou's was that he had not asked for his approval, and that the man should mind his own business.  The result was the silence he had wanted from the beginning: "Oh, he sat there like this the rest of the flight. Never said a word." 

Why it works

The episode is the mirror image of the doctrine Kiriakou describes elsewhere, and he tells the two back to back. The trained answer is engineered to generate no curiosity. When curiosity arrives anyway, the fallback is not a better lie but a socially unbearable one, an answer that makes further questions costly for the person asking them rather than for the officer. 

Kiriakou does not present the improvisation as good tradecraft, and he does not claim it was authorised. He tells it as what he did when a rule designed for polite strangers met a stranger who was not going to be polite. 

See also

- The boring cover story
- Sofia, Bulgaria Dead Drop
- Cover position
