How Kiriakou went armed in Athens
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How Kiriakou went armed in Athens is a measure of how seriously he took 17 November, and of the operational paranoia his training was designed to instil.

He describes the daily load precisely: a 9mm pistol in a tear-away waist pack with three magazines, and a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38 on his ankle carrying six rounds. All together, he reckons, about forty-seven rounds, as many as he could squeeze in.

On his first day on the job his boss presented him with a Smith & Wesson brand buck knife, with the words "just in case things go to shit." It never left his back pocket. He still has it twenty-seven years later; it is in his nightstand.

One habit qualified all of it. Kiriakou never kept a round in the chamber, being "always afraid that God forbid one of my kids should find the gun", which is why, when a man came at him during the attempted carjacking, he had to pull the slide back before the weapon meant anything.

Why

The armament went with a routine designed to defeat a pattern: leaving at a different time every day, taking a different route every day, never establishing a habit. His training, he says, was meant to make him paranoid, so that when the bad guys really were out to get him he would see them.

His wife, he says, thought the threat exaggerated. She knew how well trained he was and how heavily armed, and she knew 17 November had no interest in her, a gap in perception he identifies as one of the things that corroded the marriage, since he could not tell her the whole truth and resented her obliviousness a little more each time.

What removes the right to carry

The entitlement is conditional and is lost easily. Kiriakou describes an officer barred from a Beirut assignment because he had been accused of beating his wife: the accusation alone, without a conviction, removes an officer's authority to carry a gun, and a posting that cannot be worked unarmed therefore becomes closed to him.

See also

- The Athens carjacking
- Revolutionary Organization 17 November
- The Nordeen house
- The Farm
