Mark Polymeropoulos
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Asked what happens to an officer whose cover is destroyed, John Kiriakou answered with the general rule and then with a friend's career as the illustration.

Brought in from the cold

Kiriakou explained that officers are blown "all the time," and that the standard remedy is reassignment rather than dismissal: they are sent to a country where they will be declared to the local service. When Aldrich Ames "revealed the identities of more than a hundred officers," he said, "they had to be, the terminology is, brought in from the cold."

What such officers lose is a specific country, not the profession. They "could no longer be undercover officers in Russia, where they were all assigned at one time or another," but they could still do the work elsewhere, in cooperation with the local intelligence service.

Kiriakou contrasted this with the position of a nonofficial cover officer, a "knock", whose cover is a private identity rather than an embassy job. That, he said, is "a whole different kind of cover. It's one that you can't come back from."

The Moscow appointment

"One of them was a friend of mine, Mark Polymeropoulos," Kiriakou said. "He was in his first tour when Ames blew his identity, and he ended up becoming the station chief in Moscow."

Kiriakou does not treat that as coincidence. He reads it as a message, and voices it as one: "which was just like a thumb in the Russians' eye, you know, oh yeah, you blew our officer, your spy blew our officer, now he's going to be the one in charge of operations against you. And he was."

Why the story is told

The anecdote arrives inside a broader answer about whether a burned officer has any remedy. Kiriakou's implicit point is that the damage from an exposure depends less on the exposure itself than on what kind of cover was destroyed and what the service chooses to do afterwards. Ames burned more than a hundred officers; Polymeropoulos was one of them, in his first posting, and finished by running the station in the capital of the country that had been given his name.

Asked whether other intelligence services behave as spitefully as the Americans, Kiriakou said they do, offering the example of streets renamed in foreign capitals to needle a rival embassy.

See also

- Aldrich Ames
- Valerie Plame
- Central Intelligence Agency
- John Kiriakou
