Recruitment attempts on Kiriakou
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Recruitment attempts on Kiriakou collects the episodes John Kiriakou recounts of foreign services trying to recruit him. The first came while he was still a CIA applicant in grad school: a Hungarian "third secretary for education affairs" latched onto him at a dinner party during the communist era; Kiriakou reported it, and a security officer later confirmed the man was an intelligence officer, young and over-eager.

As a senior officer in Islamabad, he was sent to meet the French head of counterterrorism, who screeched around a corner and told him to "jump in", a car pickup used for sensitive sources. Kiriakou refused, saying "I am not your asset," and insisted on coffee at the Pearl Hotel instead. The third came at his first liaison briefing, when a Shin Bet officer asked whether he was Jewish; Kiriakou answered that he was not recruitable.

The reopened FBI case

Separately from foreign recruitment attempts, Kiriakou says he left the CIA in 2004 and, after going public in 2007 with information on the CIA torture program, was investigated by the FBI for a full year, from December 2007 to December 2008, before it determined that he had not committed a crime. Three years later, Kiriakou says John Brennan personally asked for him to be put under surveillance and for the closed case to be reopened, directing Attorney General Eric Holder to bring charges; Holder's staff at first wrote back that they did not believe Kiriakou had committed espionage, but Brennan pushed the case forward anyway.

Threats and surveillance

Kiriakou says that in the days after he blew the whistle in 2007 he received hundreds of pieces of hate mail, and that about a week later the FBI called to say it had three credible threats against his life and suggested he leave town; he took his wife and children to Mexico for a week until the FBI told him it had made arrests and he could return. He says he was twice the target of assassination attempts, once in the Middle East and once in Athens, where the attackers killed his next-door neighbor, British defense attaché Stephen Saunders, instead. In a separate telling, he put it as two separate assassination attempts over the course of his 15-year CIA career. Even 20 years after leaving the CIA, Kiriakou says he remains paranoid about surveillance and has repeatedly spotted and reported apparent FBI surveillance to his attorneys.

The pitches that came, and the ones that didn't (Tegan Broadwater Pt 2)

John Kiriakou adds that he expected pitches that never came, from the Greeks, and from the Russians, while an odd Hungarian and a French officer did try, and, most elaborately, an FBI agent posing as a Japanese diplomat in the Japanese diplomat sting. "Sometimes you're just a target of opportunity for some odd outlying service," he says.

See also

- Shin Bet
- MOSSAD
- Sleeper Agent
- Stephen Saunders
- John Brennan
