Planning a surveillance detection route
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Planning a surveillance detection route was, in John Kiriakou's telling, the least glamorous and most time-consuming discipline of field work: for every meeting, both to and from, a route had to be plotted in advance, and "that takes hours."

The paper

There was no Google Earth and no GPS. Officers worked from large Rand McNally-type road atlases, photocopying pages and taping them together into sheets that could be six feet by four. On these you plotted, in different coloured highlighters, the first leg, the second, the third and the fourth, and the three stops between each leg.

The plan was then submitted to the instructors, who approved or rejected it and explained why a given route was good or bad. And then it had to be driven, because a route that exists only on paper will put you in a neighbourhood you have never seen, making a left turn that is prohibited, or down a road that has been closed for six months for repaving.

In the field

Kiriakou describes carrying the habit into his first posting. For his first several weeks in Athens he worked a normal eight-, nine- or ten-hour day and then drove around the city at random, looking for a good route, a good cover stop, a pick-up place, somewhere to bump a contact, somewhere to service a dead drop.

He says the training never left him: more than two decades out of the CIA, he still keeps his head on a swivel, checking the side mirrors and the rear-view mirror to be sure he is not under surveillance.

See also

- Surveillance detection route
- Cover stop
- The Farm
- Denied areas
