Situational awareness
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Situational awareness is the subject John Kiriakou says has become and remains one of the most important things in his life, and which he presents as the civilian translation of professional surveillance detection.

The first lesson

At eighteen, a freshman at George Washington University, he was not situationally aware. On the last warm evening of the year he went walking alone at half past ten down 19th Street toward Constitution Avenue. Just past the State Department a voice asked him the time; he turned to find a man holding a large mailing tube like a baseball bat, demanding his watch and wallet. Putting his hands up, Kiriakou thought in a split second that the tube was probably empty, swung at the man, stunned him, and the mugger ran. "That was the first time something like that had ever happened to me. And I was determined to be more situationally aware."

Rule number one

The first rule taught in training, and the one he says applies to everybody, is to get out of the kill zone at the first sign of trouble. He illustrates the failure case with a CIA contractor, a civilian in a classified job who had never been through the training, stuck in traffic in Lahore, who saw two men approach on a motorcycle in his side mirror, one drawing a gun, and shot them both dead. He then put the car in park, called the consulate and waited. A mob formed and tried to pull him from the car; the security team sent to help him struck and killed a cyclist on the way and could not reach him. The Pakistani police arrested him, saving his life, and charged him with two counts of murder; it took six months to negotiate his release.

The success case is a friend who was on the 87th floor of Tower 1 on 11 September and got out. Asked how, she said: "John, I was born in Cheschna. And we learned young that at the first sign of trouble, get out."

Practical measures

Kiriakou's civilian prescriptions are deliberately small. Keep six feet between your car and the one in front at a red light, so you can get out, bumping the car ahead if you must. On foot he prefers surveillance detection routes because you can stop at a shop window and use the reflection to see who is behind you, or stairstep, a block, a right, a block, a left, checking both ways at each corner ostensibly for traffic. He stresses the threat need not be terrorism: it can be a mugging or a purse-snatching in any American city.

The technique he singles out as the most counter-intuitive is to never play the radio while driving, and instead to speak aloud about what you are seeing, "White male, blue jeans, mid-50s, walking a dog", so that if the same man appears five miles later, you know you have a problem.

Why it matters to civilians

Kiriakou frames the asymmetry plainly: the FBI, the CIA, TSA and NSA have to be on top of their game 100 per cent of the time, and "the bad guys have to get lucky once." A self-radicalised lone wolf cannot be gauged in advance, so the worst can happen anywhere. He adds that large international events, Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, make people angry, and that while few will act on it, one or two might, from a rooftop or in a shopping centre or a school.

His conclusion is about responsibility rather than fear: everyone has to be personally responsible for his or her own safety, and it is not about being paranoid, "Just force yourself to practice, practice, practice" until it becomes habit.

See also

- Surveillance detection route
- The Islamabad surveillance incident
- The CIA Insider's Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection
