The divorce at the airport
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Asked whether CIA officers of an earlier generation were permitted to tell their spouses what they did, John Kiriakou said they were not, and then described how the resulting arrangement ended his own first marriage.

What she was allowed to know

Kiriakou's first wife "knew that I was in the CIA, but that was literally all she knew." She did not know what he did all day. He characterises the routine that followed as unsustainable: "How was work? I'd say great. What'd you do? Nothing. Well, who'd you see? Nobody." He would then go out at midnight, return at six, shower, shave and go back to work.

The suspicion that pattern invites is one he addressed directly at the time. "Listen," he recalls telling her, "I was meeting with an Iraqi dude. Do I smell like I've been with a woman?" Ted Rall noted that the secrecy rule of the old days had produced a great many divorces, with spouses concluding they were being cheated on; Kiriakou confirmed it.

The morning of the evacuation

What ended the marriage was not the secrecy but the danger. 17 November assassinated Kiriakou's next-door neighbour, and "they left a manifesto saying that they had set out that morning to kill me instead of Stephen Saunders, the British defence attaché."

The response was immediate and total. Kiriakou was put in an armoured car and taken to the embassy. When he objected that he had just dropped his children at school and could not simply leave for the airport, he was told the collection was already arranged: "No, we're going to pick up your kids. We're going to pick up your wife." A car went for the children, another for his wife, and "a team packed out our house."

The airport

Kiriakou was at the airport first. "When my wife got to the airport, I was already there," he said. "And she walked up to me and she said, 'I want a divorce. I'm not doing this anymore.'"

His account of what followed is one sentence: "And that was it. We flew home together on the same plane." Rall's response, "awkward", drew the summary: "And that was the end of our marriage."

Kiriakou does not present the decision as unreasonable. He had already described her as having asked at first and then stopped asking; the attempt on his life, he says, was the point at which "she was just like, uh, I'm done. No more."

See also

- Revolutionary Organization 17 November
- Mike Baker
- Ted Rall
- John Kiriakou
