The Athens carjacking
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The Athens carjacking took place about two months into John Kiriakou's posting, while the family was moving from a temporary flat into the house he had found in 1998.

He had bought a 50-inch television, huge for the time, and it was sitting on the back seat of his car. His wife was driving ahead with the children and boxes when she telephoned to ask whether he could see the motorcycle following her. At a red light the rider looked at Kiriakou, then at the television; when the lights changed, he fell in behind Kiriakou instead.

Kiriakou told her to get ahead and go, running a red light if necessary, and tried to shake the rider. Speeding up, slowing down, and finally swerving to hit him, "because I'm thinking this has to be 17 November", he missed; the rider was skilled and did not care that he was being rammed.

The intersection

They came to a jammed ten-lane junction outside the country's biggest hospital, where Kiriakou was stuck. The rider dismounted and came toward him. Kiriakou put the car in park, opened the door and pointed his pistol. The man answered in Greek, "I'm not afraid of your gun", and reached for it. Because Kiriakou never kept a round chambered, for fear of one of his children finding the weapon, he pulled the slide back to chamber one, and the man ran back to the motorcycle and went for a gun of his own.

Kiriakou hit the motorcycle with the car and disabled it, noticing the open mouths of drivers in the surrounding lanes as two men pointed guns at each other in front of hundreds of people. As he drove off, a shot was fired at him and missed.

The aftermath

His wife called the embassy. State Department security, the contract guards and CIA security all arrived, along with the Greek police; cables went back to both the State Department and the CIA.

The investigation concluded it had been an attempted carjacking, the deciding factor being that the motorcycle's licence plate was stolen. The reconstruction: the rider saw a Honda Civic full of boxes, then a BMW with a 50-inch television on the back seat, and had no idea that the driver was a CIA officer, was armed, or that the car was armoured.

Kiriakou's own lesson is procedural and rueful, trainees are told that if you are going to draw a weapon you should be prepared to use it, "because it's the same amount of paperwork whether you fire the thing or you don't", and, he adds, "my God, there was paperwork."

The question

Nobody at the embassy in Athens second-guessed him. Plenty of people in Washington did: could he have avoided it, could he have not drawn the gun, and, some began to ask aloud, "is John a hothead?"

His own conclusion ran the other way. The episode reinforced the operational paranoia his counterterrorism training had instilled: safety was an illusion, and he could be shot on any day in any place, the more so because 17 November was so good that the agency had never identified a single member, meaning they could be standing six feet away in the grocery shop.

See also

- Kiriakou Athens House
- Revolutionary Organization 17 November
- The Nordeen house
- The Welch .45
