Kiriakou's first recruitment
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Kiriakou's first recruitment is his own case study in how the asset acquisition cycle, spot, assess, develop, recruit, actually works when a station gives an officer no inherited leads worth having.

John Kiriakou arrived in Athens in 1998 with a couple of inherited agents and the rest to build from scratch. Recruiting somebody at a cocktail party is one thing, he says; recruiting somebody willing to infiltrate a terrorist group at risk to himself is another. He tried the obvious approach first, sitting in cafés in the grim, anarchist and communist neighbourhoods where dangerous people drank, trying to become a familiar face, and reports flatly that "that never really worked for me in terms of identifying a target."

The files

What worked was the analyst in him. Kiriakou went back through thousands of pages of files on 17 November, becoming enough of an expert that the ambassador and the chief of station used him to give classified briefings to visiting generals and cabinet members, looking specifically for Greeks the police had arrested at some point in the previous twenty-five years.

His criterion was counterintuitive. He did not care whether a man had talked to the police; he cared whether he had gone mute. Somebody who gives the police nothing at all for three days "is not gonna talk to a CIA guy" either. One file stood out: a communist street thug, a petty criminal and drug addict arrested in the 1970s, who had answered every question with obscenities. Not the answers the police wanted, but he was engaging.

The coffee shop

Kiriakou found the man's regular coffee shop and went half a dozen times before seeing him. They drank in silence; the man left. Kiriakou asked the waiter who that was, George, a regular, and asked for his number. "What are you, a cop?" The waiter walked away. So Kiriakou called for the bill, which came to about two dollars, and handed it back with a fifty: "keep the change if you can remember his phone number." The receipt came back with the number on it.

He notes what the waiter probably concluded, this being a neighbourhood that hated police and anyone resembling authority, and that he did not care: "I think he thought I was gay and I was interested in the guy. And frankly, I didn't care what he thought so long as I got the number."

The approach

The pitch was built around a real event. Athens had just had an earthquake, and cracked walls and floor tiles were everywhere. Kiriakou telephoned as a Greek Australian who owned an apartment and had heard the man did tile work, a job worth about five hundred dollars, and proposed meeting at a different coffee shop on the Saturday morning. One thing led to another.

It earned him a Snickers bar at the staff meeting.

He contrasts the patience this required, a recruitment can take a year or two for a sensitive target, with the cold pitch, which takes ten minutes: knock on the door, say you are from the CIA, that you know who they are, that you want them to work for you and that you have a great deal of money. "That almost never worked. Almost."

See also

- Asset acquisition cycle
- The Snickers bar
- Revolutionary Organization 17 November
- Chief of station
