The Nordeen house
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The Nordeen house on Deliyani Street in Athens was the first property the American embassy offered John Kiriakou when he arrived in 1998 with his wife and two small children, and the offer is his standard illustration of how little the housing office understood the threat environment its officers worked in.

Kiriakou recognised the street name at once and asked whether it was the Nordeen house. The housing officer, pleased, asked whether he knew it. Kiriakou did: the American defence attaché had been blown to a thousand pieces in front of it by 17 November, and his head had been found on the roof of the house next door. "So no, I'm not living in the Nordeen murder house. Can you imagine?"

The housing officer's answer was that nothing else was available, and then, in Kiriakou's account, he simply stopped trying. Weeks passed with no contact, so one Saturday Kiriakou walked into an estate agent's office himself, said he needed four bedrooms, was shown a house with five, and told the embassy to negotiate the contract, well within the budget he already knew.

His point is not about bureaucracy but about training. Choosing where to live in Athens had to be approached with counterterrorism considerations in mind, "something that would just never have occurred to" the housing officer.

The episode also set the tone for a posting Kiriakou spent expecting to be killed: he left home at a different time every day, took a different route every day, and never established a pattern.

See also

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