Burn Notice is the spy series for which John Kiriakou served as script adviser in its sixth season, having been a fan of it first. The title is real tradecraft: a burn notice is a cable sent to every CIA officer in the world forbidding any contact whatsoever with a named individual.[1][2]
What a burn notice actually is
The example Kiriakou always reaches for is Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi opposition figure terminated in the mid-1990s. Termination was not the end of it: the agency issued a burn notice saying that no CIA officer anywhere in the world was permitted to have any contact with him. Kiriakou paraphrases the cable — “You are forbidden from speaking with Ahmed Chalabi. He has stolen millions of dollars of our money. He tells us lies every time we speak to him. Nobody is allowed to have any contact with him.”[1][2]
The reason was theft on two scales. Chalabi reportedly took six million dollars of the agency’s money and bought a townhouse in Mayfair by Harrods and another house in Geneva; earlier, in Amman, he had founded Petra Bank, which became the bank of choice for Iraqis living in Jordan, and embezzled thirty-six million dollars from it — bankrupting, in Kiriakou’s words, every Iraqi in Jordan — before escaping to Syria in the boot of his secretary’s car and making his way to Geneva and then London.[3]
What happened next is the point of the story. The burn notice infuriated Vice-President Cheney, who ordered the Pentagon to create a new under-secretary of intelligence whose sole responsibility was to liaise with Chalabi — after which cables began arriving at the CIA reporting Iraqi weapons of mass destruction complete with coordinates and chains of command.[1][4]
The one they threatened him with
Kiriakou was on the receiving end of the same threat. A station chief, with the chief of operations sitting in as her witness, threatened to put out a burn notice against him, and “I laughed at her.” His answer was to remind her how she had congratulated him on a recent recruitment — by telling him to take petty cash and go and buy himself a sexual favour — and to ask what the Washington Post or the New York Times would make of that, “because as God is my witness, I’m gonna call them and tell them.” She backed off immediately.[5][6]
The flight
Kiriakou’s account begins with an exception to his own habit. Flying from Washington to Los Angeles, he found himself beside a man he did not know — “I never talk to anybody on planes, but I was sitting next to this guy” — and struck up a conversation anyway. The man was Matt Nix, whom Kiriakou describes as “an absolutely brilliant and gifted writer and showrunner.”[7]
Asked what he did for a living, Nix said he had created a show. Asked whether it was one Kiriakou might have heard of, he said: “Well, maybe. It’s the number one show on basic cable. It’s called Burn Notice.”[7]
Kiriakou’s reply gave away how closely he had been watching. He had seen every episode, and — wanting to know who was keeping the tradecraft straight — “I ran the credits in slow motion just to see who your script advisor was.” Nix’s answer was that there wasn’t one: he had been obsessed with the CIA since he was a child and had read every book on it.[8]
“By the time we landed in LA, I was the script advisor for season 6. And Matt and I are still friends.”[8]
The point of the story
The friendship outlasted the season. Nix went on to remake True Lies, and Kiriakou was script consultant on that too, for the single season it ran before cancellation.[9]
Kiriakou uses the episode as his counterexample to the general complaint that screen spycraft is nonsense: “sometimes writers take this so seriously that they make it 100% accurate” — or, as he puts it elsewhere, “sometimes, man, in Hollywood, they get it exactly right.”[8][10][9]