Asked what the risks of counterterrorism work actually are, John Kiriakou begins with the obvious one and names the people. “There were two guys who I worked with in CTC, the Counterterrorism Center — Helge Boes and Mike Spann — who were killed in the line of duty. And it wasn’t just them. I was the chief of the counterintelligence branch in the Osama bin Laden group. The woman that I sat next to was killed in the line of duty in the Khost bombing in Afghanistan. The suicide bomber, he blew her and six of our colleagues up.”[1]
The second cost
Kiriakou states the domestic consequence as an expectation rather than a risk: “on an equally personal note, your marriage is probably not going to survive an operational tour in the directorate of operations. The stress is just otherworldly. It’s the most difficult and dangerous thing you can do as a CIA officer.”[2]
He gives his own case as the instance. The night before he was evacuated from Athens — after a 17 November manifesto claiming the murder of the British defence attaché Stephen Saunders named him as the target they had passed over — “was the last night I spent in a house with my wife, and we were divorced soon after. She’s just like, ‘yeah, I’m not doing this anymore.’”[3]
Why the work is unlike other operations
Two things, on Kiriakou’s account, make counterterrorism the hardest posting. The first is the adversary: “when people join terrorist groups, they do that because they are true believers, and in most cases they hate you or what you stand for more than they love life itself. And so they are very happy to die for a cause.” The second is the terrain: “if you’re working counterterrorism issues, you generally aren’t doing it in London or Paris or Ottawa. You’re doing it in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan” — and in Pakistan, unless he was carrying out an operational act, he had to stay on the compound because it was simply too dangerous.[2]