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.”[1][2][3]
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.[4][5]
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.[5][6][7]
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.[7][8][9]
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.”[10]
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.[11]
It earned him a Snickers bar at the staff meeting.[12]
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.”[4]