The hostile border crossing exercise was one of the set pieces of John Kiriakou’s operations training. The class was told that the next day would begin at four in the morning at Dulles Airport. Kiriakou pointed out that Dulles is closed at four; the instructor’s answer was “exactly.”[1][2]
He got up at half past two, drove some forty-five miles, and found police waiting to let the class in. The scenario: they had just flown into the Republic of Victoria, a country with very bad diplomatic relations with the United States, where an American arrival is unusual and unwelcome.[2][3]
Crossing
Kiriakou’s stated rule is “don’t draw attention to yourself” — he notes he has crossed many borders and been to seventy-two countries. Confronted by openly hostile instructors playing border guards, he answered plainly: a business meeting with one of their business leaders, a couple of days, meeting tomorrow, dinner, leaving the following morning.[3][4]
Then the guard asked what was in his pocket. It was a ballpoint pen — and, as he pulled it out, Kiriakou realised it was stamped US government. He had picked it up off his desk without looking; he wonders in retrospect whether it had been planted there. His answer was instant: that is funny, he had found it in the glove compartment of his rental car, and wondered whether somebody from the US government had had the car before him. The guard winked “like, excellent answer”, returned his passport and passed him through.[5][6]
The lesson
Walking through, Kiriakou glanced into an open side room and saw a classmate — the loud, joking class clown — stripped to his underwear and no longer laughing. When the exercise was wrapped up an hour later, before the airport opened, an instructor pointed at that man and delivered the entire lesson in one sentence: “don’t draw attention to yourself.”[6][7]