Joe Weisberg is a former CIA Counterterrorism Center officer whom John Kiriakou describes as a colleague and a brilliant writer.[1] Kiriakou says Weisberg walked up to him at the office one day and announced he was quitting that morning, explaining he wasn’t married, had no children, and was going to Hollywood to find his fortune; Weisberg went on to create the television series The Americans.[1] Kiriakou says the show succeeded because it was realistic, pointing to a former neighbor of his in Arlington, Virginia, an elementary school substitute teacher who was arrested as a Russian sleeper agent for the SVR after living for years as an ordinary American waiting to be activated.[2]
Kiriakou has repeated the resignation story in near-identical terms elsewhere, giving Weisberg’s stated reason more starkly: “I don’t have it in my gut to convince somebody to commit treason.” In this telling, Weisberg’s novel — written after he left the agency and heavily redacted by the CIA’s pre-publication review — was well-received specifically because it was true to life, and he created The Americans immediately afterward.[3] In a third telling, Kiriakou quotes Weisberg’s resignation line slightly differently — “Convincing people to commit espionage, it’s just not for me… in my gut, I can’t do it” — and notes that Weisberg became a wealthy, highly sought-after A-list writer and showrunner, for whom Kiriakou says he has “deep respect.”[4] In a fourth account, Kiriakou again calls Weisberg “a terrible case officer” who “just wasn’t cut out for it,” attributing the mismatch to Weisberg’s personality rather than his ability, and repeats that Weisberg had no wife or children when he decided to leave for Hollywood.[5]