How Kiriakou went armed in Athens is a measure of how seriously he took 17 November — and of the operational paranoia his training was designed to instil.
He describes the daily load precisely: a 9mm pistol in a tear-away waist pack with three magazines, and a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38 on his ankle carrying six rounds. All together, he reckons, about forty-seven rounds — as many as he could squeeze in.[1][2]
On his first day on the job his boss presented him with a Smith & Wesson brand buck knife, with the words “just in case things go to shit.” It never left his back pocket. He still has it twenty-seven years later; it is in his nightstand.[2][3]
One habit qualified all of it. Kiriakou never kept a round in the chamber, being “always afraid that God forbid one of my kids should find the gun” — which is why, when a man came at him during the attempted carjacking, he had to pull the slide back before the weapon meant anything.[4]
Why
The armament went with a routine designed to defeat a pattern: leaving at a different time every day, taking a different route every day, never establishing a habit. His training, he says, was meant to make him paranoid — so that when the bad guys really were out to get him he would see them.[5][1]
His wife, he says, thought the threat exaggerated. She knew how well trained he was and how heavily armed, and she knew 17 November had no interest in her — a gap in perception he identifies as one of the things that corroded the marriage, since he could not tell her the whole truth and resented her obliviousness a little more each time.[2][6]
What removes the right to carry
The entitlement is conditional and is lost easily. Kiriakou describes an officer barred from a Beirut assignment because he had been accused of beating his wife: the accusation alone, without a conviction, removes an officer’s authority to carry a gun, and a posting that cannot be worked unarmed therefore becomes closed to him.[7]
Pakistan: the opposite decision
The Athens load was not how he worked everywhere. Arriving in Pakistan he declined a weapon outright, and gave two reasons for it. The first was his own state: he had “just finished a tour in Athens, where I was the subject of an assassination attempt,” and was “still a little rattled, PTSD-wise,” from it.[8][9] The second was what he thought he might do with a gun in that condition — “I declined the gun when I first arrived in Pakistan because I was afraid that I would just kill somebody.”[9] His reasoning was that everybody around him was armed anyway: “just better to not have a gun, because if there’s going to be a shootout, well, I’m going to just hope for the best and hope that my colleagues can take care of me.”[9]
He went armed for the raids, but it “took me a couple of months to ease into that.”[9] Body armour he skipped as well, and remembers being challenged on it by a colleague who tapped him on the chest on the way out: “Hey, where’s your bulletproof vest?” His answer was that he hated the way it felt, that it was a hundred degrees outside, and that it would leave him sweating and dehydrated. The colleague’s response was “are you crazy?” — to which Kiriakou pointed out that he did not have a gun on him either.[10][11]
He attributes the whole disposition to age rather than courage. Asked by his mother after Pakistan whether he had been afraid, he said no — “because I was so busy that it just never occurred to me to be afraid” — and adds that in your twenties and thirties “you think that you’re indestructible. And looking back, I did think I was indestructible.”[12][8]