Nicholas Burns was the American ambassador to Greece during the period John Kiriakou served at the embassy in Athens with the CIA, from 1998 to 2000.[1][2]
Kiriakou’s assessment of him is consistent and hostile. He describes Greece as having had a long string of popular American ambassadors going back to — and not including — Nicholas Burns, and says the dislike was not merely local: “even those of us who worked for Nick Burns hated Nick Burns.”[3] Assessing a later appointment to the post, his measure of relief was that “we could have done worse. We could have had Nick Burns come back, God forbid.”[4] The ambassador’s standing in Athens was low enough that the satirical weekly Pondiki ran a doctored photograph of him naked in a dog collar; see the Pondiki cartoon.
The hat
The exception Kiriakou grants him concerns Bill Clinton’s visit to Athens in November 1999. When a president visits a country, he explains, it does not matter which agency an officer works for — CIA, State, Commerce, Agriculture — everybody at post has to pitch in and help. Burns put every job that needed doing into a hat and had the staff draw for them. “Ambassador Nicholas Burns, whom I have always disliked and disrespected, on this one occasion did the right thing.”[5][1]
In later tellings the hat is literal — an actual hat Burns brought in — and the staff took turns pulling jobs out of it. Kiriakou’s verdict on the method is grudging: “surprisingly democratic for somebody like Nick Burns.”[6][7] The formula he uses for the man is otherwise unchanged — “the ambassador, whom I loathed.”[8]
Kiriakou drew the note-taker’s seat for Clinton’s meeting with the Greek prime minister, defence minister and foreign minister, and describes the draw as hitting the lottery — the assignment that produced one of the stories he has told most often since.[1]
That draw put Burns and Kiriakou in the same room: on the American side the meeting was Clinton, Secretary of State Albright, national security adviser Sandy Berger, the ambassador and Kiriakou; on the Greek side the prime minister, the defence minister, the foreign minister and a Greek note-taker who was himself an intelligence officer. It was held in the presidential suite of the Intercontinental Hotel.[9][10] The note-taker’s chair, Kiriakou adds, was “the job that everybody wanted.”[6]
Afterwards
Burns went on to serve as ambassador to China, among other posts.[7]
Kiriakou also places him at the embassy during the 1999 case in which one of Greece’s shipping families reported being under long-term surveillance — the man had noticed the same watcher outside his apartment and a car following him. The station took his information, advised him to leave, and he spent some six weeks in Switzerland; the licence plates he had recorded all turned out to be stolen.[11][12][13]