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]