Operational vehicles — the cars an intelligence officer actually drives in the field — are, in John Kiriakou’s account, chosen by the threat environment rather than by preference. Asked whether he had a favourite make or model and what made a vehicle good operationally, he answers: “It depends on what country you’re in.”[1]
The Middle East
In most of the countries where he served operationally — almost exclusively in the Middle East — the answer was deliberately unremarkable: “my car was whatever the rental car company gave me. Seriously. Most of the time it was a Toyota of some sort, Corolla, Camry, whatever, no big deal. Couple of times it was a Volkswagen. I think I had a Nissan one time.”[2]
Athens
Athens was different, because there the requirement was survivability: “I needed something that was fully armored with level four armor. And so we had to special order a BMW 540. I need I needed a big engine, big enough to carry all that armor.” Both the armour and the engine were factory-fitted rather than retrofitted — and the car was still a disappointment. “I did not like that BMW at all… And still it it was just not meant to be. So it broke down constantly.”[3][4]
He grants that it did the job it existed for, protecting him “in case somebody wanted to try to assassinate me while I’m sitting in traffic, which thank God didn’t happen.” The general pattern for counterterrorism officers was armoured BMWs or armoured Jeeps, most of his colleagues having Jeeps — “but Jeeps break down all the time, too. So you kind of just take what you get.”[4]