Planning a surveillance detection route was, in John Kiriakou’s telling, the least glamorous and most time-consuming discipline of field work: for every meeting, both to and from, a route had to be plotted in advance, and “that takes hours.”[1]
The paper
There was no Google Earth and no GPS. Officers worked from large Rand McNally-type road atlases, photocopying pages and taping them together into sheets that could be six feet by four. On these you plotted, in different coloured highlighters, the first leg, the second, the third and the fourth, and the three stops between each leg.[2]
The plan was then submitted to the instructors, who approved or rejected it and explained why a given route was good or bad. And then it had to be driven — because a route that exists only on paper will put you in a neighbourhood you have never seen, making a left turn that is prohibited, or down a road that has been closed for six months for repaving.[2][3]
In the field
Kiriakou describes carrying the habit into his first posting. For his first several weeks in Athens he worked a normal eight-, nine- or ten-hour day and then drove around the city at random — looking for a good route, a good cover stop, a pick-up place, somewhere to bump a contact, somewhere to service a dead drop.[3]
The Athens routes were not only operational. With Revolutionary Organization 17 November hunting American officials, Kiriakou ran them defensively as well: “I tried hard to do surveillance detection routes to and from work every day. I left at different times. I took different roads.”[4] The routine still failed him on the day the group came for him, and the failure has stayed with him precisely because of his qualifications: “not only was I trained in counter-surveillance and surveillance detection, but I was an instructor in surveillance and surveillance detection in the agency. I should have seen them surveilling me.” His explanation is that he was “too mired in my own problems to pay attention to my safety.”[5]
The cost in hours was real and, at home, hard to explain. A single emergency meeting could mean leaving in the middle of the night for “a two- or three-hour surveillance detection route,” holding the meeting, then a two-hour route back — arriving home at six in the morning in time to shower and go to work. His wife wanted to know “so what was her name, where did you meet her,” and did not take his word for it.[6]
Being followed, rather than following
The mirror-image discipline — what to do once you have detected surveillance — Kiriakou reduces to one rule. “The first rule of surveillance is: don’t let them know that you know that they’re following you.” Do not try to lose them, do not go the wrong way down a one-way street, do not speed up and slow down and speed up again. “Just go about your normal business,” because the watchers “are looking to see if they can detect an anomaly” — behaviour that simply does not make sense, such as running an obvious detection route.[7][8]
He applied it to himself once the FBI turned its attention on him. Knowing he was already being followed, he cut through a neighbourhood he knew well “using what I would have called a surveillance detection route” and drove to the cemetery where his grandparents are buried. He stopped near their graves and got out; the car behind him passed, parked about a hundred feet away, turned around and simply watched. “It was pretty clear” they wanted him to know. He telephoned his wife: “this is going to sound crazy, but I’m under surveillance.”[9] The habit has outlasted the career — more than two decades out of the CIA, he still keeps his head on a swivel, checking the side mirrors and the rear-view mirror.[10]
The book, and the six redacted pages
Kiriakou turned the subject into one of his CIA Insider’s Guide volumes — The CIA Insider’s Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection, written alongside guides to disappearing and living off the grid and to lying and lie detection, all three published on the same day.[11][12][13] He says the questions that prompted it come overwhelmingly from private life rather than espionage — “you can’t imagine how many questions I get from people who think their spouse is cheating on them.”[14]
The manuscript went through prepublication review, and the review is part of the story he tells about the book. He was told the holdup was not the FBI but the NSA — “well, what does NSA care about what I write about surveillance and surveillance detection? Well, I don’t know, he said. We just need two weeks.” They took five, he missed his publisher’s deadline, and the manuscript came back with six pages redacted.[15] In another telling he describes an entire page blacked out, an appeal, and the answer that the material was “properly and currently classified.”[16]