Running into former sources is something John Kiriakou says has happened to him twice, and he raises it immediately after describing the vetting that once governed those relationships — with the aside that his prize source might not have survived the surveillance detection route he ran across an eight-lane highway.[1][2]
The encounters
“I’ve actually run into sources twice. uh once at at an airport and uh and once on the street.”[2]
The intervals were long and very different. “In one case it was it was four years after I left the agency in the other case it was you know, 20 years after I left the agency.”[2]
Who moved first
Asked on the programme whether the correct response was a nod or a greeting, Kiriakou’s answer described a situation in which he had no say. “They came up to me. I wasn’t really paying attention and they came up to me and it was big bear hugs and oh my god how are you doing?”[2]
The relationship, in other words, outlasted the operational reason for it, and the former agents felt no need for the discretion that had once been the condition of their survival.[2]
The line he remembers
The detail Kiriakou singles out is one that reveals how much of the original relationship had been managed. “And one guy said I can’t believe YOU SPEAK ENGLISH. I can’t believe it.”[3]
The source had run for years without ever learning that his case officer had a language in common with him — the meetings having been conducted, presumably, in the source’s own. The concealment held so completely that its exposure came as a shock in an airport decades later.[3]
The wider point
The anecdotes sit directly against the question Kiriakou had just answered about whether officers regarded their agents as traitors. His position was that they did not — that a recruited source became “one of the good guys” and part of “one big happy family” — and that seven of the nine people he recruited were people he would gladly be friends with. The bear hugs are offered as evidence that the feeling was mutual.[4][5]