John Kiriakou describes the failure of his first marriage as a structural feature of the job rather than a personal one, and calls the pattern “uniquely CIA.”
What she knew
His first wife was a ballet teacher. “She knew I worked for the CIA and that was it. She didn’t know anything else.”[1]
He renders the daily conversation as a closed loop: they are overseas, he comes home from work, she asks how work was — great — what did you do — nothing — who did you talk to — nobody.[2]
The phones
Then the second half of it: “one of my seven cell phones would ring at night, at midnight, and I would speak in Arabic and then leave and not come back for a day.”[2]
The question that produced, in his telling, was: “what’s her name?”[3]
“And so fourteen years of marriage down the drain, because I couldn’t tell her what I did for a living.”[3]
The institutional answer
The remedy the agency effectively encourages is to marry inside it, which Kiriakou did. “So I married a CIA officer. Which happens. Which is encouraged, because you’re both cleared. And so you can talk about work.”[3]
He describes the internal social apparatus that follows from the same logic — a softball league, a quilting club, a choir, “any club that you could possibly want they have” — and gives the reason: everybody is cleared, so people can talk about work without fearing they will accidentally reveal a secret.[4]
It does not solve the underlying problem. Kiriakou puts the CIA’s divorce rate at eighty per cent, “the highest of anywhere in the U.S. government.”[4] His own second marriage also ended, after prison. Asked in 2019 whether he had married again, he said no: “I think it’s just not for me.”[5]