Spies traded home are the subject of a question put to John Kiriakou about what happens to intelligence personnel after they are convicted in one country and exchanged back to their own. His answer distinguishes between the rare public disgrace and the ordinary, quieter outcome.
The hard case
Kiriakou’s example of the disgrace is Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union and eventually exchanged for KGB prisoners held in the United States. “He was treated as a traitor when he came back to the United States,” Kiriakou says.[1][2]
The reason, as Kiriakou reconstructs it, was an expectation about the aircraft rather than about the man. “I think the conventional wisdom was if you were a U-2 pilot, it was impossible to shoot you down. And if you did get shot down, shame on you, you should take it like a man, and just go down with the plane. And he didn’t. He parachuted out. He was severely injured, uh and then he was captured.”[2]
The ordinary case
The usual outcome, in Kiriakou’s account, is not punishment but obsolescence. “In most cases, most cases, uh you go on to less sensitive positions.”[3]
The cause is the total collapse of cover, and Kiriakou traces the chain of onward disclosure explicitly: “Because your cover’s blown, the Russians are on to you, they’ve probably traded the information to the uh to the Chinese, to the Cubans, maybe to the Iranians, to the North Koreans. So everybody that you would want to hide your identity from knows exactly who you are.”[3]
What remains is administrative. “So you’re going to end up with some some desk job someplace, or a domestic assignment, or maybe they’ll send you to, you know, Western Europe or something. For the most part, your career is irreparably irreparably damaged, I hate to say.”[3][4]
The summary judgement
Kiriakou declines to give the confident answer the questioner wanted about a particular traded prisoner — whether he would be punished, executed or recycled — calling it “a tough one” with no easy answer. What he offers instead is a general rule drawn from both the Powers case and that of Bowe Bergdahl: “good things don’t happen to people who get caught.”[1][5]