The false volunteer is John Kiriakou’s account of the one occasion he deliberately intimidated someone in the manner of the wrist-grabbing scene in Meet the Parents. He declines to say where it happened.[1][2]
A man walked into the American embassy volunteering information on someone the station was very interested in. He treated it as a social meeting; for Kiriakou it was a work meeting.[1] Asked for the information, the man instead named his price: money, resettlement in the United States, and more. Kiriakou agreed to all of it if the access was real, took his driver’s licence and passport for a name trace back at headquarters, and told him to come back in twenty-four hours.[2][3]
What the man did not realise was that surveillance was put on him for the rest of the day. He was a dishwasher at a restaurant with no access to the target at all — someone who thought he could lie his way into the United States.[3]
He returned the next day in a suit. Kiriakou took his wrist, would not let go, and threatened him; the man began crying, and was told never to come back to that embassy or to any other American embassy anywhere in the world. A colleague walked up and photographed him mid-sob, and he left as quickly as he could.[4] Kiriakou’s summary afterwards was of the cost rather than the theatre: “I can’t believe I had to waste two hours on that guy” — an hour each day.[5]