The Grasshopper is the cryptonym John Kiriakou uses when telling the story of a recruited source whose case turned, briefly, into a domestic emergency.
The recruitment
Kiriakou describes the man’s position as one that made recruitment straightforward. “He’s broke. He’s just a terrorist. You can’t make any money from terrorism. So I started paying him. And I was paying him pretty handsomely, too. And he was giving me good information, like operational information.”[1]
The source’s own affiliation shifted during the relationship. “This terrorist group had sort of fallen out of fashion, and he became involved with a group of anarchists. And what they wanted to do was just blow [expletive] up for no reason other than to, you know, shout, ‘Yay, anarchy.’”[2]
The call
The contact procedure is the tradecraft detail Kiriakou lingers on. The man called around eleven at night on a telephone kept for him alone — “it was him, cuz I had this phone that was just for him. It was a burner” — and opened with the fixed nonsense phrase they had agreed. “He says, uh ‘Hi. The the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.’ And so I said, ‘Oh, ears eat oats and dosey doats and little lambs eat ivy.’ And he laughed and I laughed and we hung up.” The exchange, Kiriakou explains, meant a meeting in the car park of a toy store at two in the morning — the same challenge-and-response discipline described at the exchange of bona fides.[3]
The jewellery
What the source wanted was not operational. “he’s like, ‘I’m I’m desperate. I’m broke.’ He goes, ‘My my daughter’s sick. We have these unexpected medical bills.’” He had brought a paper bag full of gold jewellery — “‘It’s all my wife’s jewelry,’ he said. ‘Can you buy it from me?’” Kiriakou refused on the ground that he could not value it: “Dude, I’m not a jeweler. I have no idea what this stuff is worth.” They agreed to meet the following midnight behind a church in a northern suburb.[4]
The resolution came from the chief of station the next morning. Told the sum needed was five thousand dollars, he answered: “He’s been good. Just give him the five grand. We’ll call it a We’ll call it an early Christmas bonus.”[5]
Kiriakou met him behind the church, handed over the money, and had him sign the receipt. “He was forever indebted to me. He actually cried when I when I left to return to headquarters. He’s like, ‘I’m not sure I can work with anybody else.’” Kiriakou’s reassurance was unsentimental: “Oh, you’re going to be fine. Everybody else has money that’s just as green as the money that I carry.”[6]