Asked repeatedly to name the thing that turned him toward the Middle East, Kiriakou declines to identify one. “From when I was a kid, I can’t really give you a straight answer because I’m not really sure myself what it was.” What he will say is that the fascination was there early, and oddly specific: he was “absolutely fascinated by the Middle East” and “especially fascinated by the Persian Gulf.” [1]
The bookstore
The episode he does offer as concrete is a purchase. Kiriakou was given a week-long scholarship to take a class at Penn State University in his junior year of high school. While there he went into the university bookstore — by his account, “just to see what these college kids were reading.” [2]
What he found were books on the Middle East, for classes he was not in. “I wasn’t in that class, of course. It was a college class, but I bought all the textbooks for these Middle East classes.” [2]
What was in them
Kiriakou lists what he read in them with evident pleasure: dynastic succession, the history of the Bedouins, the creation of the Trucial States and their becoming the United Arab Emirates, and the full history of Saudi Arabia and the rise of the House of Saud. [3]
One fact from that reading stayed with him and was still live years later, when he was stationed in Saudi Arabia and able to raise it with a member of the family concerned: that the Rashids, not the Al Saud, had controlled the peninsula first. [3]
The reading fed a course of study he had already decided on — he told his father at sixteen that he wanted to be a spy in the Middle East specifically, and went on to study Middle Eastern studies, Islam and oil. [4]