Asked whether an intelligence service really does have a witness protection programme, John Kiriakou answered that it does, and gave the case of the officer he had recruited in Athens as the illustration.
The package
The agent and his family disappear. “You get American citizenship. Your family gets American citizenship. You get the seed money to start whatever it is you want.” The size of that money follows from the deal already negotiated: “I’m going to give him a hundred thousand, I’m going to give him a million or five million or whatever it’s going to be. That’s what he used to get started in life.”[1]
The rationale Kiriakou gives is transactional rather than sentimental: “you’ve provided us with a great service."[1]
"Steve”
Inside the CIA the man was known only as Steve — “we didn’t use his Arabic name, we just made up a name.”[2]
Several years after Kiriakou had left the agency he ran into a former colleague and asked how Steve was. The answer: “believe it or not, Steve owns seven restaurants.” They had set him up with one; he had a knack for it, and it became seven. He was rich, his children were in college, everything was good.[2]
Kiriakou’s response — “great, that’s what it’s all about” — is the closing note of the story as he tells it.[2]
How the agency regards such men
The interviewer pressed the obvious point: these people have informed against their own countries, and have committed espionage or treason. How are they seen inside the agency?
Kiriakou allowed that it is a good question, and that one would expect them to be held at arm’s length as traitors. His answer is that they are not, and that the reason is institutional self-belief: “there is such an overwhelming sense in the CIA that we are the good guys that we consider them to be the good guys.”[3][4]
It is the same frame he used in the pitch itself, where the choice offered was between dying with one’s leader and being “on the side of the good guys” — a phrase that, on his account, means in practice a new passport, capital, and a restaurant business.