The Reluctant Spy Read online

  Now the moment had arrived: I knocked on the Arab’s door and started to speak to him in Greek after he opened up. He put up his hand and said in English, “No, no, I don’t speak Greek.” He used English because it’s the lingua franca; he figured that the vast majority of Greeks my age spoke it.

  “Oh, you speak English,” I said. “Sir, I speak English. I’m so sorry. I stopped next door and the lady told me this was your car. I was walking past it, and I was not paying attention. I’m so clumsy. My bag hit your mirror and broke the mirror off the car.” It wasn’t exactly Oscar worthy, but what the hell, I thought, my acting wasn’t half bad.

  “Dammit, this will cost me [the equivalent of $150],” he said.

  “I’m so sorry. I feel terrible about this. I want to pay for the repair.” There was a pause that I filled: “You speak English with a slight accent. Where are you from?”

  He identified his country.

  “I’m from America,” I said. “You know, our people used to be such good friends. Inshallah, we will be again someday, once all this unpleasantness is behind us.”

  He looked at me like I was nuts. Oh, man, that last bit probably didn’t ring true to him. Slow down, don’t move so fast.

  “I want to pay you for the damage,” I repeated. “I feel just terrible.” Then I took a big step forward and asked, “May I trouble you for a glass of water?” His brow furrowed because he knew something was up. But in Arab culture, you can never deny a request for hospitality. It’s just bad manners. We’d been talking through a screen door, and the intel guy must have sensed that this stranger was playing for time, perhaps trying to get him out of the living room.

  “Just a minute,” he said, and he left the room to get a glass of water. As he did, I let myself in. His daughter, four years old or so, was in the living room, sitting on the floor and playing with some toys. I bent down and began to talk to her in Arabic: “What’s your name, how old are you, how do you like Athens?”

  My reluctant host had reentered the room and, having heard me speaking Arabic to his daughter, knew without question that this encounter was no accident. I had used Arabic with the child because I wanted to get her father’s attention focused on what I might have to say. He was riveted: “What exactly do you want from me?”

  “Look, I’m not going to insult you,” I said. “I’m from the CIA in Washington. We’ve heard some nice things about you. We believe we can work with you. The bottom line is, we’re the good guys. Your leader’s the bad guy, and someone’s bound to take him down. This is your opportunity to be on the side of the good guys.” He said nothing, so I pulled out a business card, one with my real name on it, and gave it to him. “This is to prove my bona fides,” I said. “It’s my true name. Call this number tomorrow, ask for John Kiriakou, and I’ll answer the phone. I’ll be happy to meet you anywhere you want, in Greece or another country.”

  He put the card down on the table. “I admire your courage in approaching me,” he said. “But I’m offended that you would do it in my own home.”

  I apologized and reiterated my interest in hearing from him.

  “You have a good day,” he said, showing his unwelcome visitor the door.

  “You have a good day, too, sir,” I said, and left.

  The next day, I waited for the phone to ring, but the only call was from the agent I was running, asking for an emergency meeting. We met at 2 a.m. at an amusement park south of the city.

  “Did you approach him?” the agent asked.

  “Yes. What’s going on?”

  “He’s hunkered down. He was behind a locked door all day.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “He’s not going to report the approach to his bosses because, if he does, they’re going to call him back and they may very well execute him. And he knows it.”

  “Well, I don’t know what’s happening, but he’s panic-stricken,” my agent said. “There’s no way he’s going to say anything to the folks back home. You scared the hell out of him.”

  Sure enough, no one said a word. Three years later, the intel guy called my old number and got another CIA officer doing temporary duty in Athens; he knew the whole story of my approach. “I need to talk to John Kiriakou,” the Mideast officer said. Now, when it was long past too late, he wanted to talk. But the case officer in Athens asked him for something—something sensitive—to test his willingness to help.

  “I am a patriot, loyal to my country,” he said. “I cannot give you such a thing.” That was the end of it—and the end of agency contact with him, at least so far as I knew.

  So was this pitch a failure? Yes and no. Yes, because I did not succeed in recruiting him to work for the United States. No, because the approach effectively shut down his operations in Athens. He’d been penetrated. He knew the Americans knew about him, and that constrained his freedom of movement. He couldn’t raise a warning flag at home because it would risk his life to reveal that his leader’s adversaries had approached him. The outcome wasn’t as good as opening a pipeline of information from his country’s embassy, but rendering that embassy deaf, dumb, and blind in Athens was a damn fine second prize.

  6

  GREEK TERRORISM WASN’T confined just to Greece, and that was the beauty of the job. If there was a Greek Communist in Italy I needed to talk to, I could hop a flight to Rome. If there was a connection to the network of Carlos the Jackal, the notorious terrorist arrested a few years earlier, and I needed to see somebody in Paris who could talk about it, I ran off to France. The former Soviet Union was very active in Greece in the 1970s, and I often wondered if there was a connection between the intelligence services of the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe and Greece’s hard-left terrorist groups.

  In 1991, not long after the collapse of the Soviet empire, a general from an eastern European country agreed to go to an FBI training program in New Orleans, Louisiana. In the bad old days of Soviet-style Communism, Radomir Zhivkov had been such a true believer in Marxist-Leninist nonsense that they used to call him Radomir the Red. But after the fall, he was able to recognize Moscow’s corrupt and stultifying ideology for what it was. He was still a true believer; the difference now was that he believed in democracy, free markets, and especially the rule of law made by elected representatives, not dictators. In the postcommunist world, he was interested in making the transition from a military career to law enforcement, which was why he ended up in New Orleans.

  His training evaluation at the end of the course was in his file, part of the voluminous material I had read before heading to southern and eastern Europe on temporary assignment. Radomir testified to his new faith in the institutions of the West and said he looked forward to working with the Americans in the future. But no one from any U.S. government entity contacted him afterward. He seemed to disappear from America’s radar screens.

  I found it stunning but not terribly surprising. One of the problems with some CIA operatives in the field is that they don’t read files because they don’t think like analysts. They glance quickly at the two or three cables on top of the file, then run with whatever idea they’ve cooked up—sometimes without thinking much about the hook to catch the fish. There was a terrific hook for Radomir, separate and apart from his apparent affection for Americans, but no one had twigged to it, which was why, I supposed, no one had followed up with him.

  Radomir lived on turf outside my area of temporary assignment, so I had to cable headquarters to ask whether I could approach him, assuming the Red was still around. Yes, he’s around, I was told by my bosses, but we don’t think there’s any useful purpose in contacting him. From their point of view, I was on my own: They were fine with an approach, providing the money and any subsequent expenditures came out of my operational budget. Burt, my boss in the region, approved the trip; I flew to Radomir’s country and tracked him down to a small office in what may have been a Russian Mafia bank, where he worked as head of security for about forty dollars a week. From his file, I was betting that
this wasn’t what Radomir had in mind when he said he wanted to work in law enforcement.

  His door was open, but I knocked anyway, walked in, and wasted no time when Radomir looked up: “General Zhivkov,” I said, extending my hand. “My name is John Kiriakou from the CIA in Washington, and I’m here to change your life.” Really, that’s exactly what I said.

  Radomir blinked several times rapidly before he answered. “Please, my friend, sit down, sit down. I’ve waited a long time for this day.”

  “General, I understand that nobody knows as much about your country’s intelligence service and its activities in Greece in the 1970s as you do.”

  “I think this is correct,” Radomir said. “What is it that you want?”

  What the United States wanted was anything that could shed further light on the murder of Americans by 17 November, particularly the 1975 assassination of Richard Welch, head of the CIA’s office in Athens at that time. Operational details must remain off limits here, but with Radomir’s invaluable help, we were able to identify the link between Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the infamous Venezuelan-born terrorist also known as Carlos the Jackal, and 17 November. The link was a fairly prominent Greek businessman who was important in PASOK and who also had an office in Zhivkov’s country. Radomir was a retired general from the days of Soviet domination, but he was not without some lingering influence in his newly democratic country. He asked his country’s intelligence service to tap the Greek businessman’s phone and secure all the transcripts. With that, we worked with his country in a joint operation to bring down this Greek conduit between 17 November and Carlos the Jackal, who had assisted the terrorist group in securing arms and gathering intelligence.

  I visited Radomir’s country a dozen times during my time in the region. He was a superb agent, who earned and kept our trust by his various good deeds. And the agency did right by him, too. He didn’t want to be paid, which itself was remarkable for an agent. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking money from you,” he told me. “I’m a national patriot, and it would be wrong to take money from a foreign government.”

  But he clearly needed money. I knew that Radomir was fiercely proud of his grandson, who was graduating from his country’s equivalent of high school and who wanted to go on with his education. “Radomir, let me do this,” I said. “We’ll pay for your grandson’s college education anywhere he wants to go in the world. If it’s an American university, we have an office that can help him arrange that, too.” Radomir was thrilled. His grandson felt more comfortable staying home and going to a local university. That proved a lot easier on the agency’s pocketbook, but the CIA would have gladly paid the tab had his grandson chosen Harvard or Stanford.

  By this time, in the late nineties, the political climate in Greece had begun to shift. For the better part of two decades after the murder of Richard Welch, the 17 November group was widely regarded as a band of Robin Hoods, standing up for the common man and attacking bad people, or those perceived to represent bad people. Americans fell into this category and probably would have topped the imaginary enemies list if it weren’t for the Turks. But 17 November targeted Greeks, too, so long as they were perceived to be tools of the military or conservative and right-wing organizations. In 1985, one victim was a newspaper publisher; in 1986 and 1988, Greek industrialists. In these murders and attempted murders, collateral damage was rare, which was one reason the mayhem did not seem to dent 17 November’s reputation as a defender of the downtrodden. Most Greeks felt the group’s victims deserved what they got. In fact, the group never earned that misplaced goodwill among Greece’s working class by delivering social services the way, say, the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas first achieved its popularity on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. No, 17 November’s work was murder in the name of a credo that no longer existed.

  Turning the tide against terrorism isn’t easy, but the good guys can always hope that the bad guys go too far. And for once, 17 November did. On the morning of September 26, 1989, parliamentary deputy Pavlos Bakoyannis was coming out of the elevator of his apartment building in the Kolonaki neighborhood, a beautiful and upscale area of Athens. Several 17 November killers were waiting for him; they shot him repeatedly, making sure he was dead before they fled the scene.

  He was the first active politician to be murdered, and 17 November could not have chosen its target with less appreciation for public sentiment. Bakoyannis was immensely appealing, perhaps the most popular political figure in Greece. He had opposed the colonels’ takeover of Greece in 1967 and even made radio broadcasts from exile attacking the junta. He was a liberal who was a leading light in the New Democracy Party and who helped engineer an alliance between conservatives and the Communist Party that eventually pushed the Socialists and Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou out of government.

  Greeks across the political and social spectrum, from the monied precincts of the right to Communists and Socialists on the left, were outraged by Bakoyannis’s assassination. From that day forward, 17 November’s purchase on public support steadily weakened. The group continued to murder and bomb, but with the help of Radomir the Red and other informants during the 1990s, its adversaries—and America’s clandestine case officers proudly counted themselves among them—were slowly closing in.

  GREECE WAS NOT a regular stop on European swings by American presidents. Dwight David Eisenhower visited in December 1959, near the end of his presidency, and George H. W. Bush paid a call in July 1991. That was it, two presidents in four decades, until President Bill Clinton arrived in 1999. Despite warnings from the intelligence community, the White House was bound and determined to include Greece in a November presidential trip, especially since Clinton was also touching down in Turkey, Greece’s longtime adversary. But the timing wasn’t great, to put it mildly. His trip, originally planned for November 13 to 15, was trimmed back after a series of early November protests, a bomb explosion or two, and even a tableau featuring a mock trial of the president and a hanging of his effigy. The list of grievances was long, from U.S. support of the junta in the late sixties and early seventies to the recent bombing of Yugoslavia, an offense to Greece and its traditional Serbian allies. The president’s visit, cut back to less than twenty-four hours, was reset for November 19 to hopscotch a critical day on every Greek’s calendar.

  November 17, the day the military junta bloodily crushed a student protest, the inspiration for the radical group of the same name, was a day for celebration by Greeks, not a day for Americans trying to befriend Greeks. There were always marches commemorating the day, even as 17 November’s grip on the popular imagination was loosening, and there were always demonstrations in front of the U.S. Embassy and even red paintballs tossed at its façade, symbolic gestures of disdain for American backing of the junta. On November 17, 1999, more than ten thousand people filled the streets, protesting Clinton’s upcoming arrival and just about everything else American.

  The next evening, in the center of Athens, several banks were burning—the result of Molotov cocktails tossed by assorted anarchists, Communists, and maybe even a few 17 November types, although small firebombs normally would have been beneath their dignity as self-reverential terrorists. Friday, November 19, 1999, when Clinton arrived, central Athens seemed like a ghost town because Greek authorities had limited protests to an area several miles away from his motorcade’s route. In addition to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton were accompanying the president, with the entire entourage staying at the Intercontinental Hotel, some distance from the U.S. Embassy. Security was tick tight.

  During a presidential visit abroad, nearly every American in an official capacity gets pressed into duty, even if the stop is only for a few hours. Exceptions were not made for CIA officers on temporary assignment. My job was to take notes at Clinton’s late afternoon meeting in his Intercon presidential suite with the leader of the opposition, Costas Karamanlis, nephew of former prime minister Con
stantine Karamanlis, who was a towering figure in twentieth-century Greek politics. Albright, Berger, and U.S. ambassador Nicholas Burns attended, of course, as did Karamanlis’s foreign-affairs and military advisers. For all that intellectual firepower in the room, very little substance came out of it. This was happy talk—we love you, you love us—and why not? Greece was two decades past military dictatorship, a flourishing democracy with its share of troubles but a country now committed to peaceful transitions of power.

  The Greeks left after the meeting ended. Then the president and Berger walked out, the two of them chatting, followed a half minute later by Albright and Burns. Albright was upset about something: “These Greeks, they’re such horrible people,” she said to the ambassador. “I don’t know how you live here.” What apparently bugged her was the Greek government’s penchant for telling Washington what it wanted to hear, particularly about its commitment to combat terrorism, then never acting on the promise.

  Berger ended his conversation with Clinton; suddenly, I found myself four feet away from the president of the United States—in effect, all dressed up and no place to go. Then the elevator door opened and Hillary and Chelsea walked out. As they approached him, the president, making small talk, said something about how much they’d all enjoyed the Parthenon that morning; the head of the Parthenon Museum had given them a personal tour at 10 a.m. Hillary did not appear happy, so the president repeated his thought: “We sure had a good time at the Parthenon this morning, didn’t we, Hill?”