The Reluctant Spy Read online

  “Jesus Christ, Bill, it rained all day. I’ll be in the room.” After which she walked past him with Chelsea in tow. You had to feel for the guy. Maybe it was a lingering hangover from the Monica Lewinsky mess, but this was rough treatment, particularly in front of strangers. Clinton chewed his lip for a couple of seconds before he turned to me and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said and followed him and three Secret Service agents into the elevator. We were headed to a lower level ballroom where the president had to deliver a speech on trade and business relations to an audience of 1,200 that included the Hellenic-American Chamber of Commerce, an American women’s association, and all the U.S. Embassy families. He had only three or four minutes to marshal his composure; he did that and more, delivering a terrific speech that drew several standing ovations. For the first time, I saw up close what they meant about Clinton magic before big crowds.

  In fact, President Clinton did and said all the right things on the trip. He gave that great speech. He became the first American president to apologize for U.S. support of the military junta. And he left Americans in Athens with nothing but warm feelings about him.

  Amazingly, his visit also had a profound impact on the Greek press. For the two weeks prior to Clinton’s arrival, the printed and electronic media were on the warpath, with commentators across the political spectrum claiming the American president wasn’t welcome in Greece. What really got to me and many other Americans was the way they referred to him—not as president of the United States, but as “O Planetarhis,” which translates as “the planet ruler.” It was a phrase concocted for the moment, and if it was intended to offend Americans, and it was, the ploy was successful. Americans in Greece took pride in their country. This kind of dissing was uncalled for. The Greeks were portraying the American government and its politicians as a bunch of fascists and imperialists; at the same time, they ignored Serbian atrocities against the Muslim population in Yugoslavia.

  But the trip went so smoothly and Clinton said such nice things about Greece that the press did a complete 180 after he left. Suddenly, he was “President Clinton” again. One particularly virulent critic on TV said the reporters, editors, and pundits, and he included himself, should be ashamed of themselves. The president had extolled the virtues of Greece; he could have complained about his chilly reception, compared to the idolatrous greetings he got in Sofia and Istanbul, but he didn’t. And he could have complained about terrorism, but he didn’t.

  That he didn’t was all the more remarkable because the central purpose of the trip was to broker an agreement between the two countries to join forces in the battle against terrorism. The details had been worked out and no roadblocks seemed in the way, except, apparently, for one called Greek pride. Given all the anti-American demonstrations attending Clinton’s truncated trip, the Greek government clearly worried about the appearance of meek acquiescence to U.S. “demands.” In the end, the Greeks took a pass on the agreement; it was never signed. No wonder Madeleine Albright was pissed off.

  The world was on the lip of a new millennium; after nearly four decades of domestic terrorist acts committed by Greeks against Greeks in the name of a discredited ideology, the people were still without a government prepared to go to war against the bad guys.

  But 17 November was beginning to implode, even though its members still reveled in their own mythology. In less than three years, two events—a murder and an errant bomb—would bring it low once and for all.

  7

  AS I HAVE said before, work at the CIA—whether you labor in a cubicle in Langley, Virginia, or travel the world on behalf of your country—isn’t what used to be called banker’s hours in the days when bankers worked from nine to five. The business of running foreign agents could be particularly unnerving. These were sensitive operations, and I couldn’t exactly meet with agent-recruits during the day. Most of the time, the meetings were set for the wee hours of the morning, which meant I had to leave the house in the late evening and drive for three hours doing surveillance detection runs to make sure I wasn’t being followed. After a one-hour meeting, I’d do the anti-surveillance work again. This routine left me bone tired two or three days a week and on edge every waking hour of every day.

  Part of my problem was that my marriage was falling apart. JoAnne and I came from families where long marriages were the norm. Her parents and my parents had both been married about forty years, and their marriages were rock solid. The two of us? Not so much. Our marriage, as I indicated earlier, was troubled from the very start. JoAnne’s behavior of choice for dealing with perceived emotional wounds continued to be the silent treatment.

  My line of work certainly didn’t help. She knew I worked for the CIA, and that my initial job as an analyst was thinking big thoughts about big issues and writing papers about them at headquarters in suburban Virginia. I had often left for Langley early in the morning and stayed late into the evening; she grudgingly wrote off this routine as a condition of my employment. After all, I returned home every night, just like any white-collar laborer in the many fields that serve the U.S. government in Greater Washington.

  But she was plainly upset by what she sensed as a change in me during and after my training at the so-called Farm. I never went into the specifics of weapons training or tradecraft, but she maintained that something fundamental had transformed me. “You’re a different person now,” JoAnne said, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

  How? I really wanted to know how she perceived this new alien figure in her life. I could plead guilty to greater maturity and a strengthened confidence in my ability to handle the rigors of my chosen work. Perhaps JoAnne’s emotional parsing of these traits translated as tough, callous, and unforgiving. But she was never very precise, so I was left to grope for answers to questions that hadn’t been asked.

  Amazingly, given the growing distance between us, my wife accepted the middle-of-the-night absences in Athens, at least at first. I couldn’t talk in detail about what I was doing, just that I had appointments that were a part of my work. But after several months, she became convinced I was having an affair—and on that matter, she found her voice.

  “Oh, it’s business,” she’d say. “What’s her name?” I wasn’t having an affair; I would swear to that under oath and wired up for a lie detector. But she was having none of it. After four or five months, she moved into the guest room of our temporary digs. We were barely speaking at that point.

  The divorce rate in the CIA is sky-high, and part of the reason is the stress such working conditions put on marriages. But despite accumulating evidence to the contrary, I always believed my marriage was stronger than that.

  I begged her to believe me, promising to do anything to prove that I was telling the truth, that I wasn’t cheating on her. She was deaf to my pleas.

  I had two men, both Greeks, both really good guys, who guarded our house and, in effect, watched our back. One day, Dimitri, one of the two, sidled over after I got home and pointedly commented on how good my wife was looking these days.

  “Yeah? What do you mean?”

  “Man, haven’t you noticed? She’s lost weight, she bought all new clothes, she’s colored her hair. She’s looking good.” Dimitri clearly sensed a disturbance in the Force. The truth was, I hadn’t noticed. In retrospect, it was clear she was trying to send me a signal, but I wasn’t receiving.

  Soon after Dimitri’s remarks, my wife said she had to go on the Pill. “I’m having some female problems, and the birth-control pill will help.”

  “We’ve been married twelve years and you need to go on the Pill now?” But I thought, what the hell did I know? So I drove her to the gynecologist.

  Now, my wife had inherited her late grandmother’s house on the island of Chios. The house was made of fieldstone and in some disrepair; before we left for my temporary work in Greece and elsewhere in the region, JoAnne said that she wanted to fix up her grandmother’s old place and take the kid
s there so they could get to know their cousins. It would also improve their Greek.

  I thought it was a terrific idea. So JoAnne would go once a month for a couple of days. Then it was twice a month, then once a week. Then she started to take our older son out of school for a day to extend that weekly visit. Maybe the altered pattern should have raised my suspicions or triggered some sort of bullshit meter, but it didn’t. I was always fighting exhaustion to stay sharp in my work, and my wife’s increasingly frequent jaunts to Chios were welcome. They reduced the number of distractions.

  Early on the morning of April 18, 2000, my oldest son, Chris, who was just four days shy of his seventh birthday, was sitting on the floor in the bathroom watching his old man begin to shave. Shaving around the mouth must have reminded Chris of something because he went from talking about his upcoming school day to this:

  “Daddy, I told Mommy she shouldn’t kiss Uncle Stelios on the lips like that. She should only kiss you on the lips like that. And she told me to mind my own business.”

  I wiped the shaving cream off my face very slowly, trying without much success to control my emotions, then went to the guest room and kicked the bed.

  “What?” she said, coming awake.

  “Who the fuck is Stelios?”

  Suddenly, she was fully awake. “Where did you hear that name?”

  “Who is he, JoAnne?”

  “Don’t believe everything a six-year-old says.”

  I could feel the anger building in me. Not good. “I’m going to leave,” I told her, “before I do something I’ll regret for the rest of my life.” So half-shaven, I got dressed, grabbed my guns, got in the car, and headed for work.

  About 2 p.m., the phone on my desk rang. I ignored it just as I had ignored the constant calls on my cell. I didn’t want to talk to her. Finally, one of my colleagues picked up my landline.

  “Buddy, your wife’s on the phone and she’s really upset.”

  “Yeah, she ought to be upset,” I said, punching the flickering button on my phone.

  “What?” I shouted at her.

  She was in tears. “I was just in this terrible car accident. I think my wrist is broken, the kids are crying, the car’s totaled.” She told me where she was and that the kids seemed to be all right; I called my two security guards, filled them in, and asked them to meet me at the accident scene. The car was demolished. JoAnne was semihysterical, but she was cogent enough to tell me what had happened. She was in the left-hand lane signaling a left turn with five cars behind her. Greeks never wait in line. They’ll all edge up to the front, then all try to make the left turn at the same time. That’s what happened. Just as JoAnne was making her left, the guy at the end of the line passed all the cars in front of him on the left. He hit her broadside, pushing her vehicle up onto the sidewalk and into a tree. Fortunately, the air bags deployed.

  The guy who caused all this mayhem walked up to me, shaking and upset.

  “What the hell happened here?” I really wanted to hear how he was going to try to wriggle out of this.

  “I wanted to make a left and your wife wanted to make a left and we ran into each other,” he said.

  “You ran into each other?” I was furious. “You were at the back of the line, she told me. You hit her when she went to make the left.”

  He said she was lying, I said she wasn’t. We went back and forth like that a few times, and then he said to me, in Greek, “Ah, your wife, she’s a whore.”

  I snapped. “My wife’s a whore?” I screamed it back at the guy and bang! I hit him as hard as I could, right in the face. The guy was stunned. I hit him fast two more times and he went down. Then I blanked, remembering nothing until the two guys who watched my house and my back arrived on the scene and pulled me off. Later, they told me I was on top of the driver, holding his hair and beating his head against the pavement. I could have killed him. I would have killed him, if my guardian angels hadn’t gotten there first.

  “Are you insane?” Dimitri bellowed. “Are you insane?” At that blind moment, there probably was only one honest answer. I had never been in a fistfight in my entire life, not even in the schoolyard as a kid. I didn’t even know how to hit someone, which was why I wrecked my hand. I’d hit the guy full fist, shattering the two weaker knuckles; it’s called boxer’s fracture, I learned later, just before the first of three surgeries.

  By this time, traffic had come to a standstill; horns were blaring and the spectacle of a car crash, strong words, and a fight had drawn quite a crowd of onlookers. The police arrived and, after cursory explanations, took everyone involved to the local station, where the top cop asked whether I was an American official. Yes, I said.

  “Okay, sit in the cell,” the cop said. “We’re going to call your embassy and work this out.”

  “I’m very sorry for what I did,” I told him, probably saying more than I should have. “I lost it on the guy. He called my wife a whore and I lost it.”

  The police officers nodded sympathetically but didn’t say much. They let me sit in an open cell while they called the embassy, and they didn’t bother to take my gun, which was still in my fanny pack.

  Their attitude wasn’t surprising: The Greeks hate confrontation. The guy I hit was a baker, and he didn’t deserve the pounding he got. After the baker was patched up at the hospital, the police brought him to the station to see if they could smooth everything over. I said I was willing to shake hands and forget it, but the baker wanted to press charges. The police captain asked the two of us to tell our stories.

  I told my tale and the police captain said, “Is this true? Did you call his wife a whore?” The baker acknowledged he did. The captain said he had a beating coming to him for that insult and asked us to shake and call it a day. Again, the baker refused. I put my hand over my heart and apologized for the assault. It wasn’t for show: I meant it on more levels than the baker or the police captain could possibly know. What I had done was inexcusable, a terrible breach of restraint, even given the provocation. I had made an utter fool of myself. Worse, I had put my employer—not the CIA but the U.S. government—in the crosshairs of a potentially embarrassing international incident.

  “Look,” the captain said to the baker, “we’re going to arrest you for the accident and we’re going to allow him to press charges against you for calling his wife a whore. That’s defamation of character, and it’s a crime in Greece.”

  Finally, the baker wilted, but he still refused to shake my hand. I was free to go.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. One of my security guards was on his cell phone in the police station’s waiting room, just ringing off when I walked out.

  “The ambassador wants to see you right away,” he said. I must have turned ashen. That’s it, I’m finished. Good-bye, Greece. Goodbye, career. Good-bye, reputation. Good luck finding other work.

  My arrival at the embassy didn’t exactly lift my spirits: “Good luck, John,” someone said. There was some gallows humor—appropriate enough, I supposed, for someone being observed as a dead man walking. I headed straight for the office of Ambassador Nicholas Burns, whom I had met years earlier in Saudi Arabia. In those days, Burns had a reputation as someone who flat-out hated the CIA.

  Burt, my boss, met me outside the ambassador’s office and got right to the point:

  “What the hell was this all about?”

  “Burt, I’m ashamed of myself,” I tried to explain. “It’s all my fault. I’m ready to take it like a man.” I had screwed up big-time, but was I now contemplating martyrdom?

  “All right, all right, just try to keep quiet in there and let me do the talking,” said Burt. “I’ve got a couple of ideas.”

  The ambassador was livid and, at that moment, not given to the language of diplomacy.

  “What the fuck went through your head?” It was a rhetorical question, but I had already forgotten Burt’s injunction and answered anyway.

  “Ambassador, I’m so sorry, I can’t excuse what I did,” I said
. “But I can explain my actions. If you’re willing to listen, I’m willing to tell you.”

  “I don’t even want to know the details,” Burns said. “I don’t care why you did it. The fact that you did it means you’ve got to go. Tomorrow morning, ten o’clock on Delta.” That was the next scheduled flight to New York.

  It was over, but I couldn’t let it go: “Okay, it’s my own fault, getting expelled, but let me explain.” In Burt’s eyes, I was beyond help; even so, he came to the rescue.

  “Wait, wait, wait one second,” he said. “Ambassador, first of all, this guy deserves a good ass kicking. Second of all, the cops aren’t charging him with anything. They let him go. Third, there’s been no press involvement, at least not yet.” I didn’t know where Burt was going with this, but I finally knew enough to keep my lip buttoned.

  “What I would propose is, let’s wait a day,” Burt said to Burns. “If this doesn’t make the press, we let him stay. He’s done good work here. If it does make the press, I’ll drive him to the airport myself.”

  Burns did not appear happy with Burt’s counter; he’d been boxed in and he knew it.

  “Well, all right, but if it’s in any of the papers,” he said pointing at me, “you’re out of here.”

  I had hand surgery that afternoon, arriving at the hospital just as JoAnne was leaving after her own surgical repairs, and got home around nine o’clock. She was shedding tears as I walked in. I told her not to waste them. “This happened because of you,” I said. “I did this to protect your honor, and your honor didn’t deserve to be protected.” Emotionally exhausted, I headed for the bedroom and crashed.

  The next morning, I shaved as best I could with my left hand, got in the car, and drove one-handed to work. Everybody wanted to hear the story, but I begged off. There was nothing I could honestly say to diminish my embarrassment at making such an undisciplined fool of myself. Besides, I was too busy praying. Maybe Burt’s gambit will work. Maybe the Greek papers haven’t heard about the incident or, if they have, maybe they thought it wasn’t newsworthy. Maybe I have a chance of surviving this.