Read Online The Reluctant Spy by John Kiriakou - Free Book Online Page B

You willing to be tested?”
    â€œAbsolutely,” I said.
    It turned out Praig’s secretary was a Greek immigrant whose brother lived on Rhodes, the island my grandparents came from. A nod from Praig, and she immediately started talking to me in rapid-fire Greek; in no time, the two of us got right into a conversation, complete with Rhodian accents. After two or three minutes, she stopped, smiled, looked at her boss, and gave him a thumbs-up.
    â€œAre you willing to take an Arabic exam?” Praig asked.
    I had just retested in Arabic and my scores showed that I was still completely conversant in the language; that was enough for Praig.
    â€œOkay, I’m going to have to convince some of the Ops people that sending an analyst is the smart thing to do. But, believe me, it’s a lot easier and a lot cheaper for me to train a linguist in operations than it is to take an operations guy and make him fluent in Greek and Arabic.”
    Praig managed to sell me to the skeptics in Operations based mainly on my language skills, but there was a lot more I needed to bring to the table. One essential was a deep understanding of contemporary Greek politics. After my transfer to the Directorate of Operations in April 1998, I began to “read in” to all things Greek—that is, read and digest all the available files in the agency’s archives on a country where I’d be spending time on special assignment.
    Terrorism was a fact of life in Greece, dating back to the 1960s, when the military, led by a group of colonels, hijacked the national government and imposed a junta that lasted seven violent and repressive years, until 1974. Once, reading a file in the Counterterrorist Center, I responded to one awful episode with a reflexive “Oh, my God.”
    â€œAre you reading the Greece files?” The question came from an adjacent cubicle.
    â€œYeah,” I said.
    â€œThat’s what everyone says when they read the Greece files,” he said. Some of the episodes in the Greece files had been reported in the national and international media. And luckily, I was getting some informal help from one of the legends in the CIA’s clandestine service. Gust Avrakotos had worked in Greece during the 1960s and beyond and probably knew as much about terrorism in the country as anyone around. His biggest coup, however, wasn’t in Greece; it was in Afghanistan. After the Soviet Union invaded in 1979, Gust was one of the CIA’s principal officers responsible for getting weapons to the mujahideen resistance, including shoulder-held Stinger missiles. Stung Soviet helicopters fell from the skies, Afghan fighters sliced and diced Soviet ground troops, and a defeated Soviet army marched out of the country a decade later, certainly one of the final nails in the coffin of the Evil Empire. Gust’s exploits were featured in a book,
Charlie Wilson’s War
, by the late George Crile, which focused on the efforts of the Texas congressman in the title to trump the godless Commies in Afghanistan. Both men grew thirty feet tall when they were played in the 2007 movie starring Tom Hanks as Wilson and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Gust.
    By the time I met him in the late 1990s, Gust was a so-called Greenbadger—a retired officer still working for the agency under contract. He worked with me in the Counterterrorist Center as I began reading the Greece files, to which he had made many contributions, and his detailed, intimate knowledge of the country’sterrorist groups helped inform my thinking. Once I was actually on assignment in Greece, we kept in regular touch; even years removed, Gust provided valuable insights, guidance, and even the names of people worth contacting. He was an abrasive guy, who could swear with the best of them and who had a difficult personal life. He had grown up in Aliquippa, a tough steel town only thirty miles from my home in New Castle, but our connection went beyond geography