John Kiriakou

At the time, the American government spent more money on security in Athens than they spent anywhere else in the world, including Beirut.

Why?

It was a combination of two things.

There were two indigenous Greek groups that were exceedingly dangerous.

One was called Revolutionary Organization 17 November.

They had killed the CIA station chief, two U.S.

defense attachés, just bad guys all around.

The other was called Popular Revolutionary Struggle.

And then on top of that, you had Abu Nidal, the Libyans, the PFLP, the PFLP-GC, the DFLP.

Everybody was there because there was this informal agreement between the Greek government of Andreas Papandreou at the time and these terrorist groups that if you don't kill Greeks,

We'll leave you alone.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

But killing Americans wasn't part of the deal.

So it was every man for himself.

Wow.

Well by then I had been in the CIA Well by the time I got to Pakistan as the head of counterterrorism operations after 9-11 I'd been in the CIA almost 13 years and and I was responsible for all counterterrorism operations in the country and

Al Qaeda was running out of Afghanistan into Pakistan because we were bombing the daylights out of them.

And so my job was to find them and grab them.

And then just hold them or send them to trial was the original idea.