John Kiriakou

And I think you would fit into the CIA's culture.

Would you like to be a CIA officer?

And the truth is, you know, I wanted to go into public service.

I wanted to see the world.

But the real truth was I was getting married in six weeks and I didn't have a job.

So I said, yeah, sure.

I'd love to join the CIA.

And the next thing I knew, I was in the CIA.

That was the start of it, yes.

It turned out that I was hired by the office that he had created about six years earlier called the Political Psychology Division.

So I was assigned to Iraq.

I became Saddam Hussein's classified biographer.

And I did that for years before making what at the time was a very unusual switch to counterterrorism operations.

But the agency gave me opportunity after opportunity.

I learned to speak fluent Arabic that went with the fluent Greek that I had.

And yeah, I mean, one day you're sitting in a college class and the next day you're in the Oval Office trying to think of, you know, how not to sound like an idiot when you're speaking to the president.

And yeah, the rest, the rest was history.

Well, at the beginning I was an overt employee, so I wasn't under formal cover, but what that meant for all intents and purposes was that I could tell those closest to me that I was working for the CIA.

And then that was it.

I mean, even my own wife, she knew that I was a CIA officer.