John Kiriakou

How'd that end up with that girlfriend?

You know, we're still Facebook friends, but I will admit to you that she's the one who got away.

That's a good question.

It was kind of a combination of the two.

On the one hand, yeah, I was so fascinated by the whole place.

For example, even as a teenager, I wanted to know

how these little royal families in these little tiny countries got to be royal families.

And why was, for example, the Kuwaiti family a ruling family and not a royal family and all the others were royal families?

And why were some emirs and sheikhs and the others were princes and kings?

And I loved it.

What made the job easy, easier, was that...

The United States has always had very close relations with these countries.

And so we were always seen as as the good guy.

And, you know, relations were close and we weren't targeting these countries for anything.

recruitment because, you know, our intelligence liaison relationships were close enough that they were giving everything to us anyway.

So when I was working there, it was Iranians that I wanted to go after or Iraqis that I was going after or or Syrians or Russians and Chinese for that matter.

It wasn't we didn't have this.

We didn't have the kind of relationship with these different countries that would have caused any kind of friction or difficulty.

And it made life very, very easy for me there.

Well, I'll answer you in two ways.