The Reluctant Spy (12 page)

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
.

The folks in the U.S. Information Service office, who monitor the Greek press, said there were no reports of an American losing
it in the middle of the previous afternoon and beating the shit out of a poor baker. Burt told his excited subordinate to calm down. “Let's wait one more day,” he counseled. “If there's nothing, we'll take the ambassador's temperature and see where we go from there. Maybe it'll blow over.” And it did: The papers never did run a story, and the ambassador gave me a stay of execution. I'd earned a reputation as something of a nut, but the diplomatic imbroglio everyone anticipated hadn't happened. I was free to return to my duties—a case officer on temporary assignment in Greece and other ports of call in southern and eastern Europe.

My domestic situation needed attention. JoAnne had always vehemently denied being involved with anyone else and said marriage counseling was unnecessary. Although she finally agreed to give it a try, it was a joke almost from the very beginning. She got stuck in traffic going to the first appointment—with an Anglican priest who'd agreed to talk to us—and eventually turned around and went home rather than show up late. A guy at the U.S. Embassy who ran some sort of religious study group said he'd give it a try. At the first session, she wouldn't speak—nothing in response to his invitation to talk about her view of our marriage. Then, at his suggestion, I left the room and they talked for forty-five minutes. But she wouldn't tell me what they had discussed.

At the second session, our counselor suggested a half hour with each of us privately in an adjoining room. I went first, laying out my view of what had gone wrong—the absence of communication, the silences, her suspicions, and, of course, my belief that she had betrayed our marriage vows. Then it was JoAnne's turn; after a half hour, the door opened and she walked right by me without even making eye contact; as I learned later, she left the embassy and drove home.

“What gives?” I knew the answer but had to ask him anyway.

“Look, I'm sorry, but she doesn't want to be married to you anymore,” he said.

“What the hell's that supposed to mean?”

“She's unwilling to try to work this out,” the counselor said, repeating what he'd said about her not wanting to be married to me. “I'm sorry. I can't help you.”

That was in mid-May 2000. Within three months, the two of us separated and she and the boys left for New York.

IN EARLY 2000
, Stephen Saunders arrived in Athens as the new defense attaché at the British Embassy. Stephen was an engaging guy, popular within the diplomatic community and among Western military and intelligence figures. One night at a party, we got to talking about security precautions; Saunders was gently needling me about my car, the BMW 540, which was fully armored, and about the two handguns I always carried. And the body armor the Brits' American cousins sometimes wore. “You Americans, you're so obsessed with security,” Saunders said. “Nothing's going to happen to you here. This is Greece! This is an EU country. This is a NATO country.”

Saunders was a fifty-three-year-old brigadier, the equivalent of an American one-star general, a worldly man who should have had a keen appreciation of the risks to Brits and Americans in Greece. Maybe he was joking, but I didn't think so at the time. “You guys, you live in a dream world,” I told him. “If you think just because it's EU and NATO and pretty here that they're not going to kill you, you're crazier than I am.” We laughed and turned to another subject.

A few weeks later, having returned to Athens from an assignment elsewhere in the region, I was driving down Kifissias Avenue, a straight, ten-mile shot down the hillside from my house to my office. Traffic was always heavy, but on this day, it seemed as bad as anything I'd seen. The radio station was reporting a traffic incident of some sort and urging drivers to take alternative routes. But any alternative would have required a huge detour, so I kept moving forward as best I could. The next radio report described the scene ahead as a “criminal incident” that had closed two of the three lanes
on my side of the road. As I inched along, wondering what was happening ahead, I finally spotted a car in one of the closed lanes. A bit further and the scene resembled a war zone, with shattered glass everywhere and blood all over the interior of the car.
Oh my God, somebody was killed. This has got to be a terrorist attack. Those bastards hit someone again
.