The Reluctant Spy by John Kiriakou

Author:John Kiriakou [Kiriakou, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-553-90733-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

MEANWHILE, THE GRAND Canyon between my professional life and my personal life was taking on new contours. The former was reborn in the spring of 2001; the latter was a continuing soap opera with plot twists absurd enough to win a daytime Emmy. JoAnne was the protagonist in this pathetic tale of revenge and bizarre behavior.

On June 8, 2001, I arrived at Dulles airport on a flight from the Middle East, skipped the office, and rushed to my apartment in Arlington, Virginia. I planned to shower and shave, pack a fresh bag for the weekend, and head for my parents’ place in Pennsylvania to see the kids. My parents were going to pick them up around 6 p.m., and I figured to get over there later that night. This trip was special: I was supposed to have the kids for half the summer, not just the weekend; we had all sorts of things planned, including a visit to Disney World.

The phone was ringing as I got out of the shower. It was my mother, calling from JoAnne’s parents’ place in Warren. That is, she was calling on a cell phone outside the Tsimpinos house. “We’re at the house,” Mom said. “I don’t want to alarm you, but nobody’s here, and it looks like nobody’s been here in weeks.”

“Oh, my God, she stole the kids.” It had just popped into my head, along with a vision of her returning to Greece and picking up with her secret life there.

I called my Ohio attorney, Mary Jane Stephens, who suggested there might be a logical explanation but that I’d best get to my folks’ place in New Castle as soon as possible. “If you don’t get the kids over the weekend, we’ll go to court on Monday,” she said. The road trip was a nightmare. Nothing I’d encountered as a CIA operative had ever frightened me as much as the prospect of losing my children; twice during the drive, I got so sick to my stomach that I pulled over to throw up at the side of the road. I kept calling JoAnne’s cell phone and kept getting her voice mail. When I got to New Castle around 11 p.m., I tried to get some sleep but nothing worked. At 4 a.m., my dad came down to the basement family room, where I was trying to distract myself with TV, and asked after my state of mind. State of mind? I was a complete wreck and told him so.

“Look, why don’t we get in the car and go over there, see what’s going on,” he said. So we did.

We arrived around 5 a.m. The grass was unkempt, reinforcing my mother’s view that the house had been unoccupied for a while. But we saw a light on in the kitchen. JoAnne’s dad always had trouble sleeping, so I wasn’t all that surprised to see his face peering through the curtain on the kitchen door after I knocked. His expression telegraphed a certain absence of enthusiasm at the sight of his son-in-law standing in the shadows.

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