Chapter One IT'S A REMARKABLE turn of mind in our country built upon wave after wave of immigrants: Most of us--the sons and daughters or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of foreigners--have come to take our American birthright for granted. In the land of assimilationand the melting pot, we don't spend much time puzzling over the circumstances of our citizenship or the potential consequences if our forebears had chosen a different path. Maybe it's a Greek thing, but my heritage plays tag with my consciousness on a fairly regular basis, reminding me what might have been and how lucky I am. Yiannis Kiriakou, my paternal grandfather, was born in 1900 on the Greek island of Rhodes, then underTurkish occupation, and immigrated to the United States in 1920, when Rhodes was under an Italian thumb. It wasn't foreign occupation alone that impelled young Greeks to leave. Fighting between Greeks and Turks after World War I ended with the great populationtransfer, as the Turks called it, or the disaster of 1923, as the Greeks called it. Whatever it was called, the two sides expelled millions of the "others" from their lands. Greece was a mess. People were starving, there weren't enough jobs, and the governmentwas actively encouraging young men to go abroad for work. Yiannis, one of eighteen children, only nine of whom lived to adulthood, chose America as his destination. Other young Greeks decamped for Egypt or Lebanon, colonial capitals in Africa, reputedly untamed Australia, and the countries of South America insearch of work. I have friends and acquaintances in all those places and have visited many of them for business or pleasure; with all respect, I cannot imagine any of them as home. My grandfather boarded the SS Themistocles, bound for New York, mainly because an older brother, Markos, had preceded him and had set down roots in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, eighteen miles southwest of Pittsburgh, where he worked in a steel mill. The ideawas to find a job, work hard, save money, then perhaps move back to Greece and buy a farm or small business. John, my grandfather's Anglicized name in the United States, embraced this idea with a vengeance. He labored in the Canonsburg steel mill, pinched pennies,and managed to save $10,000 in a decade. That's $10,000 in 1930, the equivalent of roughly $130,000 in today's dollars. It was more than enough to buy two parcels of land on Rhodes, one a forty-five-acre farm inland, another a smaller piece on the beach. Healso came into an ample dowry with his marriage to my grandmother, Ekaterini Capetan Yiorgiou--Katina for short. The newlyweds planted olive trees and some crops on the farm and settled in for the nonce. But only eight months later, Yiannis got a letter from his brother in Canonsburg. Markos reported that the U.S. Congress was going to change the law and make itmuch more difficult for immigrants to become citizens. If Yiannis had any intention of bringing his bride to the United States, Markos said, he had better act immediately. My grandfather had always planned to return to America, a land he had come to love. Thatvery day, he literally walked away from his fields and told my grandmother to pack the steamer trunks and make ready for the time of her life. His first journey to America had been awful. The Themistocles was a small ship with cramped quarters on a long passage of several weeks. This time, the nearly illiterate peasant farmer would do it right. Yiannis booked first-class passage on the MN Saturnia;he and my grandmother arrived at Ellis Island in February 1931 and almost immediately made their way to Canonsburg, where they remained for two years before moving to Farrell, another Pennsylvania mill town. It was there in 1934, on the kitchen table of a rentedhouse, that my father came into the world--the first Kiriakou boy born in the United States. My grandmother Katina w Excerpted from The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror by John Kiriakou, Michael Ruby All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
