KiriPedia Kiripedia The Free Encyclopedia of John Kiriakou's World

Category: Cia

12 articles in this category

  • Bigger than the Russian embassy — Why American embassies in small, strategically unimportant countries are enormous: the answer John Kiriakou says he was given by a station chief on one of his first CIA trips — that the building had to be bigger than the Soviet one across town. He describes American embassies in Africa as "absolutely gigantic" for that reason alone, and calls the US embassy in Cairo an enormous facility matched by an equally enormous Russian one.
  • How the CIA kills — John Kiriakou's description of the methods used when the CIA is ordered to kill someone outside a war zone: a team parachuting in miles away, stealing a car, a locks-and-picks specialist opening the door and suppressed weapons inside; a snatch into a van bound for an airport or a boat; or a brush past in a market with something poisoned — a technique he says the Russians used often and taught the Bulgarians into the early 1980s.
  • Mark Polymeropoulos — The CIA officer John Kiriakou describes as a friend who was in his first tour when Aldrich Ames blew his identity, was brought in from the cold, and later became station chief in Moscow — an appointment Kiriakou characterises as a deliberate thumb in the Russians' eye: the officer their spy had burned, put in charge of operations against them.
  • Nine recruitments in twenty-five years — The conversation in which John Kiriakou's Athens station chief, a twenty-five-year operations officer who had reached senior intelligence service level four with nine recruitments to his name, pointed out that Kiriakou had recruited five in two years — and Kiriakou's explanation of the knack: that he could hide his disdain for a man completely while talking about whatever interested him.
  • SEALs on loan to the CIA — John Kiriakou's answer to why the CIA did not use its own paramilitary team against Osama bin Laden: it did. The raid was a CIA operation directed by the Counterterrorism Center, and every Navy SEAL involved was temporarily a CIA contractor, on loan to the agency for the duration.
  • Suing the CIA — John Kiriakou's answer to whether anyone has ever successfully sued the CIA in civil court: not that he knows of. He allows only what he calls small, picky victories — chiefly suing for the right to sue — and applies the same pessimism to the burned officer whose case prompted the question.
  • The Armitage leak — John Kiriakou's account of who actually disclosed Valerie Plame's identity: Richard Armitage — whom Kiriakou identifies as deputy secretary of defense — who everybody assumed would be charged under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and who was never charged with any crime at all. Scooter Libby, he stresses, never leaked the name and was never accused of doing so; Libby fell on a perjury count.
  • The ayatollah and the photographs — The training story John Kiriakou says ended the CIA's use of compromat: a prostitute lured a junior Iranian ayatollah into a hotel room wired for audio and video, the agency took dozens of pictures, and when confronted with them abroad he asked for two in 8×10, three in 5×7, and one on a slide for his wall.
  • The CIA recruiting video — The Agency recruiting video John Kiriakou says he watched with dismay, in which a woman described herself as an autistic, depressed, anxious lesbian who had found a home at the CIA — and his reaction that this was not the CIA he joined.
  • The January 6 pipe bomber report — The story John Kiriakou says he posted to Facebook and nobody else picked up: a report that the FBI had identified the person who placed pipe bombs outside the RNC and DNC as a former Capitol Police officer who had been on rotation to the CIA doing physical security, recognised from a limp caused by a college sports injury, at a stated confidence of 94 per cent. She had not been charged, and Kiriakou lists the questions it would raise if true.
  • The thirty-seven analysts — John Kiriakou's account of Tulsi Gabbard firing thirty-seven CIA analysts connected to the national intelligence estimate on Russian election interference, publishing their names, and thereby — because one of them was undercover — violating the same Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981 under which he was himself prosecuted. He says she will not be charged, and argues nobody should be.
  • The twenty-two-month clearance — John Kiriakou's figures for getting his first book through CIA prepublication review: nine months to write it, twenty-two months to clear it, and 120 pages rejected. He says everything he writes still goes to the agency for clearance, but that the process has become much easier as his detractors there have died or retired.