KiriPedia Kiripedia The Free Encyclopedia of John Kiriakou's World

Category: Procedures

17 articles in this category

  • Asset acquisition cycle — The four-step process — spot, assess, develop, recruit — taught as the first lesson of CIA case officer training
  • CIA cable priority levels — The five levels of immediacy assigned to U.S. government cable traffic, as described by John Kiriakou. From lowest to highest: Routine, Priority, Immediate, Flash, CRITIC. Most career officers will never see a CRITIC; during the Gulf War, Kiriakou's desk was receiving multiple CRITICs a day, each one announcing a hostile missile launch.
  • Cold cell — A CIA interrogation technique in which a stripped detainee is chained to a ceiling eyebolt in a cell chilled to 50°F, then doused with a bucket of ice water at hourly intervals; never authorized; documented to have killed at least two prisoners.
  • Executive Order 12333 — The U.S. presidential directive — in its post-9/11 amended form — that grants the CIA the legal authority to kill any individual anywhere in the world deemed by the agency to pose a "clear and present danger" to the United States; the legal foundation underlying both CIA paramilitary operations and the agency's contractor relationships including with Blackwater.
  • Hummus — The CIA's documented use of pureed hummus in coercive rectal feeding of detainees; one of the unauthorized interrogation techniques exposed in the 2014 Senate Torture Report and the practice for which John Kiriakou has become most widely associated in popular culture.
  • Operating Directive — The CIA's six-tier (0 through 5) intelligence priority system used to indicate the urgency with which case officers should pursue specific topics
  • Pick the man, then find the crime — Robert H. Jackson's 1940 doctrine — recurringly invoked by John Kiriakou — that a prosecutor's worst abuse is to select a target and then comb the law books for an offense to charge him with
  • Sleep deprivation — A CIA interrogation technique used against high-value detainees post-9/11; the agency was authorized to deny prisoners sleep for up to 12 days continuously; people died; at least one detainee was rendered permanently clinically insane.
  • The "Soylent Green is people" cable easter egg — A long-running CIA case-officer in-joke in which the line "Soylent Green is people" is hidden inside classified operational cables as a sequence of incongruously lowercase letters
  • Surveillance detection route — Tradecraft technique used by intelligence officers and assets to determine whether they are being followed before, during, or after an operational meeting
  • Ticking time bomb scenario — The hypothetical case — an imminent attack only the captured terrorist's confession can prevent — used to justify the CIA's post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program; characterized by John Kiriakou as fictional and not corresponding to any real-world case.
  • Title 10 vs Title 50 — The U.S. legal-code distinction governing which kinds of armed action fall under military authority (Title 10) and which fall under intelligence authority (Title 50); the operative legal frame for the post-9/11 question of whether CIA contractors can lawfully kill in the agency's name, addressed in the 2025 Ninth Circuit ruling in the Abu Zubaydah contractor case.
  • Walling — A CIA interrogation technique in which a detainee is slammed against a wall; designed on paper to use a padded fiberboard surface and a rolled towel around the neck, but applied in practice against bare concrete-block walls without protective measures, producing in at least one case permanent brain damage.
  • The Welch .45 — The single .45 caliber pistol used by Revolutionary Organization 17 November in every confirmed assassination over the group's twenty-seven-year operational life
  • Yellowcake Niger forgery — The fabricated intelligence document claiming Iraq had attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger; passed to the U.S. via the British (originally from the Italians); identified by CIA analysts including John Kiriakou as a forgery on sight ("it's not even in the right font"); pulled from President George W. Bush's State of the Union draft by Colin Powell; reinserted by Vice President Dick Cheney; pulled out by the CIA again; delivered in the 2003 State of the Union address anyway.
  • Hawala system — Informal, ledger-based money-transfer network used across the Middle East, South Asia, and their diasporas to move funds without involving banks; per John Kiriakou's first-person account of testing one in the UAE — handing $50 to a grocer for a 16-digit number to redeem at an Arabic bakery in Bethesda, Maryland — completely untraceable; identified by Kiriakou (later, as Chief Investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) as one of the principal channels through which al-Qaeda moved operational money in the post-9/11 period, along with DHL.
  • Mad minute — CIA case-officer procedure for the opening seconds of every meeting with a recruited source — confirm the source is safe, confirm a clean surveillance-detection route, and set the next meeting — so that if the door is kicked in, the operational essentials have already been taken care of.