Category: Procedures

108 articles in this category

Access Agent — CIA (and foreign intelligence service) term for a recruited asset whose value lies not in the secrets they hold directly but in their regular social access to high-value targets — politicians, executives, heads of state — who cannot themselves be recruited. Per John Kiriakou, the access agent is funded generously to maintain an environment in which the targets feel comfortable and return repeatedly; kompromat — compromising photographs or recordings — may be collected as a secondary tool. Kiriakou identifies Jeffrey Epstein as a textbook access agent, in his assessment working for Israeli intelligence.
Administrative remedy process — The Bureau of Prisons' internal grievance system, which Kiriakou describes as a fig leaf designed to run out the clock on prisoners' complaints rather than resolve them.
Advanced Counterterrorism Operations — The six-week specialist course John Kiriakou flew back from Athens to attend roughly eighteen months before 9/11 as one of fourteen officers selected worldwide — high-threat operations, technical collection, and a driving syllabus built around crashing through roadblocks that left the class with whiplash. By accident of timing it meant a trained cadre was ready to deploy the moment the attacks came.
"All it takes is a signature" — John Kiriakou's answer, drawn from his years as a Senate investigator, to the claim that Congress had run out of time to obtain the Epstein flight logs — that a committee's investigative power is exercised by one senator signing a piece of paper, which can be done at any hour, and that the excuse is therefore not a sensible one.
Asset acquisition cycle — The four-step process — spot, assess, develop, recruit — taught as the first lesson of CIA case officer training
CIA Arabic hiring practices — John Kiriakou's account of how few CIA officers historically spoke Arabic — he was one of only two people in the entire agency fluent in both Greek and Arabic — and of how the agency's more recent pool of Arabic speakers, dominated by Arab Christian hires who clear background checks easily, often carries an innate anti-Muslim bias that limits their operational usefulness.
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.
CIA driving training — The counterterrorism-driving component of CIA training, in which officers are ambushed in a simulated third-country no-man's-land and must "get off the X" — get out of the kill zone. John Kiriakou's own run ended with the instructors killing his engine by remote, a robot in a van firing paintballs at him, and Kiriakou shooting out his own car windows to get an angle on the robot. "Damn it, Kiriakou. That was the last decent car we had."
CIA Drug Facilitation — Per John Kiriakou, the CIA's reported involvement in facilitating the arrival of cocaine into the United States during the era that became the crack epidemic, and his own firsthand discovery — as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigator — that under American military control Afghanistan produced 93% of the world's heroin. A DEA contact told him the report would never be published because 'we want Iran and Russia to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies.' Kiriakou draws a direct parallel to the current fentanyl crisis: China is doing to the US what the US did to Iran and Russia.
CIA operational psychologists — The branch of the CIA's psychological staff that John Kiriakou says he worked with directly as a case officer — not the analysts who profile foreign leaders, but the clinicians who vet a prospective recruit for insanity or invention, and advise an officer on exactly how hard a source can be pushed before he breaks.
CIA psychological evaluations — The two kinds of psychological work John Kiriakou describes inside the CIA — the recurring psychiatric screening every officer undergoes, before employment, again three years after hiring and every five years thereafter for life; and the long-distance evaluation of foreign leaders carried out by the analytic side. The agency's clinical psychologists are split between the two, with a third group in operations advising case officers on the sources they recruit.
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.
Commercial off-the-shelf tradecraft — John Kiriakou's account of how much CIA field equipment is simply bought rather than built. He describes the pen recorder arriving while he was in Pakistan and early GPS units in Athens being repurposed to map surveillance detection routes, and states the underlying economics: buying existing technology is far cheaper than developing it from scratch.
Communications management unit — The two restricted-contact units inside the American federal prison system, at Terre Haute and Marion; built for "the worst of the worst" but, in John Kiriakou's account, used to silence prisoners whose messages are inconvenient — and a practice he groups with solitary confinement as torture. He served part of his own sentence in a modified one.
Concealment devices — Hollowed everyday objects — known inside the CIA as CDs — issued to officers to hide documents, equipment and, in the larger sizes, a gun. Per John Kiriakou every CIA officer has access to them, some are simply assigned with no instructions attached, and the way they are found in real life is the way they are found in *The Good Shepherd* — by an anomaly a hand can feel.
Critical Analytic Thinking — Per John Kiriakou, the foundational discipline of CIA analyst training and the most practically valuable skill he carried into civilian life: questioning all incoming information — including, especially, sources whose ideological positions align with one's own — and arriving at conclusions from evidence rather than prior belief. Kiriakou cites his own COVID lab-leak conclusion, reached against his initial instinct, as an example of the method in practice.
Curtailment cables — The career-ending requests John Kiriakou says he read coming back from the CIA's black sites — officers, doctors, psychologists and nurses asking to end their tours early rather than continue to take part in the interrogation programme — and his conclusion that if that many people were objecting in classified channels, someone would surely go public.
Dead drop — The classic tradecraft technique of passing material through a hidden location rather than a meeting. Per John Kiriakou, the hard part is not the drop but everything around it — in a sophisticated counterintelligence environment, merely identifying a viable site is very difficult, and the drop itself is bracketed by surveillance detection routes and a signal mark that can turn a single document into a sixteen-hour workday. It was the only element of clandestine training he struggled with, and the only exercise he was ever criticized for.
Decapitation strikes — John Kiriakou's argument that killing an adversary's leadership does not defeat the adversary — grounded in a standing joke from his own service that the CIA had killed twenty-seven separate "number three" figures in al-Qaeda, and applied to the 2026 Iran war, where the entire political, military and scientific leadership was killed in the opening days and the fighting continued regardless.
Diesel Therapy — Per John Kiriakou, a punitive practice within the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons in which an inmate is placed into indefinite transit — moved continuously from facility to facility — for up to six months, with no access to phone, email, or pen and paper, and listed on the BOP website only as 'in transit' with no destination. Kiriakou described it as the one threat at FCI Loretto that actually frightened him.
Double-Agent Capture — Clandestine operation in which an intelligence service, having identified a recruited agent as working simultaneously for a hostile service, arranges a controlled final meeting to apprehend the agent before the agent can carry out orders — which may include killing the handler. Per John Kiriakou, he ran one such operation in the Middle East in the early 2000s after an NSA analyst warned him that his agent had just been ordered to shoot him in the next meeting.
Embassy fortification after 9/11 — The post-2001 rebuilding of American embassies as hardened compounds, which John Kiriakou explains as a direct answer to Iranian Revolutionary Guard reconnaissance of diplomatic premises. His illustration is Doha: an embassy sitting above a grocery store in 1990, and an embassy occupying an entire city block and fortified "nine ways from Sunday" today.
Espionage Act — United States federal law enacted in 1917, originally aimed at combating German saboteurs during World War I; per John Kiriakou, never meaningfully updated, does not mention the word 'classified information' anywhere in its text, and has been used disproportionately against national security whistleblowers — particularly under the Obama administration, which prosecuted eight people under the act for speaking to the press, nearly three times the total of all previous presidents combined.
Exchange of bona fides — The challenge-and-response protocol taught on the first day of CIA operational training, by which two intelligence officers who have never met establish that they are on the same side — a fixed nonsense phrase answered by a fixed nonsense phrase. Per John Kiriakou it is drilled hard enough that forgetting it under pressure, a staple of spy films, does not happen; if one side does not have the bona fides, "anything goes."
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.
Extraordinary Rendition — Per John Kiriakou, the CIA practice of seizing terrorism suspects in one country and transporting them to a third country — often a country with no due-process protections — to be held, interrogated, or tortured outside U.S. legal jurisdiction. The program operated alongside the enhanced-interrogation program and was the operational mechanism by which prisoners reached secret CIA facilities and allied torture sites in countries like Bahrain. Kiriakou himself was not in the rendition line of work but became a federal felon under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for a single confirmation of a colleague's surname to a journalist who claimed to be writing a book on the Abu Omar rendition from Milan.
Federal Torture Act — United States statute criminalizing torture; per John Kiriakou, on the books since at least 1946, with concrete enforcement history — after World War II the United States executed Japanese soldiers convicted of waterboarding American prisoners of war, meaning waterboarding was at that time a capital offense under U.S. law. The act was effectively set aside for the CIA's enhanced interrogation program after 2002.
Field loadout — John Kiriakou's itemised answer to a question he says no one had ever asked him — what a CIA operations officer actually carried in the field. In Athens: a 9mm in a tearaway fanny pack, a snub-nose .38 on his ankle, a Buck knife, and some 47 rounds. In Pakistan: one 9mm, and a daily prayer that he would not have to use it. Plus $2,000–$5,000 in cash on an ordinary day, because "intelligence is a cash business."
FISA — The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the U.S. legal framework governing surveillance warrants for foreign-intelligence purposes. Per John Kiriakou, FISA is dangerously easy to abuse — he cites Carter Page, whose life was ruined and who was driven into bankruptcy after the Steele dossier was used to support four FISA applications against him. Kiriakou groups FISA with the Patriot Act and Section 702 as the legal architecture stripping Americans of constitutional protections, opposed by only a handful of legislators.
Glenn-Symington Act — U.S. federal statute, co-authored by Senators John Glenn and Stuart Symington, that prohibits the U.S. government from providing foreign aid of any kind to any country possessing a nuclear weapons program that has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; per John Kiriakou, Israel is the only country in the world meeting both criteria, making the law the principal reason the U.S. government officially declines to acknowledge the Israeli nuclear program.
Government Purchase of Social Media Metadata — Per John Kiriakou, the practice by which U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies — including the NSA and FBI — buy bulk user metadata from social media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter), bypassing the warrant requirements that would otherwise apply to direct surveillance. The practice exploits a provision in platform terms of service under which users surrender ownership of their metadata to the company, which may then sell it freely.
Havana Syndrome — Cluster of neurological symptoms — including nausea, ringing in the ears, vertigo, and traumatic brain injury — reported by American diplomatic and intelligence personnel beginning in Havana, Cuba, and subsequently at posts around the world. Per John Kiriakou, his initial skepticism gave way when a friend developed Havana Syndrome with an MRI-confirmed traumatic brain injury after a meeting outside the Russian Foreign Ministry; Kiriakou attributes the syndrome to Russian or Chinese directed-energy weapons and acknowledges the United States used a similar weapon during the operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
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.
Hire a lawyer first — The single piece of practical advice John Kiriakou gives to anyone considering blowing the whistle: retain a lawyer before saying anything, and have that lawyer sitting beside you when you do.
Hummus — The CIA's coercive 'rectal feeding' of detainees using pureed hummus — an unauthorized interrogation technique used at post-9/11 black sites, exposed in the 2014 Senate Torture Report, and the abuse for which John Kiriakou became most associated in popular culture.
Intelligence Identities Protection Act — U.S. law enacted in 1982 that makes it a crime to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert intelligence officer; per John Kiriakou, his 2012 prosecution under the act arose from confirming a single surname of a former CIA colleague to a journalist — a confirmation that was never published. The name passed through a chain from journalist to Human Rights Watch to Guantanamo defense attorneys before reaching a judge and ultimately the FBI, which traced it back to Kiriakou.
Operational eating — The two rules John Kiriakou gives about food on operations: that a case officer never orders seafood, and above all never shellfish, because a day spent incapacitated by food poisoning makes him useless to the operation — and that a fourteen-hour surveillance can be run on nothing but a container of mango juice.
Kompromat — Russian-derived term for compromising material — recordings, photographs, or documentation of an individual's criminal, sexual, or embarrassing behavior — used to coerce cooperation or silence. Per John Kiriakou, the CIA's formal policy conclusion is that kompromat doesn't work as a recruitment tool: faced with the binary choice between confessing to a spouse and committing treason, most targets confess. The agency therefore prefers voluntary, ideologically or financially motivated recruitment.
Leadership profiling — The CIA practice of producing classified psychological profiles of foreign leaders for the president, vice president, national security advisor and the secretaries of state and defense before any meeting. It was John Kiriakou's first job at the agency, where he served as Saddam Hussein's classified psychological biographer working alongside psychiatrists, psychologists and anthropologists.
Learned Helplessness — Psychological concept adapted by the CIA as the theoretical basis for its post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program; per John Kiriakou, the goal of techniques including waterboarding was not primarily to elicit specific information but to render the prisoner so terrified of his captors that he would volunteer confessions on demand. In practice, applied to Abu Zubaydah, it meant a dog cage he would climb into on command, a coffin filled with cockroaches, and a towel whose mere appearance made him crumple — a programme Kiriakou says had far less to do with gathering intelligence than with ruining a man's life.
Letters the cabinet ignored — John Kiriakou's account, from his years on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of what happened to congressional oversight letters sent to cabinet secretaries and agency directors — mostly nothing — and why he expects the same of demands made from the minority side of the aisle.
Lie Detection — Per John Kiriakou, both a subject he addresses in his book The CIA Insider's Guide to Lying and Lie Detection and a practical skill he describes using throughout his career. Physical tells include gaze direction (down to conceal, up to construct), fidgeting, and throat-clearing; structural tells — losing the thread mid-conversation and self-contradiction — are more reliable, because the truth is stable while a lie requires maintenance and eventually collapses under its own complexity.
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.
Moral Injury — Psychological diagnosis John Kiriakou received from a friend — a CIA veteran, brigadier general, and psychiatrist — who identified it as the source of Kiriakou's post-divorce PTSD. The concept describes the psychological damage caused when a person you fully trust does something that violates the moral framework you were raised to believe in; the brain cannot process that such a violation has occurred, and the result is a form of PTSD. Kiriakou had no PTSD from Pakistan or his CIA career but was, in his own description, destroyed by his divorce.
Music as torture — The use of recorded music played on indefinite loop as a coercive interrogation technique. Per John Kiriakou, the CIA's post-9/11 rotation ran to the Bee Gees and the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song, and the practice was not an invention of the war on terror — he places its use throughout the Vietnam War.
Narcotics under cover — John Kiriakou's answer to whether a CIA officer under cover may take drugs when an asset offers them: yes. The rule he describes begins with qat in Yemen and extends to cocaine in Latin America, on the ground that refusing can be a matter of life and death.
Non-Personal Communication — Per John Kiriakou, a category of espionage tradecraft encompassing all methods of passing information between an officer and an agent — or between two intelligence services — that do not require the parties to meet in person. Techniques include concealment devices (e.g. hollowed-out objects no passerby would willingly touch, such as a dead rat or a used condom), signal sites and dead drops coordinated by chalk marks, and burst transmissions sent through devices hidden in false-backed drawers.
One-Time Pad — Cipher system in which a secret, random key — shared between sender and receiver — is used to encode a message and then destroyed so that it can never be used again. In traditional shortwave-radio tradecraft, one-time pads enabled spies to broadcast number sequences over public airwaves that only the intended recipient, holding the matching page, could decode. Per John Kiriakou, his lifelong interest in intelligence began at age nine after he picked up KGB number transmissions on a 50-cent shortwave radio.
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
Operational vehicles — The cars John Kiriakou used in the field. In the Middle East they were whatever the rental company supplied — usually a Toyota — on the reasoning that anonymity was the point; in Athens, where the threat justified it, he was issued a factory-built, level-four armoured BMW 540 that broke down constantly.
Patriot Act — U.S. law passed after the September 11 attacks that vastly expanded domestic surveillance authority. Per John Kiriakou, the Patriot Act 'opened up everything' — and he disputes the common belief that 9/11 was required to pass it: 'You underestimate Congress. They didn't need a catastrophe — they would just pass it because they can.' He ties it to NSA bulk-collection programs that vacuum up every phone call, text, email, and piece of metadata from Americans, in violation of the NSA's own charter.
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
Private Intelligence — Post-CIA commercial intelligence work performed by John Kiriakou — both operational (surveillance, bribery, dossier-building for private clients) and analytical (paid forecasts for hedge funds, mutual funds, and a global mining company). Per Kiriakou, his clients ranged from a Cypriot billionaire investigating his daughter's fiancé to the ninth-largest hedge fund in the world.
Public safety factor — The Bureau of Prisons classification that barred Kiriakou from a minimum-security camp by rating him as dangerous as a murderer, applied over the objections of both his sentencing judge and the prosecutor who convicted him.
Qat in Yemen — The afternoon shrub-chewing habit of Yemen, and the special dispensation the CIA had to issue so that its officers could take part in it. John Kiriakou explains that no source could be developed in a qat-chewing country by an officer who would not chew.
Safe Housekeeper — Per John Kiriakou, a person recruited by a CIA officer to rent and maintain an apartment or other premises as a safe house, using their own name and identity to conceal any CIA connection. The role itself is minimal — rent the apartment, keep it clean, keep it stocked with water — but the recruitment is itself a covert operation requiring the same persuasion and pressure techniques used to acquire any sensitive asset. Kiriakou recruited a safe housekeeper overseas and believes the pressure he applied may have caused her a nervous breakdown.
Say five years — The first piece of prison advice John Kiriakou says he was given — from a Bonanno family captain, walking laps of the snowed-in basketball court at FCI Loretto — to tell anyone who asked that he was serving five years rather than the thirty months he actually had.
Sealing the courtroom — The physical measures John Kiriakou describes as accompanying a classified-information trial: plastic sheeting and duct tape over the windows so lasers cannot read the vibrations, white noise in the vestibule, and the clearing of everyone but the judge, jury, bailiff, clerk, lawyers and defendant.
Security, finance and medical — The rule John Kiriakou says CIA recruits were taught in their first week on the job — that there are exactly three offices an officer may never lie to, because those three can end a career — and the reasoning he attaches to each.
Serving at the pleasure of the president — The employment rule John Kiriakou says he was taught in his first week at the CIA: agency employees have none of the protections of the Civil Service Act and can be dismissed at will, over a bad tie or an unwelcome line in the President's Daily Brief. He treats the rule as long-standing and harmless in itself, because every previous president wanted unbiased analysis — and as newly dangerous when a president fires the analysts whose assessments he dislikes.
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.
Sleeper Agent — Per John Kiriakou, a person taken in early childhood, raised in a simulated version of a target country, given a false identity built from the birth record of a deceased infant, inserted into the target country, and then left dormant — sometimes for decades — until activated. Kiriakou says only Russia is known to use sleeper agents; no other country's intelligence service employs the technique. A former East German sleeper agent he interviewed on his podcast defected to the FBI after his daughter was born and a kill threat was delivered to him on the New York subway.
Sociopathic Tendencies — Per John Kiriakou, the CIA actively recruits for what its instructors call 'sociopathic tendencies' — not full clinical sociopathy, but the capacity to operate in legal, moral, and ethical gray areas without being paralyzed by regret. Kiriakou describes this as the trait that makes case officers effective at recruitment and adaptable in the field, and offers his own act of whistleblowing as evidence he does not possess the deeper sociopathy that, in his view, characterizes the most institutionally successful intelligence officers.
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
Special operations officer — The CIA staff category John Kiriakou describes as an assistant to the operations people — abbreviated SOO and pronounced "Sue" — most of whose members, he says, could not get through operational training, and whose duties included assembling surveillance teams for a case officer's dangerous meetings and filing his accounting paperwork at the end of a long night.
Spies traded home — What happens to intelligence officers and agents after they are exchanged and sent back, in John Kiriakou's account: not usually execution, but a career that is irreparably damaged, because every service you would want to hide from now knows exactly who you are.
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
The briefing held off campus — John Kiriakou's account of his first classified liaison briefing, given to the Israelis: the Israelis are never allowed into CIA headquarters because they spy on it, so the exchange was held miles away in rented space, with nothing above the secret level.
The Capitol switchboard — John Kiriakou's advice, drawn from years as a congressional staffer, on how ordinary constituents actually move members of Congress — that the House will act on a single letter, that the Senate needs ten or twenty calls to put an issue on a senator's agenda, and that the Capitol operator will identify a caller's own representative for them.
The Caracas checklist — The sequence of steps John Kiriakou says an operation to overthrow the Venezuelan government would run through — pressure Maduro into flight, secure the presidential palace, co-opt or bombard the military, take the television and radio stations, hold the main intersections of the capital — and his insistence that none of it is the hard part.
The chapel rule — The chapel and the library at FCI Loretto were the two places child molesters could be certain of safety, because a correctional officer was always present; John Kiriakou, who worked in the chapel, has described the house rule against discussing your case there and the indignation with which it was met.
The CIA and Iridium — John Kiriakou's account of the Central Intelligence Agency buying the satellite telephone company Iridium when it was unprofitable and about to go out of business, because the agency needed the network — a purchase he places alongside its acquisition of Intelsat, and which he encountered personally when he had to rent the phones for Afghanistan.
The CIA performance metric — John Kiriakou's answer to a viewer who asked whether the CIA used key performance indicators: for case officers there was only one measure — how many genuine spies you had recruited to steal secrets — and recruiting the old lady who keeps the safe house clean might earn a pat on the back and nothing more.
The clear and present danger finding — The presidential determination John Kiriakou says must precede any CIA paramilitary targeted killing — an assertion that the person concerned is a clear and present danger to the United States, to an American installation, or to an American person — and his judgement that in early 2026 that threshold had not been reached in Iran.
The Clinton-era asset cull — In the 1990s the CIA reviewed the file of every recruited asset in the world and dismissed any with a history of human rights abuses — roughly a third of its agents, in John Kiriakou's account, in a reform he says was reversed as though by a switch after 11 September.
The colour-coded badges — The CIA's badge system as John Kiriakou describes it — blue for the top secret compartments everyone in the building holds, green for contractors, yellow for the language instructors cleared only to secret, red for the man in the cafeteria doughnut shop and the woman who vacuums at night — and the lettered suffixes that were dropped once the letters themselves gave the game away.
The counterintelligence exemption — The rule John Kiriakou says makes counterintelligence the darkest corner of American intelligence: such cases are the only category that need not be briefed to the congressional oversight committees, because a mole hunt might implicate a member of those very committees. He argues Mike Pompeo's description of WikiLeaks as a hostile non-state intelligence service was chosen precisely to move the Assange operation into that exempt category, where a killing in a London street would never have had to be explained.
The diplomatic stool collection — John Kiriakou's confirmation that visiting heads of state routinely carry their own faeces home rather than leave them in an American hotel — because, in his account, entities within the United States government will gladly collect the material for its DNA and health information, and the hotel employee who retrieves it is a CIA officer under cover.
The El Salvador hotel drill — A night exercise at the Farm in which trainees sat alone in a mock flea-bag hotel room in El Salvador, were visited by two men announcing housekeeping, and were shot with paint pellets. All eight failed, and the lesson John Kiriakou drew from it he says he never forgot.
The embassy local hire — John Kiriakou's account of how a foreign service recruits inside an American embassy without ever approaching an American: by paying long-serving local staff a supplement they cannot refuse, and letting them assemble the identity of the station from fragments — most conclusively the office a new arrival names when he answers his telephone.
The fifteen-minute call — How Marty Gottesfeld, held in the communications management unit at Terre Haute, allocated the single fifteen-minute telephone call he was permitted each week: an email to his wife, his two attorneys and John Kiriakou, with the call going to whoever answered first.
The gamma globulin shot — The yellow fever inoculation John Kiriakou says every CIA officer took from his hiring through about 2000 — a gamma globulin injection he compares to having maple syrup put into the buttock, which raised a knot the size of a tennis ball and earned an hour of paid administrative time to walk it out around the compound.
The hotel room cover — John Kiriakou has described the improvised cover story taught for a clandestine meeting raided in progress: with a hostile service banging on the hotel door, both officer and source were to strip and get into the bed, on the reasoning that a surveillance team hunting a CIA meeting would lose interest the moment it found something else entirely.
The Indonesian recruitment question — A hypothetical put to John Kiriakou and other CIA applicants during the interview process — what to do when a foreign official you have cultivated for a year turns out not to be recruitable — and the answer that Kiriakou later understood had been the point of the exercise: break into the embassy and steal the information.
The Iranian interest section — How John Kiriakou obtained a visa to travel to Iran in the absence of diplomatic relations — through an Iranian interest section housed in the Pakistani embassy in Washington — and the argument he draws from it, that withholding recognition only makes diplomats' work harder.
The Israeli listening devices ban — Why Mossad and Shin Bet representatives were barred from CIA headquarters, per John Kiriakou: the gifts they brought to liaison meetings kept turning up with listening devices and batteries embedded inside, so the agency stopped admitting them and rented meeting space in Virginia instead.
The Israelis were off limits — John Kiriakou's flat denial, given on a televised panel, that the CIA collected against Israel in return — 'the Israelis were off limits to us at the CIA. We were not permitted' — and Alan Dershowitz's refusal to believe it.
The mailroom standoff — Told at FCI Loretto that he had no right to write to journalists, John Kiriakou printed the Bureau of Prisons regulations in the law library and laid them out in the mailroom until the staff gave up and sent the letter.
The modified CMU — The communications restrictions imposed on John Kiriakou at FCI Loretto after his Letter from Loretto was published by the Huffington Post. Staff called it a modified communications management unit: a five-day delay on incoming and outgoing email, live monitoring of his telephone calls rather than recording, and a prohibition on speaking Greek to his family.
The NYPD intelligence post — The New York Police Department position — deputy commissioner for intelligence — that John Kiriakou says traditionally goes to someone coming out of the CIA, and which he uses to explain why the agency is indifferent to who wins a New York mayoral election so long as the post and its liaison with the joint terrorism task force survive.
The operational test — The vetting procedure John Kiriakou describes for moving a trusted source onto normal handling: put a full surveillance team on him without telling him, watch how he gets to the meeting, and then ask him to describe what he did.
The order of the whistleblower process — John Kiriakou's objection to the 2019 Ukraine complainant — that the Whistleblower Protection Act prescribes a sequence in which the inspector general comes first and the congressional committee last, that this complainant went to the committee first, and that the inversion is a violation of the letter of the law.
The O'Reilly exclusivity rule — The condition Bill O'Reilly's producer attached to booking John Kiriakou — that he appear on no other programme for three days either side — and Kiriakou's refusal to surrender a week of his diary, which meant he never appeared on the show at all.
The pre-interview — The booking practice John Kiriakou says all the American television networks use and which he finds maddening: an invitation to appear, a quick pre-interview to establish what he thinks, and then a call a minute later saying they have decided to go a different way on the story.
The restaurants in witness protection — What became of the foreign intelligence officer John Kiriakou recruited in Athens — resettled in the United States under a made-up name, given citizenship for his family and seed money to start again, and last heard of owning seven restaurants — and the resettlement package Kiriakou says the CIA offers a burned agent.
The six-hour queue for seats — John Kiriakou on learning that members of Congress arrive six hours early with packed meals to hold a seat for the State of the Union, and that in 2026 the absence of 112 Democrats freed those seats for the cabinet, the sub-cabinet and visitors.
The standard operating procedure assignment — The task John Kiriakou says he was given on arriving in Pakistan in January 2002 — to write a standard operating procedure for taking down an al-Qaeda safe house — the legal pad he wrote it on, the high value target list it was built around, and the first raid it produced.
The swimming pool substitution — John Kiriakou's illustration of how classified words are handled at trial: prosecutors and judge agree in advance to replace them with harmless unclassified substitutes, so that "Vault 7" becomes "swimming pool" — and the jury, told the real words are too secret for their ears, concludes the defendant must be guilty.
The visa reciprocity rule — The bilateral arrangement John Kiriakou describes by which each country sets the price of its own visas and the other matches it — and his conclusion that a United States policy of refusing visas to applicants who are overweight or who have cancer or diabetes must, under the same rule, license every other country to weigh American travellers at the door.
Thursday arrests — The scheduling practice John Kiriakou attributes to the FBI — arresting on a Thursday so that a defendant, unable to be arraigned on a Friday, spends four nights in jail before seeing a judge — and the single sentence that he says kept him out of it.
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.
Training to kill — John Kiriakou's account of arriving at the CIA's clandestine training facility expecting to learn how to recruit sources at diplomatic cocktail parties, and finding instead parachute training, resistance-to-interrogation instruction, and — as his old supervisor had warned him — training to kill people.
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.
Waterboarding — Torture technique in which a prisoner is restrained on an inclined board with the head lower than the feet, a cloth placed over the face, and water poured continuously over it to simulate drowning. Per John Kiriakou, waterboarding was treated as a criminal act under U.S. and international law for decades before 2002 — including a post–World War II execution of Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American POWs, and a 1968 court-martial of a U.S. soldier photographed waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner — before the CIA reauthorized it after September 11. Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 187 times.
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
Whistleblower Protection Act — United States statute protecting federal employees who disclose government wrongdoing from retaliation; per John Kiriakou, national security employees — including those at the CIA, Pentagon, FBI, NSA, DEA, White House, and Homeland Security — are explicitly exempt from its protections, leaving them with no legally safe avenue to report illegal activity within their agencies.
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.