Category: Tradecraft

59 articles in this category

Abu Zubaydah as a sounding board — The second, longer phase of Abu Zubaydah's usefulness to the CIA, described by John Kiriakou in his December 2007 ABC News interview: once the prisoner had given up what he knew about current operations, his value shifted from threat reporting to analysis, with case officers reading him the names of men arrested in European capitals and asking whether the operations attributed to them made sense.
"You were the first person that ever asked me about my children" — The answer John Kiriakou says he received when he asked a mid-level al-Qaeda member he had recruited in Pakistan why he had allowed the recruitment to happen: that in five years of detention Kiriakou had been the first person to ask about his children.
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.
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.
College tuition as an inducement — The recruitment inducement John Kiriakou describes as among the CIA's most effective — enrolling a source's child at any American university and paying for it — and the arrangements with universities and corporations he says make it possible.
Corkscrew landings in Afghanistan — John Kiriakou's account of the tight spiralling helicopter approaches used to evade rocket and Stinger fire on landings in Afghanistan after 9/11, with the side doors open, and of the passengers around him being sick while he found it exhilarating.
Corporate competitive intelligence — The private-sector discipline John Kiriakou entered on leaving the CIA in 2004: collecting human-source intelligence on rival firms for a big-four accountancy. He was the fourth CIA officer Deloitte had hired into a group that paired former intelligence collectors with corporate research analysts, and his requirements were a rival's pricing models, its discount structure, and which of its top-producing partners were unhappy enough to be poached. All the major firms, he says, run the same operation against each other.
Encryption before the key — John Kiriakou's account of where encryption actually fails, offered against John McAfee's claim that no communication can be private. Kiriakou defers to the technologists he knows — Edward Snowden, Bill Binney, Thomas Drake and Kirk Wiebe — who tell him sufficiently sophisticated encryption does work. The exposure is upstream of the cipher: if an agency can reach your machine as you type, before you hit the encryption key, the encryption never gets a chance. He nonetheless encrypts everything he sends, and rejects the argument that encryption is what lets attacks through.
Fusha and the Gulf dialect — John Kiriakou's account of his own Arabic training — a first year in fusha, high standard Arabic, followed by a second year in khaleeji, the Gulf dialect — and what he reports of both: that Yemen is the only place pure fusha is spoken, that Saudis asked him why he spoke Arabic like Shakespeare, that the Gulf dialect is marked by a hard J other Arabs dislike, and that the Maghreb defeats him entirely.
The German POW chess analogy — The reasoning John Kiriakou gave ABC News in December 2007 for why he had believed at the time that waterboarding was necessary: he had heard of Second World War German prisoners who, over months of playing chess with their interrogators, built enough rapport to talk, and he judged that al-Qaeda prisoners were a different order of adversary who would never be seduced into cooperating.
How Chinese intelligence recruits — John Kiriakou's assessment of the Ministry of State Security's tradecraft: very effective with anyone who simply wants money, because the money is limitless, and very bad at cultivating a source who does not yet know who is cultivating him — with the target usually being access to sophisticated technology.
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.
Leaks come from the Pentagon — John Kiriakou's rule of attribution for national security leaks, drawn from his own CIA experience: ninety-nine times out of a hundred the leak came from the Pentagon — which he says leaks constantly, is so gigantic that the source cannot be traced, and does not polygraph anybody. He adds the motive: somebody who opposed the operation and was overruled.
More money on security in Athens than Beirut — John Kiriakou's measure of how dangerous Athens was for American officials at the turn of the century — that the United States spent more on security there than in Beirut — and the consequence he says followed: no diplomatic plates, because they would make Americans easier to identify and kill.
Muddling through — An analytic term John Kiriakou says CIA analysts used all the time, and his defence of it: forecasters instinctively reach for either/or outcomes, when what actually happens most often is that the parties to a conflict muddle through and little changes over the medium term. He applies it to Ukraine, and to why he expects Russia not to use nuclear weapons.
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.
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.
"Our job is to break the law" — The line John Kiriakou says CIA instructors repeated in training, and the qualification he attached to it at the time: the job is to break the law over there, not here. He describes participating willingly in break-ins abroad while insisting a warrant is required at home.
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.
Recruiting from the bottom — The targeting method John Kiriakou believes produced the killings of Iran's leadership: not agents at the top of the state but destitute refugees at street level, paid a hundred dollars a month to write down when a general leaves his building and by which route. He contrasts it with the CIA's own record in Iran, where it spent his career trying and failing to recruit inside the Ayatollah's office, the foreign ministry and the IRGC.
Running into former sources — John Kiriakou has twice met people he once ran as agents by accident, years after leaving the CIA — once at an airport and once in the street — and both times they came to him with a bear hug. One of them was astonished to discover he spoke English.
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.
Security, medical and finance — The warning John Kiriakou says his first station chief gave him and that he passed on in turn to a first-tour case officer in Pakistan: there are only three offices at the CIA that can wreck your career — security, medical and finance — and only finance can send you to prison.
Six different passports — John Kiriakou's answer to what has changed for intelligence officers since his own service — that he carried six different passports, and that he does not know how officers cross borders now that AI and facial recognition mean everything is scanned and stored — coupled with his advice not to let the technology take over the job.
Sources are not traitors — Asked whether CIA officers privately regarded their recruited agents as traitors and held them in contempt, John Kiriakou answered that they did not — because the officers believed they were the good guys, and a recruited source had become one of them.
Spotting a CIA impostor — John Kiriakou's method for exposing people who falsely claim to have served in the CIA — a short sequence of questions about directorate, division and leadership whose correct answers, he says, cannot be guessed by anyone who was never inside.
Taking the ball and going home — John Kiriakou's rule of thumb, offered after the July 2024 Butler shooting, that a failed state-run assassination is not retried: an operation with that many moving parts would not be attempted in front of thousands of people, would not be entrusted to a twenty-year-old, and once blown would be abandoned rather than repeated.
The airbridge — John Kiriakou's definition of an airbridge, given when the term surfaced in reporting on German aid to Gaza: a direct path into another country's airspace along which safety is guaranteed — his worked example being Cyprus to Gaza, with an undertaking that the Israeli Air Force will not shoot the aircraft down.
The applicant who invented a CIA career — The job interview John Kiriakou conducted in the private sector at which he took a candidate to lunch, asked two questions any real CIA officer could answer, and was told: "I'm really sorry. I really need this job."
The asset recruitment cycle — The four-step professional standard John Kiriakou says governed CIA operations before September 11 — spot, assess, develop, recruit — and without which an officer did not get promoted. He calls it the asset acquisition cycle as often as the recruitment cycle. Spotting looks for access, not rank; assessment looks for a vulnerability, a word he insists is less ugly than it sounds; development is months or years of friendship bought on an unlimited expense account; and the recruitment itself rests not on money, revenge or ideology but on the target believing the officer is his best friend. Threats are forbidden — partly on ethics, partly because the target may come to the next meeting with a gun.
The autographed basketball — A recruitment John Kiriakou has cited as proof that an agent's price is not always money: a source who loved the Chicago Bulls, an ordinary basketball bought from the NBA online store with a forged provenance involving Michael Jordan, and an acrylic display box.
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 beer and the couch — What John Kiriakou says he did with the CIA's spot-assessment training after leaving the agency. He still sizes up strangers within moments of meeting them, but the question is no longer what they can do for him: it is whether he would want to have a beer with them, and whether, if he were down on his luck, they would let him sleep on their couch.
The booby-trapped Christmas cards — Among the devices al-Qaeda left behind in positions it was forced to evacuate in Afghanistan, John Kiriakou describes a detonator laid flat inside a Christmas card, so that opening the card would take the reader's hands off.
The boring cover story — The CIA training principle John Kiriakou says governed how officers described their jobs to strangers: pick something so dull that nobody asks a second question. His own standard answer was the foreign service, training work, and some import-export negotiation.
The broken side-view mirror — The cold pitch John Kiriakou made in Athens against the incoming intelligence representative of a hostile Middle Eastern state — a manoeuvre suggested by his mentor Gust Avrakotos, in which Kiriakou snapped the mirror off the man's diplomatic car with a bag of books, established cover with the neighbour, apologised at the door, asked for a glass of water, and used the minute alone to kneel down and speak Arabic to the target's four-year-old daughter.
The bug in the bedroom — The listening device John Kiriakou says fell out of an air conditioning vent onto his bare chest while he read in bed in Bahrain — planted, his chief told him, because he was writing the embassy's human rights report.
The Chinese professor on LinkedIn — The year-long approach John Kiriakou says he received through LinkedIn from a professor at a Chinese university he had never heard of — an invitation to speak that became five arranged stops across eastern China without his agreement, and which ended when he wrote back that he does not work for the Chinese intelligence service and was immediately blocked.
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 code room and the buried weapons — What John Kiriakou demanded when the officer he had cold-pitched in Athens agreed to meet him — access to his embassy's code room and all of its weapons — and the meeting in a hotel coffee shop, surrounded by armed CIA officers at every table, at which the terms were set.
The desert sunset photograph — The half-hour standoff John Kiriakou describes with Saudi security after photographing a desert sunset that happened to include the Ministry of Interior in the distance — resolved, he says, only when he produced his black diplomatic passport. He also explains that the ban on photographing American embassies from the street is Office of Diplomatic Security policy rather than law, because such pictures can be used to case a building.
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 embassy swap — The 1970s agreement under which the United States and the Soviet Union each built a new embassy in the other's capital — the Russians choosing the highest ground in Washington, the Americans being sold a dry riverbed in Moscow, and the American building having to be demolished because listening devices had been built into every beam.
The forged award certificate — A recruited source John Kiriakou says he brought to tears twice — first by telling him his reporting had gone directly to the president of the United States, then by presenting him with an award certificate Kiriakou had made himself in Word with clip art, the agency seal, and a forged signature of the director, which he then took back for safekeeping on the grounds that being seen with it would get the man killed.
The French human sources — John Kiriakou's confirmation of what Chris Hedges was told by French intelligence after 9/11 — that the CIA had no human assets inside al-Qaeda at all, while the French thwarted attacks by having recruited people next to the plotters — and the general principle he draws from it: that no amount of money spent on electronics substitutes for a human source.
The Grasshopper — A recruited terrorist source John Kiriakou ran under a cryptonym, who called him after midnight on a dedicated burner, met him behind a church with a paper bag of his wife's gold jewellery, and was given five thousand dollars from station funds as what the chief of station called an early Christmas bonus.
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 hundred-dollar informants — John Kiriakou's explanation of Iran's mass detention of some 20,000 suspected Israeli spies after the 2026 twelve-day war: that most of those rounded up were undocumented Afghan refugees, targeted by Israeli intelligence precisely because Iran had spent two years expelling them, and recruited for about $100 a month to report troop movements and the addresses of nuclear scientists and utility headquarters.
The interrupted break-in — A break-in in a friendly country nearly failed when the neighbour who was supposed to be at work turned out to have given birth the day before; John Kiriakou talked his way out of it at the door by claiming to be looking for his aunt's flat in the wrong building.
The let-them-in strategy — John Kiriakou has claimed one of the ideas he contributed as CIA counterterrorism chief in Pakistan was to stop trying to intercept al-Qaeda fighters one at a time on the Afghan border, and instead let them cross into Pakistan and take them ten at a time in their safe houses.
The live satellite feed myth — John Kiriakou's flat rejection of one of the most common screen conventions about American intelligence: that officers can call up a live satellite picture and watch a target walk through the streets of a city. There was no such thing then, he says, and there is no such thing now.
The Milan–Sofia flight — A flight John Kiriakou took from Milan to Sofia, routed away from Athens under a different passport for a sensitive operation, on which a persistent seatmate refused to accept a dull cover story — until Kiriakou told him he smuggled women and cigarettes out of Eastern Europe.
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 persona in the first week — Five days into a sentence he had expected to serve at a minimum-security camp, John Kiriakou decided to fall back on his CIA training and adopt a deliberately aggressive exterior — reasoning that in a prison where the weak end up checking themselves into solitary for protection, he would rather be the man other people needed protection from.
The slap approval cable — The cable-by-cable approval chain that governed each escalation of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, described by John Kiriakou in his December 2007 ABC News interview: permission for even a single open-handed slap of Abu Zubaydah came from Washington after a discussion, was granted by the deputy director for operations, and had to be reported back by cable afterwards.
A spy's guide to a city — The premise of the third season of John Kiriakou's Dead Drop podcast: that a CIA officer reads a city in a wholly different way from a tourist. The tourist looks for the Parthenon or the Eiffel Tower; the officer is thinking about surveillance, counter-surveillance and surveillance detection, and about not being shot from behind a building.
The strongly worded protest — John Kiriakou's account of what actually happens when one state violates another's airspace: not an act of war but a démarche. He notes that the Russians do it to the United States over Alaska all the time, that the Americans do it back with some frequency, that the Norwegians, Swedes and Turks do it too — and that the response is to send an ambassador in to lodge a formal protest.