George Washington University
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George Washington University in Washington, D.C., is where John Kiriakou's intelligence career began. He left western Pennsylvania at eighteen to attend it, took a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies, became fluent in Greek there, and stayed on for a master's programme in legislative affairs, expecting to end up on Capitol Hill, in the Foreign Service, or as a lobbyist.

The undergraduate years

In his earliest extended account of the period, Kiriakou describes a Middle Eastern studies degree he had to assemble around the university's gaps. Arabic was not offered at all, and the regional-studies programme had no strong language component; its focus was oil and oil security, the history of the region's relations, and subjects like the politics of North Africa. Even a class on Islam was hard to find.

So he went looking. He took Islam courses at graduate level and enrolled in what the university called experimental classes, one of them taught by the former Shah of Iran's chief of staff, who was teaching at Temple University and came down from Philadelphia once a week to give it. Courses on the New Testament and the Hebrew scriptures he likewise had to seek out himself. His stated purpose was not credentials but comprehension: "I really wanted to have an understanding of what we were up against."

The Greek he brought from home turned out to need rebuilding rather than polishing. Having spoken it with his family but never having been to Greece, he was told at university that he was speaking 1930s-era slang, his grandparents' Greek, handed to his parents and passed on to him, by then fifty or sixty years out of date. He had to relearn the language from the beginning.

The psychology of leadership

The recruitment ran through a graduate class called the Psychology of Leadership, which Kiriakou describes as the best class he had in graduate school. It was taught by Jerome Post, an eminent psychiatrist who held a doctorate in political science, a doctorate in psychology and a medical degree, and who called himself a political psychiatrist. Post was working undercover as a graduate adviser, looking for students who might fit the CIA's culture; he liked Kiriakou's writing style and asked whether he had ever thought of applying.

Kiriakou is emphatic that the arrangement could not happen today, the practice was made illegal by equal-employment law, but that in the late 1980s there really was an old-boy network, and one could not simply apply to the CIA: one had to be spotted and recruited.

The tests on campus

The agency's screening began on the university's own premises. Sent to meet a CIA personnel officer he knew only as Bob, a man he describes as six foot five and 350 pounds, Kiriakou was told to be at the George Washington University medical centre auditorium at eight o'clock on a Saturday morning to take some tests. Written examinations, medical examinations, financial and security vetting and a polygraph followed over roughly nine months before he entered on duty. In his 2010 telling the sequence moved faster at the front and took longer overall: Post walked him down to his office and telephoned Bob on the spot, and Kiriakou was sitting in a nondescript suburban Virginia office thirty minutes later, with the tests beginning that Saturday, but the process as a whole ran about fourteen months before he started at the agency.

One coda he reports only in that account: when he was finally hired he went back to thank Post, and Post refused the credit, insisting he had done nothing beyond introducing him to a personnel officer who could start the process. Kiriakou did not believe him, "I knew that wasn't really true. He was extremely helpful to me."

Afterwards

The university recurs on the far side of his career. When Kiriakou submitted The Reluctant Spy to the Publications Review Board, the fact that he had attended George Washington University was among the details initially redacted; he appealed on the ground that it was not classified, and the chapter was cleared. He later taught a class at the university on surveillance and surveillance detection, and noticed, in the course of it, that the FBI was following him.

The institution also supplies him with a recurring measure of political weightlessness and of political energy. Of Juan Guaidó he observes that a graduate student from George Washington University "right down the street" was a nobody whom even Venezuelans had never heard of until Washington decided he would be president. Of Mike Gravel's 2020 presidential campaign, for which Kiriakou served as foreign policy adviser, he notes that the campaign manager was a twenty-year-old from George Washington University and that the students running its social media built one of the biggest crazes in political Twitter.

Why the Middle East, and why Washington

Asked what drew him to the subject, Kiriakou can offer no better answer than the fact of it: "I don't know. I was fascinated with the Middle East." Several people suggested Hellenic studies instead, which he could have read at Georgetown among others, and he declined. His father, trying to keep him near home, proposed the Eastern European programme at the University of Pittsburgh, and got a flat refusal: "I don't care about Eastern European studies, I don't care about the Soviet Union. I truly didn't. I only cared about the Middle East."

The field was narrow enough that the decision made itself. "There were three schools in the country at the time that had Middle Eastern studies programs: George Washington, Rutgers, and Brigham Young. And George Washington was the easy choice." His first act on arriving was political: "the first thing I did, literally on my first day in college, was to join the College Democrats."

See also

- Jerrold Post
- The polygraph
- John Kiriakou
- Publications Review Board
