Deloitte Consulting Career
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Deloitte Consulting employed John Kiriakou after he left the CIA, by his own account his resignation took effect in 2005, following a 2004 departure decision, until his effective firing in December 2008 following his public disclosures about CIA torture. He served as deputy director of Deloitte's competitive intelligence practice, a role he later summarized bluntly: "we're spying on Ernst & Young, KPMG, IBM ... stealing their pricing models," which he elsewhere called "the most boring job I ever had in my life." He did not publish any writing before 2007, when he was 43 and still working in that role.

Acquisitions

Deloitte sent Kiriakou to Hyderabad, India for six weeks, with an office and driver, to evaluate open-source intelligence (OSINT) companies for potential acquisition. He identified six OSINT firms operating in the city, narrowed the field to two, and recommended Deloitte acquire "India Tiger Analysis", reasoning that the firm could bill Indian analysts' work at the same $1,000-an-hour US rate while paying them roughly $5 an hour. Deloitte purchased the firm for approximately $50 million on his recommendation.

A separate tip, from a source at rival consulting firm Bering Point, formerly KPMG Consulting, alerted Kiriakou to a mandatory global-partners meeting in Orlando, Florida. It turned out to be an announcement that Bering Point was going bankrupt and needed to be sold; Deloitte, which had the smallest federal consulting practice among major firms, was well positioned to acquire Bering Point, which had the largest. Kiriakou says he covertly surveilled the Orlando conference, wearing a fake Radio Shack earpiece to impersonate security, and secretly recorded the CEO's bankruptcy announcement to 600 employees. He later hid in a bathroom stall to record partners privately discussing deal figures, including a $150 million U.S. Department of Agriculture contract, at the urinals.

Because Deloitte's competitive-intelligence practice was based in McLean, Virginia, the same town as CIA headquarters, the firm fielded dozens, even hundreds, of job applicants who claimed a CIA background. The managing partner asked Kiriakou personally to take each of them to dinner and vet them. Kiriakou says he caught the very first candidate immediately: asked which CIA directorate and division he had worked in, the young applicant answered "DI and DIO," a combination that made no sense, and could not give a credible account when pressed further.

The ABC News interview and firing

Kiriakou's boss at Deloitte was a former CIA analyst with more than 20 years' experience who understood agency culture and recommended to the managing partner that Kiriakou be allowed to appear on ABC News to defend himself over the emerging waterboarding story. General counsel signed a memo permitting the appearance, on condition that he not mention Deloitte or any Deloitte client. At the time of the interview both his boss and his boss's two deputies at Deloitte were themselves former CIA officers, and all had known in advance, in writing, exactly what he planned to say on air. After landing at LaGuardia following the interview, Kiriakou found his voicemail full of dozens of messages from journalists worldwide and realized, in his words, that he had "opened a Pandora's box", the story had gone international. NPR later asked for his reaction to Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, then a top member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying he wanted to see Kiriakou "hanging from a tree."

Kiriakou's attorney, reviewing the signed Deloitte permission memo, told him "we have them by the balls," and when his director demanded his resignation soon after, he refused. A Deloitte director who was also his neighbor told him the CEO tracked firm problems on a bulletin board of index cards, one of which read "John Kiriakou." Deloitte initially offered six weeks of severance, before agreeing to 18 months after roughly five days of negotiation. The severance was paid in a single lump sum with a heavy tax bite, and Kiriakou lost health insurance for his family of four children; his effective firing came less than two weeks before Christmas 2008, just as the Great Recession began. He later learned from the Washington Post that the CIA had separately filed a "crimes report" against him, alleging he had revealed top secret information said to cause "grave danger" to national security.

After Kiriakou left for Deloitte, the CIA issued a formal, agency-wide "burn notice" barring anyone from ever contacting him again and banning his rehire, a designation Kiriakou notes shares its name with the TV series Burn Notice, for which he had once served as a script advisor.

What the group was for

The competitive intelligence group Kiriakou joined in 2004 was designed around former intelligence officers: hire ex-CIA collectors and pair them with the firm's corporate research analysts to collect and analyse intelligence on competitors. Kiriakou was the fourth such hire. His own collection targets were Ernst & Young, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers and consulting firms including IBM and Accenture, and his requirements were pricing models, discount policy, expansion plans and disgruntled top-producing partners who might be poached. The discipline is treated at corporate competitive intelligence.

He notes that every large firm ran the same operation against the others, "absolutely, to each other; they all have the same groups", and that Deloitte's own group did not survive the recession, though the rival firms' equivalents did.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- The Reluctant Spy
- Central Intelligence Agency
