Kiriakou's transfer to the Directorate of Operations
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John Kiriakou joined the CIA in January 1990 after being recruited in graduate school, spent seven and a half years as an analyst, and then made what he repeatedly calls a "very unusual" switch into the operational Directorate of Operations, a transfer that took roughly two months of internal advocacy to overcome what he calls a "natural bias in operations against the eggheads on the analytic side." His immediate boss reacted angrily to the move, telling him bluntly not to come back asking for his old job.

Recruitment

Kiriakou was recruited into the CIA while a graduate student at George Washington University, where he was taking a class called "the Psychology of Leadership" taught by Dr. Gerald Post, a political psychiatrist who turned out to be a CIA "spotter", a talent scout undercover as a professor. Post assigned an odd paper, then invited Kiriakou to stay after class; during their conversation Post revealed he was a CIA officer working undercover, and, after Kiriakou called him a racist during an argument, provoking Post to ball up his fists before instead blurting out a bizarre insult, Post nonetheless called someone in CIA personnel on Kiriakou's behalf. Post reportedly tested Kiriakou's knowledge of world geography by showing him a blank world map, which Kiriakou, "a map nut", filled in from memory. By his own account the timing was less idealistic than practical: he was getting married in six weeks and had no job. Kiriakou dates his recruitment to 1988, during the Reagan administration, and says this method of recruiting officers through undercover professors acting as spotters was outlawed in 1993 under Bill Clinton with passage of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act. He started working for the CIA the first week of January 1990.

Kiriakou grew up in Western Pennsylvania and enrolled at George Washington University for graduate school. He learned Greek at home, all four of his grandparents came from the Greek island of Rhodes, attending Greek school twice a week from first through seventh grade before earning a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies. He entered the CIA speaking Greek, and the agency later taught him Arabic, sending him to a full year of language school; he became a go-to Arabic linguist, eventually fluent in both Fussa (formal Arabic) and the Khaliji Gulf dialect from time spent in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

"You are always going to be the good cop"

Asked what he turned out to be naturally good at, Kiriakou says the assessment was made of him twice, years apart, by people who did not know each other. On joining the agency, someone told him "you would be a really good operations officer", and when he asked why, the reason given was not analytical ability: "People like to be around you. You're fun." He dismissed it at the time. Years later, when he did switch to operations, an instructor arrived at the same verdict in different words: "you are always going to be the good cop." Kiriakou's reply was that this was simply what he had: "I don't really have it in me to be the bad cop."

He credits the aptitude to range rather than charm, "I'm blessed that I have broad interests. I can talk about sports, or opera, or weapons, or whatever", and draws the distinction that he says separates the skill from the paperwork. "If somebody just walks in off the street and volunteers to be recruited, anybody can do that. But to actually develop a relationship with someone who doesn't realise that he's being recruited, I was good at that."

He tells one anecdote against himself about how badly he judged where the job was heading. In pre-9/11 operational training, preparing to jump from the back of a C-12, he asked a colleague "when in the world am I going to have to jump out of the back of a plane? I'm going to be making my recruitments at diplomatic cocktail parties." Roughly four years later he was in a plane over Afghanistan.

Analyst years on Iraq

Kiriakou entered the Directorate of Intelligence, the CIA's analytic cadre, and was assigned to the Iraq/Kuwait account, described to him at the time as a quiet "training account" because nothing ever happened there: the same cabinet had held power in Iraq since the 1968 revolution, and the same leadership had run Kuwait since independence in the early 1960s. He was, by his account, the CIA's sole analyst covering Iraq and Kuwait at the time. He became the intelligence community's classified biographer of Saddam Hussein, the only officer covering leadership analysis on the Iraqi leadership, a role that put him in the office at 6 a.m. on August 2, 1990, the morning Iraq invaded Kuwait, when his boss told him not to take his jacket off because they were going to the White House. He recalls the invasion arriving just as he'd finally grown comfortable in the job.

Kiriakou spent his first seven and a half years as a Middle East analyst, learning Arabic and serving overseas in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. He returned to headquarters, spent two years on loan to the State Department as economic officer at the U.S. embassy in Bahrain, then came back to Iraq work again in 1996, this time focused on the Kurdistan area of northern Iraq, where the United States had good relations with the Kurds under no-fly-zone protection. He describes an officer's job in places like Iraq as recruiting local spies to steal secrets, since American officers often lack the language skill or local trust to operate directly. Early in his time as an analyst, a boss complimented his quick, sharp analytic writing but suggested he'd be happier as a case officer, a suggestion Kiriakou says proved prescient once he made the switch and discovered a knack for recruiting people. His first wife did not want to live overseas, which factored into his initially taking an analysis position rather than operations. In his 2010 account the preference settled the matter in a single exchange. Offered interviews in both directorates, he sat down with the Directorate of Operations and was asked what his wife would say about living in Sudan or a similar posting. He answered that she would not want to do that at all, at which the interviewer stood up, put out his hand and said "well, thanks for coming today." Kiriakou knew immediately it had not gone well; his interviewer Frederick Hitz, himself a former CIA inspector general, put it back to him that it had gone fine, because it had reached the point that mattered.

On the analytic side he was considered for two accounts, Iraq and Kuwait, or North Korea. He objected that he knew nothing about North Korea and was told "that's okay, we can train you." He counts himself fortunate to have been given the Middle East, and doubly so in where it placed him: the office he was hired into was the one Post had founded, devoted to analysing the motivations of foreign leaders, and since abolished.

The switch to operations

By his seventh and a half year as an analyst, Kiriakou had grown bored. He describes analysis as sitting in a cubicle writing papers that go largely unread, sent up the chain to the White House and the Secretary of State. The breaking point, in one telling, came while drafting a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq: after a coordination session moved unusually fast, Kiriakou realized the paper was essentially unchanged from the year before and told himself, "I'm ashamed of this paper, we could have just taken last year's NIE and changed the date... I am wasting my time here." He also cites simple frustration with the Clinton administration's lack of a coherent Iraq policy.

A counterterrorism operations job opened in Athens, hosted by the Counterterrorism Center, requiring an officer fluent in either Greek or Arabic; Kiriakou was, by his account, the only person in the entire CIA who spoke both fluently. The job targeted Arab terrorist groups, Abu Nidal, the PFLP, PFLP-GC, Libyan groups, and the DFLP, before later shifting, like the rest of the intelligence community, to al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremist groups. He applied despite having no operational experience, going to the hiring officer, a recently returned station chief, and being tested on his Arabic and Greek fluency; the officer told him plainly, "it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper for me to take a linguist and teach him operations than it is to take an operations officer and teach him how to speak Greek and Arabic." A hiring officer's secretary, ethnically Greek, born on the same island as Kiriakou's grandparents, also vouched for his Greek during the process.

Moving from analysis to operations was, in Kiriakou's telling, highly unusual for the era: there was a formal committee process to move between directorates, and going from analysis to operations before 9/11 required permissions all the way up to the deputy director for operations. He went through an accelerated operations course, skipping the introductory "CIA 101" orientation because he had already served seven and a half years as an analyst. Kiriakou switched to operations formally in 1997, after seven years as the agency's Iraq/Saddam Hussein analyst.

Athens and beyond

The Athens posting lasted two years, after which Kiriakou liked operations enough to switch to it permanently. His career then moved through further assignments, back to headquarters, then the Middle East, before culminating, after 9/11, in Pakistan as chief of CIA counterterrorism operations. He describes repeatedly volunteering for an Afghanistan deployment after 9/11 and ultimately threatening his deputy director's assistant that he would quit and go work at Exxon if not sent; the next day he was instead asked if he would go to Pakistan, and accepted on the spot, becoming chief of counterterrorism operations there. In Pakistan he worked directly for Bob Grenier as his executive assistant.

September 11, 2001

Kiriakou was in Cofer Black's office at CIA headquarters on the morning of September 11, 2001, when the first tower was reported burning; he remarked on a 1932 incident in which a bomber flew into the Empire State Building, and the second plane hit the World Trade Center just as the words left his mouth. He recalls the Counterterrorism Center's bullpen holding roughly 300 employees in cubicles, with private offices around the walls for leadership and the aisles informally named after CIA figures and terrorists, including "Bin Laden Boulevard." One branch chief fled the building in panic that day; her five branch members later told Cofer Black they had lost confidence in her leadership, and she was fired. Kiriakou stayed at headquarters for four days afterward, sleeping under his desk; staff eventually took bolt cutters to the cafeteria lock and helped themselves to the food, later writing a check for roughly $10,000 to the caterer, Saga, to cover what had been taken. He says CIA job applications rose sharply in the aftermath, from 200 applicants per position before 9/11 to 2,500 per position after.

Refusing the torture program

In the summer of 2002, a senior counterterrorism officer asked Kiriakou if he wanted to be trained in "enhanced interrogation techniques", a term Kiriakou says he had never heard before, and which he immediately identified as describing a torture program; the officer told him it wasn't torture because the president had approved it. Kiriakou sought advice from a senior officer he had worked for a decade earlier, who told him plainly it was a torture program and a slippery slope: someone would eventually go too far and kill a prisoner, triggering a Justice Department investigation, and someone would go to prison for it. Kiriakou says he turned out to be the only person who did. After he declined to participate, Cofer Black's successor cited a "shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism" to deny him a promotion, language Kiriakou says was used explicitly in his promotion panel, though the senior officer he'd consulted overrode the rejection.

Kiriakou contrasts his later human-rights reporting work with a CIA station chief in the same host country simultaneously requesting permission to open a secret torture prison in exchange for money, telling local officials, in Kiriakou's account, "don't pay any attention to the human rights guy... we'll give you $10 million." He attributes his sense of right and wrong to growing up in a tightly knit Greek Orthodox family and community, and rejects the CIA's institutional culture, which he says pushes officers to believe "everything's a shade of gray" when, in his view, torture is simply wrong. He credits his paternal grandfather, his best friend, who died in 1978 and kept a framed photo of Franklin Roosevelt displayed until his death out of gratitude for being allowed to immigrate, with instilling a sense that the family owed public service in return. That grandfather had once snuck out of work at a Pittsburgh steel mill, risking deportation, to attend a rally supporting Sacco and Vanzetti, the anarchists executed in the 1930s for a crime he believed they hadn't committed. He also told Kiriakou he had witnessed John Dillinger rob a savings and loan in Mercer, Pennsylvania, in 1934, with Dillinger reassuring customers in line that the gang was after the bank's money, not theirs, a story Kiriakou later confirmed via a period newspaper article, found at the Mercer County Historical Society, in which his grandfather himself was interviewed.

Looking back, Kiriakou says he would like to see the CIA abolished but doesn't expect it to happen, believes the only way to change the agency is from the inside, and says he would still choose the same career path if given the chance again. Asked what reforms he would make, he names three: abolishing extraordinary rendition, ending extrajudicial drone killings without any trial (even in absentia), and ending the weekly "kill list" meeting run by the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism.

Executive assistant to the deputy director for operations

On the strength of the Abu Zubaydah capture, Kiriakou was promoted to chief of counterintelligence at Alec Station from May to August 2002, then went up to the seventh floor and was named executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. In that role, one of several executive assistant slots, each given access to nearly everything the CIA was doing worldwide, he learned on his first day of plans to invade Iraq, and says he helped begin planning the Iraq war roughly a year in advance. He held the position for about a year; every morning he briefed CIA director George Tenet and deputy director John McLaughlin. He says that once he moved to his next assignment, he lost that access, not because his clearances changed, but because he no longer had a "need to know," and was removed from the relevant compartments.

While working on the Emir of Qatar's classified biography during his CIA career, Kiriakou calculated that the emir personally owned about 2 percent of the total land mass of France. Over his 15-year CIA career, the first half in analysis, the second in counterterrorism operations, including his time as chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11, he received 12 exceptional performance awards, a sustained superior performance award, two meritorious unit commendations, a medal for bravery, and the counterterrorism service medal. He also served overseas as a State Department human rights officer, writing the congressionally mandated annual human rights report for his country of assignment, a role he later contrasted directly with the station chief's parallel request to open a secret torture prison.

Resignation

Kiriakou resigned from the CIA in 2004. He gives converging accounts of the reasons: after his 2000 divorce, with sons then seven and four years old, he arranged two consecutive domestic assignments, one as executive assistant, one at the United Nations, to stay close to them, ultimately resigning rather than accept a further overseas posting. He also cites needing to support his five children financially, and says he still expected at the time that someone else would come forward publicly about the interrogation program before he had to. A more specific account has him seeing a flyer in the CIA headquarters elevator lobby for a class titled "Raising Your Children in a War Zone," posted just after he learned he would be forced under a stop-loss program to volunteer for another rotation to Iraq or Afghanistan or be passed over for promotion; on seeing the flyer, he thought, simply, "I quit."

Post-CIA career

After leaving the CIA, Kiriakou could no longer work for the government, hold a corporate job, or obtain a security clearance, so he began his post-prison career at the Institute for Policy Studies, the oldest left-wing think tank in Washington, writing a syndicated column for minimum wage. He also worked for a period at Deloitte, one of the "big four" professional-services firms. After his first book was published, around early 2010, he was invited to give the keynote at an offsite for roughly 140 PricewaterhouseCoopers partners, arranged through a former Deloitte colleague who had become a PwC partner; he told them a story from his time in Pakistan about surveilling a group of al-Qaeda associates who met daily at the same coffee shop.

Kiriakou later became senior investigator, then chief investigator, for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Chairman John Kerry, where he blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program. Kerry promised him full access and freedom to investigate anything, a promise Kiriakou says was a lie once he began the work. He held Tony Blinken's former desk on the committee when Blinken moved to the State Department, and traveled to Afghanistan in 2011 with Kerry; at a Bagram Air Base briefing before roughly eleven generals, Kiriakou judged the optimistic PowerPoint presentation on the war as "all bullshit" and told Kerry afterward that the U.S. would not win, and that Afghan President Hamid Karzai was merely "mayor of Kabul." On a commercial flight around this period, Kiriakou happened to sit beside the creator of the television series Burn Notice, and by the time the plane landed had become its unofficial script consultant, a relationship that later extended to the show True Lies.

Years later, after his arrest, Kiriakou emailed Kerry begging him to ask the president to commute his prison sentence for the sake of his five children; Kerry's entire reply was "Please do not ever attempt to contact me again." Kiriakou states flatly that Kerry is "no friend of human rights" or of transparency in government, comparing him to a neoconservative in the mold of Dick Cheney. He says the intelligence community pursued him because he had "aired the dirty laundry" of a torture program his own chain of command had created and implemented, with a former colleague privately calling what he did "unforgivable."

Kiriakou's first station chief told him CIA officers overseas earn substantial pay once post differential, danger pay, and language pay are added, joking there were "GS-15 millionaires walking the halls", but Kiriakou says he never met an officer who joined the CIA for the money; in his account, officers join out of patriotism and a desire to keep Americans safe.

Operations training

In preparation for the Athens assignment, Kiriakou's operations training included recruiting spies to steal secrets, weapons handling, building and defusing several kinds of bombs, and surveillance-detection driving.

The sequence, and the shortened course

Kiriakou's first tours, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, were analytic, and the Bahrain posting was a secondment to the State Department in a genuine State job. The switch to counterterrorism operations came in the middle of 1997. Because he was already seven and a half years into the agency and knew what it did, he was allowed to skip the entry-level material the agency calls CIA 101 and go straight to operational work: six months of training rather than eighteen, mixing operational tradecraft with weapons, explosives, counterterrorism driving, and surveillance and surveillance detection. He went on to become a surveillance instructor at the agency.

The postings that followed ran Athens from 1998 for two years, headquarters, Abu Dhabi, and headquarters again in time for the September 11 attacks.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- CIA
- Abu Zubaydah
- John Kerry
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
- CIA Torture Program Whistleblowing
