Mary Margaret Graham
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Mary Margaret Graham is a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who later served as Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Collection under Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. John Kiriakou, who served under her as chief of station on a domestic assignment, gives an unflattering account of her career and conduct.

Chief of station

Kiriakou says Graham did not want him assigned to her station, citing an earlier incident in Athens in which he had beaten a pastry chef into a coma for insulting his first wife; the CIA's Deputy Director for Operations, Jim Pavitt, overruled her objection and assigned Kiriakou to the station regardless. Kiriakou states that although Graham was a member of the Senior Intelligence Service, she had never personally recruited a source, having instead worked as a "reports officer", reformatting and sanitizing raw intelligence cables for analysts, a track he considers categorically different from operations work. He notes that a class-action lawsuit brought by female CIA officers over systemic gender discrimination, decided in the Eastern District of Virginia, resulted in every woman at the agency receiving a cash settlement and an automatic two-grade promotion, for example, from GS-14/15 to Senior Intelligence Service Level One or Two, and implies Graham's rank owed more to that settlement than to operational merit.

Kiriakou says Graham imposed a quota, unique to her station worldwide, requiring each officer to publish five intelligence reports a month to be considered meeting expectations; he was rated as not meeting expectations after producing only two reports in his first weeks, despite inheriting zero sources from his predecessor. At a diplomatic event, Kiriakou approached a North Korean official he had surveilled fishing earlier and asked only, "did you catch any fish?", the official walked away quickly, and Graham subsequently called Kiriakou "unhinged" over the incident, despite his having recruited five sources in two years to her none. When Kiriakou left the station for a higher-paying position, Graham made a station-wide announcement that he was leaving for "more money than God had," while privately controlling the language of his performance evaluation, alongside an exceptional performance award and medal she was also issuing him.

Deputy Director of National Intelligence

Kiriakou says Graham was later named Deputy Director of National Intelligence under John Negroponte because the two "were joined at the hip." In that role, he says she inadvertently revealed the classified CIA budget figure, classified at the highest level since the agency's founding in 1947, during a speech covered by the Washington press corps, before remarking, "my bad, sorry about that." Kiriakou also quotes a since-published memoir in which Graham, discussing Afghanistan, offered the observation "war is what it is", which he calls "another pearl of wisdom from the brilliant mind of Mary Margaret Graham." Kiriakou has repeated the assessment elsewhere, calling Graham, for whom he worked, "one of the most horrible humans" he has ever encountered, and giving the leaked budget figure as roughly $44 billion, around 15 years before the telling, a figure he guesses has since grown to roughly $100 billion.

The only figure the public has

Kiriakou treats Graham's disclosure as the sole reason any public estimate of intelligence spending exists. "We only have a general idea of what the CIA spends because the former deputy director of national intelligence Mary Margaret Graham accidentally let it slip while giving a speech. Otherwise we wouldn't have any idea what the budget is. The budget has always been classified."

He raises it in the context of a redaction covering declassification spending itself, a secrecy he calls "outrageous, and typical, and very common."

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- John Kiriakou
