CIA Training Doctrine
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John Kiriakou says CIA training teaches operatives that "our job is to break the law," framed as necessary to protect the United States.  He says this doctrine applies only overseas, since the CIA is forbidden by law from conducting operations inside the United States, that is the FBI's jurisdiction. 

Kiriakou says he was perfectly happy, and on multiple occasions actively participated in, breaking into people's houses or offices and planting bugs and cameras as part of CIA operations, describing the underlying rationale as "we're the good guys" protecting the United States. 

The mission, before and after 9/11

Kiriakou says his deputy director for operations was fond of describing the CIA's core job as simple: recruit spies to steal secrets, then analyze those secrets so policymakers can make informed decisions. He applied the same doctrine, "the first thing I set out to do", after entering prison himself. He says after September 11 the agency shifted into a paramilitary organization whose job was to kill, capture, and render anyone who could pose a threat. Kiriakou himself became chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before the Obama administration charged him with five felonies over his public disclosures about the CIA's torture program; he served two years in prison.

Special operations training

Kiriakou describes CIA special-operations training as covering counterterrorist driving, crashing cars through vehicle roadblocks, along with weapons training ranging from sidearms to .50-caliber weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, bomb diffusion, parachute jumps from airplanes, and surfacing from ocean depths in mini-submarines. He says his own counterterrorism driving course took place in the sand dunes outside Las Vegas, Nevada, not, as sometimes assumed, in Morocco, and that operatives also trained to swim across swamps to make a dead drop.

Polygraph culture

Kiriakou says every CIA employee is polygraphed before hire, again after three years, and every five years for the rest of their career, even groundskeepers, who must hold full security clearances. He recounts a colleague who had spent twenty years as a CIA polygraph examiner after transferring in from a career as a calligrapher, and who told Kiriakou that people hooked to the machine had confessed to virtually every crime imaginable, including murder, with a hidden panic button under the table to summon guards if needed. In one routine five-year repolygraph, the examiner says a longtime CIA groundskeeper admitted that after fights with his wife, he would go out to the barn and have sex with a horse to get back at her.

The recruiting route that was closed

Kiriakou's own entry to the agency is one he says can no longer happen. He was "sort of plucked out of graduate school by my grad school adviser who was a CIA officer undercover as a grad school adviser", and "the way I was recruited is not legal anymore."

What replaced it he presents as a deflation rather than a reform: "Now, it's it's far less sexy." An applicant goes to the CIA website and clicks apply, or approaches a CIA recruiter at a job fair, "which is also quite common", and then proceeds through what he calls a long, arduous process before any training begins. Which training that turns out to be depends on which of the four directorates the applicant has entered.

Exercises indistinguishable from the job

Kiriakou rates the fidelity of the training unusually highly, and says so from the other side of it: going into the field for the first time he was "shocked at how real life was exactly like the training." The exercises were staged accordingly, a rented back room dressed as a diplomatic cocktail party overseas, suits, drinks, waiters circulating with hors d'oeuvres, and a fictional host country.

The lesson he draws from his own failure in one of them is about the limits of a generalist. He worked the room to a woman who said she worked at the port processing paperwork, "I'm thinking, what do I care about this woman?", until she mentioned in passing that she had been kept late by a shipment whose paperwork was wrong. He let it go, and the instructors "went nuts": the chemical she had named was a precursor, and he had walked away from the only intelligence in the room.

His defence was that the knowledge was not his to have, "I have a degree in Middle Eastern studies. I don't know what the chemical makeup of cocaine is", and the conclusion he takes from it is a staffing one: the service needs specialists "who can talk in these kinds of details," which is why an MIT-trained scientist who struck him as "the unlikeliest operations officer" was there at all. To infiltrate a nuclear programme, he says, "you need people who can talk the talk."

Training also taught the reverse skill, reading a person for the lever. A vulnerability might be "obvious like a person is in financial trouble," or it might be a wife with breast cancer, against which the officer sets a choice of hospitals: "do you want her to get treated in Romania or do you want her to get treated at the Mayo Clinic? Because I can arrange the Mayo Clinic for you", in exchange for the plans to a new tank.

He is equally clear about what the training does not lean on. Asked about gadgets, he answered that the work is "all a battle of wits ... the gadget isn't gonna win you the new agent or the operation."

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- FBI
- John Kiriakou
