The asset recruitment cycle
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The asset recruitment cycle is the professional standard John Kiriakou describes as governing CIA operations in the era before September 11, when, in his account, the work was much more old school and much more sophisticated than what followed.

The four steps

Every officer, Kiriakou says, has to spot, assess, develop and recruit an agent in order to get promoted. The purpose is stated as plainly: recruit spies to steal secrets. Where the spotting happens depends on the target and the job, he offers diplomatic cocktail parties as one setting among any number of different scenarios.

What the recruitment rests on

When his interviewer likened the structure to a multi-level marketing scheme, Kiriakou allowed that it was pretty much the same idea, and then described the mechanism.

The officer establishes a relationship with the target and builds a rapport, to the point where he becomes so close to that person, or at least that person believes he is close, that the target will commit espionage, will commit treason, because he likes the officer. Kiriakou acknowledges the other classic motivators, money, revenge, ideology, but insists that the real basis of the relationship is friendship.

His interviewer's response was that this sounds like the work of a confidence man, a comparison Kiriakou does not resist; his own account of what the training does to an officer is set out in the CIA culture of lying.

What replaced it

After September 11, Kiriakou says, the work really did change to paramilitary operations: wearing whatever special forces wear, parachuting into somewhere, shooting the place up and grabbing the target. Before September 11, he says, that is really not what the CIA was. He develops the same periodisation at greater length in the CIA as a paramilitary organization.

See also

- CIA culture of lying
- The CIA as a paramilitary organization
- The tier one walk-up
- Walk-in
