The autographed basketball
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The autographed basketball is an example John Kiriakou has used to illustrate the assessment stage of agent recruitment, the search for what a target actually wants, as opposed to what an intelligence service assumes he wants.

The recruitment

In Kiriakou's account, he recruited a man who was, in his phrase, absolutely crazy for the Chicago Bulls. Kiriakou bought a basketball from the NBA store online and had it shipped out to him. He then presented it to the target as an autographed ball, telling him that he knew a man who knew a man who knew Michael Jordan, that Michael Jordan had been told all about him, and that Jordan had signed the ball. Kiriakou placed it in an acrylic display box. 

By Kiriakou's telling the man could not give him the information he wanted fast enough, and took no money for it. The reason the source gave was that Kiriakou had been so thoughtful, that he had known how much the man loved the Chicago Bulls. 

The principle

Kiriakou frames the episode as an illustration of a general rule: find what a person's currency is, what they are interested in, and then find a way to get it to them.  He places this within a wider account of vulnerability assessment in which the useful vulnerabilities are frequently mundane rather than lurid, a man who loves his children and does not earn much, or a spouse with a serious illness, and in which the CIA's ability to place a child at an American university or to secure treatment at a major clinic can be decisive.  

He is nonetheless explicit that money remains the dominant motive, estimating that 95 per cent of recruitments made by a CIA operations officer are for money, at rates running from a thousand dollars a month to twenty thousand a month, or a lump sum, payable in cash, diamonds or gold as the agent prefers. 

See also

- College Tuition As An Inducement
- The Farm
- John Kiriakou
