CIA liaison relationships
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CIA liaison relationships are the intelligence-sharing arrangements the Central Intelligence Agency maintains with foreign governments, arrangements John Kiriakou says expanded sharply after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when the CIA suddenly had reason to open relationships with countries it previously had no cause to deal with, including the Central Asian states.

The risk officers don't weigh

Kiriakou says CIA officers do not consider the long-term risks of these relationships: "Does anybody inside the agency ever stop to consider the long-term risks of liaison activities, that by disclosing your most sensitive operations to a foreign intelligence service, which has its own separate national interest, you're just handing over America's darkest secrets, giving those governments leverage, even potential blackmail material, over the United States itself?" His answer: "No, they don't consider it. They don't consider it at all."

The collapse of oversight

Kiriakou attributes part of the problem to high turnover, officials rotate out every two or three years, so institutional memory of why a liaison relationship was established gets lost, compounded by the disappearance of congressional overseers willing to challenge the agency. He names Senator Frank Church, Congressman Otis Pike, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Senator Ted Kennedy as the last overseers with the will to do so, noting they are all dead, and that no one currently in Congress has the guts to stand up to the CIA.

The choreography of a liaison visit

Kiriakou describes the hosting of a visiting foreign service as a standardized and constant piece of business rather than an occasion: setting up "a day of briefings, they get a photo op with the director, you know, shaking hands, we exchange gifts, and we take them out to a fancy dinner at night." This was done "literally every single day, usually multiple times a day," and the visitors were not senior, "they're all mid-level, like majors and lieutenant colonels." Asked whether there was a lot of ceremony in it, he agreed there was.

It is that routine setting into which he places Cofer Black's pre-9/11 warning: Kiriakou had booked a young analyst covering al-Qaeda to fill an hour, and the director of counterterrorism came in his place, bringing the director of operations from the bin Laden unit and an appeal, "I'm begging you, if you have any sources inside Al-Qaeda, please help us." The delegation "just sat there and looked at him. Nothing."

Liaison beyond the host service

Asked what an officer does about the standing risk that a recruitment target simply reports him to the host country's authorities, Kiriakou's first answer is not tradecraft but diplomacy: "what you want to do is to cultivate strong liaison relationships, not just with the host country, but with other countries represented there uh that also have coinciding interests."

The reasoning he gives is one of match. Al-Qaeda "is an Arab was an Arab group," so the relationships worth having in Islamabad included the other Arab embassies there, to be worked jointly on counterterrorism raids. He characterises the underlying problem plainly, recruiting in an adversarial country under the constant possibility of denunciation is "literally the challenge that you face every day. It's very, very difficult."

Bumping into the competition

Asked how he rated officers of other services and how much exposure he had had to them, Kiriakou's answer was "Lots and lots of exposure", and his illustration was a film convention he says is accurate: "you know the scene in every James Bond movie where James bumps into the CIA guy... that's in all the movies is because that happens every single day." The exchange he imagines for it is territorial and unbothered, "Hello, John. Hello, Nigel... Stay away from the Deputy Prime Minister, Nigel. He's mine."

It happened to him in Kuwait, where he and a British officer turned out to be pursuing the same target: "He comes up to me, he's like, hello John. I said, hello Ian." Not every encounter was as easy: his account of a French officer who tried to run a car pickup on him rather than meet as a colleague is recorded separately.

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
