Groupthink at the CIA
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John Kiriakou identifies institutional conformity as the CIA's central analytical failure, and states the consequence in the broadest available terms: "if you look at the major international developments over the last 70 years since the creation of the CIA, the CIA has been wrong about just about every one of them, and it's because of that groupthink." He and one of his attorneys, Bruce Fein, discussed writing a book on the subject.

The vocabulary and the reality

Kiriakou's objection is that the agency has adopted the language of contrarian analysis without the practice. "They throw around these slogans and business buzzwords about thinking outside the box, and establishing a red team or a blue team, and it's all nonsense. They don't know what they're doing. In fact they end up sitting around a conference room table and just agreeing with one another."

Self-importance as the companion trait

Kiriakou pairs the analytical failure with an institutional self-image. He recounts a former senior CIA official, retired about a year and a half, telling him that he had gone on antidepressant medication "because on Friday he was one of the most important people in America, and on Monday he was a nobody, because he had retired. And he can't handle being a nobody."

"That's a theme at the CIA," he says. "They all think that they're the most important people in America, because they have sort of self-appointed jurisdiction over life and death for so many people, and then they trick themselves into thinking that they're irreplaceable. And in fact they're very replaceable."

The hiring pattern he describes elsewhere, an agency that selects for sociopathic tendencies and then finds full sociopaths climbing to the top of it, is, on his account, the same problem seen from the personnel side.

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- Sociopathic Tendencies
- John Kiriakou
- George Tenet
