The professor and the Ellsberg profile
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The CIA officer who recruited John Kiriakou was working undercover as a professor and became his graduate school adviser. Kiriakou says the man once told him a story that changed how he understood the recruitment.

The unit

Before the university posting, the officer had founded a unit inside the CIA that produced psychological and psychiatric examinations by long distance, mostly of foreign leaders.

The file

In 1971, as he was about to leave on holiday, his boss came to him and asked for a psychological profile before he went, and handed him a file. The file was on Daniel Ellsberg.

It is illegal for the CIA to act against an American. In Kiriakou's retelling of the exchange, the officer said: "you want me to do a psychological evaluation on an American citizen? Not a chance", and handed the file back.

What was done with his name

He went on holiday. When he returned, a subpoena was waiting, from a congressional committee that wanted to know why he had done a psychological evaluation of Daniel Ellsberg.

He had not. His boss had done it and written his name on it. He testified before the Watergate Committee: "this is wrong. I knew it was wrong. I refused to do it. And they knew it was wrong. And they did it anyway."

The lesson Kiriakou draws

Kiriakou says the story "made me think that I was a lot more like him than I had realized. And I think he saw it in me before I ever saw it in him."

He attaches to it the moral he repeats about the agency: "sometimes you just have to stand up and call it like it is. One of the things about the CIA is, CIA culture is such that they want you to believe that everything is a shade of gray. And that's just simply not true. Some things are black and white."

The recruitment itself he describes as ordinary for the period: the officer was undercover as a professor, looking for people who might fit the CIA's culture, and thought Kiriakou would. It remained for the candidate to pass the tests, the polygraph and the background investigation. "I'll be forever indebted to him."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Daniel Ellsberg
- The scholar-in-residence pipeline
- Church Committee
- Central Intelligence Agency
