The CIA recruiting video
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During an October 2025 interview with a retired Army colonel who was criticising the personnel policies of the American armed forces, John Kiriakou volunteered an example from his own former employer.

The example

The Russians and the Chinese laugh at some of the recruiting commercials released by the American military, and by the CIA, he said. He then described one in particular.

"There was a CIA recruiting video that came out, I don't know, two years, three years ago, where they're interviewing this woman and she said, 'I'm an autistic, depressed, anxious lesbian, you know, blah blah blah. And I have a home at the CIA.' And I was like, 'Oh my god, that's not the CIA I joined.'"

The frame he puts it in

Kiriakou's stated objection is not to who is recruited but to what the material broadcasts to adversary services. He offers the video as evidence for the guest's contention that American institutions have made themselves objects of ridicule abroad, and the measure he applies is how it reads in Moscow and Beijing.

The guest's own argument, which surrounds the remark, is broader and more categorical, a criticism of women serving in tanks and infantry formations, delivered with the claim that war is the absence of moral restraint. That argument is the colonel's; Kiriakou does not endorse it, and his contribution is the single anecdote.

Context in his own record

Kiriakou joined the CIA on 1 January 1990 as an analyst, having been recruited while in graduate school. The phrase "not the CIA I joined" is one he uses elsewhere in a very different register: he has said that the Agency he came of age in was not the real CIA, and that after 2001 it returned to its roots as an organisation constantly pushing the bounds of morals, ethics and legality. Here the same phrase carries the opposite complaint.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Central Intelligence Agency
