Recruiting from the bottom
==========================

Recruiting from the bottom is John Kiriakou's explanation of how a foreign service acquires the physical location of a country's leadership without penetrating its government.

The method

Israel, he notes, "has bragged for years about the number of people that they've recruited in Iran. And most of them, at least many of them, were Afghan refugees." The vulnerability is destitution: "refugees in Iran get nothing. They get no food, no shelter, no medical care, no nothing."

The pitch follows from it, and is deliberately small. "If you approach these people and you say: look, I'll give you a hundred dollars a month to stand on this corner and write in a little book how often General so-and-so leaves his apartment, and what time, and what time he returns, and what route he took when he left, well, that's a hundred dollars you didn't have yesterday. That's a hundred dollars that you can use to feed yourself, if you're a penniless refugee."

Why it beats recruiting at the top

Kiriakou sets it against his own service's record. "When I was at the CIA it was virtually impossible to recruit an Iranian", because the target set was ministerial: "the CIA was trying to recruit those people at the top, somebody in the Ayatollah's office, or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defence, the IRGC."

His conclusion about the 2026 strikes is that the approach was inverted: "maybe they learned a lesson, that you should start at the bottom, and collect the information from the bottom, and use it for targeting. Because that's apparently what they did over the last three days."

The corollary, on his reading of the New York Times reporting, is that the network doing it was not only Israeli. "I think now that it wasn't just the Israelis that had these operations under way, it was also the CIA."

See also

- 2026 Iran war
- The asset recruitment cycle
- Agent payment mechanics
- MOSSAD
