The Fox News military analyst
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The Fox News military analyst is John Kiriakou's most frequently told case of an impostor claiming CIA service, and the one he uses to demonstrate his method for spotting them.

The green room

Kiriakou has said he appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News programme a dozen or a dozen and a half times and struck up something of a friendship with him. One day, waiting in the Fox News green room, another guest asked whether he was going on with Carlson. Kiriakou said he was, mentioned that he was former CIA and would be talking about, he thinks, John Brennan, and asked the man what he did. The man said he was former CIA too.

Kiriakou's first question is always the same: which directorate. The man said "ops". Kiriakou notes that a real officer would not normally use that word, he would say the DO, the Directorate of Operations, but let it pass. Asked where in the DO, the man said the Counterterrorism Center, and then volunteered that he had been doing black ops and wet work. Kiriakou's verdict is flat: literally no CIA officer on earth would answer that way, and the phrasing is straight out of a bad movie.

He went on air, and during the commercial break told Carlson that the guest coming on after him was a fake, explaining that the man did not know the agency's vocabulary and was using movie language instead. The man then went on and talked about the operations he had supposedly run.

The vocabulary tell, retold

In an earlier account given while the case was in the news, Kiriakou described the same tell from the broadcast side: the man had claimed a position he called "outside paramilitary special operations", which Kiriakou dismissed as meaningless, words that sound intriguing but denote no job that exists. The first time he heard it, he said, he concluded there was absolutely no way the man was CIA; he might have been a contractor inflating what he did, but nothing more.

What Kiriakou calls the real shame of the case is that the man managed to trick the Defense Department into granting him a security clearance on the strength of his claimed CIA service, and on that basis went to Afghanistan to advise American generals on strategy. Kiriakou says any CIA officer he ever worked with could have pegged the man in five seconds.

Asked why nobody at the agency called the network, Kiriakou noted that officers do watch and do recognise former colleagues on air, and offered a suspicion rather than an answer: the man's message on Fox News was always solidly pro-CIA and pro-Defense Department, and Kiriakou wonders whether people at the CIA knew he was an impostor but concluded that he was saying the right things and therefore let it stand.

The arrest

Six months after the green-room encounter, Kiriakou says, he saw the man in the Washington Post: arrested and charged, of all things, with mortgage fraud. The mechanism, in Kiriakou's telling, was the same claim used on a bank, that he could not produce pay stubs because his work was deep-cover special operations, and on that basis he was given a mortgage he could not repay, because he had no job. Kiriakou says he ended up with something like six years in prison.

See also

- Spotting a CIA impostor
- Fake Cia Resumes
- CIA media revolving door
- CIA directorates
