The child-trafficking misquotation
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A claim circulated online, and repeated in aggregator articles and clips, that John Kiriakou had said the CIA is involved in the sex trafficking of children. Asked directly, Kiriakou answered without qualification: "Absolutely untrue. First of all, not only is the CIA not involved in the sex trafficking of children, but I most certainly never said any such thing."

What he actually said

The source, on his account, is a lecture at American University about ethics, built on the observation that "at the CIA there are no ethics classes. You have to go into the CIA confident in your own moral compass, because there's not going to be anybody to tell you what's right and what's wrong, what's legal and what's illegal."

The hypothetical he uses to force the point, see military ethics, asks the audience to imagine a bona fide terrorist recruited as a penetration, running productively for a year or two and saving American lives, who one day asks his handler to procure him a prostitute. "I said, how many here in the room would get him the prostitute? And usually about half the hands go up. And I said, the correct answer is yes, at the CIA you would get him the prostitute. This is a despicable thing to do, but you deal with scumbags. It's your job to cultivate relations with dirty, dangerous people."

The second question is the one that was inverted in transmission. "But what happens if he asks you for a child prostitute? How many would do that? And usually nobody raises their hand. Once in a while you'll get one or two people who very tentatively will put their hand up. And I said, the answer is absolutely not. Not under any circumstances should you go out and seek a child prostitute to give to this man. But the problem is that there's no rule at the CIA saying you can't do this. You have to know in your heart that it's the wrong thing to do."

The aftermath

"And then the next thing I see is all over the internet, and I'm getting emails, dozens of emails thanking me for exposing child sex trafficking at the CIA, these cabals of child sex people in Washington. It's like, what the heck happened? I didn't even know where it came from." He notes the speech was the standard one he gives at every university and had been cleared by the CIA's Publications Review Board.

Asked whether anyone contacted him before publishing, his answer is "not a soul", and he adds the detail he finds hardest to credit: "the original article had attached to it a video of me giving the speech. It's like the guy who wrote the article didn't even bother to watch his own video that he attached to the article."

His assessment of the audience the story reached is sympathetic rather than dismissive: he agrees that such readers are "well-meaning", with "their hearts in the right place", and are being taken advantage of by hucksters.

The show of hands

The lecture Kiriakou gives at colleges and universities, which is the origin of the misquotation, is built as a two-stage hypothetical put to the room. The students are told they are a CIA operations officer who has recruited a bona fide terrorist, a member of ISIS, Hezbollah or al-Qaeda, it does not matter which, and that the man has given them actionable intelligence used to disrupt attacks and save American lives. At a meeting in the Middle East he says he has given them everything they wanted and now wants something in return: a prostitute, or he stops talking.

Asked for a show of hands, about 80 per cent of a room will say they would do it. Kiriakou's own answer is that in real life they probably would, "It's not very nice. It's a kind of a dirty business, but this is the job that we've chosen for ourselves." He then changes one word and asks what if the agent asks for a child prostitute. The room goes quiet and roughly 10 per cent still raise a hand.

His own answer to the second version is absolute refusal under any circumstances. The point of the exercise is that no rule exists to make it for him: an officer's job overseas is to break the law and to persuade people to commit espionage, headquarters will not produce an employee regulation forbidding it, and the decision therefore falls entirely on the individual's own moral formation.

See also

- Military Ethics
- Publications Review Board
- John Kiriakou
- Central Intelligence Agency
