Office of Leadership Analysis
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The Office of Leadership Analysis, internally known as LDA, for Leadership Development Analysis, was the CIA analytic office founded by psychiatrist Jerome Post, who pushed for John Kiriakou to be placed there at the start of his agency career. Kiriakou has said the office that hired him was, fittingly, the same one his recruiting professor had founded.

A quiet first assignment

Kiriakou was assigned as the CIA's leadership analyst for Iraq in the first week of January 1990. On his first day, his boss described the Iraq-and-Kuwait portfolio as so quiet that the office sometimes went days without a single incoming cable. He spent his first seven and a half years at the agency in the office, working exclusively on Iraq and Kuwait and serving, in his words, as Saddam Hussein's classified psychological profiler, working with psychologists and psychiatrists to write profiles of Saddam, his sons, and his cabinet and military leadership.

The bin Laden warning nobody read

In July 1990, a colleague in the office, the branch's Saudi analyst, wrote an article in the CIA's in-house Leadership Review magazine calling Osama bin Laden "potentially the most dangerous man in the world," more than a decade before the September 11 attacks. Kiriakou has recounted that the CIA nonetheless struggled to get permission to act against bin Laden: when the agency located him and sought authorization to capture or kill him, President Clinton reportedly asked "Has he been indicted?" and, absent formal charges, declined to authorize action. After bin Laden was later expelled from Sudan, Qatari authorities allowed him to continue flying commercially to Afghanistan through the transit lounge of Doha airport, reasoning that with no criminal charges pending against him, he had to be let on the plane.

Merger and legacy

In 1997 the Office of Leadership Analysis was folded into the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis. Briefing the incoming office director, who knew nothing about the Middle East, on bin Laden, one analyst was met with the dismissive question "You bin Lein? Why should I care about this guy?" Kiriakou has separately noted that bin Laden's father, Abd Rahman bin Laden, had 114 sons.

Briefing the Israelis, last

Kiriakou describes the shape of a full liaison briefing from the bottom of the room. At the March 1990 session, the first he ever gave, and the first foreign service he was declared to, there were about eleven briefers: the political analyst, the economic analyst, the military analyst, the oil analyst, an overhead-imagery specialist who came over from the Navy Yard, and the rest. As the junior-most analyst he went last, working from a script he had been given. His own line was the Iraqi leadership: "I was the Iraq leadership analyst in the Office of Leadership Analysis", which meant, he says, that what he did all day was write psychological profiles of the Iraqi leadership.

Several years later he left the office through the analyst overseas programme, which transferred analysts to the State Department to serve a rotation as foreign service officers; Kiriakou went to Bahrain, while two colleagues who had married each other went together to Jerusalem, the couple whose posting became the harassment campaign he has described since.

The offer

After passing the second battery of tests, Kiriakou was interviewed at headquarters by several offices, in both operations and intelligence. Exactly one made an offer, and it came from "the office that was founded by my grad school professor." He entered the Office of Leadership Analysis as an Iraq analyst in the first week of January 1990.

See also

- Jerrold Post
- John Kiriakou
- CIA
