The ayatollah and the photographs
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Asked whether American agencies search for compromising material on friendly countries in case leverage is needed later, John Kiriakou said the practice had already been on the way out when he joined, and gave the training anecdote used to explain why.

The doctrinal answer

Kiriakou said the agency was "trending away from that when I first started," and that he had put the question directly during operational training in the late 1990s. An instructor's answer was that the technique had been adopted in imitation: "we only did that because the Russians did it so frequently, but we've found that it's just not really good for source development."

The reasoning offered was operational rather than moral. An agent who is being threatened or blackmailed will not perform, Kiriakou said; "he's going to do it because he loves you and you're his best friend, or you're giving him so much money that he just can't say no." His conclusion, stated twice in the passage, is simply: "compromat doesn't work."

The story itself

The instructors illustrated the rule with a specific failure. Kiriakou said one of them told the class about "hiring a prostitute who lured an Iranian ayatollah", and was careful to add the qualification the instructor had made, that this was "not a senior one. There are thousands of ayatollahs in Iran." He dated it to around the time of the revolution.

The operation itself went to plan: "she took him into a hotel room that was wired for audio and video. They had sex. The CIA took dozens of pictures of him." The pitch came later, when the cleric travelled to another country in the region and was confronted with the photographs.

His reply is the point of the story. In Kiriakou's rendering the ayatollah said: "Nice work. I'll take two of those in 8×10 and give me three of those in 5×7, and, oh, can I have this one on a slide so I can put it on my wall?" He then told the officers: "You people, what's the matter with you people? You're not going to compromise me."

The conclusion drawn

"That was kind of the end of compromise for the CIA," Kiriakou said. "It just doesn't work." Asked what actually happens when the technique is attempted, his answer was that the target simply refuses, publish and be damned.

The story functions in training as a warning about a category error: the operation succeeded at every technical step and failed at the only one that mattered, because it assumed a shame the target did not have.

Kiriakou's separate account of what trainees were formally taught about blackmail in recruitment is treated elsewhere and reaches the same conclusion by a different route.

See also

- Blackmail in agent recruitment
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Nine Recruitments In Twenty Five Years
- John Kiriakou
