Nine recruitments in twenty-five years
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Asked how many agents a CIA case officer is normally expected to recruit, and what happens if months of work produce nothing, John Kiriakou answered by reproducing a conversation with his own station chief in Athens.

The numbers

The station chief, Kiriakou said, pulled him aside one day and set out his own record: "I've been an operations officer for 25 years, and in my 25 years I've recruited nine sources." That officer had reached senior intelligence service level four, a rank Kiriakou describes as "huge," a community leader of the intelligence community, on those nine.

He then put Kiriakou's figures beside his own: "You've been here two years and you recruited five people."

The character of the agents

Kiriakou is emphatic that the comparison is not only arithmetic. "Every one of those people was a badass," he said. "Let me tell you, dangerous criminals, killers." He drew the contrast explicitly with padding: "I wasn't recruiting safe housekeepers, little old ladies, to make sure that the safe house is nice and clean when you need to use it for a meeting. I recruited badasses."

The knack

Asked to account for it, Kiriakou said he had told the station chief: "it's the craziest thing, I just have a knack for it." The skill he identifies is concealment of feeling rather than charm. "I can well hide my disdain for a person. I may hate you, but you don't have any idea that I hate you, because we're talking about whatever it is that interests you."

He listed the range of subjects he was prepared to sustain, baseball, the founding of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who attended the Baader-Meinhof funerals, the theatre, FIFA, and summarised the method: "whatever you want to talk about, and I will make it look like I'm your best freaking friend. And that's why I was successful."

The counter-example

Kiriakou then supplied the other end of the distribution. He worked for a man who made GS-15, "the top grade in the GS scale, before you make it to senior service", knowing he would go no further. In twenty-five years that officer "made one recruitment. One. And it was a guy who reported on Spanish wheat harvests, when that used to be a thing back in the '80s."

Kiriakou's verdict, "he was a disaster, and he made it all the way up to GS-15 with one recruitment", leads to the answer he gives the original question: "if you have quality recruitments, you're going to do just fine." The measure, he says, is not the count. Ted Rall offered the analogy of a police officer writing traffic tickets to make a quota, and Kiriakou's account is a rejection of it.

See also

- Kiriakou's first recruitment
- The ayatollah and the photographs
- Blackmail in agent recruitment
- Ted Rall
