Walk-in
=======

A walk-in is, in John Kiriakou's account, someone who literally walks into an embassy and offers information to an intelligence officer. About 95% are "lunatics or liars"; others are "intelligence peddlers" who sell a small nugget to the CIA, then the British, French, Russians and Chinese in turn; and some are hostile "probes" casing the embassy's defenses. Only about 1% are "the real McCoy." During the Abu Zubaydah hunt, a friendly service claimed a "walk-in" had reported al-Qaeda fighters in a big yellow house; when told the walk-in was "not available," Kiriakou knew there was no walk-in, it was a phone intercept the ally would not admit to.

Kiriakou has given similar breakdowns across many retellings. On his first day in the Athens CIA office, he handled a walk-in within the hour and says roughly 96% of walk-ins are outright lunatics. Besides the lunatics, he distinguishes "intelligence peddlers," who sell small kernels of real information to multiple embassies for cash, from "probes", people sent by hostile services such as Iran, Russia, China or North Korea to case an embassy's security in preparation for a possible future attack. He has cited studies putting the ratio at 95 out of 100 walk-ins being mentally ill people acting on delusions, such as a chip in their tooth telling them to act, with probes and a small genuine minority making up the rest.

Because he spoke Arabic and other languages, Kiriakou was the designated walk-in officer in Pakistan. One Pakistani walk-in gave him intelligence that led to three consecutive failed raids, each time explaining away the miss, before he ultimately admitted he had personally fired a shoulder-mounted rocket at the American Embassy in 1995. Kiriakou also recalls being ordered to fly to Sudan the same day he returned from a trip to Yemen because a walk-in source there was considered too sensitive to hand off, and he was the only Arabic speaker available.

The hypnotized walk-in: an assassination witness

John Kiriakou described a genuine walk-in, someone who walked into an American embassy claiming to have witnessed a terrorist assassination. His account: he had pulled off a highway to urinate, parked behind a banyan tree at an abandoned church, and while relieving himself watched a van pull up. The back doors opened. He saw two motorcycles and two men inside. He heard one man ask: "Does he still live?" The other replied: "He should be dead by now." After the van left, the men saw him and one punched him in the face. He told them he had seen nothing.

He sat with a sketch artist; his drawings were close to photographs the CIA had of suspected members of the target terrorist group. The FBI interviewed him and dismissed him as a fraud. The CIA took him back.

Kiriakou flew to London with two CIA psychologists, one of whom was a licensed hypnotist, and a second case officer. He had been skeptical of hypnosis; the psychologist told him that intelligent people go under much more quickly than others, a fact Kiriakou says he still doesn't fully understand. The CIA bought the witness a coat because he was too poor to own one in the London cold.

In a darkened hotel room, Kiriakou counted backwards in the witness's language, a demanding job for a translator, requiring absolute calm and very slow deliberate speech. The man went under before the count reached zero. The hypnotist had told him to raise his arm and not lower it until instructed. The arm remained in the air for three hours, in Kiriakou's characterization, "physically impossible for a conscious person."

Kiriakou asked the hypnotized witness to walk back through the scene: the exit ramp, the church, the banyan tree. Then: "Can you see a license plate on the van?" Eyes closed, the man said yes. "What does it say?" He read off the plate. Kiriakou wrote it down, handed it to his colleague, who went to the other room and called headquarters: "Run this plate ASAP." Headquarters immediately cabled the field. The plate came back stolen.

The witness then said under hypnosis: "They see me." He described being punched and went through the full three-hour account, details about the van's rust spots over the rear wheels, the motorcycles, the conversation between the men, filling in details he had not consciously recalled in his unassisted account.

In a separate retelling, John Kiriakou recounts flying a CIA psychologist and a hypnotist to meet the walk-in. Under hypnosis, the man held his arm in the air for four and a half hours and read off the license plate of the getaway van, which headquarters confirmed was a stolen plate. When the session ended, the man vomited and asked "what happened?"; the psychiatrist said, "I believe that he believes what he said." The case later collapsed when the same man produced a recording in which he "kidnapped" himself and claimed to be the interior minister leading the terrorist group.

The Athens rolling-meeting probe

In Athens, Kiriakou describes a security operation in which he and his boss picked up a walk-in claiming to be a terrorist informant outside a Marriott, riding in an armored car with a chase car and motorcycle escort while conducting a "rolling meeting" interrogation entirely in Arabic. Kiriakou explains the CIA's rough breakdown of walk-in informants: the vast majority are fabricators or "probes," roughly 5% are "intelligence peddlers" selling minor scraps of intelligence to multiple embassies simultaneously, and about 1% are genuine high-value sources, "the real McCoy." This particular walk-in was caught in a lie when he gave his name as "Muhammad Abdullah" one day and "Abdullah Muhammad" the next, confirming Kiriakou's suspicion the story was fabricated. Kiriakou's boss ultimately pulled a gun on the man mid-drive and ordered him out of the car, ending the interview; the man walked away and was picked up by a car from an unnamed rival embassy that had been surveilling the operation.

See also

- Abu Zubaydah
- Lie Detection
- John Kiriakou
- CIA
