PricewaterhouseCoopers
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PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is the Big Four firm that appears in John Kiriakou's story from three unlikely directions.

Target, then audience

In his post-CIA corporate job, Kiriakou's assignment was to collect first-person human-source intelligence on his employer's competitors, Ernst & Young, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and consulting rivals like IBM and Accenture. The competitive stakes were concrete: a $50 million deal could turn on PwC undercutting a bid by four million.

When his first book came out around early 2010, PwC hired him to keynote an offsite for 140 partners. He told them the story of the al-Qaeda fighter he recruited in Pakistan by treating him like a human being, and landed the moral: "What I did and what you do really isn't that different, because it's all about the relationship. If I can convince somebody to commit espionage... just because he has a good relationship with me, you can certainly" close a deal.

The audits

PwC anchors two of Kiriakou's favorite indictments. First, the Pentagon: brought in to externally audit the defense budget, PwC tried for three years and gave up, "we can't find where this money went." For Kiriakou, the unaccountable trillion-dollar budget is one of America's major mistakes. Second, Greece: as the Greek government's auditor, PwC had been falsifying economic records for years, with Goldman Sachs involved, and in the end nobody from PwC, Goldman, or the government was ever prosecuted, while Greeks were left indebted for generations.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Mahmud (alias)
- CIA
