The car pickup meeting
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A car pickup, or CPU, is the technique by which a case officer collects an agent without the meeting being observed. Kiriakou describes the sequence: the officer runs a surveillance detection route to reach a specified intersection "on a black road. Black meaning not a main road, so nobody can see you", makes a quick right turn, and "the agent jumps in your car, and ducks down, and you continue on. So, even if you are being followed, nobody saw the agent get in your car."

The French incident

Instructed to meet a French intelligence officer, Kiriakou telephoned and proposed lunch. The Frenchman instead named an intersection, "I'm like, okay, that's odd", and Kiriakou went, only to find a car turning off a side street and the officer telling him to jump in.

He refused, and the refusal was about status rather than security: "you set me up for a car pickup meeting?... I am not your asset. We're colleagues. I said, I'm walking down to this restaurant down here. I'll meet you there, but I'm not getting in your car. I'm offended." Asked why the offence, his explanation is that the technique itself carries the insult, the whole apparatus is designed for a recruited agent, and the meeting was to discuss a joint operation between services: "Well, buddy, we're having lunch to discuss some joint operation. I'm not getting in your car. Yeah, I'm not your recruited asset."

Bumping into the competition

The anecdote comes from a broader answer about foreign services, in which Kiriakou confirms that a film cliché is accurate: "you know the scene in every James Bond movie where James bumps into the CIA guy... that's in all the movies is because that happens every single day." His illustration of the etiquette is a pair of greetings and a warning off, "Hello, John. Hello, Nigel... Stay away from the Deputy Prime Minister, Nigel. He's mine." It happened to him in Kuwait, where he and a British officer were pursuing the same target: "He comes up to me, he's like, hello John. I said, hello Ian."

See also

- CIA liaison relationships
- The liaison class
