Intelligence peddlers
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Intelligence peddlers occupy the middle band of John Kiriakou's taxonomy of people who volunteer information to an intelligence service.

The taxonomy is not abstract for him. After returning to CIA headquarters he was assigned to the Counterterrorism Center as chief of counterintelligence in the Osama bin Laden unit, and the job in that capacity was precisely this sorting problem: out of everybody walking into American embassies around the world saying "I'm a member of al-Qaeda. If you give me a million dollars, I'll give you Bin Laden," to determine which were liars, which were intelligence peddlers going from embassy to embassy to make money, which were probes counting the security cameras, and which were the real McCoy.

Volume

How often the problem arises depends entirely on the post. In Islamabad there were walk-ins every single day, sometimes several in one day; at other embassies Kiriakou worked in, the post might see three or four in a year. Athens was busy enough that his very first walk-in arrived within an hour of his first day in the office, the city being a major crossroads for Arab terrorist groups.

The distribution

Kiriakou's figures move a little between tellings, 95 per cent, 96 per cent, 99 per cent, but the shape does not. The overwhelming majority are, in his words, lunatics, fabricators and liars simply seeing whether they can get money out of you. A further slice are probes, Iranian, Russian, Chinese or North Korean visitors pretending to be volunteers while establishing where the cameras are, how thick the glass is, where the armored door sits, how many people are armed and how far into the building they can get before being stopped, against the day somebody decides to attack the embassy. Those are the ones that frighten the service most.

The peddler

The peddlers are the band in between: people who genuinely do hold a small nugget of real information. Kiriakou's stock illustration is the dishwasher in a restaurant who overhears something worth hearing. They bring it in, ask for money, and are paid, the figure he quotes varies with the telling, from twenty dollars to a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred or five hundred.

What makes it a trade rather than a transaction is what happens next. The same nugget goes to the British embassy and MI6, then the French embassy and the DGSE, then the Israelis, the Turks, the Canadians, the Germans, the Russians and the Chinese in turn. Kiriakou's arithmetic on the result escalates across tellings, a month's salary, a year's salary, "a year's worth of money in three days", and he does not begrudge it: "That's a good life for something you picked up at the coffee house."

The real McCoy, and the rule

The remaining one per cent are what he calls the real McCoy, fewer than one in a hundred, the nuclear scientist, the three-star general who took the day off, "somebody really great who you would never encounter in your day-to-day life." Kiriakou cites the old Soviet hands for why that residue matters more than its size suggests: the greatest sources in the history of the CIA were walk-ins, because they were people deep in a military leadership or a nuclear program whom an officer would otherwise never reach, whose names were not even known, and who simply arrived at the office and offered to work for the Americans.

That distribution produces the working rule. Because the genuine article is rare and unannounced, there is a protocol and it has to be taken seriously every time, "you have to treat everybody equally just in case it's that one out of the hundred that's gonna make your career."

The same taxonomy carried a practical edge in the field. When a friendly Western service passed word of a walk-in reporting a large group of al-Qaeda fighters in a brightly painted house, Kiriakou asked to speak to the walk-in and was refused, which told him there was no walk-in at all, and that the allied service was concealing a telephone intercept to protect its own equities. The house was in Faisalabad.

See also

- Walk-in
- The walk-in who was a probe
- Asset acquisition cycle
- Chief of station
- Faisalabad
