The Farm
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This article is about the CIA clandestine training facility. For other uses of "the farm," see disambiguation.

The Farm is the colloquial name for the Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine training facility, located in Virginia. Almost all operational training for CIA case officers takes place at the Farm; approximately 80% of CIA training overall is conducted there, with the remaining 20% taking place at specialized sites including a bomb-training facility and additional advanced driving and weapons ranges in the western desert.

The facility spans several thousand acres and contains dormitories, classrooms, vehicle tracks, and shooting ranges. "Anything you need to do you can do at the Farm." Kiriakou separately describes it as "an absolutely enormous facility. It's well over a thousand acres," with mock towns and villages built for scenario training in addition to the driving tracks, dormitories, and an officers' club; armed operations trainees were given private rooms, while analyst trainees had to share. He describes it elsewhere as the CIA's primary training site, well over a thousand acres, most of it wilderness, where virtually all CIA training takes place, from the new analyst course through counterterrorist operations and leadership classes. He also refers to it simply as "the Farm, its famed training facility in the Virginia countryside."

Curriculum

Kiriakou says a trainee hired straight out of graduate school typically spends a solid 18 months at the Farm going through "CIA 101" rotational assignments, six months on the Iran desk, six months on the nuclear desk, six weeks on Russia, and so on. Because he was already mid-career and knew how the agency worked, he skipped those rotations and went straight into operational (weapons) training, the first phase of which lasted about four months.

Operational training at the Farm includes:

- Counterterrorist driving, known colloquially as crash and bang because trainees crash cars and fire weapons
- Weapons qualifications across a range of firearms
- Airborne training, including parachute jumps from aircraft
- Asset recruitment exercises, "the nuts and bolts: how to recruit spies to steal secrets"
- Surveillance and surveillance-detection routes
- Various scenario-based judgement exercises

Elicitation and recruitment role-play

Trainees in the Operations Course were taught that if something particularly useful surfaced during an elicitation meeting, they should excuse themselves to the restroom to write a secret note capturing it, a technique from the era before cell phones could serve the same purpose. In Kiriakou's own exercise, a role-played elicitation target, a Cypriot import-export businessman, revealed he had Parkinson's disease, and Kiriakou built rapport by noting that his own father had the same condition. A second lunch, at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, paired him with a role-player obsessed with ancient Greece who quoted Plato and claimed to have read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey twenty times each. Agency rule for these operational lunches: the CIA pays for one drink, and anything beyond that comes out of the trainee's own pocket. Kiriakou's instructor for the exercise was a very senior, semi-retired former officer who had directed Near East operations and critiqued each trainee's cables, meeting conduct, and even clothing afterward.

His actual recruitment target in the exercise was a Turkish-American woman working for her Cypriot brother's import-export company, who confided she feared for her safety over suspicious middle-of-the-night pickups; a mystery chemical name overheard at lunch, "hydrodextrochloromethorophan", was cabled back to headquarters and identified as a precursor chemical for making cocaine. Kiriakou recruited her, intercepted the simulated drug shipment, and produced both an intelligence report and an operational cable to headquarters.

A failed exercise in the operational phase is disqualifying: a trainee who fails an exercise once cannot be deployed overseas.

Before GPS and Google Earth existed, trainees built surveillance detection routes by cutting up large paper Rand McNally map books, photocopying pages, and taping them together. A separate "hostile border crossing" exercise began at 4 a.m. at Dulles Airport before it opened to the public, simulating arrival in a fictional hostile country called the Republic of Victoria; Kiriakou bluffed his way past a mock hostile border guard who'd found a US government pen in his pocket by claiming he'd picked it up in a rental car's glove compartment, while another trainee, the "class clown" who drew unwanted attention, was caught and stripped down to his underwear by the mock guards.

Counterterrorist driving

Driving is one of the most extensively trained skills at the Farm. Among the documented exercises:

The blindfold ambush

The trainee is placed in the driver's seat of a vehicle while wearing a blindfold, with an instructor steering the vehicle slowly down the track. The instructor removes the blindfold without warning. The trainee then has two seconds to react to one of two possible ambush configurations:

- Two attacker vehicles positioned to form a "V" opening toward the trainee, the correct response is to accelerate and crash through the gap
- Two attacker vehicles positioned to form a "V" closing on the trainee, the correct response is to immediately reverse, because attempting to drive forward will wedge the vehicle and result in a kill shot

Simultaneously, a third attacker armed with an AK-47 attempts to open the driver's-side door. The exercise is repeated three times; "you fuck it up one time, you're dead."

Door discipline

Standard doctrine drilled at the Farm: always lock the door. The lock buys the operator one to two seconds of additional time against a carjacker, kidnapper, or armed approach at a stop sign or red light, "all you need to get off the dime." The lesson was reinforced by a kidnapping-simulation exercise in which an instructor simply opened Kiriakou's unlocked car door and announced he'd been "kidnapped"; Kiriakou says the drill instilled a lifelong habit, "the first thing I do, still, every time I get in the car, I put my seatbelt on, I lock the door and then I start the car in that order." More than two decades after leaving the CIA, he says he still instinctively checks his mirrors for surveillance: "I've been out of the CIA for 21 years and I still have my head on a swivel looking at the side view mirrors and the rear view mirror."

Gun-and-car marriage

In a later exercise, instructors remotely kill the engine of the trainee's vehicle while the trainee is driving on a track using live ammunition. The trainee must drift to the side, take incoming fire from automated shooting robots equipped with black-and-white ring targets that rotate to present and conceal themselves, crawl from the driver's side to the passenger side, exit, and engage the targets from a prone position.

In one variation, a target robot fires from inside a van whose sliding door has opened. Kiriakou, unable to obtain a clean shot at the robot from a covered position, stood up and shot out his own windshield to obtain the firing angle. The instructor's response: "You passed, but damn it Kiriakou, you just cost me $900 in broken windshields." Kiriakou has recounted a similar car-based exercise elsewhere: his engine remotely disabled and unable to get a clear shot at a robot target, he instead shot out his own car's windows, prompting the exasperated instructor to shout, "Damn it, Carriacou! That was the last decent car we had. It was a Ford Taurus." A separate roadblock-ramming exercise left him seriously injured when his seat detached from the floor of a beater training car and he smashed his knees against the dashboard, an injury that led, roughly sixteen years later, to a diagnosis of spontaneous osteonecrosis and a titanium knee replacement.

The "Adam-12" stoplight test

A trainee approaches three red traffic lights in three adjacent lanes at speed. One second before the trainee reaches the intersection, one of the three lights turns green. The trainee must swerve into that lane. Passing through a red light is a failure; failure is disqualifying for overseas deployment.

Advanced driving

A small number of trainees who demonstrate strong performance are sent for additional advanced counterterrorist driving in the Nevada desert, where the curriculum includes operation over sand dunes and recovery from immobilization in sand.

Weapons training

The weapons curriculum begins with elementary handling for trainees who have never used a firearm; advanced phases include rocket launchers, grenade launchers, vehicle destruction with explosives, and night shooting. Trainees in Kiriakou's era were issued Browning pistols and heavy leather gun belts during firearms training, required to be worn at all times except in bed or the shower. At the start of his own weapons class, Kiriakou was the only trainee, out of about a dozen, who had never owned or touched a real gun; he was issued a bright orange rubber training gun for the first couple of days before receiving a real one. He went on to test first for accuracy in the class, and an instructor recommended he pursue competitive shooting, favoring the pump-action 12-gauge shotgun.

A standard scenario-based assessment is the shooting gallery: the trainee stands with weapon drawn while an instructor stands directly behind them with a hand on their shoulder. Targets pop up in windows, an armed man with a machine gun should be engaged immediately; a woman holding a baby should not be engaged. Misidentifying a non-combatant target is disqualifying. A related "shooting house" drill gave trainees roughly three-quarters of a second to distinguish hostile targets from civilians, including a woman holding a baby, firing paintballs; Kiriakou says he "aced it every single time."

An elderly, chew-tobacco-chewing instructor taught Kiriakou the Remington pump-action 12-gauge shotgun, citing three virtues, buckshot lethality, ease of loading, firing, and cleaning, and "it makes that bitchin' sound." His performance on the range impressed the instructor enough to suggest a second career: "this is gonna sound crazy, but I think you could be a competitive skeet shooter." Kiriakou went on to compete at shooting clubs around the Washington, D.C. area, including in Warm Springs, Virginia.

Scenario-based judgement exercises

The flea-bag hotel

Trainees rotate through a constructed scenario representing a low-quality hotel room in El Salvador, a single table and chair on a Hollywood-quality set. The trainee sits at the table. There is a knock at the door, and on opening it the trainee sees two men, one holding a vacuum cleaner and announcing "housekeeping, señor." The trainee, naturally, refuses housekeeping. The second man then produces a pistol and fires two paint pellets at the trainee's chest.

The instructor's debrief: "If you're in a shit-hole motel in a shit-hole country and two people just walk into your room, kill them."

In Kiriakou's class of eight trainees, all eight failed this exercise. After failing, trainees were forbidden to describe the exercise to others in the rotating cohort.

The lesson, that perceived threats should be neutralized rather than negotiated with, became operationally important to Kiriakou on at least two later occasions, when he drew his weapon preemptively against situations he assessed could become threatening within ten seconds.

Graduation

Trainees graduated the operations course wearing full disguises for the class photo and received a certificate that, being classified, must remain in their personnel file rather than be displayed.

Advanced courses beyond the Farm

Beyond the Farm itself, Kiriakou took a week-long CIA "bomb course" at a separate agency facility referred to only as "the base," which began with basic chemistry and progressed from the construction of a Molotov cocktail, the most basic weapon in the curriculum, to a final exam in which trainees built and detonated their own explosive. He has described the same structure elsewhere: the class starts with a Molotov cocktail, and the final exam, at the end of the week, requires building a bomb of one of the designs taught during the week and using it to blow up a car. For his final exam, Kiriakou built an ammonium nitrate/fuel oil (ANFO) device, the same type of bomb Timothy McVeigh used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, from commercial fertilizer and diesel fuel, planted it under a van, and detonated it; the blast threw the van's transmission 300 yards into the woods.

He later took two further courses: Advanced Counter-Terrorist Driving in a western desert, and a six-week Advanced Counter-Terrorism Operations course for which he was one of only about a dozen CIA officers selected agency-wide, finishing just before the September 11 attacks. He also took a leadership class at the Farm, sometimes a day, sometimes six months, depending on the course, and says he came away having learned that the CIA has no real method for identifying potential leaders, despite believing it does: "they think they do, but they're winging it."

An instructor at the Farm once told Kiriakou's class that his own best recruitment ever was not a prime minister but a copy-machine repairman who serviced the prime minister's office, since every time the bugged copier made a copy, it also transmitted a copy back to CIA headquarters.

Sociopathic tendencies as a hiring criterion

Kiriakou states that the CIA "actively seeks to hire people with sociopathic tendencies", the same ease with the polygraph he separately attributes to Mormons in intelligence, because the ability to dissociate from feelings and convincingly inhabit false identities is operationally valuable: "If you believe that you are the good guy and you're doing this for patriotic reasons and you can flip that switch on and off on your personality and you're a chameleon where you can adapt to these different situations, you're going to have a successful career in espionage."

The practical risk: sociopaths can also "blow right through a polygraph exam and not react to it in any way," meaning they pass screening undetected and can "work their way to the top of the ladder on the backs of the people around them", the same dynamic Kiriakou observes in the corporate world.

Kiriakou attributes his own decision to blow the whistle on the torture program to the fact that he does not have these tendencies: "That's why I blew the whistle, cuz I'm not a sociopath."

The disguise and forgery specialists

Kiriakou separately describes meeting, on his first day at the agency, two future specialists in the CIA's disguise program: a woman recruited from a beauty academy to become a master disguise maker, and a man recruited off cartoons he had drawn for his college newspaper to become a master forger.

The vacuum-cleaner exercise

Among the counterterrorist operations courses John Kiriakou took at the Farm was an exercise staged in a mock-up of a seedy zero-star Central American hotel, a cot, a table, a chair, bugs and rats.

There was a knock at the door. Kiriakou asked who it was and did not say come in; two men walked in anyway, one holding up a vacuum cleaner, both speaking rapidly in Spanish. He kept eye contact with the man holding the vacuum cleaner. The second man came around from behind and shot him three times in the chest with a paintball gun.

The instruction that followed was the point of the exercise: when you ask who it is and they walk in anyway, "Your job is to open fire", and get off the X.

He was sent back to the van with three paint marks over his heart and told not to say what had happened. Seven other students were waiting; one by one, all eight were killed in the exercise. "It's a lesson I will never ever forget. Ever. And I never allowed myself to be in a situation like that ever again."

Six months of writing training

Alongside the operational curriculum, Kiriakou describes a purely stylistic course on the analytic side: "at the CIA, on the analytic side, you go through six months of writing training at the CIA's famed training facility called the Farm."

The purpose is uniformity rather than quality. "They do that because they want every CIA analyst to write in exactly the same style, so that when the president reads the PDB, the President's Daily Brief, every morning, no matter who wrote it, it looks exactly the same."

Kiriakou treats that training as a forensic tool. His reason for doubting that the Ukraine call complaint was written by a CIA analyst was that "it is not in that CIA DI writing style. It's in a style of attorneys."

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- Case officer
- Counterterrorist driving
- John Kiriakou
- The Reluctant Spy
