The prostitute hypothetical
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The prostitute hypothetical is a teaching exercise John Kiriakou has said he uses when lecturing at colleges and universities. Its subject is the absence of ethical guidance in CIA operational work.

The premise

Kiriakou asks his audience to imagine themselves as a CIA operations officer who has recruited a bona fide terrorist, a member of ISIS, Hezbollah or al-Qaeda; he says the affiliation does not matter. The source has provided actionable intelligence that has been used to disrupt attacks and save American lives. On a subsequent trip to the Middle East, the source tells the officer that he has given him everything he wanted, and that tonight the officer is going to do something for him: go out and get him a prostitute. If he does not, the source will stop talking. 

Kiriakou asks for a show of hands. He has said that roughly 80 per cent of an audience will raise a hand, and that he tells them they are right, in real life they probably would get him the prostitute. He describes it as not very nice and "a kind of a dirty business", but as the job they would have chosen for themselves. 

The second question

He then changes one term: what if the source asks for a child prostitute? By his account the room becomes uneasy, people look around, and about 10 per cent of hands go up. Kiriakou's own answer is absolute, not under any circumstances, "it's a child for God's sake." 

The point of the exercise

Kiriakou's conclusion is that the issue is not the answer but the absence of any rule to consult. He notes that an officer's job overseas is to break the law, to persuade people to commit espionage and to obtain classified or protected information, and that it is not to disrupt human trafficking. From that he draws the requirement that an officer must arrive with his own moral values already settled, because headquarters will not supply them: there is no employee rule, he says, numbered 305 or otherwise, forbidding the provision of child prostitutes.  

He has said flatly that when he was asked whether there were guidelines governing how sources could be recruited, the answer was no, financial guidelines existed, but nothing ethical or moral.  Elsewhere in the same conversation he links the failure to the occasional prosecutions of CIA employees for sexual assault or embezzlement, which he attributes to officers who cannot turn the tradecraft off and who lack a moral compass of their own. 

See also

- Security Finance And Medical
- Sociopathic Tendencies
- John Kiriakou
