Narcotics under cover
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Narcotics under cover is the subject of a question put to John Kiriakou by a viewer of his Q&A programme: while operating under cover, if a valuable asset invites the officer to take drugs, is he permitted to do so in order to establish that he is not the police?

Kiriakou's answer was immediate and unqualified. "The answer is yes. You may partake of the drugs."

The rule's origin

What follows is a history rather than a policy citation. "This all started way back in the day in Yemen," Kiriakou says, and the substance concerned was qat, a shrub whose leaves are chewed green every afternoon by, in his account, effectively every man in the country. Because a source could not be developed by an officer sitting out the national ritual, the CIA issued "special dispensation to every officer working in Yemen or in other qat-chewing countries like Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea."

The rationale Kiriakou gives for the original dispensation is social rather than pharmacological: "you've got to do it to fit in."

The harder case

Kiriakou then extends the rule to substances that are unambiguously narcotics and to postings where the stakes are higher. "Now, if you're deep undercover in Colombia or Mexico or Peru or Ecuador and you need to snort a line, they're going to let you snort a line."

The justification changes with the setting. Where qat was a matter of fitting in, cocaine in a deep-cover setting is a matter of survival: "It could be a matter of life and death. So, you're going to snort the line."

Kiriakou's own reaction to the question

Kiriakou marks the exchange as unusual. "Nobody's ever asked me that question before. Good question," he says, a note that places the subject among the parts of operational life that are routine inside the organisation and almost never discussed outside it.

The answer sits alongside the general position he takes in the same session on the relative morality of intelligence services: that the CIA's conduct is not constrained in the ways outsiders assume, and that most other countries' services behave better.

See also

- Qat in Yemen
- More Moral Than The Cia
- CIA Drug Facilitation
- Cover position
