The applicant who invented a CIA career
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John Kiriakou says he has met a great many people over the years who claim to have been with the CIA, and that "you can spot them from a mile away because they get the lingo wrong." His standing illustration is an interview he conducted himself.

The lunch

After leaving the CIA he worked in competitive and business intelligence. A man applied for a job whose résumé said he had been a CIA officer. Kiriakou thought they might have friends in common and took him to lunch to see whether he was any good.

Two questions

The first was neutral. Kiriakou said it was not clear from the résumé whether he had been from the Directorate of Operations or the Directorate of Intelligence, and asked where he had worked.

"Oh, both. I was I was both."

"Well, that's kind of impossible. You have to be from one or the other."

"I was operations."

"Oh, okay. So where did you work?"

"Oh, I was counterterrorism."

"Well, that's great. I was counterterrorism. What division were you in?"

The blank look

"And he just looked at me with this blank, this blank. And I said, you made all this up, didn't you? And he's like, I'm really sorry. I really need this job. And I said, okay, thanks. Nice meeting you. And that was the end of it."

The tell

The diagnostic Kiriakou generalises from the episode is that impostors reach for vocabulary that sounds classified and means nothing. Of a television commentator later exposed as never having been with the agency, he notes the claimed title, "outside paramilitary special operations", and observes that "those are just meaningless words. There is no such position." It sounds intriguing, "but it doesn't mean anything."

He gives a second example from the same private-sector period: a colleague who wanted very badly to be a CIA officer, finally got in as a contractor, and when asked what he was doing over there answered that it was "pretty hush-hush, but it's special intel ops, uh, support, uh, special weapons and tactics." Kiriakou's reply, "dude, you make yourself sound like a fool", rests on the same point: none of those words mean anything.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Spotting a CIA impostor
- The Fox News military analyst
- The Directorate of Operations
- CIA directorates
