James Bond
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James Bond is the myth that shadows every real intelligence career, including John Kiriakou's, from the Christmas presents he asked for as a boy to the language federal prosecutors used against him thirty-five years later.

Wanting to be Bond

Asked whether he wanted to be James Bond as a kid, Kiriakou's answer is yes. At nine he told his parents he wanted to be a spy when he grew up; they thought it was cute and bought him walkie-talkies, a box with disappearing ink and a little code reader for Christmas. He kept logs of what the neighbor kids were doing.

He was still serious about it at sixteen, in a conversation he can still place on the road, driving down Old Plank Road past Frazier's Pond with a father who wanted him to take a science degree. "I said, but dad, I'm not interested in science. I want to be a spy in the Middle East. And he said, why? After all these years, can't you just get this out of your system?" The supply was television: Bond films and the spy comedy Get Smart. "I really believed I was going to be James Bond. And in a lot of ways I was. We all were."

He loved the movies, the subterfuge, the excitement, and remembers the recruitment-era thrill of working against Soviet communism as "a James Bond kind of thing... of course that turned out to be ridiculous." The pull is institutional, not just personal: "It's in operations where everybody wants to be James Bond, and in some cases they actually achieve that," aspiring to the handful of legendary senior officers with many recruitments. Asked directly whether the Bond aspect brings in a lot of recruits, his answer is "oh, very much so", and the justification he offers is not glamour but itinerary: 65 countries in fourteen and a half years, several overseas tours totalling about five years abroad, and two attempts on his life, which he says is not unusual for an officer working counterterrorism. Training delivered a taste: airplanes, mini-subs from the ocean depths, a shot-out windscreen that made him think "this is awesome", along with surveillance and surveillance detection, counterterrorist driving and a multitude of weapons. The way in, he notes, is no longer like that at all, since 1993 it has been "far less sexy and clandestine", a matter of going to the CIA's website and clicking apply.

The reality audit

Rating Hollywood counterterrorism scenes, Kiriakou is blunt: "Literally none of that is true to life, but that's what makes you love James Bond." Almost no officers carry weapons; a post must be rated high or critical threat, and in his whole career he was armed only in Athens and Pakistan. Shooting one's way through a parliament is "just not real life." But one Bond staple he certifies: James always runs into the CIA officer at the embassy party, "that happens every day in real life. We always see each other and say hello."

The franchise even reached the org chart: the CIA's venture capital arm named itself In-Q-Tel, the Q inserted "as kind of a wink-wink nod to Q from the James Bond movies", a piece of self-conscious cuteness Kiriakou reports with amusement in more than one telling.

Who is James Bond?

The character has also been used as a diagnostic instrument, and Kiriakou reports the results on himself and his colleagues with visible discomfort. A New Mexico State University professor, Peter Jonason, published a paper titled Who is James Bond? finding that successful intelligence officers share a triumvirate of traits: "the stratospheric self-esteem of narcissism, the fearlessness, ruthlessness, impulsivity and thrill-seeking of psychopathy, and the deceitfulness and exploitiveness of Machiavellianism." His response is two words: "that's a little harsh."

He sets it against what a CIA psychiatrist told him, which points the other way: the agency does not want sociopaths, who are too hard to control, but people comfortable working in ethical, moral and legal grey areas, "I had no problem bending some rules if it was in the interest of national security." And an actual psychopath, on the definition he quotes, seeks reward at any cost and elbows risk aside, which is the opposite of the job: the officer "tries to get the job done while not making waves or attracting undue attention."

What became of Bond

Kiriakou uses the figure once more as a measure of decline, in the case of the MI6 officer he says he ran an operation with in London in the 1990s, Christopher Steele, at the time "the guy at MI6 that all the other MI6 guys wanted to be, that's how highly respected he was." His theory is that Steele "went from the James Bond kind of officer that every MI6 guy wanted to be to this caricature" not through any change in the man but through the loss of the machinery around him: inside a service, an operations officer passes whatever he collects to analysts who sort the rubbish from the possible, and the golden-showers claim would have died there for want of corroboration. In private practice there were no analysts.

The myth was finally turned on him. Describing how prosecutors work to deny a defendant bail, Kiriakou says that when they came after him "they talked about me like I was 007, you know, he's been to too many countries, he's worked for agencies, we can't..." He got bail; it was set at $250,000.

See also

- In-Q-Tel
- Sociopathic tendencies
- Counterterrorist driving
- Christopher Steele dossier
- CIA
- John Kiriakou
