Corporate competitive intelligence
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Corporate competitive intelligence is the private-sector application of intelligence collection that John Kiriakou moved into after resigning from the CIA in 2004.

Why he left

The reason he gives is domestic. "I left the CIA, as funny as it might sound, to spend more time with my children." An acrimonious divorce had taken his ex-wife and two sons to north-eastern Ohio to be near her parents, and he knew his career would shortly send him overseas again "to some place not family friendly, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, something like that." A friend knew somebody at Deloitte & Touche, which was looking for someone to head competitive intelligence in its Washington office. He applied, was offered the job within a couple of weeks, resigned from the agency and started the next day.

How the group was built

Kiriakou was "actually the fourth CIA guy that Deloitte & Touche had hired." The competitive intelligence group had been created on a simple design: hire former CIA officers, or others with experience in intelligence collection, and pair them with the firm's corporate research analysts "to collect and analyze intelligence on their competitors."

His own brief was collection rather than analysis: "my job was to collect first-person human source intelligence on Ernst & Young, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers and a myriad of consulting firms like IBM and Accenture and others."

The requirements

The targets are commercial but the shape is familiar. "We tried to steal their pricing models, or how they determine discounts. Or, interestingly, at least to me, we tried to figure out which of their partners were disgruntled, so we could steal them, provided that they were top producers."

The reason pricing matters he sets out as arithmetic: "if you're going to go into a bid with a price of 24 million dollars, let's say, we want to know that, so we can go in with a bid of 20 million dollars and win the job, because a 20 million dollar contract of course is better than a zero dollar contract." The full requirement list he gives is "the bidding process, it's discounts, it's disgruntled partners, it's plans to expand service lines or offerings, anything that might give you a corporate leg up."

Everybody does it

Asked whether the targets were doing the same back, his answer was "absolutely, to each other. They all have the same groups." Asked whether he was any good at it: "wildly, in some cases."

See also

- Deloitte Consulting Career
- John Kiriakou
- Central Intelligence Agency
