Rick Praau
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Rick Praau, the name as the source transcript's automatic captions render it, and possibly mis-transcribed, was a career CIA officer of more than thirty years whose retirement memoir John Kiriakou reviewed for Covert Action Magazine. Kiriakou worked briefly under him at the Counterterrorism Center, where he was chief of operations; before that he had served in the Special Activities Division, of which Kiriakou says the reader "can draw your own conclusions as to what they do for a living."

Working twenty feet away

Kiriakou says he had no idea of the man's reputation at the time. Before the promotion to chief of operations they sat about twenty feet apart and exchanged pleasantries every morning. "And finally I asked a colleague of mine, 'what exactly does he do here?' And my friend looked at me and he says, 'John, he works for the Special Activities Division. What do you think he does here?' And I was like, oh, okay. I knew not to ask any more questions."

The memoir

Kiriakou describes the book as "a very typical, normal CIA memoir." Its author emigrated from Cuba with his parents immediately after the revolution, fleeing communism, and the book conveys how viscerally he hates it, Kiriakou paraphrases the register as "I wanted to double tap those guys, we hung Marxists from the light posts, and even the dogs hated Marxists", which he calls "just silly." Roughly 120 pages cover Afghanistan, which Kiriakou says is "all fine and good."

What the review said was missing

Kiriakou's argument is about omission. "There have been credible reports in Florida newspapers and in Vanity Fair magazine that before joining the CIA, [he] was a hitman for the Medellín cartel", reports that he was investigated by Miami-Dade police over seven contract killings, "including the stepson of Meyer Lansky, who helped to found the modern American mafia with Lucky Luciano." On Kiriakou's account the tracks were covered well enough that Miami-Dade could never build a case, and he passed the polygraph into the CIA and had a long and successful career.

Kiriakou is explicit about the limits of his own claim: "I don't know if he was a hitman. I don't know if he was a drug trafficker. I don't know if he came to the CIA from the Medellín cartel", and later, "I'm speculating. I'm not saying that [he] was a drug trafficker, I'm not saying that he was a hitman. I'm saying there are reports out there saying he was."

What he does assert is a duty owed by the book: "if he's going to come out with a memoir that is celebrated in the Washington Post and the New York Times and CNN and Fox News, he at least owes the reader an explanation of what in the world he was doing for a living through the 1980s."

He connects the possibility to the agency's hiring doctrine rather than to any individual finding, restating the account he attributes to a CIA psychiatrist: the agency seeks people with sociopathic tendencies rather than sociopaths, and "the problem is, when you're looking for people who have sociopathic tendencies, the actual sociopaths frequently slip through the cracks."

See also

- Special Activities Division
- Sociopathic Tendencies
- Central Intelligence Agency
- John Kiriakou
