Fake CIA résumés
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Fake CIA résumés describes a screening task John Kiriakou performed in the private sector after leaving the agency, and the rate of fraud it turned up.

The dinner test

At the consulting firm Kiriakou joined after the CIA, every time somebody applied claiming CIA experience the firm asked him to take that person to dinner. His count is unambiguous: fully fifty per cent of the people who had the CIA on their résumés had never stepped a foot inside the agency. It was all made up.

The lunch that collapsed

Kiriakou has given one such interview in full. Working in competitive and business intelligence, he took a candidate to lunch, intending to find out whether the man was any good and whether they had friends in common.

He opened by saying the résumé did not make clear whether the man had come from the Directorate of Operations or the Directorate of Intelligence, and asked which. The man said both. Kiriakou pointed out that this is impossible, it has to be one or the other, and the man switched to operations. Asked where, he said counterterrorism. Kiriakou, who had himself served in counterterrorism, asked which division, and the man looked back at him blankly. Kiriakou said: you made all this up, didn't you. The man answered that he was sorry and that he really needed the job, and the lunch ended.

The contractor who wanted it too much

Kiriakou offers a companion case of embellishment rather than outright invention. He worked in the private sector with a man who, he says, wanted to be a CIA officer more desperately than anyone he ever met, and who eventually got himself in as a contractor. Asked what he actually did there, the man said it was hush-hush, but that it was special intel ops support, special weapons and tactics. Kiriakou told him he was making himself sound like a fool, because none of those words mean anything, and adds that one gets this a lot, especially in Washington.

The underlying test in all three cases is the same one set out in spotting a CIA impostor: the fraud is exposed not by a secret but by ordinary internal vocabulary that no outsider has occasion to learn.

See also

- Spotting a CIA impostor
- The Fox News military analyst
- Deloitte Consulting Career
- CIA directorates
