The spy shop
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The spy shop was a retailer headquartered in London, with a sister shop in New York and, briefly, one in Washington. John Kiriakou says he went in every time he passed through London to see what gadgets they had for sale, and bought small items, a pinhole camera, something of that sort, partly for fun. "We bought a lot of the equipment that we needed at the spy shop."

It was not a government supplier. "Any Joe off the street could walk in and buy stuff," and in Kiriakou's account the customers were mostly ordinary people buying for fun, along with a great many private investigators. Nor was it unique: he counts "like a half a dozen" such shops.

Why buy rather than build

The rationale he gives is economic, and he attributes it to his bosses rather than to himself: it is "so much faster, easier, and cheaper just to buy it commercially than it is to reinvent the wheel." Put as a sum: "Why spend a million dollars developing a tool when you can go to the spy shop and buy it for a thousand dollars?"

Where the shop could not supply, the answer was not a laboratory either. "Much of it was just from Radio Shack. We would just go buy the parts at Radio Shack and put stuff together." The equivalent today, he says, is Amazon, listening devices, hidden cameras, beacons, tracking devices, all of it available online.

The clearest measure of how far this went is his own most equipment-intensive posting: "I used more spy gadgets in my six months in Pakistan than I used in the rest of my entire career combined. And all of it but one gadget we purchased online. There was one that we made, and it took about two days to put it together."

What the CIA did develop

Kiriakou's answer on in-house invention is that he was largely outside it. DARPA's work, he says, was so highly classified that almost nobody at the CIA was cleared for any of it, and he had "literally zero interaction" with it.

What he did see was a story he tells as the agency's technology problem in miniature. At lunch on his first day, glancing out of a window into one of the CIA's interior courtyards, he saw a robot mowing the lawn. His boss's explanation was "yeah, we invent a lot of things here", and that they are not always sure what to do with what they invent, so it was mowing the lawn. Five years later, in Kiriakou's telling, the same machine was released as the Roomba, converted into a vacuum cleaner with the technology licensed out.

The friends who tried it as a business

Kiriakou has given two accounts of acquaintances who left finance or law for the gadget trade, and they end differently. One is a Washington attorney who quit law, moved to Southern California and opened a spy-gadget store and development shop, which lasted about five years, by the time an order arrived, the item was already outdated. The other is Glenn, a New York hedge-fund man "always fascinated with spycraft all of his life", who left Wall Street to open his own shop selling gear, made his money on home security systems and hidden cameras, and "ended up making a handsome living for himself."

Kiriakou has not been able to find the London shop since, and believes the business model was overtaken by the pace of technological change.

The broader answer

The episode is part of his broader answer on whether the CIA has James Bond gadgets: twenty or twenty-five years ago it did not, "we didn't have any of that, unfortunately", because buying what an operation needed was far easier and cheaper than building it. That changed after 9/11, when Congress gave the agency a waiver to invest in technology companies, including, as its first investor, Palantir.

He is candid that the field has since outrun him. Asked what is available now, his answer is that he has been out too long to know, and that with facial recognition and AI where they are, "I can't even imagine" how undercover officers cross borders or pass through airports successfully.

See also

- Palantir Technologies
- In-Q-Tel
- James Bond
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Spy films John Kiriakou considers accurate
