The election day 1992 poll
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Asked whether there are political views shared by nearly everyone at the CIA, Kiriakou gave one, and then spent longer dismantling the assumption behind the question.

The one view he says was universal concerned Israel: "the one political view that everybody shared is we all just hated the Israelis. All of us." He immediately separates sentiment from practice, noting that hating them and being forced to work with them are two different things, and that the agency was forced to work with them. "But nobody liked or respected the Israelis." 

The assumption

On domestic politics, Kiriakou says he had assumed his colleagues were conservatives, and that he was wrong. The reason he could be wrong for so long is that the subject never came up: "we never ever ever talked about politics. It just was not a thing. It was not a part of the CIA culture." Who the president was did not matter, in his account, "We were there to serve the American people." 

The show of hands

By election day 1992 Kiriakou had been at the agency for almost three years. He describes the office voting habit as a practical one: most of them voted early in the morning, because there was no telling when the day would get busy, a question from the president, a briefing, a stay until midnight. 

His branch chief then did something Kiriakou calls bold. "I know we're not supposed to do this," the branch chief said, "but I'm really curious as to who everybody voted for." Kiriakou's reaction was that this was a genuine transgression, and that he had no idea of the ideologies of the people he sat three feet away from. 

They went round the room. The count, as Kiriakou gives it, was three for Bush, three for Clinton, and two for Perot. 

The reaction

What Kiriakou reports feeling was shock, and he is precise about the source of it: "I was shocked by it because I just assumed I was the only progressive."  The anecdote functions in his telling as a correction to an outside picture of the agency as ideologically uniform, an evenly split room, in a workplace where the split had never once been discussed. 

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- Mormons in intelligence
- The scholar-in-residence pipeline
