How the CIA kills
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Asked by a viewer what CIA killing actually looks like outside wartime, and who carries it out, John Kiriakou answered in operational detail, pausing first to note his own discomfort at the vocabulary he was about to use.

The framing

"They try to make it as clean as possible," Kiriakou said, and immediately interrupted himself: "I can't even believe I'm describing it like that." The self-correction is characteristic; he supplies the tradecraft and marks his distaste for it in the same breath.

He set up a deliberately hypothetical target, an order to kill "some Libyan cleric, I'm just making this up", so that no actual operation was being described.

The three methods

The first is an entry killing. A team is sent in at night, parachuting "to wherever, 10 miles away." They steal a car and drive to the target's house. Somebody "from the agency's locks and picks team" opens the door discreetly, the team goes in, and with suppressors fitted "they'll just assassinate the guy." The detail Kiriakou volunteers, a dedicated locks-and-picks capability travelling with the team, is the one that marks the account as institutional rather than cinematic.

The second is a rendition. Officers "parachute in or boat in, you know, in the middle of the night, and snatch a guy, throw him in a van, and just drive to the airport or drive to the boat and take him offshore."

The third is the quietest. "Sometimes they'll just walk up to him in the market," Kiriakou said, "and as they're walking past him, scratch him with something, some kind of poison that will kill him in the next two, three, four hours."

The Bulgarian lineage

Ted Rall recognised the last method as a KGB signature, and Kiriakou confirmed the attribution and extended it: "the Russians used to do that a lot, and they taught the Bulgarians to do it all the way into the early 1980s." It was, he said, "a favoured Bulgarian assassination technique."

The symptom profile is part of what recommends it. As Rall put it and Kiriakou accepted, the victim comes home feeling as though he has a bad case of influenza and is dead the next morning.

Placement

Kiriakou gave this answer in response to a question premised on his own repeated statement that the agency kills people regularly. The account is method-level and deliberately unattached to any named operation. His separate descriptions of the authorisation required for such a killing, and of the standing components that carry them out, are treated elsewhere.

See also

- The assassination approval process
- Special Activities Division
- Tuesday morning kill list
- Seals On Loan To The Cia
- Ted Rall
