Chief of station
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The chief of station, station chief, or COS, is the CIA's senior officer in a given country and, in John Kiriakou's account, the single most consequential person in an American embassy's intelligence life.

Appointment and standing

Kiriakou uses the appointment power to argue that the Director of National Intelligence is a bureaucratic figurehead rather than the head of American intelligence. Despite the title, he says, the DNI has no authority to appoint a CIA chief of station, that is the sole authority of the CIA director, and the DNI is not even informed when someone is named station chief overseas. The DNI's authority is supposed to flow from budget control, but the largest intelligence budgets, NSA's among them, are controlled by the Secretary of Defense.

Promotion to station chief is also, in his description, the prize that distorts behaviour inside the Directorate of Operations, where officers are "clawing to get ahead of each other to recruit somebody, to get face time with the director, so that they can get promoted and become a station chief."

The chief as tasking authority

Kiriakou's own operational career is punctuated by station chiefs handing him work. Arriving in Pakistan in January 2002, a seasoned analyst but not a seasoned counterterrorism officer, he was told on his first day to come up with a standard operating procedure for taking down an al-Qaeda safe house, because the station simply was not doing it. He went back to his office with a legal pad. The same chief later shaped his career from headquarters: promoted to associate deputy director of the whole CIA, he made Kiriakou his executive assistant and promoted him, this at the very moment Kiriakou had been told that his refusal to be trained in the enhanced interrogation techniques had been described in a promotion panel as "a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism."

Compartmentation can run above the chief as well as below him. Discussing the black site over which Gina Haspel presided, Kiriakou suggests the chief of station in that country probably did not know it was happening, "that's how sensitive this operation was."

The station chief and the human rights officer

The figure of the station chief carries Kiriakou's most frequently repeated parable about American foreign policy. A State Department human rights officer goes into a minister of interior's office and warns him that his men beat a fifteen-year-old boy to death for marching in a pro-democracy demonstration, that it is an extrajudicial killing, and that it is going into the human rights report. Fifteen minutes later the CIA station chief walks into the same office and says: don't listen to the human rights guy, we want you to open a secret prison here where we can bring people to be tortured, or you torture them and give us the transcripts, and we will cover the costs. The minister, Kiriakou observes, is not going to listen to the human rights officer. "We can't be both of those countries."

The post as a target, and as a résumé line

The job has been a target of first resort for those attacking American intelligence abroad. 17 November opened its campaign by murdering the CIA station chief in Athens, Richard Welch, in 1975, the case Kiriakou was later sent to Greece to work, and the pistol used became known as the Welch .45.

It is also, in his account, a credential that migrates into the private sector in ways that ought to trouble people: asked how far Silicon Valley is entangled with American intelligence, Kiriakou points out that the director of security for Microsoft is a former chief of station, declining, characteristically, to say where.

See also

- Pakistan Station (2002)
- Richard Welch
- Revolutionary Organization 17 November
- Cover stop
