CIA driving training
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CIA driving training teaches officers what to do when a vehicle becomes a kill zone. The governing instruction John Kiriakou quotes is a single phrase, "get off the X, or get out of the kill zone."

The first-day scenario

Reviewing a film sequence in which a car is boxed in by shooters, Kiriakou identifies it as taken directly from the syllabus: "virtually on your first day of CIA counterterrorism training, you are put in this situation where you're in a car, you're cut off, shooters cut you off, you have a second to decide if you should run them over and kill them, or reverse."

His own answer to the exercise is unhesitating: "Somebody that close I'd run them right over. And then I'd back over them if I had to." He does not treat the scenario as theatrical. "That is completely real life. We've lost a lot of people over the years in situations like that."

The robot in the van

The run Kiriakou describes at length was set in a training landscape meant to stand for the Middle East, Africa or Central Asia. The instructors shut his engine off by remote control. "My car just went dead. I was like, what the heck?", and then someone opened fire on the car with paintballs.

He took off his seatbelt, crawled across the car, got out on the far side, lay flat on the ground and drew his weapon to find the source of the fire. The source was a robot, firing from the open sliding door of a van.

From the ground he could not get a clean shot at it. His solution was to raise himself slightly, shoot out his own car's windows, and fire through the resulting gap to disable the robot.

The instructors' reaction was about the vehicle rather than the outcome: "Damn it, Kiriakou. That was the last decent car we had." Kiriakou's defence was the doctrine they had taught him, "You're the one who told me get off the X, get out of the kill zone. I couldn't shoot the robot from the angle that I was."

Training as it actually was

Kiriakou's broader assessment of CIA training rejects the film version while defending the real thing. Of the Kingsman depiction he says simply "the training is tough, but it's not that tough." Of his own: "training was a challenge. I learned skills that I never even imagined existed. I was proud of what I ended up doing in training, but there was nothing like that."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- CIA training doctrine
- Surveillance detection route
