The boring cover story
======================

Kiriakou describes cover-story doctrine as an exercise in boredom rather than invention. "We were trained to tell people something so boring that they wouldn't ask any follow-up questions," he says. 

The standard answer

His own line, as he gives it, was a short stack of dull specifics: he was in the foreign service, he did a lot of training, and some import-export negotiation.  The point of the construction is that each element invites nothing. It is a job, it has tasks, and none of the tasks is interesting.

Kiriakou accepts on the spot that the last element is the weak one. When his co-host observed that import-export "I immediately think of weapons," he conceded the point, "Oh, right", and moved directly into an account of a flight on which precisely that follow-up question was asked, and asked repeatedly. 

Cover that does not survive a local fact

The rule is put in relief by a story his co-host told him, which Kiriakou endorsed rather than originated. Travelling in Central Asia in the years after independence from the Soviet Union, Rall fell into conversation in a Bishkek pub with the only other Anglophone present, who said he worked for an oil company. Rall pressed him until the man conceded he had been "inside the company" for eight years, then asked how he had been spotted. The answer: Kyrgyzstan has no oil. "You need a better cover." 

Kiriakou's response was to agree, "No, he needed a better cover", and to state the doctrine as the lesson.  A cover story fails not because it is implausible in general but because it collides with something the other person happens to know. Boring answers reduce the number of collisions available, because they generate no curiosity to collide with.

Its limits

Kiriakou's own account of the technique includes its failure case. Boredom is a defence against ordinary politeness, not against persistence; a stranger determined to keep talking will simply keep asking, and the officer is then improvising rather than reciting. His solution on one such occasion was to abandon dullness altogether and offer something so unpleasant that the conversation ended, a manoeuvre he describes separately, and which worked. 

See also

- The Milan Sofia Flight
- The asset recruitment cycle
- Chief of station
