The FLETC badge
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The FLETC badge was the federal credential John Kiriakou carried before he joined the CIA. He raised it on the DeProgram programme in July 2025 to settle an argument about whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, then conducting masked, unmarked raids across American cities, could properly be called law enforcement officers. His answer, drawn from his own service record, was that they could not, and that having attended the government's law enforcement academy proves nothing either way.

The distinction he draws

Kiriakou's argument rests on the federal job-series numbering. Agents are, he says, "either what's called a series 1810 or 1811. In this case, they're both 1810s, which means they're allowed to be armed, but that doesn't necessarily mean that ... they're not going to pull somebody over for speeding." He extended the same point to prison staff, agreeing with the host that Bureau of Prisons guards "are not really law enforcement officers."

When a viewer noted that ICE agents had been through FLETC, Kiriakou answered that he had too. "They've gone through Fletsie, which is the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. I went through Fletsie before my CIA days ... But I was an 1810. So we did the handgun training, but I was 100% not considered law enforcement."

The badge itself

Asked what FLETC stood for, he gave the name and then described what the training entitled him to carry: "I had a beautiful shiny gold badge that I kept in this beautiful leather case. I really regretted having to turn it in when I went to the agency." He adds, without embarrassment, that "it got me out of a couple of speeding tickets."

The badge did not change what he understood himself to be. "I was not considered law enforcement. I didn't consider myself law enforcement," he said, and he would not have acted like it: "I would not have tried to stop a shoplifter at Walmart. I would have said, 'Well, it's not my job. Let the next guy do it.'"

The point about ICE

The force of the anecdote, in Kiriakou's telling, is that the trappings of policing, a badge, a sidearm, a course at the academy, are not the thing itself. He and the host agreed that agents who want to be treated as police "ought to wear uniforms and they ought to show their faces and they should show ID," and that absent those, they are indistinguishable from anyone else who has decided to detain people in the street.

He took evident pleasure in a consequence of that anonymity, relaying reporting that tow-truck operators in Los Angeles had begun following ICE officers and impounding their illegally parked cars, since "it's not like they can extend any professional courtesy to these random unidentified people."

See also

- The Bureau Of Prisons Polos
- John Kiriakou
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Prison guard hiring standards
