CIA culture of lying
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The CIA culture of lying is John Kiriakou's account of deception treated not as a tactic but as a working condition, and of what he says it does to the institution that trains for it. His starting proposition is one he does not soften: "we all lie. We're trained to lie. You lie every day, all day."

Arrogance as the failure mode

Kiriakou separates institutional deception from institutional competence, and argues the second undoes the first. Planted articles, he says, are often exposed for a mundane reason: the ISP information for the editors "oftentimes goes back to Langley." Asked whether they are really that careless, he says they are.

He offers his own case as the example. In a meeting of the eleven attorneys representing him, one proposed requesting a particular item in discovery; another objected that the government would not have been careless enough to leave it there. The reply, "No, actually they are that stupid", proved correct, and the resulting error forced prosecutors to drop three charges. His diagnosis is of attitude rather than ability: "They're arrogant... They think they're smarter than everybody else is, that they don't make mistakes, or even if they do make mistakes, you're not smart enough to figure out that they've made a mistake. And that's just simply not true."

The corollary he draws is one he says senior officials never learn: "the cover up of the crime is always worse than the crime." Richard Nixon, on his reading, resigned over the cover-up of Watergate rather than over Watergate.

Detecting it

The other half of the discipline is spotting deception in others, which Kiriakou calls "a really important skill." The training he describes is behavioural and mostly ocular. A subject who looks up and into the air, "as if he's trying to picture what it is that you're asking," is usually fine; looking down is the alerting sign, "that perhaps he's coming up with a lie."

He flags one exception explicitly, that the tell does not hold for people with autism, and adds sustained looking away as a second indicator: "looking away, looking away constantly, that's usually a sign of deception as well." Deeper training exists for those going into the Office of Security as polygraphers or investigators.

The rule he was given

The formulation Kiriakou says stayed with him came from a boss who acknowledged the lying openly to him as a junior officer, and then drew two lines around it: don't lie in a way that will get you fired or sent to prison, "and I also don't want you ever to lie to me."

The occupational fact underneath it is that serving abroad means criminality by design: "when you're serving overseas, your job is to break the laws of that country."

"Some guys don't know how to turn it off"

The problem Kiriakou identifies is not the lying but the failure to bound it, "a lot of guys just can't turn it off."

Five wives, five secretaries

Asked whether a life spent under cover makes infidelity a short step, Kiriakou's answer is immediate, "Oh my gosh, yes", and his example is a deputy director he worked for who had been married five times, "and every single one of his five wives had begun as his secretary."

Asked whether applicants for the next executive assistant job understood that marriage was part of the arrangement, his reply is the article's bleakest line about the workplace: "here's how sick the culture can be sometimes", because the answer was yes. The incentive he describes is structural: promotion above GS-15 into the senior intelligence service means belonging to the entire intelligence community, with the White House, State and Defense all open to you.

Pressed that this is, on a basic level, rotten and bound to affect the whole organisation, Kiriakou agrees, and extends it to the promotion machinery itself, officers denied advancement "not because they hadn't met all the criteria for being promoted, but because they weren't sleeping with one of the people on the promotion panel."

The line he drew at home

Kiriakou says he kept the two lives separate from the start. His first wife was a ballet teacher with no connection to the agency: he would spend the day "guns drawn, bulletproof vest, making high-threat pitches," and then go home to an ordinary evening.

The specific deception he refuses is the classic one, "the meeting that I have tonight, it's going to be an important meeting, so I'm going to have to be out all night long. Come on. Come on, that's ridiculous. That you have to be honest about."

That the institution he gave that much to later prosecuted him is something he says still lands: "it actually stings, to tell you the truth. I devoted my life to the CIA. I got divorced because of the CIA." He chose the agency over his first marriage in the belief that "this was God's work", keeping the country safe, disrupting attacks.

Punishing the ones who won't

The distinction Kiriakou draws is between transactional lying in service of something and the machinery that turns on people who decline, "to hunt down" those who won't lie. His case in point is Jeffrey Sterling.

The psychiatrists in the cafeteria

The episode Kiriakou offers as his earliest glimpse of the culture is something he overheard rather than saw, shortly after arriving at the agency: two psychiatrists from the CIA's Office of Medical Services discussing a colleague, how to make him crazy. They were working through it "in the cafeteria, no less," planning how to push the man over the edge "so that he would either resign, have to go on a mental leave, or commit suicide." His own gloss: "It's awful."

He confirms these were licensed physicians. Asked why no medical body ever revoked their licences, his answer is the structural one that runs through all of it: "everything's classified. And so, you couldn't report it if you wanted to."

Asked separately whether a currently serving officer's account of a colleague's suicide, driven, that officer believed, by the agency itself, was plausible, Kiriakou says yes.

The closed loop this creates, classification making the abuse unreportable, and the reporting of it prosecutable, is what Kiriakou's interviewer calls the perfect system, and what leads directly to the question of who is supposed to be watching. That is the subject of congressional intelligence oversight.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Jeffrey Sterling
- Congressional intelligence oversight
- CIA sexpionage
