Stansfield Turner
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Stansfield Turner was an admiral and Director of Central Intelligence under Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981. John Kiriakou names him, with visible hesitation, as one of only two CIA directors he considers good. Asked for an example of a good director he answered John McCone first, then added: "And I'll tell you the honest-to-God's truth, I can't think of another one. Maybe Stansfield Turner." Both, he says, are "considered to be ... fail directors" inside the agency precisely "because they tried to rein the organization in."

The endorsement sits awkwardly beside a general rule Kiriakou states in the same breath, that "a military officer should never be the CIA director," because officers "became generals or admirals by saying, 'Yes, sir,'" and what a president needs is a director willing to say "Mr. President, that's a terrible idea." Turner was an admiral.

The Friday Night Massacre

Kiriakou describes two events in agency history that CIA officers call Friday Night Massacres. The first was in October 1977, when Turner "just arbitrarily fired something like a hundred and forty officers from the Director of Operations, some of them just weeks away from retirement." The stated reason was failure, on Iran, on terrorism and on other major issues at the time, and a wish for a clean slate. Kiriakou's own assessment: "that was probably a bad idea, to just fire your most experienced" officers. It was done on a Friday, which is where the name comes from.

Appointment

Turner got the job because Carter would not keep his predecessor. Kiriakou recounts that George H. W. Bush, who had run the CIA for only eleven months at the end of the Ford administration, went to Carter and said he would love to stay on as director; Carter said no, he wanted to put his own people in, and named Turner instead.

The cruise-ship briefing

Kiriakou briefed Turner personally after Turner's retirement, and tells the episode as his standing illustration of how little access a former director retains. Turner and his wife had been given a free round-the-world cruise in exchange for four lectures on Middle Eastern politics, and Kiriakou, then an analyst, in the early 1990s, was instructed to brief him on pro-democracy movements in the Middle East. They met three times for lunch in the director's dining room; Turner "took copious notes," carefully writing down only the unclassified material, and used that for the shipboard speeches.

Kiriakou's two accounts of that instruction do not agree, and the difference matters. In the 2017 telling he was warned repeatedly not to go above the secret level, the standard ceiling for retired directors. In the 2022 telling the ceiling was lower and personal: he was told to brief Turner "at the unclassified level," and when he asked why, "they said, no, because we hate him, that's why." In the same account Kiriakou says that in his whole career "only one time did I ever hear of anybody having their clearance revoked, and it was Admiral Stansfield Turner."

See also

- John McCone
- George Tenet
