The CIA's internal social culture
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Asked to characterise the CIA's internal culture in a single word, John Kiriakou answered "incestuous," and said there was no other word that would do.

A club for everything

The first evidence he gives is the completeness of the agency's internal provision for its officers' non-working lives. "You want to play softball? Great, there's a CIA softball league. You want to make a quilt? Not a problem, there's a CIA quilting club. You're LGBTQ? Not a problem, we have the gigantic LGBTQ group. You want to sing hymns? No problem, Tuesday at seven o'clock, everybody meets in the auditorium to sing hymns."

He does not present this as a perk but as a design. The purpose, in his reading, is that "the CIA wants you to devote your entire life to it, and to not have outside friends, or outside interests, outside activities. You can do everything internally."

Encouraged romances, and the cleared spouse

The same logic extends to marriage. "The CIA actively encourages CIA romances, because you're both cleared. And you can talk about work and not get in trouble."

Kiriakou offers his own two marriages as the demonstration, and the contrast is the argument. His first wife was a ballet teacher, and the marriage "didn't work out, because she had no understanding whatsoever what I was doing all day and all night." His second wife was a CIA officer, and "I could tell her exactly what I was doing."

He notes the specific counter-intelligence anxiety the arrangement removes: with an uncleared spouse there is always the question of whether there was "any pillow talk when I revealed a secret", a question that does not arise when both parties hold clearances.

The building he joined in 1990

Asked about the agency he walked into, Kiriakou describes an institution still physically of the previous era. There were typewriters on the desks, the transition from paper documents to computers had only just begun, and officers could smoke at those desks. The detail he offers as the strangest is the barbershop in the basement of CIA headquarters, which kept copies of Playboy out for waiting customers. His own summary is simply that "this was a different era... you can't do any of that stuff anymore."

The catering arrangements make the same point about clearance culture. Headquarters ran two cafeterias, one classified and one unclassified. The unclassified room existed for the rare visitor from another department or agency who held no clearance, and it was so small and so little used that the agency eventually abolished it. The consequence is that clearance is now a condition of eating lunch there at all, "half the people in there are undercover", and, as Kiriakou puts it, "even the fast food people have security clearances."

"Decidedly more The Office"

Put the choice between the two television versions of the agency, the thriller and the workplace comedy, Kiriakou did not hesitate: "Oh, it''s decidedly more The Office." The illustration he reached for was a standing joke among officers: "we used to have this ongoing joke that when you went into a meeting, don''t touch the table, because you don''t know who was having sex on it last night."

His serious gloss on the same question separates the workforce from the institution. John F. Kennedy, he noted, once called the agency "the best and the brightest", "and oh, how I wish that were true." There are "some really brilliant people in there," and "for the most part these are whatever it is now, 30-, 40,000 people who want nothing more than to serve the American people." The failure he locates in supervision rather than personnel: "without appropriate oversight, it''s human nature just to push and push and push the envelope until somebody or something pushes back. And as a result you have a CIA that, in a cycle of every twenty or thirty years, goes out of control."

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- "Once CIA, always CIA"
- John Kiriakou
