Private Intelligence
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After leaving the CIA, John Kiriakou worked in private intelligence, both operational and analytical. He described two cases that illustrate how CIA tradecraft translates to commercial work.

The Cypriot billionaire

A Cypriot billionaire with a single daughter, his only heir, asked Kiriakou to investigate the daughter's fiancé, a Greek-Cypriot man living in London. The client did not like him and wanted everything he could find. Kiriakou accepted the case, flew to Cyprus, bribed a police captain for the secret police files, flew to London, and ran six weeks of surveillance on the target's building. His findings: the fiancé had been stealing money from the daughter to fund a partnership in a London warehouse with an Armenian and a Turkish co-investor, a venture that was losing money, purchased with her funds under a false pretext. He was attempting to buy a mansion in London in anticipation of inheriting her wealth. Additionally, he had multiple drug smuggling arrests, specifically, smuggling drugs from Israel into Cyprus, paid off a judge to avoid prosecution, and was believed by British intelligence to be continuing the activity. The father confronted the daughter with the full report.

Romanian mining elections

Kiriakou's analytical clients included the ninth-largest hedge fund in the world, a mutual fund, and the largest mining company in the world. One assignment: predict who would win the Romanian municipal elections in September. Kiriakou knew nothing about Romania. He sent LinkedIn connection requests to sixty Romanian Orthodox contacts, obtained private polling data, and delivered an analysis. The context for the question: the mining company wanted to buy a silver mine underneath a Romanian village and would need to destroy the village to extract it. If socialists won the election, they would block it; if conservatives won, they would relocate the villagers and approve the excavation. Kiriakou told them the polls showed conservatives winning.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- CIA
- The Analysis Corporation
- Arrais Corporation
